Nervous Water Read online

  “It’s not so much the heat—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “it’s the damn humidity,” completing the hoary New England cliché.

  “Thunderstorm brewing,” I said. “You can smell it.”

  She looked up at the sky, where dark clouds were roiling. “No doubt,” she said. “I love thunderstorms.”

  “Tough day?”

  “Budget crap.” She waved the subject of budget crap away with the back of her hand. Evie was an administrator at Beth Israel Hospital. She worked a lot harder than I did. “How ’bout you?”

  “I had the MacPherson suit today. We settled in the lobby a half hour before the hearing.”

  “That’s good, huh?”

  “This time it was.” I took a sip of gin and tonic. The grosbeaks had not returned, but a couple of chickadees were flitting back and forth between the lilac bush and the feeder with sunflower seeds in their beaks, and three or four goldfinches were perched on the thistle-seed feeder.

  Henry had taken up a position beside Evie’s chair and was pretending to ignore the birds. Evie’s arm dangled down and she was scratching the top of his head. She was slouched in the chair with her eyes closed.

  “Looks like I’ll be heading up to Maine on Saturday,” I said.

  “What’s up?”

  “I got a call from my uncle. Uncle Moze. Moses Crandall. My mother’s brother. Lives in Moulton, just over the New Hampshire border. He wants me to go out on his boat with him, help him tend his lobster pots. Maybe we’ll try to catch a striper.”

  “Sounds like fun.” Evie took a sip of beer and looked at me over the bottle. “I don’t remember you ever mentioning your uncle Moses.”

  “I haven’t seen him for over thirty years. When I was a kid Uncle Moze used to take me out on his lobster boat. He was my favorite uncle.”

  She looked up at the sky. The dark clouds were thickening, and the air had become noticeably cooler. “I think you’re right about the thunderstorm.”

  I smiled. “Of course I’m right.”

  After a few minutes of comfortable silence, Evie said, “So why now?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why after—what, thirty-odd years?—why is it today that your uncle invites you to go lobster fishing?”

  “That,” I said, “is the question. Did I ever tell you about when I was a kid and we found my Uncle Norman’s body floating in the river?”

  “You never talk about your childhood, Brady.”

  “Well, what do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  My mother grew up in the village of Moulton on the estuary of the Piscataqua River in southernmost Maine. Her name was Hope. Jacob and Moses were her older brothers. Uncle Jake and Uncle Moze.

  My mother had three sisters. Faith, Charity, and Mary. Mary was the baby of the family. My grandparents apparently ran out of virtues by the time they got to Mary, so they named her after a virgin, which turned out to be pretty ironic.

  Gram Crandall had white hair and a large bosom and smelled like violets. She is, in my memory, a kind of mythic presence, sweet and gentle and beloved by everybody. I associate her primarily with the aroma of corn chowder and warm apple pie and boiled new red potatoes doused in butter and sprinkled with parsley.

  My grandfather worked for the paper company running pulp on the Kennebec River. He died in some kind of accident when I was four or five. I have no memory of him.

  My mother was the only one in the Crandall family who actually left home. Her sisters married local boys and settled right there in Moulton. Her brothers chased the local version of the American Dream, which was owning their own lobster boats.

  My mother was the rebel. She went to college in Massachusetts, taught seventh-grade English, and married Alan Coyne, who was a lawyer with a big firm on State Street.

  All of that made my family members objects of awe and suspicion among my aunts and uncles and cousins and their neighbors in Moulton, Maine, and probably accounted for the fact that we didn’t visit Gram Crandall more often.

  Except for Mary and Moses—Uncle Moze—I didn’t know my aunts and uncles very well. Faith and Charity were younger, more nervous, less loving versions of my grandmother. Uncle Jake pretty much ignored me whenever he was around.

  Uncle Moze was my favorite. He was strong and independent and profane, the closest thing to a New England cowboy that you’d meet in those times thirty-odd years ago. He was the only uncle who paid any attention to me, actually. He seemed to enjoy having me on his boat, maybe because he didn’t have kids of his own. Uncle Moze gave the impression of being taciturn, but when he was in the mood, he loved to tell long, ironic stories. They involved colorful Maine characters he’d presumably known—poachers and drunks and adulterers, mostly—and it flattered me that he didn’t censor his stories because I happened to be there.

  To me, going lobstering with Uncle Moze was another kind of fishing. We chugged around the broad tidal river spewing diesel fumes, and he and my old man snagged the buoys with the boat hook, looped the thick line around the power winch, and hauled up the pots.

  I liked anticipating what we might find inside the big wooden lobster pots. It wasn’t that different from seeing my bobber start to jiggle on my neighborhood millpond back in Massachusetts and wondering what kind of fish might’ve eaten my worm. I was seriously hooked on fishing of all kinds when I was a kid.

  In those days, lobsters were abundant, and Uncle Moze’s pots generally came up crawling with them. He wore rubber gloves that came up to his elbows, and he groped around inside the pot, came out grasping a lobster around its middle, and quickly measured it with his steel lobster ruler. He threw the shorts overboard. The keepers went into tubs filled with seaweed—those with both claws, which Uncle Moze sold to a wholesaler in Kittery, in one tub, and the unsalable ones with a missing or deformed claw, which he kept for himself or gave to Gram, in the other.

  My job was rebaiting the pots. For bait Uncle Moze used pollock and haddock minus their fillets but with the heads still attached that he got cheap from the wholesaler he sold his lobsters to. I liked digging my hands around in the tub of smelly fish skeletons and stabbing them through their eye sockets onto the metal hooks inside the wooden pots. I liked how I smelled fishy for several days afterward.

  Most of all, I liked the fact that Uncle Moze, unlike my old man, made me feel useful.

  That’s why he was my favorite uncle.

  Two months after we found Uncle Norman floating in the Piscataqua River, Aunt Mary gave birth to a girl. She turned the baby over to Uncle Moze and his wife, a quiet little woman named Lillian who, my mother once told me, couldn’t have children. It was Lillian and Moze, not Aunt Mary, her actual mother, who named the baby Cassandra.

  Aunt Mary lived with my grandmother until the following spring, when she hooked up with a boy from Portland who’d just been drafted by the Detroit Tigers. She followed him to someplace in Iowa where he’d been assigned to a minor-league team, and that was the last I heard of Aunt Mary.

  Cassandra, her baby, stayed in Moulton, Maine, with Uncle Moze and Aunt Lillian.

  My grandmother moved to Florida a year or two later, and after that my family stopped going to Moulton, and I pretty much lost track of the Crandall side of my family.

  They never did figure out who plugged Uncle Norman in the forehead. They questioned a lot of people, but nobody had seen anything or had much to say. Forensics, such as they were, weren’t much help. His body had been in the water for quite a while.

  Or maybe they just didn’t try very hard. Nobody had much tolerance for a beer-bellied drunk who’d break his pregnant wife’s arm and punch her face and kick her out of their trailer.

  Anyway, it turned out that Norman Dillman had plenty of enemies. He’d been transporting more than lobsters and fish on the boat he kept moored over in Kittery, and he owed a lot of money to some shady people in Boston.

  The consensus in the Crandall family was that all in all, things
hadn’t turned out so bad.

  Two

  I left for Moulton at ten on Saturday morning, allowing myself two hours to drive from my town house on Beacon Hill to the cove near the estuary of the Piscataqua River where Uncle Moze kept his lobster boat moored. I figured it would be less than a two-hour drive, pretty much a straight shot up Route 95 to the first Maine exit, but I allowed myself some time to get lost in Moulton. The old landmarks were burned into my brain, even after all those years, but I assumed they’d mostly be gone, replaced by new landmarks to deceive me.

  There were plenty of new, deceptive landmarks. Since I’d been there thirty years ago, Moulton had become a suburb almost indistinguishable from the suburbs around the 128 belt west of Boston, except somewhat less posh. Where in my memory there were orchards and pastures and fields and vacant lots and dusty roads, there were now condominium complexes with names like Royal Ridge Estates and residential cul-de-sacs with tightly packed rows of identical McMansions. The main roads were lined with Ford dealerships and Chinese restaurants and tanning parlors and supermarkets.

  But the old roads that I remembered from the backseat of my old man’s car were still there, and I didn’t get lost. I pulled into the gravel parking area beside a seafood restaurant that hadn’t been there the last time I went lobstering with Uncle Moze. I was almost half an hour early.

  Now there was a small marina in the cove where Uncle Moze parked his boat. A dozen boats—mostly Boston Whalers and speedboats, with a couple of blocky working boats—were lined up along the floating docks. There was a gas pump and a small shed for the attendant.

  There were a dozen or so vehicles in the parking area, many of them sporting boat trailers. At the far end I spotted a black pickup truck. A man was leaning against the front bumper smoking and looking at the water.

  I drove over, pulled up beside the truck, and got out.

  Uncle Moze turned and looked at me with narrowed eyes. Aside from the fact that his beard stubble had turned steely gray and the creases on his sun-baked face had deepened, he looked the same. He wore black hip boots turned down at his knees, blue jeans, a blue denim shirt, and a long-billed fisherman’s cap, just as I remembered. A half-smoked unfiltered cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth.

  It couldn’t have been the same truck, but it looked the same, too.

  “Uncle Moze,” I said. “It’s me. Brady.”

  He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Sonnyboy,” he said. “You’re early. Don’t think I would’ve recognized you.”

  I gripped his hand. It felt like cracked leather. “You haven’t changed.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I’ve changed plenty.” He pointed out to the boats, and I spotted the one with Miss Lil painted on her transom. “I got her all loaded up. Might as well get to it.”

  We walked out onto the dock and climbed aboard the boat. It was, as I remembered it always had been, clean and tidy. The lines were coiled, the tubs stacked, the deck spotless, the brass polished. Uncle Moze always kept Miss Lil shipshape.

  He got the engine going, and I untied the lines from the cleats on the dock, and then we were chugging out of the little harbor. Uncle Moze steered through a maze of buoys, scanning the horizon, squinting against the glare of the midday July sun on the water, dragging on his cigarette. Way off to our left arched the Route 95 bridge, spanning the river that separated New Hampshire from Maine.

  The salty air was rich and evocative. It smelled of wet mud and rotting seaweed and dead fish and diesel fumes, and it transported me. I was eleven years old again, riding on Uncle Moze’s lobster boat with my old man, looking for clouds of diving birds and the swirls of giant striped bass.

  I wanted to ask him about his health, and what he’d been up to for the past three decades, and his family—which was also my family. I remembered that his wife, my aunt Lillian, had died back when I was a teenager, and that he’d raised Cassandra, my cousin, Aunt Mary’s baby, pretty much on his own.

  I wanted to ask him why, after more than thirty years of silence, he had suddenly decided that he and I needed to get reacquainted. But there was very little idle chitchat with Uncle Moze when he was out on his boat tending his lobster pots. Never had been. Lobstering was serious work and he gave it his full attention.

  So we worked in silence. He steered us from buoy to buoy, and I snagged the lines with the boat hook and looped them over the power winch the way my old man used to do, and Uncle Moze hauled up the old wooden pots, balanced them on the flat place on the gunwale, opened their trapdoors, and plucked out the lobsters. Two-clawed keepers went in one tub, single claws in the other, shorts and crabs over the side.

  Uncle Moze’s only apparent concession to the passage of thirty years was his choice of bait. Now he used salted herring instead of ripe fish skeletons. I jabbed two herrings through their eye sockets onto each bait hook and latched the trapdoor before he pushed the pot over the side.

  “You ain’t forgotten how it’s done, I see,” he said at one point. It sounded like a compliment, and it occurred to me that he might’ve arranged this outing as some kind of test. If it was, it felt important to me that I pass.

  “Any money in lobstering these days?” I said. I hoped to spark a conversation, see where it might go. Uncle Moze wanted something from me. Most people, when they want something from a relative, however distant, it’s money.

  “Never was any money in it,” he said. “I got a couple restaurants buy direct from me, take whatever I got, pay a little better than the wholesaler. Still, when the lobsters’re crawlin’ good, they don’t give much per pound. When I ain’t got many to sell, that’s when they pay good. Either way, by the time I’m done buying bait and fuel, scraping Miss Lil’s hull, paying for her mooring, gittin’ her engine overhauled, replacing the old lines every year, repairing my pots and buoys, all that”—he waved his hand at all his expenses—“I guess I might come close to breaking even, if you don’t give me nothin’ for my hours, with the one-claws for me and my friends as profit.” He flicked his cigarette butt over the side. “If I did it for money, sonnyboy, I wouldn’t do it at all.”

  “It’s hard work,” I said.

  “For an old geezer, you mean.” He cocked his head and squinted at me.

  I smiled. “I guess that’s what I meant.”

  “I been doin’ it for more’n fifty years,” he said. “Just haven’t gotten around to quittin’ yet. Wouldn’t know what to do with myself, anyway.” And then he frowned and shook his head, as if he’d revealed too much.

  After we finished hauling and rebaiting Uncle Moze’s string of lobster pots, we trolled plugs around the bay and up and down the river for a couple of hours. We saw no clouds of seabirds, no wakes or swirls, no nervous water, and we didn’t get a strike.

  After a while, Uncle Moze said, “Well, the tide’s turned. If we was going to catch anything, we would’ve already. Might as well head in. You’ll come back to the house for a beer.”

  He didn’t make it a question, so I didn’t give him an answer. I figured he’d tell me what was on his mind when he was ready.

  Uncle Moze’s house looked the way I remembered it, except it appeared to have shrunk. It was about the size and shape of a double-wide trailer at the end of a long dirt driveway. A couple of wooden rowboats lay upside down on sawhorses in the side yard, and lobster pots, buoys, and oars spilled out of an open shed with flaking red paint. A pair of enormous maple trees flanked the house, and the lawn grew scruffy and sparse—not really a lawn, just tufts of grass and weeds pushing up through the hard-packed sandy soil.

  The house featured window boxes with nothing growing in them, and dirty white paint, and a screen door with a rip in it, and a pair of big propane tanks beside the door. The rhododendrons and yews against the foundation were leggy and sprawling.

  It was dark and cool inside, and stuffed with old furniture that, except for an enormous console television set, might’ve been the same furniture I had sat on thirty years ago. I’d only been
inside a few times, and what I mainly remembered was the smell of Lysol and Aunt Lillian shuffling silently around in her housedress and slippers and pin curlers, fetching beers for Uncle Moze and my old man and an Orange Crush for me.

  Aunt Lillian, I remembered, was a compulsive cleaner. Even when I was sitting in the living room watching the ball game with Uncle Moze and my old man, she would be gliding around with a rag in her hand, wiping off the coffee table, straightening out the piles of magazines, adjusting the Venetian blinds.

  Uncle Moze apparently expended all his clean-and-neat energies on his boat. Now newspapers were scattered on the sofa and floor, and a soup bowl, a pizza box, and a couple of mugs sat on the dust-covered coffee table. Thin white curtains covered the windows, leaving the inside dim and shadowy. The place smelled faintly of propane.

  He asked me if I wanted a beer, and I said I did. He went into the kitchen and left me in the living room.

  A collection of framed photographs stood on the top of the TV. Aside from a studio-type hand-colored wedding portrait—Uncle Moze looking about the same, except for the crew cut and uncreased face and white dinner jacket and red bow tie, and Aunt Lillian looking bewildered in her white wedding dress—all the other photos showed a dark-eyed girl at varying ages.

  Cassandra. My cousin Cassie, Aunt Mary’s baby, whom I hadn’t seen since she was a toddler and I was a young adolescent. The photos atop Uncle Moze’s TV chronicled the first eighteen years or so of Cassie’s life….

  Cassie as a toothless infant in Uncle Moze’s arms, her big dark eyes peeking over his shoulder gazing straight and calm into the camera’s lens.

  Cassie as a chubby-legged little girl, barely past the toddler stage—the way I remembered her, the way I had seen her last—wearing shorts and a T-shirt with a yellow smiley face on it, squinting into the sun.