Strange Fits of Passion

  The port side of the boat was enclosed, with the foul-weather gear hanging from a hook. The starboard side was open. The wheel was there and a kind of hydraulic setup for pulling the pots. Above the wheel was a CB radio, but he didn't use it that day. There were other bits of equipment near and around the wheel—a depth sounder, he explained, and fuel gauges. In the cockpit beside me there was a bait barrel. He stood at the wheel and saw us around the island. Then he gestured for me to come up beside him.

  I hung on to a center pole and watched the land recede behind the boat. It was hard to hear each other over the engine, so we didn't talk much. He shouted that he would take her straight out to the grounds, pick up twenty traps he'd set a few days before. At the end of the week, he said, he'd have the boat hauled. After he'd picked up his pots, he added, he'd take us over to Swale's Island. It was beautiful, he said. It had the prettiest beach in eastern Maine.

  As soon as the engine started, Caroline fell asleep, and she did not wake up until we stopped the boat in the natural harbor of Swale's. The air was frigid, but if I stood close to Jack, inside the well of the pilothouse, I did not feel the wind. I thought that Caroline was probably warm enough, though I did not like to think of all the possible things that could go wrong and how quickly a person could die out there.

  Jack was relaxed and loose and amused, smiling at me in a way he seldom did at the cottage. Perhaps he was enjoying the incongruity of myself and the baby on his boat, or perhaps he was just continually tickled by the way I looked with the baby at my front and the life vest tied around me. There were few boats on the water. Indeed, once we had put the coastline behind us, and there were only islands, I had a sense of being very far away. At first, I had been able to see the village of St. Hilaire from the water, but now that was gone, even the white steeple of the church. The sun was up, but the shore was just a hazy blue.

  After about forty-five minutes, we reached a point where he cut the engine, idled the boat. He took the foul-weather gear from its hook, put on only the pants. He already had on his yellow slicker over his sweater. He wore the bib of the pants over the jacket, like an apron. I asked him how he knew where he was. He pointed to a small cove in a nearby island, then to a rocky ledge. They seemed identical to all the small coves I'd seen, all the rocky ledges. He laughed. He said he had the depth sounder too. And then, of course, all around us were his buoys—red on the top and bottom, with a yellow band in between.

  I watched as he hauled his pots. As each came up, he would remove the lobsters, band the claws with elastic, put the lobsters into one of the buckets that he had filled with water, throw back into the sea any detritus that had been in the lobster pot, and stack the pot on those he had already retrieved.

  "Normally I'd rebait them, throw them back, but I'm hauling them for the winter," he said.

  It was hard work, and it had a certain kind of ugliness to it too. I did not think it was romantic, the actual hauling of the pots, only cold and difficult. He wore long cotton gloves, but I thought his hands must be freezing. The water splashed up on his bib and around our feet.

  When he was finished, the small cockpit was jammed with buckets and pots and buoys, and I had lost my seat on the box.

  He turned the boat south then, toward Swale's Island, which he pointed out to me when it became visible. On the north side of the island, as we approached, I could see several large wooden houses and what looked like fields.

  "It's privately owned," he said, "though we all use the beach on the other side in summer. It's where we take our families for a picnic or whatever."

  At the mention of families, he looked away from me and busied himself at the wheel. He checked the depth sounder, looked westward toward shore. I knew that it had cost him to give me this time on a Sunday, and that there might not be any more Sundays. The boat we were on had his wife's name on it, and I was sometimes reminded of this, as when he would say—a common enough expression—"I'll just take her out to the grounds."

  He took the boat in close to the western shore of the island, so that I could see the rocky ledges there or catch a glimpse of a seal. Then he negotiated the cut, and we were in the harbor—a crescent bordered by a nearly pure-white beach. It was a wild beach, undomesticated. The only way to get there was by boat. He cut the engine and threw an anchor overboard. The baby woke up.

  "I've brought us a picnic," he said.

  "I have to nurse the baby," I said. I had never nursed her in front of him. He cleared two seats facing each other in the cockpit. He helped me off with the life vest and extricated Caroline from the sling. As he held Caroline, he said to me to go forward and see if I could find an old beach towel he thought was there. It would make a kind of tent, he said, to shield Caroline from the breezes while she nursed.

  I went forward into the small cabin. I supposed there was an order to it that Jack understood, but to me it looked chaotic. There was hardware and ropes, a canvas tarp and rags. I opened a door to a cabinet. It was the books that first caught my eye. There were half a dozen paperbacks. I remember a book of poetry by Yeats, Malamud's The Fixer. The books were worn, dog-eared, and some had water stains. Also inside were old charts, folded and refolded a hundred times. A flashlight, some flares, a flare gun. A bottle, a third full, of whiskey. I saw the towel, picked it up. Under it was another gun, a pistol. I picked the pistol up, held it in my hand, put it back. I returned to the cockpit with the towel.

  "I found the towel," I called to him, emerging, stopping a second to watch him holding Caroline, "but I also found a gun."

  "Oh," he said. He seemed unconcerned, as if I'd found a watch he'd misplaced and not a gun. "We all have them," he added. "We all keep a gun for poachers, to warn them off. I'll fire it from time to time to keep it from getting rusty, but that's all."

  "It's loaded?" I asked.

  "Wouldn't be much point in having it if I didn't keep it loaded. Anyway, no one's ever on board except me."

  "I also found some books," I said. "Paperbacks. Do you read when you're out here?"

  He looked startled for a moment, embarrassed.

  "If I get the chance," he said. He laughed. "Well, sometimes I make the chance. It's peaceful out here."

  I took the baby from him and sat down. I opened my coat and raised my sweater. I immediately felt the cold air on my bare skin. He shook out the towel and placed it over my shoulder to shield Caroline's face from the cold. He went forward into the cabin and returned with the bottle of whiskey. Then he sat down and began to unpack the picnic. Occasionally, such as at that moment, I would shut my eyes, for just a second, and let the smallest picture come into my mind of what my life might have been like if I had met Jack years ago and not Harrold, but I immediately shook these pictures away. It was treacherous ground—shifting shoals.

  He had made bacon sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. It was all he had made, but he'd made lots, and I was ravenous. My God, you cannot imagine how good bacon sandwiches are when you are hungry. He had toasted the bread, and even though the sandwiches were cold, they were indescribably delicious. He poured a generous amount of whiskey into the coffee. It seemed to be the custom here—to lace your coffee or tea with spirits. He gave me my coffee in the cap of the thermos; he himself drank from the canister. Around us the sun was brilliant and doing its best to try to warm us. It reflected off the white beach and the water. He sat across from me; our knees were touching. I ate with one hand, held the baby with the other. The boat was rocking gently. I looked at his weathered face, the wrinkles, his gray eyes. He had the collar of a flannel shirt up high under the sweater. It was just the two of us and all that water and all that sand and all that sky.

  "This is...,"1 started to say, but I couldn't finish.

  He looked at me.

  He adjusted the towel on my shoulder.

  He nodded and looked away.

  Perhaps we talked while we sat there eating the sandwiches. We must have, because I have bits of information I might not otherwise have now. We
tended not to talk much in the mornings, and he was reticent by nature, not used to sharing thoughts and feelings—or possibly he was just long out of practice. I thought that in this way we were alike, for I had learned to be guarded, too, in conversation. If you cannot talk about the thing that is at the center of your life—cannot let bits slip out for fear of revealing the entire story—you develop what might pass for a natural reticence, a habit of listening rather than of telling stories yourself. But that day, I think he did speak of his family: not of his wife and children, but of his father and his grandfather. They'd been lobstermen too, or at least his father had, he said. His grandfather had fished for cod, then had switched to lobster when the demand for it had begun to increase after World War II. His grandfather was dead now, and although his father was still alive, living just south of town with his wife, he could no longer fish. I don't remember exactly what words Jack used to describe his father's accident, but I understood it and the early retirement it necessitated to be a calamity of serious proportions.

  Though I never met Jack's father, I did sometimes have an image of an older, smaller version of Jack, a man with withered arms, sitting in an armchair in the living room of a Maine Cape, looking out across the gulf.

  When we had eaten all the sandwiches, Jack said that we ought to be heading in. He would drop me off at the point, then take the boat over to the wharf to wash her down and set his pots on the dock. Easier to pick them up there, he explained, than to ferry them in the dinghy.

  We didn't speak on the voyage home—again the engine was too loud—but the ride was comfortable and strangely warm. We were going with the wind.

  We rounded a pine-thick island, and I could just make out the point and my cottage.

  "Damn!" he said.

  I tried to see what had caught his attention, but his eyes on the water were sharper than my own. I squinted in the direction of the cottage. And then when we had drawn a little closer, I saw it. A red pickup truck at the shack.

  "There's a truck at the fish house," I said.

  "You know whose it is?"

  "Yes."

  "We can't turn around...."

  "No, we can't," I agreed.

  "All right, then," he said. "Jesus Christ, what's he doing here on a Sunday?"

  I knew, but I didn't say.

  He brought the boat to the mooring, lowered me into the dinghy, and sculled us to the shore. By the time he had pulled the dinghy far enough up onto the sand so that I could step out, Willis had traversed the length of the beach.

  "Jack."

  "Willis."

  The two men greeted each other, but Jack did not look up in Willis's direction. Willis was smoking a cigarette.

  "Red."

  I nodded, bent my head to the baby.

  "You out for a spin or what?" he said to Jack.

  "Hauling some pots."

  "On a Sunday. Good for you. I always said you were a hard worker, Jack."

  Jack pushed the dinghy back into the water, prepared to get in.

  "And you took Red here along for the ride."

  Jack looked up from the dinghy at me. "Yes," he said.

  No excuses. No explanations.

  "So what'd you think, Red? You like it or what?"

  Willis had sunglasses on, as I did. I couldn't see his eyes, but I looked straight at the sunglasses.

  "It was instructive," I said. "Very instructive."

  Jack pushed himself away from the shore with the oar. I thought he was smiling.

  "So long, then," he said.

  "Thanks for the trip," I answered as casually as I could.

  I was thinking: In a few hours, I will see him again.

  Perhaps he was thinking that too.

  Willis walked me back toward the cottage. He said, "I saw your car was here. I tried the door a coupla times, no answer. I got worried, thought maybe you'd had an accident or something, or fallen into a honeypot. Another half hour and I'd a gone for Everett."

  "That would have been silly," I said.

  "It's dangerous you goin' out on a boat in the winter with a baby. You got to think of the baby, you know."

  "I think of the baby all the time," I said. "And don't worry about me. I can take care of myself."

  We were at his truck by then. I was not going to invite him in, even if he asked, and I suppose he sensed that, because he did not ask.

  "Is that a fact," he said, touching the baby on the cheek.

  Willis Beale

  Well, I suppose someone's goin' to have to tell you the whole story about Jack and Mary. I don't mean to say that this has any bearin' on the crime itself, I wouldn't want you to think that. I'm not sayin' she did it because of this, that's not what I'm sayin' 'tall, although maybe you got to think of that a little bit, but the truth is she didn't waste much time before she hooked up with Jack Strout.

  Has anybody told you the whole story yet?

  Not too much of this came out at the trial, because nobody who testified would give too many details. That is to say, it was mentioned, and Mary, she had to say, didn't she, but the prosecutor, he didn't really get into the details. But I think if you're goin' to do this article of yours, you ought to have all the facts, even though I don't want you sayin' it was me or anything that told you. This is—what do you call it—undercover information.

  Well, OK, background information.

  So long as you don't put my name with this. But the truth is, it didn't take her too long, if you understand my meaning. I can't tell you for sure when it began, but I can tell you this. By Christmas Eve, I had kind of an idea about the two of them. Just call it an instinct. I got a nose for people, you know what I mean? I didn't actually see them together until, oh, at least a week or more later, but I just began to get this idea from watchin' 'em. Now you think about that. She got here on December 3. Christmas Eve was only three weeks later. Is that a fast worker or what?

  So you think about that for a while, and you start to get a little bit of a different picture of Mary Amesbury. You know, maybe she wasn't quite the injured party she made herself out to be. Maybe she went after the fellas in New York City a little too often, and her husband had what you would call a real case against her, you follow me. I don't know, I'm thinkin' if I had a wife played around a lot—hey, you know, what if the baby wasn't even his?—well, that could turn a fella's head around, and he might get a bit hot under the collar.

  All I'm sayin' is, it bears some thinkin' about, that's all.

  Now, Jack, he was your basic family man. Never a hint of any funny business from either him or Rebecca. And to tell you the truth, this whole thing is a really sad story. When I think about what happened...

  So what I'm tryin' to tell you is, I don't think Jack made the first move, you understand me? I know Jack. He's as straight as a die. Loyal to his wife, even with all his troubles. Never even looked at another woman, far as I know, and I'd probably know. So you tell me what hap pened. I mean, Mary Amesbury, she was a pretty good-lookin' woman, even with all what happened to her, and I suppose even Jack, I mean if a woman really goes after you, sometimes, well, we're all human, right, and maybe she was just too much for him. What I mean to say is, I just can't see Jack makin' the first move. He's not the type.

  Yeah, I saw 'em together. Caught 'em red-handed, so to speak, although they weren't actually ... you know. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was over to the point to get some gear from the fish house, and I thought I'd just stop by, see if she was OK. You know I felt responsible for her a little bit, seein' as how I was practically the first person she met in town, and I noticed that her car was there, but she was nowhere to be seen. I started to get worried after a while, that she'd had an accident or something, and then I saw 'em comin' in. He took her out on the boat. On a Sunday, no less. So right then you knew it wasn't on the up and up. 'Cause how come he takes her out when he knows no one will be on the point? Right? So I go down to say hello, be friendly, and they're both lookin' guiltier than shit. All over their fac
es. And there she is with the baby, no less. I'd like to know what they did with the baby when they ... you know. Anyway, that's none of my business, is it?

  Fact is, he used to go there in the mornings, afore he went out on his boat. It got to be kind of general knowledge around town, though whether it got to be general knowledge afore or after is hard to say now. I can't really remember. I knew, but of course I wouldn't a told anyone. Except possibly Jeannine. I might of told Jeannine. I was pretty disappointed in Mary Amesbury after that. I thought she was what she was, but she wasn't, if you follow me.

  So, like I said, probably this is neither here nor there. I just thought you ought to have all the facts, that's all.

  Mary Amesbury

  That night I woke up to the sound of Caroline crying. The cries were high-pitched and insistent, and when I reached her room, she was on all fours in the crib, trying to pull herself up the bars. Her face was scrunched and reddened with pain. I reached for her, and I could feel at once that she was feverish. I put my hand on her forehead. She twisted away from me. I'd never felt such hot skin before.

  Immediately, I went into the kitchen and crushed a tablet of baby aspirin. It dissolved imperfectly in the apple juice, and when I tried to give the juice to Caroline, she flung her head back and screamed, refusing the bottle. Not knowing what else to do, I walked with her around the familiar path, but the walking was useless. I tried to hold her close to my chest to comfort her. When I did so, however, she kept twisting her head away and then flopping her face from side to side against me. I wanted to stay calm, to think clearly, but this flopping alarmed me.

  Jack came just before daybreak, as was his custom. I had Caroline on the orange mat in the bathroom. I had stripped her of her pajamas and diaper and was trying to give her a sponge bath with cool washcloths to bring the fever down. The touch of the washcloths must have been searing on her skin, however, for she shrieked even louder when I did this.