The Weight of Water (15 page)

After a time, when I could bear it, I entered the wooden-frame house that would be my home for five years. It was sided with
clapboards, and was of an entirely unadorned style I was not familiar with. It had, I imagine, originally been built for at
least two families, as there were two separate dwellings within the one, each with its own front door on the northwestern
side of the house. The house had been painted a dull red, and there were no shutters on the windows. A single chimney, such
as might accommodate a stove, had been put into the house. Inside of each apartment, there were three small rooms downstairs
and one small room up a short stairway. The stove was put into the largest room of the first apartment, and henceforth we
used that room as our kitchen and living room, and, in winter, as our bedroom as well. As it was then 9 May, however, John
put our bed in the southwestern corner of that apartment. I believe that the previous tenants, doubtless a fisher-family such
as we, had been in rather poor financial circumstances, as the walls were papered with newsprint that had yellowed, and, in
some places, torn. No curtains hung on the windows, and there was no evidence of any painting or of any effort to make a cheerful
abode. The entire interior was bleak, and, if I may say so, quite gloomy, as there was, in the kitchen, only one small window
at the end of the room. As the house held the smell of mildew as well, I thought it could not have been occupied for some
time.

John brought a chair into the house, and I sat on it. He touched me on the shoulder, but did not speak, and then he went out
again.

I sat, in an attitude of prayer, with my hands folded in my lap, though I could not pray, as I thought then that God had abandoned
me. I knew that I would not be able to leave the island, that our arrival at this place was irrevocable, as was my marriage
to Hontvedt, and I had, I remember, to bite my cheek to keep from breaking into tears that once started might continue forever.

But perhaps God did not abandon me after all on that day, for as I sat there, paralyzed with the weakest of sins, which is
despair, I believe it was God’s hand that caused me then to realize that I must somehow survive my ordeal so that I would
one day be reunited with my brother. I stood up and walked to the window and looked out over the rock. I vowed then to keep
as still and as silent as possible so that the strong emotions that threatened to consume me might come under my control,
in much the same way that a drowning man, clinging to a life raft, will know that he cannot afford to wail or cry out or beat
his breast, and that it is only with the utmost reserve and care and patience that he will be able to remain afloat until
he is saved. It would not do, I also knew, to bemoan constantly my great loss to my husband, for John would quickly tire of
that lament, and would feel, in addition, a personal sorrow that would inhibit his own ability to embrace the life he had
chosen. I turned away from the window and examined again the interior of the cottage. I would make a home here, I told myself.
I would not look eastward again.

I
N
A
FRICA, WHEN
I was on assignment there, some Masai whom I met thought that if I took a photograph of them, and if I went away with that
photograph, I would have stolen their soul. I have sometimes wondered if this can be done with a place, and when I look now
at the pictures of Smuttynose, I ask myself if I have captured the soul of the island. For I believe that Smuttynose has a
soul, distinct from that of Appledore or Londoner’s, or any other place on earth. That soul is, of course, composed of the
stories we have attached to a particular piece of geography, as well as of the cumulative moments of those who have lived
on and visited the small island. And I believe the soul of Smuttynose is also to be found in its rock and tufted vetch, its
beggar’s-ticks and pilewort, its cinquefoil brought from Norway. It lives as well in the petrels that float on the air and
the skate that beach themselves — white and slimy and bloated — on the island’s dark beach.

In 1846, Thomas Laighton built a hotel on Smuttynose known as the Mid-Ocean House. This hotel was a thin, wooden-frame, clapboard
structure, not much bigger than a simple house. It was built on pilings and had a wraparound porch on three sides. Over the
tin roof of the porch hung a hand-painted sign from a third-story window. The sign was imperfectly lettered and read, simply,
MID-OCEAN HOUSE.

From photos of the hotel, there is little evidence of landscaping around the building; sand and rock and seagrass border the
pilings under the porch. But history tells us that the hotel, in its heyday, boasted a garden, several fruit trees, and a
bowling green. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Everett Hale, and Richard Henry Dana were guests at the Mid-Ocean.
In one archival photograph, three unidentified people are relaxing on the porch. One man is wearing a suit with a white straw
hat; a woman has on a high-necked, long-sleeved black dress, with a black silk bonnet, a costume that seems better suited
for a Victorian funeral than for a holiday on Smuttynose. A second woman, who appears to be stout, and who has her hair rolled
at the back, has on a white blouse, a long black skirt, and over it an apron. One imagines her to have been the cook. The
Mid-Ocean House burned in 1911. In March of 1873, the hotel was unoccupied because the season didn’t begin until June.

I wonder now: Did Maren ever go to the Mid-Ocean Hotel? Might John, on a pleasant summer evening, have walked his wife the
hundred yards, across the rocks with the wildflowers snagged and blowing, to the hotel porch, and had a cup of tea and a piece
of American cake — a bowl of quaking pudding? Whitpot? Would they have sat, straight-backed, in the old woven rockers, damp
and loosened already from the sea air, and looked out to a view they knew already by heart? Might this view — this panorama
of rocky islands and spray and some pleasure boats coming now from the mainland — have looked different to them than it did
from the windows of the red house? Did Maren wear a dress brought from Norway, and were they, as they sat on the wooden porch
in the slight breeze from the water, objects of curiosity? Their shoes, their speech, their not-perfect manners giving them
away? Might they have sat beside Childe Hassam at his easel or Celia Thaxter with her notebook and passed a pleasantry, a
nod, a slight bow? Might John once have reached over to the armrest of his wife’s chair and touched her hand? Did he love
her?

Or was the hotel a building they could not enter except as servants — John, in his oilskins, bringing lobsters to the cook?
Maren, in her homespun, her boots and hands cracked, washing linens, sweeping floorboards? Did they, in their turn, regard
the guests as curiosities, American rich who provided Shoalers with extra monies in the summer season? Pale natives who were
often seasick out from Portsmouth?

I like to think of Hawthorne on Smuttynose, taking the sea air, as had been prescribed. Would he have come by steamer from
Boston, have brought a boater and a white suit for the sun? Would he have been inspired by the desolation of the Shoals, tempted
to bathe in the extraordinarily deep waters that separated Smuttynose from Appledore or Star? Might he have been invigorated
by the conversation of the intellectuals and artists Celia Thaxter had gathered around her — Charles Dickens and John Greenleaf
Whittier, William Morris Hunt, a kind of colony, a salon. Did he eat the blueberry grunt, the fish soup, the pluck that was
put before him? And who put it there? Is it possible that a Norwegian immigrant hovered over him? Did this woman ask a question
of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a pleasant question, having no idea who he was, another guest is all, in her charming but broken English?
Tings. Togedder. Brotter.

It is almost impossible now, looking across to Smuttynose, to imagine Hawthorne on that island. There is no trace of the Mid-Ocean
Hotel. It has passed into recorded memory, historical fact, with no life except in sentences and on photographic emulsion.
If all the sentences and photographs about the hotel were to be swept into the sea that surrounds Smuttynose, the Mid-Ocean
— Hawthorne’s stay there, an immigrant’s abbreviated pleasantries — would cease to exist.

No one can know a story’s precise reality.

On October 2, 1867, a boxing match was held at Smuttynose. Because gambling was illegal in the 1860s, isolated locations,
without much interference from the police, were in demand. The Isles of Shoals, and Smuttynose in particular, appeared to
be ideal for this purpose. Two fighters went at it for an hour and a half in the front yard of the Charles Johnson house,
previously known as “the red house,” and subsequently to be known as the Hontvedt house. The spectators came by boat. Another
fight was planned, but was canceled when bad weather prevented any observers from reaching the island and made the contestants
seasick.

At dawn on the morning of the second day at the Isles of Shoals, I am awakened by unwanted and familiar sounds. I slip out
of the bed, with its damp-roughened sheets, and begin to make a pot of coffee in the galley. When I run the water, I cannot
hear the movements in the forward cabin. I am waiting for the coffee to drip through the filter, my arms crossed over my chest,
a sense of wet seeping through my socks, when I reach up and pop open the hatch for just a sliver of fresh air. I see immediately
that the sky is a darkened red, as though there has been a fire on the shore. I open the hatch fully and climb up through
the companionway in my robe. A band of smoky crimson arches over all the islands, a north-south ribbon that seems to stretch
from Portland all the way to Boston. The red is deep in the center, becoming dustier toward the edges. Beneath the swath of
red, gulls catch the light of the slanted sun and seem momentarily imbued with a glow of color all their own. I am somewhat
concerned — the way you are when nature goes off her routines — yet I want to go below, to wake Billie, to show her this phenomenon
of sunlight on water particles in the air. But Billie is already there, behind me.

“I’ve cut my foot, Mommy” is what she says.

I turn in the cockpit. Her face is sticky and puffed with sleep, her mouth beginning to twist with the first messages of pain.
She has on her summer baseball pajamas, shorts and a T-shirt —
Red Sox,
they say. Her feet are white and tiny and bare, and from her right foot the blood is spreading. She moves slightly toward
me and makes a smudge on the white abraded surface of the cockpit floor. A small stray shard from last night’s broken glass
must have fallen below the ladder of the companionway. My opening the hatch this morning has woken Billie, who then walked
into the small triangle under the ladder to retrieve one of Blackbeard’s treasures, the key chain.

I go below to get towels and hydrogen peroxide and bandages from the first-aid kit, and after I have washed and dressed the
cut and am holding Billie in my arms, I look up and realize there is no trace, nothing left at all, of the red band in the
sky.

Rich comes up onto the deck, puts his hands to his waist, and examines the color and texture of the sky, which is not altogether
clear, not as it was the day before. To the east, just below the morning sun, a thin layer of cloud sits on the horizon like
an unraveling roll of discolored cotton wool. Rich, who looks mildly concerned, goes below to listen to the radio. When he
returns to the deck, he brings with him a mug of coffee. He sits opposite Billie and me in the cockpit.

“How did it happen?”

“She cut it on a piece of glass.”

“She’s all right?”

“I think so. The bleeding seems to have stopped.”

“NOAA says there’s a cold front coming through later today. But NOAA is not to be entirely trusted.”

Rich moves his head so that he can see beyond me. There is a gentle chop, but the harbor still seems well protected. Across
the way, there is activity aboard a ketch anchored near us. Rich nods at a woman in a white polo shirt and khaki shorts.

“Looks like they’re leaving,” he says.

“So soon? They just got in last night.”

A sudden breeze blows the skirt of my robe open, and I fold it closed over my knees. I do not really like to be seen in the
morning. I have a sense of not being entirely covered, not yet protected. Rich has on a clean white T-shirt and a faded navy-blue
bathing suit. He is barefoot and has recently showered. The top of his head is wet, and he doesn’t have a beard. I wonder
where Adaline is.

“I don’t know,” he says, speculating out loud about the storm.

“It isn’t clear how bad it will be, or even if it will definitely be here by tonight.”

I shift Billie on my lap. I look over toward Smuttynose. Rich must see the hesitation on my face.

“You need to go over to the island again,” he says.

“I should.”

“I’ll take you.”

“I can take myself,” I say quickly. “I did it last night.”

This surprises him.

“After everyone was asleep. I wanted night shots.”

Rich studies me over the rim of his coffee. “You should have woken me,” he says. “It isn’t safe to go off like that by yourself.
At night, especially.”

“Was it scary, Mommy?”

“No. Actually, it was very beautiful. The moon was out and was so bright I could see my way without a flashlight.”

Rich is silent. I pick up my own mug from the deck. The coffee is cold. Billie sits up suddenly, jogging my arm. The coffee
spills onto the sleeve of my white robe.

“Mommy, can I go over with you tonight? To the island when it’s dark? Maybe there will be ghosts there.”

“Not tonight,” says Rich. “No one’s going over there tonight. We may be having a storm later. It wouldn’t be safe.”

“Oh,” she says, dropping her shoulders in disappointment.

“I’ve got landscape shots from the water,” I say, tallying up my meager inventory. “And night shots, and I’ve done Maren’s
Rock. But I need shots from the island itself, looking out to Appledore and Star, and to the east, out to sea. And also some
detail shots.”