The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay (3 page)

“To the sons of sailors and seamen,” she offered.

“To quellin' the parched thirst,” Byron added.

“And to Pappy,” Clay said, which they all echoed. Clay drank his whiskey and watched as Kate tasted hers with a grimace.

“Go on,” Matty scolded, lifting his to his mouth.

She looked up, determined. Squinting, she gulped it down. Clay handed her a beer and told her to wash it through, which she did without complaint.

“Impressed,” Matty said. “A new page in your book. Another?” He teased.

She was unrepentant, though her face was flushed. “I'll sip another,” she whispered to Byron, though her eyes were on Clay's as she spoke.

The gurgling of the oyster stew caused Clay to turn and then rise from the table. He began to fix everyone a bowl. Kate, after him to sit down, got up and began to lay out the turkey and ham slices and biscuits. Byron opened a fresh round of beers.

After they ate, washing down their food with the beer, Kate tried carefully to ask about how the process worked, looking for a man lost overboard in the Bay. “It was actually in the Choptank River,” Byron corrected her. As he began trying to explain more, Matty made the comment that he wished he could have photographed that operation. Clay got up, excusing himself, and started on the dishes.

Matty, noticing, pushed his chair away from the table and changed the subject. He began reciting for Clay and then imitated some student election speeches at school, trying to get Clay to laugh. Matty carried a southern gentility in his voice, which softened and helped mitigate the intensity stamped in his eyes. By now, though, his words had begun to run together. In a loud voice he announced that he wanted to walk down to the creek. He had
to go to the car first and retrieve his equipment. He wanted to set up his tripod for a perfect sunset shot.

“It's only four-thirty, Matty,” Kate chided. “Sunset's not for another hour or so.”

“I need to find the right spot. The light, the sky. And setup takes time. To get it right. You want to come?”

“I'm warm and comfortable right here, thank you.”

“I'll go,” Byron offered. “Fresh air'll feel good.” He picked up the bourbon bottle. “This'll keep us warm. Help that ‘get it right' business.”

“You two go,” Kate said. “We'll be along in a while. Closer to sunset.”

As they left, Kate started drying the dishes. She and Clay worked together, hearing the wind against the eaves. She tried to get him talking, but he had grown silent. She went to the sideboard after a while and started the other side of the Patsy Cline record. “I Fall to Pieces” was the first song. She came over and took his dish towel from him and dried his hands, and then she dropped the towel on the floor and put his hands around her waist and pressed herself against him, laying her forehead against his neck, and started swaying in his arms to the song. He felt the heat from her body, her breasts soft against him through her thin cotton shirt, and her lips brushing his neck.

“Kate,” he whispered into her ear.

She put her finger up to his lips to quiet him. “I just want to help. If I can. Like this,” she said. “Just hold me now and allow me to hold you for a time. Let's let it be some comfort. To each of us. Enough.”

He thought he understood. With his mind. With his sense of the order of things. And so he danced with her there, alone, and held her as the dusk descended, and he accepted this just as she offered it, as some comfort, as enough. But none of this thinking, nor the numbing rush of the alcohol, nor other knowledge he possessed,
could diminish what it was she made him feel and had always caused him to feel, more poignant for the separation, for a heart already rent and open from grief, holding her there, that lightning flash in his blood, Kate clinging equally to him, each with the other, song after song, as the shadows drew upon them. Walking with her toward the water, toward Matty and Byron, the horizon a darkening bruise of purple, his mind whirled in intoxications of confusion, of grief and loss, of new purpose, of longing and regret.

He slept fitfully that night on the back room couch, his dreams haunted by successive images: of Pappy, of his mother Sarah, of Kate, all merging in incongruous circumstances. Rising early, he helped his two friends repack their car to leave for the airport. Kate got out of the MG and came back to hug him one last time. Standing on the porch landing, he watched them drive down the dusty lane.

In the kitchen he fixed a pot of coffee and he poured himself a cup and sat at the table. He got up and took a plate of leftover ham out of the refrigerator. There were cold biscuits on the stove, and he made himself a ham biscuit to eat with his coffee. The house was still, but he could hear the murmur of the breeze as it came up off the Bay. After he had eaten, he stuffed a few more biscuits with ham and wrapped them in tinfoil and filled a thermos with the coffee. He put on his father's old oilskin coat, which he had been using, and put the biscuits in one of the pockets. The heater in his car didn't work, so he had to keep the window down to defrost the windshield as he drove past Easton to St. Michaels Road, over the Oak Creek Bridge to Pecks Point.

He found his father's workboat riding high in her slip. The key to the ignition was where his father had always kept it, under the rear port floorboard on a small hook. He had to turn it over a bit, with full choke, but within minutes he had her started and had cast off the lines and was heading down the Tred Avon toward the mouth of the Choptank, which opened to the Bay.

He ran the north shore of the river that he knew and had always known, through the mouth of Plaindealing Creek and past the ferry dock at Bellevue, around Cooper's Shoal, past Bachelor Point to the south and the Benoni Point lighthouse and into the wider Choptank, where you could see out into the Bay, the horizon an undulation of whitecaps. It was along the north shore of the Choptank, off the mouth of Broad Creek, that his father's dredger had been discovered, foundering in a drift on the neap tide, well after a storm, her skipper washed away. He traversed the drift line once again, scouring the steel-like surface of the shoreline, and then went on.

The wind out of the northwest had strengthened and was throwing spray over the bow. He stood in the open cockpit and could taste the salt, and after a time he rode the waves by instinct, knowing where he was. He followed the Choptank's north shore across the mouth of Irish Creek and pushed south to clear Tilghman Island's southernmost tip, Blackwalnut Point, feeling his aloneness on this great watery plain, which was his and belonged to him as he belonged to it. It had always been so, from his earliest memory, since he had first recognized it as a boy, taken by and surrendering to the miracle of such water and its unfathomable mystery. Blue and deep beyond imagining, it filled him with a familiar wonder, as he knew it must have filled those who had come before, who had suffered the blow and the churning, the whipping white and darkening browns, the ghosts of the watermen before him, the sailors and sea captains, knowing the calm as well, and the feasts of crab. And before them and after them—the single Susquehanna
returning in his canoe, hugging the shore to avoid the tidal wash, his nets laden with shad and mano, and innocent of any knowledge of the end of his world that was to come. Clay drove the sharp bow of the workboat into the swells and thought of those of his father's generation who had known the Chesapeake pure and pristine, and of those who had known it first, known it perfect when it had no taint to its beauty nor limit to its abundance.

He rode the waves out into the Bay with no sense of time, immersing himself in the solitude. A squall blew by to the south, and after it passed, fields of mist lay over the water. Blanketed in the fog but still knowing where he was, he turned northeast and ran the tide up along the veiled shore. Just off the southern tip of Poplar Island the breeze freshened and the fog banks cleared, swirling away. The swells burst sharp against the bow. Flocks of black cormorants, startled at his approach, careened off the waves, and long-necked mergansers pitched over the shoreline against the moving sky. Far out in the shipping lane a single tug pushed a weighted barge northward toward Baltimore. He had long since eaten his biscuits and finished his thermos, and as he angled the boat—which his father had affectionately called the bateau—toward the shallow half-moon landing cut by the winds and tides along the northeast edge of the abandoned Poplar Island, what remained was the taste of the brine that had dried and caked against his face.

The tide was running and near high, and he figured he could get close to shore before grounding the bateau. He had prepared a forward and stern anchor and had sufficient stern line to play out. He checked the depth with the anchor. When he hit four feet, he gunned the engine to increase his forward momentum, then cut the propeller. He dropped the stern anchor and let the line play out as he coasted toward the black bank. With the engine off, he could hear the egrets and wrens crying from the trees. Scraping sand, he dropped the bow anchor and tied the boat secure.

He pulled the waders out of the cockpit and put them on. He dropped over the side and waded ashore to the island, thick with loblolly pine, vines, and undergrowth.

His father had built a cabin on Poplar Island, and two duck blinds along its northeast shore. Pappy had hunted the island for years and used the cabin as a sanctuary. He had brought Clay along many times to share its perfect isolation with him. That was years before. But Clay remembered the promises his father had made to him, and, of course, the buried ammunition box. He knew that it would be there for him if the time ever came.

He climbed the sandbank, which crumbled under his weight, and stepped into the soggy undergrowth. He walked between the knobby pines, avoiding the thick clumps of leafless thorn, and after fifty yards or so saw the ruined shack ahead. It was a crude, one-room shelter, built of logs cut on the island with a hand ax, with a stone hearth and short chimney on the north end layered with cinder block. The logs were joined with pitch. Gaps in the roof spilled the late afternoon light. The door was gone. The spoor of racoon and fox lay on the floor.

The cabin seemed smaller than it had been in his mind. And then he measured twelve steps from its front door due south toward the Dorchester marsh, and then six steps near due west toward the sun. Breaking a thick branch off one of the pines, he began to dig into the damp ground. He dug about a foot deep and began to widen the circle. After a while he struck something hard. He dug around it and knocked away the soil. It was the old steel box, sealed with a frozen combination padlock. Working it out of the earth, he set it aside and filled the hole with loose dirt and leaves. He then carried the box back to the beach and out into the river, hoisting it over the side of the boat. Once on board, he stashed the box in the cabin and got under way. The current ran swift in the cut between the island and the Eastern Shore.

It was late afternoon when he pulled into his shortcut home, the
channel at Knapps Narrows that separated Tilghman from the broader delta above. He tied up at Morrison's, went inside, and sat at the bar to order fried clams and beer. Afterward the waitress refilled his thermos with hot coffee. He went to pay his bill. Behind the register stood Buddy Morrison, the proprietor.

“You're George Wakeman's son, Clay.”

“Yessir.”

“Sorry about his disappearance, son. He was good company.”

Clay thanked him and waited for his change.

“Hard on the family. For a good waterman to lose himself awash like that. And then not be found.”

“Yessir.”

Morrison counted out the bills. “She takes some slow and some sudden, but she takes all who give themselves over, don't she?”

Clay nodded and accepted the money.

“He may wash up soon. Most do. But I am sorry, son. Truly am.”

Outside, the air had stilled and the sky was clear. Clay breathed in deeply. Angling southeast, the bateau pierced the mirrored surface. Off the mouth of Broad Creek, he cut the motor and coasted into the current. He used the crowbar from the engine locker on the metal box. The lock held, but he was able to pry open the steel top, bending it back. Inside lay his father's Navy Cross, wrapped in stained brown paper. There was a photograph also, of his father and him, and his mother, Sarah. Pappy was seated on a chair and Sarah was kneeling next to him, her arm around their young son. He turned it over. There was no inscription. In a brittle envelope there was money—five hundred dollars—and folded up behind the bills, the chart his father had made and showed him, years before. Pappy had marked the chart where he had found the wreck while tonging for oysters, where he'd pulled up the antique battle-ax. Clay remembered the books Pappy brought home from the library in Washington, convinced they proved the wreck was a Spanish frigate. Pappy had written its name and the date it was lost
on the chart. “The
Buena Ventura,
1688.” The ax had disappeared en route to New York for study by the Peabody Institute, an offense that Pappy had often recounted and never forgave. Still, Pappy had kept the chart, and when the mood struck him he would spread it across the dining room table, swearing to find and salvage the sunken ship. But the Bay had not provided for that.

Clay folded the chart back up, returned all of the contents to the box, and stored it above the cabin berth. It wasn't the chart he'd been after. That had been Pappy's pipe dream, or one of them, though it was a pleasant enough fancy. Rather than the chart, rather than the money, he had hoped for a letter. From his father to him. Or even a note.

“I'm thinking about going on the river,” Clay said. He sat holding his beer, looking back at his friend.

Byron shook his head. “I was worried you were leanin' that way.” His tone was unsympathetic.

“Refurbish the bateau. Now that she's mine. She's solid enough. Good for potting. If the summer works, then I might try to oyster this winter. Maybe even take out some fishing parties.”