Amagansett

Twenty-Two

Hollis had been trying his hardest to appear interested, so he was a little surprised when Mary said, ‘You don’t seem very interested.’
‘Don’t I? Maybe it’s the blisters.’
‘The blisters?’
‘I have a few.’
It was an understatement; his heels and toes were rubbed raw. This was due in part to the old pair of walking boots she’d lent him, her ex-husband’s feet being a good couple of sizes larger than his own. Mainly, though, it was because of the considerable distances they’d covered since their dawn departure. He had never walked so far in one day, not since a tramping trip in the Catskills with the Brooklyn Boy Scouts many years before. On that occasion the heat had been bearable, the terrain forgiving, and they’d had the roving hands of a buck-toothed scoutmaster to spur them onwards.
Mary, he’d soon discovered, was a keen believer in treading the thorny path. Without so much as a word of warning she would leave the trails that threaded the oak woods north of town, striking out through the brush and briars over uneven ground deliberately designed to turn an ankle. He’d had little choice but to follow. The treasures she sought were only to be found deep in the woods.
She showed him square indentations in the forest floor—the cellar holes of dwellings abandoned centuries before. She pointed out large flat stones buried in the undergrowth, etched with initials, that had once served as boundary markers for these early homesteads. And as they weaved through the oak, hickory, maple and birch, she drew his attention to clusters of pear and apple trees, gnarled and wretched—the vestiges of orchards considerably older than the trees that now towered around them.
She explained that at one time the early settlers had so denuded this rolling landscape that they’d been forced to drive their cattle and sheep into the kettle holes whenever the English ships appeared off the coast looking to re-stock. The East End, she said, was pockmarked with these deep depressions, footprints of the vast blocks of ice left behind by the glacier when it retreated. She insisted on making a detour to show him one such hollow, its steep sides descending to a sun-dappled pool, the water clear yet somehow black as pitch. And he imagined the farmers cowering there with their beasts, safe from the hungry eyes of the enemy, their former countrymen.
She showed him the graves of those early herders, small family burial plots reclaimed by the forest, the bones of the dead woven through with the roots of the same trees that had dislodged and toppled the weathered headstones. The names, eroded by time, had been destined for obscurity until Mary came along and recorded them, clearing off the lichen, taking rubbings with wax crayons, pulling out on to rice paper names no longer discernible to the human eye.
Some were names that hadn’t survived the years, the male lines cut short at some juncture, although some part of their blood still flowed in the veins of the living, trickling down through the generations via the womenfolk, mingling through intermarriage, surviving in everything but name.
Mary wasn’t a Calder; her husband was a Calder—from Scotland via Madison, Wisconsin—and he was new to the East End of Long Island. Or rather he had been until he left. Mary was a Northfleet, a family to be reckoned with in and around East Hampton ever since Samuel Norfleete first showed up on the scene from England. And just as Mary could trace her descent right back to the very earliest days of settlement, so they now retraced the footsteps first taken by her ancestor as he headed through the North Woods in search of an inlet or cove with a deep enough draft to accommodate the seagoing vessels that would transport his lumber, cattle and tanned hides to new and lucrative markets. He found the ideal spot at what was now called Northwest Landing, and he became wealthy on the back of the venture, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at the place almost three centuries on. All that remained of the warehouse and the wharf he had built was a handful of blackened stumps poking through the mud of the silted-up little creek, barely visible through the murky water.
It was while he was peering at these few pathetic remnants of the wharf pilings that Mary said to him, ‘You don’t seem very interested.’
It wasn’t the blisters, not if he was honest. And it wasn’t that he was bored. He had enjoyed listening to her stories of days gone by, even if she did have a tendency to talk with earnest, almost irritating, enthusiasm at times. It wasn’t even that her tales of hardy pioneers hacking out a life for themselves unsettled him—the noble clans of farmers and fishermen with their ancient lineages and deep-rooted traditions, wedded to the land and the ocean. It didn’t bother him that he knew almost nothing of his own heritage, except that he sprang from an undistinguished jumble of different races and religious creeds. There was a German great-something (or was it a great-great-something?) who had worked as a stonecutter in the granite quarries of Vermont, and a Danish wet-nurse, then some whispers of Jewish blood on his mother’s side, topped off with a large shot of Brooklyn Irish and a dash of Jesuit French.
No pure pedigree for him. He was a mongrel, genuine homegrown fare, and there seemed no reason to deny it or be embarrassed by it. For all their lofty claims, people were people. Even here in East Hampton, with their time-honored bloodlines, they would still have their share of bastards and backroom abortions and cuckolded husbands blithely bouncing other men’s children on their knees.
No, if Mary sensed a certain distraction in him it was because it was five o’clock on a Saturday—weekend cocktail hour—and by his calculation they had another hour and a half’s walking ahead of them before they reached their destination.
He was wrong.
Some unseen clock was striking eight as they crossed the bridge spanning the creek in Springs. This was the heart of the little community, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at the place. There was no Main Street as such, just a couple of road junctions, an open expanse of land bisected by a creek, and a few isolated buildings, randomly placed, as if someone had blindfolded a founding father and asked him to stick pins in a map. There was a church here, a schoolhouse over there, a barn, a hall, and a lone store on the south side of the bridge, in front of which a group of local men was now gathered, chewing the fat. Mary greeted a couple of them as they passed by.
Beyond the store, a blind lane led down to the edge of Accabonac Harbor and what appeared to be an abandoned boatyard. Closer inspection revealed a few desultory signs of activity—a small rowboat upturned on wooden stays and half painted, an outboard motor stripped down to its component parts, a torn fishing net in the process of being repaired.
Across the yard, on the shore of the creek, stood a small shack, the water lapping at the base of the veranda. An old man was seated in a spring-rocker examining a small round object between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Joe.’
He turned and his furrowed face cracked a smile. ‘Mary. And with a beau in tow.’
‘Just a friend,’ said Mary, stooping to kiss him on the cheek.
‘If you say so.’ He eased himself to his feet, extending a crooked and calloused paw. ‘Joe Milne.’
‘Tom Hollis.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Mary.
Joe handed her the small ball. ‘You tell me.’
She turned it in her fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ she conceded, handing it on to Hollis. It was hard and textured.
‘Flo Barratt back in the woods there, she’s got her an army of cats, that old heifer, scores of the damn things runnin’ all over, pissin’ on the couch and all sorts. Some of ‘em’s gone missing of late. Now I know why.’ He paused. ‘It’s a fur ball out of that greathorned owl I keep for huntin’ crows.’
To have dropped it then and there would have been impolite. Thankfully, Joe took it off him.
‘Must have developed hisself a taste for kitty meat. Best dispose of the evidence while I figures what to do.’ He lobbed the fur ball out into the creek.
Hollis noted that it floated.
Joe suddenly clamped a hand on his shoulder. ‘There’s a clam pie needs eatin’ and some cold beers to wash it down with.’
‘Thank you, God,’ thought Hollis.
They went and dunked themselves in the creek before dinner to wash away the sweat and the grime, stepping gingerly through the rushes, the mud oozing between their toes. Hollis was forced to confess to Mary that he couldn’t really swim. He knew that at a push he could flail his way to the side of a swimming pool, because he’d been forced to do so once on a day-trip to Coney Island when his father had tossed him into the deep end of the marble pool in the Pavilion of Fun. But the atavistic impulse to survive which had driven him through the water that day had little in common with the pleasure others appeared to get from swimming.
He stood near the bank up to his chest in water while Mary stroked around leisurely in the dying rays of the sun, glancing over every so often to check that he hadn’t lost his footing and slipped beneath the surface. He was warmed by her concern, and surprised by the force of the urge that welled up inside him when she stepped from the water.
She slapped his hand away and told him to behave.
They ate dinner inside by the light of a kerosene lamp hanging from a beam. The clam pie was hot and the beer, as promised, cold—manna and nectar after a day’s hiking.
‘So, bub, you get to see the sights?’
‘I think we covered pretty much everything between East Hampton and here.’
Joe laughed. ‘It’s the one comfort now that my legs is goin’—Mary don’t get to drag me around with her.’
‘He’s lying,’ said Mary. ‘Everything I showed you, Joe showed me first.’
‘Have you lived here all your life?’ asked Hollis.
‘Since the war, the one with the South—1861. Born right over there in back of Hog Creek.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Hollis, ‘she’s related to you too.’
‘Goin’ back some, but they don’t like to talk of it, them Nor’fleets.’ Unseen to Mary, he winked at Hollis.
‘That’s not true,’ she said indignantly.
‘We’re Bonackers, you see, us Milnes—clam-diggers. We was poor as muck when we first come here to tend sheep for them Gardiners out on the island; three centuries on we still ain’t got enough real estate to put in a flower pot. There’s some things you can’t change, I guess. What mule ever had another mule for a ma or a pa?’
‘Excuse me?’ said Hollis.
‘You can’t breed mules from mules,’ said Mary. ‘And you can stop bellyaching, for one,’ she continued, turning back to Joe.
‘Why not?’ asked Hollis.
‘What?’ asked Mary irritably.
‘Why can’t you breed mules from mules? I mean, where do they come from?’
‘They’re horses crossed with donkeys. They’re sterile.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m proud of my Bonacker blood,’ said Mary to Joe, defensively.
‘I know you is. And you know most in these parts ain’t of your mind.’
It was the low point of the evening, watching Mary brought to heel, Joe retouching the rose-colored picture she had painted for Hollis over the course of the day. But he loved her all the more for the speed with which she recovered, abandoning her pout for lively banter designed to draw him into the conversation.
He was being presented to Joe—that much was clear—for the old man’s scrutiny, his seal of approval. Normally, he would have kicked against such a test, but he rose to the challenge without effort, assisted by the bottle of whiskey that landed on the table with a welcome thump once the plates were cleared. And when it came to explaining how he’d come to join the East Hampton Town Police Department, he almost believed his own lies.
It was Mary who brought the evening to a close, attending to the dishes at the sink, prompting Joe to insist that she let them alone. Armed with a couple of extra blankets, they were banished to a large hut out back. It was a shed used for shucking scallops in season, Mary explained, and the mountain of empty shells heaped up outside gleamed white in the moonlight.
They used the blankets to enlarge the bed Joe had made up for her, and they undressed by the glow of a kerosene lamp that cast their shadows around the timber walls.
‘Lie back,’ said Mary, reaching into her knapsack. She removed a pot of Pond’s cream and scooped some on to her fingertips.
Hollis closed his eyes, anticipating some delicious prelude to a sexual romp. The cream was cool against his chest, his neck, his face, his arms. It was all becoming a little too matter-of-fact, her attentions drifting away from the center of his body towards the extremities.
He opened an eye.
‘For the mosquitoes,’ said Mary. ‘They can be pretty fierce around here.’
She wasn’t joking.