The Weight of Water

  When Thomas comes up the ladder, he brings with him the smell of bacon and pancakes.

  “Billie and I made breakfast,” he says. “Adaline’s setting the table.”

  I am rereading one of the guidebooks to see if I have overlooked a landmark, an artifact that I should not miss when I go across to Smuttynose to finish the shoot. In my lap is Maren Hontvedt’s document and its translation, as well as a thin pamphlet, one of the accounts of the murders.

  “What’s that?” he asks. A conciliatory gesture. Interest in my work.

  “This?” I ask, holding up the guidebook.

  “No, that.”

  I lay my hand on the papers with the brown ink, as if protecting them. “It’s the thing I got from the Athenaeum.”

  “Really. Can I see it?”

  Without looking precisely at him, I hand the papers to Thomas. I can feel the color and the heat coming into the back of my neck.

  “It’s not in English,” he says.

  “There’s a translation.”

  “This is an original document,” he says with some surprise. “I’m amazed they let you have it.”

  There is a silence.

  “They didn’t,” I say. I push my hair behind my ears.

  “They didn’t,” he repeats.

  “I knew they wouldn’t give it to me, so I took it. I’ll give it back.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a memoir. By Maren Hontvedt.”

  “Who is?”

  “The woman who survived the murders.”

  “It’s dated 1899”

  “I know.”

  He hands the papers back to me, and I look up at him for the first time. His hair has been combed off his forehead with his fingers and lies in thinning rows, an already harvested crop. His eyes are bloodshot, and his skin, in the harsh, flat light, looks blotchy.

  “You don’t need this stuff for your assignment,” he says.

  “No.”

  He is about to turn and go back down to the galley, but he hesitates a moment on the steps. “What’s going on with you?” he asks.

  I shade my brow with my hand. “What’s going on with you?” I ask.

  At the Shoals, men have always fished for haddock and for hake, for porgies and for shad. In 1614, Captain John Smith first mapped the islands and called them Smythe’s Isles, and he wrote that they were “a heape together.”

  Halyards slap against the mast, an insistent beat we can hear at the double bed-cum-dining table in the center of the cabin. Thomas and Billie have made pancakes — kidney shaped, oil glistened, and piled high upon a white platter. There is also bacon, which Adaline declines. She chooses toast and orange juice instead. I watch her, nearly naked, lift her mug of decaffeinated coffee to her lips and blow across the rim. I am not sure that I could now sit at a breakfast table in my bathing suit, though I must have done so as a younger woman.

  Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures?

  Billie, next to me, still has on her Red Sox pajamas. She smells of sleep. She is proud of her misshapen pancakes, and eats six of them. I think it is the one certain way to get Billie — any child? — to eat a meal. Have her cook it herself.

  I have on my robe. Rich his bathing suit. Thomas the shirt he slept in. Is it our dishabille that creates the tension — a tension so pronounced I find it hard to swallow? Rich wears the weather report on his face, and we seem excessively focused on the food and on Billie, in the manner of adults who have not found an easy entrée into the conversation. Or who are suddenly wary of conversation: “These are wonderful, Billie. I can see the bear now.” “What kind of coffee is this? It has an almond flavor.” “I love bacon. Honestly, is there anything better on a camping trip than a bacon sandwich?”

  Sometimes I watch the way that Thomas watches me. And if he catches me at this, he slips his eyes away so gracefully that I am not sure he has seen me. Is this simply the familiarity of bodies? I wonder. I no longer know with any certainty what he is thinking.

  “Do you keep a journal?” Adaline asks Thomas.

  I am surprised by the question. Will she dare a reprise of Pearse?

  Thomas shakes his head. “Who has so many words that he can afford to spend them on letters and journals?” he asks.

  Rich nods. “Tom’s a terrible letter writer.”

  I haven’t heard the nickname in years.

  “His literary executor will have it easy,” Rich adds. “There won’t be anything there.”

  “Except the work,” I say quietly. “There’s a lot of the work.”

  “a lot of false starts,” says Thomas. “Especially lately.”

  I look over at Thomas, and I wonder if what I see is the same face I knew fifteen years ago. Does it seem the same to me? Is the skin the same? Or is the expression now so different than it was then that the muscles have become realigned, the face itself unrecognizable?

  “Is it definite that man did it?”

  Adaline’s question startles all of us. It takes me a second to catch up. “Louis Wagner?” I ask.

  “Do they know for sure?”

  “Some think yes,” I answer slowly, “and some think no. At the time, Wagner protested his innocence. But the crime created a tremendous amount of hysteria. There were riots and lynch mobs, and they had to hurry the trial.”

  Adaline nods.

  “Even now, there are doubts,” I add. “He hadn’t much of a motive for the murders themselves, for example, and that row from Portsmouth to Smuttynose would have been brutal. He’d have had to row almost thirty miles in the dark. And it was the first week in March.”

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” says Rich. “I couldn’t do it. I’m not even sure I could do it on a flat surface.”

  “Also, I’ve read parts of the trial transcript,” I say, “and I can’t figure out why the prosecution didn’t do a better job. Maren Hontvedt’s clothes were blood-soaked, but the defense didn’t really pursue this. And the coroner was very careless with the murder weapon — they let the sea spray wash off all the fingerprints and blood on the journey back to Portsmouth.”

  “Surely, they had fingerprinting techniques then,” says Rich.

  “On the other hand,” I say, “Wagner seems to have no alibi for that night, and the next morning he’s reported to have told people he committed murder.”

  “Jean doesn’t always get to pick her assignments,” Thomas says. He sounds apologetic.

  “A crime of passion,” says Rich.

  “A crime of passion?” Adaline narrows her eyes. “In the end, a crime of passion is just sordid, isn’t it? At heart. We think a crime of passion has a morality all its own — people have thought so for years. History is full of judgments that forgive crimes of passion. But it doesn’t have a morality, not really. It’s pure selfishness. Simply having what you want.”

  “I think it’s the knife that makes it seem like a crime of passion,” says Thomas. “It was a knife, wasn’t it?”

  “An ax.”

  “Same thing. It’s the intimacy. With a gun, you can kill a person at a distance. But with a knife, you have to touch the victim — more than touch. Manhandle. Subdue. It would seem to require, at least for the several seconds it takes to complete the deed, a sustained frenzy or passion.”

  “Or a lucrative contract,” says Rich.

  “But even then,” argues Thomas, “there would have to be something in the act — the handling of the victim, the feel of the knife against the flesh — that attracted the killer to that particular method.”

  “Thomas,” I say, nodding at Billie.

  “Mommy, take a picture of the pancakes,” she says. “Before they’re all gone?”

  I reach behind me into my camera bag and bring out the Polaroid. I shoot the platter with the pancakes that are left, and then rip the film out and give it to Billie to hold. She’s a pro at this, and holds the corner casually.

  “The Masai,” I say idly, “believe that if you take a pho
tograph of a person, you have stolen his soul. You have to pay them for the picture.”

  “The soul is for sale then?” asks Adaline.

  “Oh, I think the Masai are shrewder than that.”

  “See, Adaline? Look!” Billie stands on the bench to hand Ada-line the Polaroid. As she does, she cracks her head on the sharp corner of an overhanging cabinet. The color leaves Billie’s face, and her mouth falls open, but I can see that in this company my daughter is determined not to cry.

  I reach over and fold her into me. The photograph flutters onto the table. She presses her face into my chest, and I feel her breath through the opening of my robe. Adaline picks up the Polaroid. “Lovely picture, Billie,” she says.

  I kiss Billie’s forehead, and she pulls away from me, turning in her seat, trying bravely to smile. Adaline hands the picture to Billie.

  “Very game,” says Adaline to me.

  “Thanks.” I envy you.

  I look quickly up at her and catch her eyes. Does she mean Billie? Or does she mean having my daughter with me? Or does she mean Billie and Thomas — the whole package?

  “Sometimes I imagine I have caught a likeness of a person’s soul,” I say carefully. “Occasionally, you can see it. Or what you imagine is the true character of that person. But of course, it’s only a likeness, and that likeness is only an image, on the paper.”

  “But you can fool with images,” she says. “Didn’t I read that somewhere? Can’t you change the image?”

  “You can now,” I say. “You can do it almost flawlessly with computers.”

  “So you could, theoretically, create another character, another soul.”

  “This is assuming that you believed the camera could capture the soul in the first place,” I say.

  “This is assuming that you believed in the soul at all,” says Thomas. “That what you saw was not simply an arrangement of organic particles.”

  “But surely you believe in the soul,” Adaline says quickly, almost defensively. “You of all people.”

  Thomas is silent.

  “It’s in the poems,” she says.

  I have a series of photographs of Billie and Thomas together, taken shortly after we have eaten the pancakes. I have dressed and am getting my gear together in preparation for the boat ride over to Smuttynose. I take out the Hasselblad, which I have loaded with black-and-white. I do four quick shots — click, click, click, click — of Thomas and Billie, who have lingered at the table. In the first, Billie is standing on the padded bench, inspecting Thomas’s teeth, counting them, I think. In the second, she has bent her body so that she is butting her head into Thomas’s stomach; Thomas, too, is slightly bent, and has wrapped his arms over her back. In the third picture, they both have their elbows propped upon the table and are facing each other, talking. The conversation must be serious; you can see that in the tilt of Billie’s head, the pursing of her mouth. In the fourth picture, Thomas has one hand tucked inside the open collar of his shirt, scratching his shoulder. He is facing me, but he won’t look at me or at the camera. Billie has turned her head away from Thomas, as though someone has just called to her from the forward cabin.

  The head sea is apparent the moment we round the breakwater. Small waves hit the Zodiac and send their spray into and over the inflatable boat. With one hand on the tiller, Rich tosses me a poncho, which I use to protect my camera bags from the salt water. When I look up again, I find I can hardly see for the spray. My face and hair and glasses are soaked, as in a rain, and foolishly, I have worn shorts, so that my legs are wet and cold and covered with goosebumps.

  Rich turns the Zodiac around. He has wanted to observe the ocean on the unprotected side of the island, and he has seen enough. He maneuvers back into the harbor and puts the Zodiac up onto the narrow dark beach of Smuttynose, a beach I left only the night before. I dry my glasses on the inside of my sweatshirt and inspect my camera bags for any signs of wet.

  “How do you want to work this?” he asks as he is tying up the boat. His T-shirt has turned a translucent peach. “You want me to go with you and hold things? Or do you want me to wait here.”

  “Wait here,” I say. “Sit in the sun and get dry. Rich, I’m really sorry about this. You must be freezing.”

  “I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve been wet before. You do what you have to do.” He smiles. “I know this is hard to believe,” he says, “but I’m actually having a good time. The truth is” — he gestures to indicate the expanse of the ocean and seems to laugh at himself— “I usually have to go to a lot of trouble to be able to do this on my days off.”

  “I’ll try not to be long. Thirty, forty minutes at the most. And if you do get cold,” I say, “give a shout, and we’ll get out of here. This isn’t worth getting sick over.”

  I bend to collect my camera bags. When I stand up, Rich is wrestling with his wet T-shirt. He takes it off and wipes the top of his head with it, and then squeezes it out. I watch him walk over to a rock that is in the sun, or what is left of the sun, and lay the T-shirt carefully out to dry. When I was in Africa, I observed the women there drying their clothes in a similar manner — by laying them flat on top of long grasses over a wide field, so that often you would come upon a landscape of bright cloth. Rich glances over at me. Perhaps because he has almost no hair on his head, the thick dark chest hair that spreads across his breast draws the eye. I turn around and walk to the interior of Smuttynose.

  The defense waived its right to cross-examine Ingerbretson, at which point the prosecution then called Evan Christensen to the stand. Christensen was asked to identify himself and to talk about his relationship to Smuttynose.

  “In March last, I lived at the Shoals, Smutty Nose, in John Hontvet’s family; I had lived there about five months. Anethe Christensen was my wife. I was born in Norway. Anethe was born in Norway. I came to this country with her after I married her.”

  Yeaton asked Christensen what he was doing the day of the murders. Christensen answered: “During the night my wife was killed I was in Portsmouth. I arrived at Portsmouth about four o’clock the night before.”

  “Who was with you when you arrived at Portsmouth about four o’clock that night?”

  “John Hontvet and Matthew Hontvet. I was at work for John in the fishing business.”

  “Was anyone else with you that night?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where did you spend the night at Portsmouth?”

  “I was on board till twelve o’clock; after that went up to Johnson’s house and baited trolls.”

  “Baited trolls the rest of the night?”

  “Yes, till six or seven o’clock in the morning. John Hontvet was with me when I baited trolls.”

  “When did you first hear of this matter at Smutty Nose?”

  “Heard it from Appledore Island.”

  “Where were you then?”

  “On board Hontvet’s schooner.”

  “Who were with you at that time?”

  “Matthew Hontvet and John Hontvet; it was between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “Did you go ashore?”

  “Yes; got a boat and went ashore on Appledore Island.”

  “Where did you go from Appledore Island?”

  “I went first up to Ingerbretson’s house. After I left there I went to Smutty Nose. When I got to Smutty Nose, I went right up to the house and right in.”

  “What did you see there?”

  “I saw my wife lying on the floor.”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Dead.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Went right back out again.”

  The light is flat and muffled, colors indistinct. Thin, dull cloud has slipped over the sun, still rising in the east. I am annoyed with myself for having wasted too much time the day before shooting Maren’s Rock. I walk to the spot where the Hontvedt house once stood. The air has a chill in it, or perhaps it is only that I am chilled because my sweatshirt and shorts are wet. I a
m grateful that Rich knew not to bring Billie.

  I stand in the footprint of the house, surveying its markers. There is little here that will make an outstanding photograph; its purpose will be merely documentary. Unless, that is, I can convey the foundation’s claustrophobia.

  I know that it is always true that the dimensions of a house, seen from above, will look deceptively small. Space appears to increase in size with walls and furniture and windows. Yet even so, I am having difficulty imagining six grown men and women — Maren, John, Evan, Anethe, Matthew, and, for seven months, Louis Wagner — living in a space not much bigger than the single room Thomas had in Cambridge when I met him. All those passions, I think, on such a small piece of land.

  I find what I think must have been one of the two front doors of the house and stand at its threshold, looking out toward Ap-pledore, as Maren must have done a thousand times in the five years she lived on the island. I take my cameras and lenses from their separate pouches, check the light meter, and shoot a series of black-and-white stills to make a panorama of that view. Directly west of me is Gosport Harbor and, beyond that, ten miles of water to the New Hampshire coast. To my north is Appledore; to my south is Star. Behind me, that is to say east of me, is the Atlantic. I back away from the threshold and stand in the foundation’s center. Beneath me, the floor of that old house has long given way to thistle and wood sage. I find a small patch of bare ground and sit down. Above me, the clouds are growing oilier, as though a film were being washed across the sky. My sweatshirt sticks to my back, and I shiver.

  I dig under the brush to feel the dirt. I bring the soil up and massage it with my fingers. In the place where I am sitting, two women died. One was young, one was not. One was beautiful, the other not. I imagine I can hear Maren’s voice.

  21 September 1899

  THE MORNING AFTER we arrived on the island of Smutty Nose, John went off with a man named Ingerbretson to Portsmouth to secure more provisions and also to see about a schooner that might be for sale. In order to make a living on Smutty Nose, around which we were told was an abundance of mackerel, cod, flounder, haddock, and menhaden, John would have to have his own boat plus full gear for fishing. This would be a great expense, and would largely exhaust John’s savings, but it was clear to him that no profit, nor even a livelihood, could be earned without such expenditures.