The weight of water - Anita Shreve [54]
She takes it in her hand and examines it.
“A mere negative of my former self,” she says and smiles.
In Haley’s Cove, a pier supported a long warehouse and fish processing plant. The men of Smuttynose invented the process of drying fish called dunning. Large vessels would tie up inside the pier to load and offload goods and fish, which were then stored in the building known as the Long House. The area that comprises the pier, the Long House, Captain Haley’s House, and the footprint of the Hontvedt cottage is not much bigger than a modest suburban backyard.
Dunfish sold for three or four times the price of regularly prepared fish. So many fish were harvested by Shoalers that in 1822 the national price of fish was quoted not from Boston but from the Isles of Shoals.
When Thomas comes up the ladder, he brings with him the smell of bacon and pancakes.
“Billie and I made breakfast,” he says. “Adaline’s setting the table.”
I am rereading one of the guidebooks to see if I have overlooked a landmark, an artifact that I should not miss when I go across to Smuttynose to finish the shoot. In my lap is Maren Hontvedt’s document and its translation, as well as a thin pamphlet, one of the accounts of the murders.
“What’s that?” he asks. A conciliatory gesture. Interest in my work.
“This?” I ask, holding up the guidebook.
“No, that.”
I lay my hand on the papers with the brown ink, as if protecting them. “It’s the thing I got from the Athenaeum.”
“Really. Can I see it?”
Without looking precisely at him, I hand the papers to Thomas. I can feel the color and the heat coming into the back of my neck.
“It’s not in English,” he says.
“There’s a translation.”
“This is an original document,” he says with some surprise. “I’m amazed they let you have it.”
There is a silence.
“They didn’t,” I say. I push my hair behind my ears.
“They didn’t,” he repeats.
“I knew they wouldn’t give it to me, so I took it. I’ll give it back.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a memoir. By Maren Hontvedt.”
“Who is?”
“The woman who survived the murders.”
“It’s dated 1899”
“I know.”
He hands the papers back to me, and I look up at him for the first time. His hair has been combed off his forehead with his fingers and lies in thinning rows, an already harvested crop. His eyes are bloodshot, and his skin, in the harsh, flat light, looks blotchy.
“You don’t need this stuff for your assignment,” he says.
“No.”
He is about to turn and go back down to the galley, but he hesitates a moment on the steps. “What’s going on with you?” he asks.
I shade my brow with my hand. “What’s going on with you?” I ask.
At the Shoals, men have always fished for haddock and for hake, for porgies and for shad. In 1614, Captain John Smith first mapped the islands and called them Smythe’s Isles, and he wrote that they were “a heape together.”
Halyards slap against the mast, an insistent beat we can hear at the double bed-cum-dining table in the center of the cabin. Thomas and Billie have made pancakes — kidney shaped, oil glistened, and piled high upon a white platter. There is also bacon, which Adaline declines. She chooses toast and orange juice instead. I watch her, nearly naked, lift her mug of decaffeinated coffee to her lips and blow across the rim. I am not sure that I could now sit at a breakfast table in my bathing suit, though I must have done so as a younger woman.
Are we, as we