The weight of water - Anita Shreve [5]
In the winter months on the Isles of Shoals, the windows were never opened, nor were the children ever let outside, so that by March the air inside the houses was stale and putrid and old with smoke, and the children could hardly breathe.
Rich takes Billie by the hand and guides her past the breakwater so that he can help her search for mussels among the rocks and put them in her pail. I heft my camera bag onto my shoulder and head out toward the end of Smuttynose. My plan is to turn around and frame a shot of the entire island. At my destination, the easternmost tip of the island, there is a rock shaped like a horse’s fetlock. Inside the square-cut boulders is a sheltered space, a sea cave, that sloshes with water when the tide is high. It is slippery on the rocks, but after I have left my camera bag on a dry ledge and anchored it in a crevice so that the wind will not blow it away, I crawl like a crab to the sea cave and squat inside. On three sides of me are the shoals and roiling water, and straight out to the east nothing but Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the harbor and the place where we have landed, this side of the island is unprotected. There is lichen on the rock, and small flies lift in a frenzy whenever a wave crashes and sprays.
At the rock, which is known as Maren’s Rock, I shut my eyes and try to imagine what it would be like to huddle in that cave all night in winter, in the dark, in the snow and freezing temperatures, with only my nightgown and a small black dog for warmth.
I crawl from the rock, scraping my shin in the process. I collect my camera bag, which has not moved from its notch. I take a roll of color slide film, thirty-six shots of Maren’s rock. I walk the length of the island, the going slow in the thick, scratchy brush.
On January 14, 1813, fourteen shipwrecked Spanish sailors, driven to Smuttynose by a winter gale, tried to reach the light from a candle in an upstairs window of Captain Haley’s cottage.
They died in a blizzard not forty feet from their destination and are buried under boulders on the island. One man made it to the stone wall, but could go no further. Captain Haley discovered him the following morning. Six more bodies were found on January 17, five more on the twenty-first, and the final body was discovered “grappled up on Hog Island passage” on the twenty-seventh. According to the Boston Gazette on January 18, the vessel, named Conception, weighed between three and four hundred tons and was laden with salt. No one in America ever knew the dead sailors’ names.
When I find Rich and Billie, they are sitting on the beach, their toes dug into the sand. I sit beside them, my knees raised, my arms folded around my legs. Billie gets up and stares into her pail and begins to leap in stiff-legged jetés all around us.
“My fingers are bleeding,” she announces proudly. “We pulled off a million of them. At least a million. Didn’t we, Uncle Rich?”
“Absolutely. At least a million.”
“When we get back to the boat, we’re going to cook them up for supper.” She bends over her pail again and studies it solemnly. Then she begins to drag the pail down to the water’s edge.
“What is she doing?” Rich asks.
“I think she’s giving the mussels something to drink.”
He smiles. “I once read an account of a pilot who said the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen from the air was the Isles of Shoals.” He runs his hand over his shaved head. His skull is perfectly shaped, without bumps or dents. I wonder if he worries about sunburn.
“Adaline seems very nice,” I say.
“Yes, she is.”
“She admires Thomas’s work.”
Rich looks away and tosses a pebble. His