LOCAL CRAFT BELIEVED TOTAL LOSS
Sch. Esmerelda J. Mendosa Bound Home, Wrecks off Eastern Point
July 21—Late last night, the Esmerelda J. Mendosa, returning from the Grand Banks, smashed upon Webber Rock.
Capt. Mendosa and five members of the crew abandoned ship and rowed in the ship’s dories for shore. Two men are badly injured. Their names are given as Luis Pereira and Roland Murphy.
Residents of Eastern Point and beyond were awakened by the crash of the Mendosa, who lies now with her bow buried in rock, one mast fallen, a gaping hole in her side, and her engine room full of water.
According to members of the crew, the accident was due to dense fog. They could not see the signals from the lighthouses at Thacher Island or Eastern Point, and a whistle buoy they waited to hear had recently been removed from the water, leading them to believe the ship was farther offshore.
The Esmerelda J. Mendosa has on board an estimated 4,500 pounds of fish. As of late this morning, men were making frantic efforts to save all they possibly could from the doomed vessel before the waves and water claimed her for their own.
The Mendosa was 90 feet long, 72 tons net, and insured for $30,000.
Ira’s mind moved so quickly, so determined to leap and prove itself, to be nothing like his body, that he didn’t at first notice the basic information contained in the article. He thought of the men, less than a mile from home, weighing whether to anchor or keep on. They would have been caught in fog before. They would have thought, But this is only that again.
It took Ira three tries to get through the article. He kept drifting, half dreaming.
Albert was wheeling him up the drive from a visit to Mother Rock (Mother was Vera). Through the line of sycamores Ira saw the pear trees, the fruit nearly ready to pick. He asked Albert to take him into the orchard, and Albert tried, but the field was bumpy so Ira had to sit and watch all that beauty—the late-July light playing with the leaves, the pears basking, the funny dignity they had about them—and not be able to get there himself. Albert picked a pear so Ira could feel the cool weight in his palm, but what Ira felt was guilt: this pear would not ripen well.
He shook himself to attention, straightened, read again. The lighthouses . . . He forced himself: the sentence. It was convoluted, they were always writing convoluted sentences these days, ignoring the beauty of parallel structures, losing track of their subjects. They . . . and a whistle buoy they . . . leading them to believe . . .
It struck him with sublingual clarity, his stomach fisting, his heart knowing, before he thought, Bea. Her fit. The whistle buoy. He read the names of the injured crew again, and thought, Emma. Roland Murphy. Bea, Emma. A choice had to be made. Here he shone, his mind clearing, a fine, taut wire. In one case—Bea—there might be something to be done; in the other—Emma—if her husband was going to die, he would die. And of course, there was Bea-Bea. Ira’s loyalty to his niece was a weight he couldn’t remember not wearing. It dragged at him but held him steady, too, a sort of medal, reminding him of one thing he had always, mostly, gotten right.
He cleared his throat, took up the telephone, and asked the operator to put him through to his brother.
Twenty-two
The first days went by in a green, quivering haze. The fog had left in its wake a cloudless sky and a gusting wind that threw the leaves into perpetual frenzy. Emma tripped through the clean air, winding from house to hospital and back, fighting an almost constant urge to cover her eyes, retreat back into fog, see nothing clearly. She succeeded mostly, a walking, winding body, tending, going, feeding, nodding, until nine days and nights had passed and Roland was brought home. She woke up then. She saw Roland sitting in the old nursing chair without most of his left leg, and the doctor kneeling before him, showing Emma how to clean and wrap the stump. She saw herself in the kitchen doorway, Joshua in her arms, her face worked into the easiest expression she could manage, though she was close to vomiting with what was in front of her: black stitching holding together a nearly unrecognizable, swollen, shining, ham-pink remainder of a leg.
“Like this,” said the doctor. “Then this.” He was done with the alcohol—he was drawing small circles on the flesh with a wad of linen. “Sometimes this helps with the pain. Mrs. Murphy?”
She nodded. “I see,” she said, but she was looking at the side of Joshua’s face, the curled scruff of his sideburn, the intricate, perfect tunneling of his ear. He was pointing behind her, into the kitchen, his hips rocking against her, There, go. “You want a cookie?” she asked him quietly.