Synopsis
Book by Coomer Joe
Extrait
Chapter 1
I came across a love of moving water, an ebbing tide parting on the plumb bow of an old boat, and the sea passing swiftly along the waterline carried bits of seaweed, the body of a dead bird, a dark brown leaf, and a love that seemed necessary to me, to be near that abrasive current, the green swell and nascent gurgle. I thought I'd never be able to love anything again, anything other than the memory of my husband, and so I felt ashamed and queer kneeling there on the dock, my bag over one shoulder and a kitten inside my coat, looking down into the water of Portsmouth Harbor, and feeling for a moment, not sad. He'd died at Christmas, nine weeks earlier.
The kitten mewed and, using my skin as a boarding net, tried to crawl up between my breasts. I reached for him but didn't take my eyes from the water till I had him nose to nose, round pupil to narrowing pupil, and said to him, "We'll stay here for a while: I'd found him at a rest stop in West Virginia and hadn't named him yet, though I was leaning toward Peytona Pawtucket, two small towns near my home: PP for short. Jonah never liked cats, and at the roadside it suddenly occurred to me that I could rescue this kitten without any recrimination. It wasn't the kitten's fault that Jonah had died. It was, I realized, his dumb luck. But perhaps this kitten had somehow killed my husband so I'd save him from his miserable abandonment. Maybe Jonah had died so I'd rescue the kitten. If Jonah had been there at the rest stop I wouldn't even have considered...well, it was another strange hallucination of my rage. I was still mad at my dead husband for dying. I like to lay blame and it seemed as if something as huge as Jonah's death ought to be someone's fault.
I tucked the kitten's angular tendon-taut body away again, and stood up, walked back in the March cold to my car. I'd driven east till I beached at the ocean and then splashed north along the coastline till I decided there wasn't any reason to turn away. We indulged ourselves that first night, the cat and I, and stayed at the Portsmouth Sheraton in a room that looked out over a monumental pyramid of salt to the river, the tide-wracked Piscataqua, whose mouth was the old harbor. I'd asked an old woman on the street what all the salt was for. I learned later it was simply road salt. But that afternoon she looked at me sadly and explained, "Why, dear, when the rains are heavy and too much fresh water flows down to the sea, we add salt back to the ocean so the fish won't expire."
I came across a love of moving water kneeling in the current of Caudel Run, the small creek behind our home in Kentucky, whose waters were as dear and cold as my fear, falling over black ledges of slate, gathering in white sluices of anguish, numbing my feet, blueing the skin. I could hold the water in my hands and bring it to my mouth.
By morning I'd changed the kitten's name to Piscataqua. He'd scratched up a few carpet fuzzies and taken a dump under a chair. After I cleaned it up I hid him in the bathroom and ordered room service: eggs and milk. We ate at the window and watched the working of the gulls over the river, trailing behind a boat. It was warm in the room, but I could tell it was cold beyond, cold on the street below and colder still at the water. So I bundled up and put Piscataqua between my shirt and sweater, where he dropped to my stomach and soon fell asleep. When I reached the sidewalk it dawned on me that there was nothing I had to do. There were things I should have done and things other people wanted me to do, but nothing necessary beyond breathing.
I felt as if I'd escaped. I hadn't called it that before, but an escape it was, through a tunnel, over walls. I'd left home with a wad of cash, to avoid using my credit cards to buy gas or food so I couldn't be tracked by the bills. I felt guilty. I'd left my parents a note saying I was just getting away for a few days, but I knew at the time that I had no intention of returning permanently. I'd even contacted a real estate agent to list the house. I'd call Mom later, I thought. It wasn't fair to Mom and Dad, because I wasn't running from my parents, but from his, Jonah's, the Montagues. If I told my folks where I was, I knew Richard and Mary would somehow find out. They were ravenous, and I no longer had the strength to fend them off. Jonah was their only child, and after his death they fed off my memories. I'd seen them every day since the wreck. They drove the thirty-two miles from their home to mine to keep me company, but I soon realized they were scavengers and I was their last hope for food, the only carcass on an endless stretch of desert, and that they wouldn't leave me till my bones were hollow and bleached. They seemed to have no memory of their own. Mary washed all of Jonah's clothes, even those that were already clean, going through the pockets in search of a scrap or seed that might be explained by some story I could tell. A ticket stub from a movie was a mine to her and in her grief she'd torture me asking question after question: "How was the movie? Did Jonah like it? Did you have popcorn? Where did you sit? Did he laugh? Tell me where he laughed. We could rent the video and watch it, the three of us. You could tell us where he laughed" I found Richard in the attic reading my letters to Jonah and Jonah's to me. I left the day after Mary, blowing into a cup of coffee, her eyes on the cup's rim, said, "There in the hospital, before he died, when we knew he was going to die, we should have had the doctors take the sperm from his testicles. We could have frozen it. You could have had his baby yet." I left. I loved him too.
I looked over my shoulder, Richard and Mary weren't behind me, and then walked up the street into old Portsmouth. I'd been here before as an undergraduate, attending an archaeological field school at the Isles of Shoals, five miles off the coast. I spent two weeks uncovering the foundations of a seventeenth-century fishery. The ferry to the islands left from Portsmouth, so I had frequent opportunities to roam the streets and waterfront of the city, to visit Strawbery Banke (Portsmouth's original name and now a museum collection of early houses near Prescott Park), to sit in the many restaurants and cafés, to browse the used and rare bookstores and antique shops. But most of my spare time was spent with my eyes on the water, simply watching the tide and the boats. That's what I'd come back to. And although I knew I should have begun to search for a place to live, my feet carried me back toward the piers on the river. I wanted to see the sun's reflection off the water. I crossed Market Street in front of the Moffat-Ladd House, passed through a small garden to Ceres Street, eighteenth-century warehouses turned twentieth-century gift shops on one side and tugboats on the other, climbed up along Bow Street, more waterfront brick warehouses that were now restaurants and boutiques.
Portsmouth seems to be washed with age, worn by touch and breath. Its streets, like animal paths, lead down to the river and then mimic its banks. The city is comfortable here, relaxed, as unconsciously nestled in this point of land as the last bone in my finger. What's brick is red and what's wood is white and what's stone is gray granite. Cobbles and sills are footfall worn, cupped like waiting palms. The glass of many mullioned windows flows toward the river, distorting interiors. The shops and cafes are small and eclectic, with merchandise-weary walls and light-poor corners. Layers of old patina, layers of faded paper over horsehair plaster, levels of plank flooring, all seem burnished like the head of a cane. Behind the counters, in between sales, clerks read with cats in their laps, dogs at their feet. Above them, copper dormers modeled to frame a human face look out to sea. Slate roofs, rust streaked, widow's walks and witch's peaks: the skyline crouches under the lighted steeples of old churches.
I whistled past St. John's Church with its sidewalk-level burial vaults, and finally crossed Daniel and State Streets to Prescott Park and a clear view of the river. This city is so close to the sea it's hard to put your hand in the water.
When I was here before, during the summer, the streets of Portsmouth were thronged with tourists, but in early March at eight in the morning I was alone in Prescott Park. Wind came in from the sea and down the mouth of the harbor, blowing patterns in the bare branches of the trees above me and rasping the surface of the river. I leaned on a railing at the seawall and looked down into the green but bright water, looking through shards of light and scattered leaves on the surface to the current beneath, the tide coming out of its slackness. Lobster buoys, lolling with broken necks and then swinging uptight, began to take the strain. Boats tugged at the lines holding them to the dock below, and the dock itself with rusty groans moved as far seaward as its pilings would allow. All the water was being pulled from the river. It happened, high tide and low, every six hours or so, this great back and forth, the earth shuddering, a slow shake of cleansing, over and over. Here the tide was particularly strong, the current as fast as six knots, the rise and fall as much as nine feet. I never knew a more active environment, as if the skin of the world was loose as a cat's. If the creek behind our house in Kentucky turned around and raced uphill as fast as it coursed down, and rose and dropped eight or nine feet in the process, if it did this just once, the entire human species would come and sit on its banks in hopes to see it happen again.
The sound of steel on steel came across the water from Seavey's Island and the navy yard. There were submarines flanking each side of a pier. Men stood on the rounded black hulls, pulling lines, gesturing. They seemed to have purpose.
A lobster boat puttered through the gut between Pierce Island and Prescott Park past me to a buoy on the edge of the main current, just off tiny Four Tree Island. A man in yellow bib overalls turned the bow of his boat into the ebbing tide and adjusted his speed to match the current, leaving the boat at a standstill. He reached down, picked up a buoy, and wrapped its line around a small winch. Spray flew, and soon a green rectangular metal cage appeared alongside, and he stooped over with gloved hands and pulled it aboard. He reached inside the cage and brought forth a lobster waving semaphore and then, to my great dismay, chunked it overboard. He proceeded to throw away three more, rebait the trap, and drop it back over too. I thought, perhaps lobstering is not only a business but also a sport. The smell off his bait rose to me on the wind that moved against the tide and I walked away along the railing.
The gangway to the Portsmouth Public Landing led down to a dock. Entrance was allowed only to boat owners and guests, but the small guardhouse was empty, so I crept down the aluminum incline to the green lumber of the dock. Most of the slips were empty. Two small sailboats nested near shore and further out a lobster boat was backed into its berth. I walked past Elizabeth Ann II to the end of the dock, kneeled down, held one palm under the weight of the kitten, and plunged my free hand into the water. It was colder than I could believe, colder than ice cream in the sinuses, so cold I jerked my hand back and hit myself in the face with my already blue knuckles. It didn't seem to me that anything could live in such extremes and that perhaps the lobsterman had been throwing back dead, frozen lobsters. I smelled my fingertips after rubbing them dry on my coat. It was a precise smell, thick, pungent, like moss or loamy soil but not those, more like the worm itself, like fur and skin and pee and death and rocks, but beyond all of these, on top of and suffused through them, was a sense of cleanliness. I took a handful of water, bearing the needles of pain, and saw it dear, unlike the body of the river, clear and without movement, as clear as the whorls and lines of my palm, as if it didn't exist at all without the rest of the ocean and so I threw it back.
There was a shrill peep and I looked up to see two tugboats nosing a huge ship around Henderson Point on Seavey's Island. I'd read in a guidebook at the Sheraton how the big ships came up and down the river at slack tide, when the water was at its deepest or shallowest. A loaded ship came in at high tide so her bottom would clear the rocks and an empty ship left at low tide so her superstructure would clear the bridges. As I watched the tugs push the ship around the tight corner, a great blast from the horn on Memorial Bridge lifted me an inch off the lumber of the dock and brought Piscataqua alive between my shirt and sweater. He crawled, marsupial-like, up the front of my blouse to my neck, peeked out at the collar of my coat, and so we watched the show together. After a moment or two, gates dropped in front of the traffic on the bridge above us and the center section slowly rose on steel cables. The tugs, alternately whistling and tooting in their spare, plaintive language of air, guided the ship with what seemed like inches to spare between the twin towers of Memorial and on up the river to meetings with the two other bridges that cross the Piscataqua between Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery, Maine. The ship was out of Venezuela and didn't seem to have a soul on board. I couldn't conceive of what might be in its hold, but thought myself blessed to welcome it after such a long journey.
I rose and turned back up the dock, gazing into the cockpits of the lobster boat and sailboats as I passed to see if there were any secrets there. I walked to the north end of the park and watched, for at least an hour, the tide backing out from underneath a restaurant, the Smarmy Snail, perched over the river on pilings. The receding water left mudflats and shallows, blanched barnacles, tires and splintered lumber, the remains of two wire traps, and still the water fell, revealing a tattered nylon fishing net clinging to the pilings like a forgotten web, a fragmented Styrofoam buoy and plastic bottles caught in its filaments. I could think of no word to weave in my web that would have saved him.
Another dock led out from the Smarmy Snail's deck, a private float where two larger boats were tied. I'd explored that dock the evening before. I entered the glass-enclosed dining area of the restaurant, ordered a cup of hot tea, and sat with my face to the sun looking down on the boats. Downriver was the old prison, a stone Victorian edifice now used for storage by the navy, but whose prisoners once must have looked forlornly out to sea. It was warm here, and Piscataqua began to purr heavily. I dropped two dollars on the table and carried my tea out on the restaurant's deck. One of the boats alongside the dock was obviously a work boat of some kind. There were coils of rope on board, buckets and plastic bins, nets on a huge reel. The boat across the dock was an old motor yacht, perhaps fifty feet long, varnished mahogany gleaming in the sun. On the sternboards: Rosinante and Palm Beach, Fl. There was an even older woman on board, in bright orange galoshes and jacket, hosing down the deck of the boat. As she moved around to one side, bending over with a sponge to wipe woodwork, I saw a small sign leaning on the sill of one of the many windows of the raised cabin. At first glance I thought it read, BOAT FOR RENT, but it clearly became, ROOM FOR RENT. I hadn't seen the sign the evening before because I'd been down on the dock next to the boat. This sign was intended to be seen by patrons of the restaurant. I thought for a moment, and then somewhat awkwardly yelled, "Room for rent?"
She didn...
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