The weight of water - Anita Shreve [92]
I let the wheel go, bend forward at the waist, and clutch at a stay. The wind flattens the oilskin against my body. I reach for a winch, the handholds in the teak railing. I pull myself forward. She is perhaps fifteen feet from me. My hood snaps off my head.
Adaline leans over the teak rail. Her hair falls in sheets, then blows upward from her head. I see then that she is sick.
I am three, four feet from where she is huddled at the railing. I shout her name.
The boat turns itself into the swells and heels. Adaline straightens and looks at me, an expression of surprise on her face. The jib swings hard, and makes a sharp report, like a shot. She holds out her hand. It seems to float in the air, suspended between the two of us.
I have since thought a great deal about one time when I shut a car door, gave it a push, and in the split second before it closed, I saw that Billie’s fingers were in the door, and it seemed to me in the bubble of time that it took for the door to complete its swing that I might have stopped the momentum, and that I had a chance, a choice.
In Alfred, Maine, the jury took less than an hour to reach a verdict of murder in the first degree. Wagner was sentenced to be hanged. He was then taken to the state prison at Thomaston to await execution.
The hanging at Thomaston was a particularly grisly affair and is said to have almost single-handedly brought about the abolition of the death penalty in Maine. An hour before Wagner and another murderer, a man named True Gordon, who had killed three members of his brother’s family with an ax, were to be hanged, Gordon attempted suicide by cutting his femoral artery and then stabbing himself in the chest with a shoemaker’s knife. Gordon was bleeding out and unconscious, and the warden of Thomaston was presented with a ghastly decision: Should they hang a man who was going to die anyway before the afternoon was out? The warrant prevailed, and Wagner and Gordon were brought to an abandoned lime quarry, where the gallows had been set up. Gordon had to be held upright for the noose to be put on. Wagner stood on his own and protested his innocence. He proclaimed, “God is good. He cannot let an innocent man suffer.”
At noon on June 25, 1873, Louis Wagner and True Gordon were hanged.
Adaline goes over like a young girl who has been surprised from behind by a bullying boy and pushed from the diving board, arms and legs beginning to flail before she hits the water.
The ocean closes neatly over her head. I try to keep my eye fixed on the place where she has gone in, but the surface of the water — its landscape, its geography — twitches and shifts so that what has been there before is not there a moment later.
The sea heaves and spills itself and sends the boat side-to-sliding down a trough. Water cascades onto the deck, pinning my legs against the railing. Adaline breaks the surface twenty yards from the place I expected her to be. I shout her name. I can see that she is struggling. Rich comes above to see what has happened to the boat. He takes the wheel immediately.
“Jean!” he shouts. “Get away from the railing. What’s going on?”
“Adaline’s overboard,” I shout back, but the wind is against me, and all he can make out is my lips moving soundlessly.
“What?”
“Adaline!” I yell as loudly as I can and point.
Thomas comes above just then. He has put on a black knit cap, but his oilskins are off. Rich shouts the word Adaline to Thomas and gestures toward the life ring. Thomas takes hold of the life ring and pulls himself toward me.
There are thundering voices then, the spooling out of a line, a life ring missed and bobbing in a trough. There is a flash of white, like a handkerchief flung upon the water. There are frantic and sharp commands, and Thomas then goes over. Rich, at the wheel, stands in a semi-crouch,