The Rest is Silence (12 page)

Our seed orders arrive in the mail from Vesey's and Richters. Spinach, lettuce, kale, chard, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, some herbs. She opens the packet containing her tobacco seeds and pours some into my hand. They are like dust, smaller than poppy seeds. We plant the seeds in pots and take them to Martin and Jen's greenhouse. While they germinate she prepares a bed for the tobacco. This she has to dig as the seedlings will be small and fragile, unable to compete with the hawkweed and grass.

On one of the first days of summer, we plant beans and squash and corn in the mounds we made. It's too hot and dry to transplant our seedlings during the day, so we wait until the sun drops behind the trees and the garden beds are in shade. Then we go to Martin and Jen's greenhouse and retrieve all our potted seedlings. The air grows still after supper and is hotter and heavier than it has been all day. The gentle breeze of the early afternoon has abated, leaving conditions perfect for blackflies. Lina and I don our bug gear. It's like a greenhouse inside my bug shirt. Soon there are spots of blood on my wrists. The flies crawl through any fold into the jacket and buzz, trapped by the material. I rub my hands over each other like Lady Macbeth with OCD, but the buggers are assiduous in their hunger. Where the hood rests against my ears they bite through the cotton. My ears are hot and itchy.

“Leave me alone, you miserable pricks,” I shout, slapping my hand against my hood and running to get away from them. It feels better while I do this, but they are quick to return once I kneel again. I ease each seedling from its pot, make a small space for it with my fingers, and put its roots below ground. Every dozen or so I sprinkle them from the watering can. We sing Beatles songs we both know while we work to distract ourselves from the annoyance. Occasionally, the dragonfly cavalry flies in, their wings crinkling like Chinese paper dragons, to snatch the flies that hover in front of my face. One lands on my arm to eat its prey, munching rhythmically on one of my tormentors.

We take turns having a shower-in-a-bag on the pallet. I promise her we'll have more water soon. I'm going to get a well drilled. I've had enough of hauling pails and jars of water down the road.

I bike to Middleton and withdraw two thousand dollars from my account, leaving little behind, and put the hundred-dollar bills in a Mason jar. I dig a shallow hole by my tent and bury the jar. Lina met someone named Jake who's a dowser on a land co-op in East Margaretsville who said he would show us where to drill.

As we sit on the dry ground by the fire after gardening all day, we hear scratching in the grass under the trees. The porcupines have been snuffling around our campsite before and we assume they are back. But porcupines don't meow. Into the light of the fire comes a small cat, black and white like a Holstein. She prances right up to us, meows again, and jumps into Lina's lap.

“Hello, little one. Where'd you come from?”

She isn't one of Jenifer's. She trots after Lina into her tent that night and I am jealous of that cat. As I climb into bed alone I imagine curling up around Lina's back, purring her to sleep.

*

The first cut, August 1992

It was my seventeenth birthday and, as it turned out, my last camping trip with my dad. We had been gabbing since Ellsworth because we were excited to be almost there. We were about to cross the bridge onto Mount Desert Island for the first time since I was ten and Dad asked me to guess whether the water rushing under the road meant the tide was going in or out.

“Out?”

The water was rushing off in the direction of the sea. Dad looked over at me across the front seat and smiled. I called him a sentimental old fart for remembering the last time we crossed that bridge, and when he laughed, it felt like we used to be, like things were all right.

We went to Allen's Campground near Somes Sound. We put up our tent and spent the afternoon playing in the waves at the ocean beach and renting bikes to travel the carriage paths. Dad poured himself a gin and tonic and cooked spaghetti, which we ate in front of a campfire with plates on our laps. He had bought a cake in Bangor. Now he put candles in it and sang to me in his croaky, off-key voice. After we did the dishes, we listened to the ball game while Dad drank a can of beer and lit a cigar. He only smoked when we camped. The scent of burning tobacco mingled with the smoke of the fire and dissipated on the light breeze. It smelled exotic outdoors under the spruce trees.

The next morning before my father awoke I discovered a long chain of rickety wharves stretching from shore two hundred feet into the sheltered bay. A bald eagle perched atop a tall conifer across the narrow bay. Gulls dove at it, careful to keep distance between their white wings and its beak. Stepping from one bobbing section to the next, I walked to the end of the floating wharves. Beyond the end, well into Somes Sound, a large sailboat was anchored, its mast naked, a contained and solitary island. On my way back to shore a squid, blood red, swam ten feet from the wharves. Its tentacles flapped with the grace of wings in slow motion. Suddenly, there was another pair of wings above me. A gull, its grey wings folded, dropped from the blue sky and its beak pierced the surface. It rose up above the water. The squid released ink, making the water murky as it escaped into the deeper, protective water of the sound. The gull landed on the surface and floated.

I wobbled along the docks, then kneeled down to see what was in the water. The tide was low and the water so clear that the bottom was visible, rich with life. Seaweed, mussels alive and empty-shelled, schools of little fish, tiny crabs camouflaged until they moved. I dipped my arm into the frigid water to get a blue-black mussel. They lived together, communities clinging tenaciously to one another and to the rocks on the floor, as if an inseparable geological fact. Their striped shells were covered with barnacles. I yanked a clump of them from the rocks and twisted one away from the others; the tension and grating of the threads that bound them together felt like cranking the leg joint off raw chicken. I laid the mussel on the wharf and brought my shoe down on top of it, cracking its shell to expose its flesh. When I dropped it back into the water, the shattered shell fell back and forth to the seabed like a maple leaf floating to the ground on a still day. Small crabs scuttled silently across the floor, attracted to the scent of exposed flesh. One, two, then a dozen or more came to eat the destroyed mussel. I felt bad to have killed it, but my curiosity got the best of me.

A school of minnows, no longer than my first knuckle, swam in the shallows like a disparate cloud of life, facing different directions while they fed. All of a sudden they aligned their bodies in parallel and darted away, the cloud now a plume of smoke rushing out of a chimney. Behind them a dozen or more mackerel, their backs black and gold, bulleted into the shoal after the school. The minnows broke the surface, which was roiling now. I ran back to the campsite for my fishing rod.

I tied my red devil lure with its treble hook onto the nylon line, going over and under six or more times, making up for my inept knots with a profusion of them. I found a school of minnows by the edge of the dock and dangled the lure among them. Twice mackerel shot in to catch minnows but avoided my lure. I removed the treble hook from the red-and-white disk, tied it by itself to the fishing line, and suspended it below the minnows after the mackerel had gone. They moved away as it plunked and sank. Once they grew accustomed to the treble hook and crowded above it, I jerked the rod up, snagging a minnow. The impaled minnow writhed on the hook among its schoolmates, and when they darted away from the next rush of mackerel, it was the obvious laggard to be eaten. There was a tug on the line, then an intense pull. I reeled the line in and a silver belly glittered near the surface as I pulled the sleek muscle from the water, the mackerel's silver turning to white in air. Holding the line with one hand, I slid the other over the fish's head and down its body, grasping it firmly as my dad had once shown me. I dislodged the hook as carefully as I could, the fish's one visible eye staring at its persecutor.

A motorboat pulled into the bay while I was doing this, cut its engine, and skimmed toward the dock. I knelt down to release the fish in the cold water, racing against the oil slick that floated toward me.

“Woo-hee! That's a beaut.”

I cursed the approaching boat under my breath. Not only would it scare off the fish, but the noise and smell of diesel exhaust nauseated me. A few scales that had stuck to my fingers caught the light. I brought my hand to my face and smelled the fish. Sitting in the boat was a girl wearing frayed, cut-off jeans and a red shirt with “Marlboro” stencilled across it in white letters. Her blond hair hung below a Red Sox cap. She had a can of beer in her hand. I had never seen anything like her and I'm certain I was staring. She reached over the gunwale of the boat to hold on to the dock.

“No lure, huh? That's illegal, you know. Like jacking deer. If you got caught they'd take everything you own. Your fishing gear, your car, everything.”

“I don't have a car,” I said. “I'm only seventeen.”

“Seventeen or seventy, it's still illegal. Don't worry, I won't tell the authorities.” She winked at me. “Why'd you throw it back? That was a decent size fish.”

“I don't like fish.”

“Nothing like smoked mackerel. Ever had it?”

I shook my head.

“You should try it sometime.” She leaned over the Evinrude, pulled its cord, and shouted above the noise, “See you around, poacher.”

I made sure to be on the dock the same time the next day and, when she didn't show up, the day after that. When she returned, she tied her boat to the dock and jumped out.

“I'm Katharine,” she said, thrusting her hand at me. “What's with the hat?”

I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks and reached for the floppy brim of my sun hat.

“Sun protection,” I said.

“Take that silly thing off. You can wear this if you want.”

She lifted the cap from her head and tossed it to me. Her wavy hair brushed her shoulders. It was thick, the colour of sand, and made me think it had seen a summer's worth of seawater and sun. My fingers wanted to bury themselves in her hair, to feel the tresses coated with salt.

We met each afternoon after that, while my father stayed at the campsite reading the paper or drinking gin and tonics with the ball game on the radio. She was two years older and that intimidated me. She smoked and laughed a lot and was beautiful and all I wanted was to hang out with her, to sit on the docks or in her boat, and talk.

Katharine took me out into the sound and all the way across to the far shore to the General Store in Somesville, where we bought ice cream. She taught me to fish in deeper water for cod and ocean perch. We talked about what school was like for us — she hated it — and the differences between life on an island and mine in the city.

On our last night, I told my dad I was going to watch the stars by the water. Katharine's boat was moored at the end of the docks. She met me at the shore and wrestled me to the ground before I knew what had happened. She sat on top of me, pinning my arms with her legs, and tickled me until I was finally able to throw her off. She flopped beside me, breathing heavily and we lay there, under some spruce, looking at the stars. As she talked I inched my hands closer to her head, as if trying to get comfortable on the stony ground. I rested the tips of my fingers against her hair, anxious that she would feel my touch, hoping, I suppose, that she might. At last, after what seemed like an hour of agony, I took a chance and rolled over to kiss her. It was by far the most electric kiss I'd ever had, but it confused both of us. It wasn't as if I hadn't been having sex back home. But the feeling I had with Katharine, just from that one kiss, showed me how meaningless all that casual sex had been. For the first time I felt what I assumed was love.

When it got late enough that my father would begin worrying about me I said goodbye to her. All I wanted was to stay with her by the water, and as I drifted through the darkness back to our campsite, I plotted how to see her again. I lay with my feet on the now-lukewarm bottle Dad had tucked into my sleeping bag hours before, imagining anything was possible as I tried to make sense of the fluttering wings in my belly. This all sounds so innocent, but for me it was anything but simple.

Dad and I left the next morning and began the drive home. I began writing a letter to her as soon as we left the campground. Dad was quiet until we approached the bridge off the island.

“Tide going in or out?” he asked me.

I guessed without looking up from my letter. “Out.”

“You're wrong.”

There was an edge in his voice I rarely heard. His face was rigid and his mouth set. As we crossed the bridge water was rushing in from the sea. I put my pen on the dashboard, pulled my feet up onto the seat, and huddled my knees into my chest.

“This was my vacation too,” he said.

“I know that, Dad.”

“I might as well be camping by myself.”

He banged his hands on the steering wheel. It was as if he had reached across the seat and slapped me. All the way to Bangor there was nothing between us but the wind whistling in my open window and blowing hair into my teary eyes. Dad broke the silence as we passed the life-sized statue of Paul Bunyan.