The weight of water - Anita Shreve [36]
News that the police were bringing Wagner back to Portsmouth on the ten o’clock train on Friday morning swept through the town, and the train route was lined with angry, screaming mobs. Fearing for their prisoner, the police had the train stopped a quarter mile short of the station to take Wagner off, but the crowd spotted him anyway and began to pelt the prisoner — and the police — with stones and ice chunks. They called out “Lynch him” and “String him up.” The Marines were summoned, and the police drew their guns. Wagner spent the night in the Portsmouth jail, but was transferred the next day to Saco, Maine, since Smuttynose is technically not in New Hampshire, but in Maine. Again police were confronted with thousands of demonstrators who once more tried to stone Wagner, who was wounded in the head. One of the men in the mob was Ephraim Downs, the fisherman who had once saved John Hontvedt’s life.
The prisoner was arraigned at the South Berwick jail and then kept in the Portland jail. He was transported to Alfred, Maine, when the trial of The State of Maine v. Louis H. E Wagner opened on June 16, 1873. Louis Wagner stood accused of delivering ten mortal wounds with an ax to the head of “Anethe M. Christen-son” and thereby causing her instant death.
After Rich and I clean up the broken glass, he lifts the lobsters from the pot, and we all sit down at the dining table to eat. Thomas, who has drunk even more than he usually does, struggles clumsily with his lobster, spraying bits of white chitin around the table. Billie, as anticipated, loses her appetite for lobster when she watches me crack the shells and extract with a pick the spotted, pink meat. Adaline does not dip her meat with her fingers into melted butter as do the rest of us, but rather soaks it in a bowl of hot broth and eats it from a fork. She works her way methodically through the bright red carapace, missing not a piece of edible flesh.
Thomas goes above to the deck when he cuts his thumb on a claw. After a time, Rich, who may feel that Thomas needs company, also goes above. Billie, too, leaves us, happy to turn her back on the pile of claws and red detritus that is forming in a stainless steel bowl and is becoming vaguely repulsive. Across the table, I watch with fascination as Adaline pulls tiny bits of meat I’d have overlooked from the body of the lobster. I watch her suck and chew, one by one, each of the lobster’s spindly legs, kneading the thin shells with her teeth.
“Did you grow up on a farm?” she asks. “Were your parents farmers?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, they were,” I say. “Where in Ireland did you grow up?”
“Cork,” she says. “It’s in the south.”
“And then you went to university.”
“Yes,” she says. “Billie is wonderful. You Ye very lucky to have her.”
“Thank you. I do feel lucky to have her. How did you end up in Boston?”
“I was with someone,” she says. “When I was in London. He worked in Boston, and I came over to be with him. I’ve always liked Boston.”
“How did you come to know so much about Thomas’s poetry?” I ask.
She seems surprised at the question.
“I think I’ve always read Thomas,” she says. “Even at Dublin, I thought he was extraordinary. I suppose, after the prize, everyone reads Thomas now, don’t they? That’s what a prize does, I should think. It makes everyone read you, surely.”
“You’ve memorized his work.”
“Oh, not really”
There is an accusing tone to my voice that seems to put her on the defensive.
“The thing about Thomas is that I think he wants to be read aloud,” she says. “One almost has to, to fully understand.”
“You know he killed a girl,” I say.
Adaline slowly removes a lobster leg from her mouth, holds it between her thumb and finger as she rests her hands on the edge of the table. The blue-checked oilcloth is dotted with bits of flesh and yellow drips of butter that have congealed.
“Thomas killed a girl,” she repeats, as though the sentence doesn’t scan.
I take a sip of wine. I tear a piece of garlic bread from the loaf. I try to control