Stern Men (8 page)

It was important to Ruth in principle that she feel happy on Fort Niles, although, for the most part, she was pretty bored there. She missed the island when she was away from it, but when she returned, she immediately found herself at a loss for diversion. She made a point of taking a long walk around the shoreline the minute she came home (“I’ve been thinking about this all
year!
” she would say), but the walk took only a few hours, and what did she think about on that walk? Not much. There was a seagull; there was a seal; there was another seagull. The scenery was as familiar to her as her bedroom ceiling. She took books down to the shore, claiming that she loved to read near the pounding surf, but the sad fact is that many places on this Earth offer better reading environments than wet, barnacle-covered rocks. When Ruth was away from Fort Niles, the island became endowed with the characteristics of a distant paradise, but when she returned to it, she found her home cold and damp and windy and uncomfortable.

Still, whenever she was on Fort Niles, Ruth wrote letters to her mother, saying, “Finally I can breathe again!”

More than anything, Ruth’s passion for Fort Niles was an expression of protest. It was her resistance against those who would send her away, supposedly for her own good. Ruth would have much preferred to determine what was good for her. She had great confidence that she knew herself best and that, given free rein, would have made more correct choices. She certainly wouldn’t have elected to send herself to an elite private school hundreds of miles away, where girls were concerned primarily with the care of their skin and horses. No horses for Ruth, thank you. She was not that kind of girl. She was more rugged. It was boats that Ruth loved, or so she constantly said. It was Fort Niles Island that Ruth loved. It was fishing that Ruth loved.

In truth, Ruth had spent time working with her father on his lobster boat, and it had never been a terrific experience. She was strong enough to do the work, but the monotony killed her. Working as a sternman meant standing in the back of the boat, hauling up traps, picking out lobsters, baiting traps and shoving them back in the water, and hauling up more traps. And more traps and more traps. It meant getting up before dawn and eating sandwiches for breakfast and lunch. It meant seeing the same scenery again and again, day after day, and rarely venturing more than two miles from shore. It meant spending hour upon hour alone with her father on a small boat, where the two of them never seemed to get along.

There were too many things for them to argue about. Stupid things. Ruth’s father used to eat his sandwich and throw the lunch bag right in the ocean, and that would drive Ruth crazy. He would throw his soda can in after it. She’d yell at him for this, and he’d sulk, and the rest of the trip would be tense and silent. Or he might get fed up and spend the whole trip scolding and berating her. She didn’t work fast enough; she didn’t handle the lobsters carefully enough; she was going to step in that pile of rope one of these days and get pulled overboard and drown if she didn’t pay closer attention. That kind of thing.

On one of their early trips, Ruth warned her father about a barrel drifting up on his “port side,” and he laughed in her face.

“Port side?” he said. “This isn’t the Navy, Ruth. You don’t need to worry about port and starboard. The only direction you need to worry about is staying out of my way.”

Ruth seemed to get on his nerves even when she wasn’t trying to, although sometimes she did so on purpose, just to pass the time. One wet summer day, for instance, they pulled up string after string of traps and found no lobsters. Ruth’s father got more and more agitated. He was catching nothing but seaweed, crabs, and urchins. Eight or nine strings later, however, Ruth pulled a good-sized male lobster out of a trap.

“Dad, what’s this?” she asked innocently, holding up the lobster. “I’ve never seen one of these before. Maybe we can take it into town and sell it to somebody.”

“That’s not funny,” her father said, although Ruth herself thought it was pretty good.

The boat stank. It was cold even in the summer. In bad weather, the boat deck jumped and popped, and Ruth’s legs ached from the strain of keeping her balance. It was a small boat and had barely any shelter. She had to pee in a bucket and empty it overboard. Her hands were always freezing, and her father would yell if she took a break to warm her hands around the hot exhaust pipe. He never worked with gloves, he said, even in December. Why couldn’t she handle the cold in the middle of July?

Yet when Ruth’s mother asked Ruth what she wanted to do with her summer, Ruth invariably replied that she wanted to work on a lobster boat.

“I want to work with my dad,” Ruth said. “I’m really only happy out on the water.”

As for her relations with the other islanders, she may not have been as perfectly understood by them as she told her mother. She loved Mrs. Pommeroy. She loved the Addams brothers, and they loved her. But because of her long spells in Delaware getting educated, she was pretty much forgotten by everyone else, or, worse, disowned. She was no longer like them. Truth to tell, she’d never been all that much like them in the first place. She’d always been an inward-looking child, not, say, like the Pommeroy boys, who screamed and fought and made perfect sense to everyone. And now that Ruth passed most of her time someplace very far off, she talked differently. She read an awful lot of books. And, to many of her neighbors, she seemed stuck up.

Ruth graduated from boarding school in late May of 1976. She had no plans for the future except to return to Fort Niles, where she so obviously belonged. She made no move to attend college. She never even looked at the college brochures scattered around her school, never responded to the advice of her teachers, never gave any notice to the shy hints of her mother.

In that May of 1976, Ruth Thomas turned eighteen. She was five feet six inches tall. She had shiny hair that was almost black, and it came to her shoulders; she wore it in a ponytail every day. Her hair was so thick, she could sew a button on a coat with it. Her face was roundish, her eyes were wide apart, and she had an inoffensive nose and long, pretty eyelashes. Her skin was darker than anyone else’s on Fort Niles, and she tanned to a smooth, even brown. She was muscular and a little heavy for her height. She had a bigger rear end than she wanted, but she didn’t fuss about it too much, because the last thing she wanted to sound like was those girls at school in Delaware who fussed over their figures annoyingly, uninterruptedly, odiously. She was a heavy sleeper. She was independent. She was sarcastic.

When Ruth returned to Fort Niles at the independent, sarcastic age of eighteen, she did so in her father’s lobster boat. He picked her up at the bus station in the rotten truck he kept parked down by the ferry landing, the truck he used for his business and shopping whenever he came to town, which was approximately every two weeks. He picked Ruth up, accepted a slightly ironic kiss from her, and immediately announced that he was dropping her off at the grocery store to pick up supplies while he had a goddamn talk with his goddamn wholesaler, the miserable bastard. (“You know what we need out there,” he said. “Just spend fifty bucks.”) Then he told Ruth the reasons that his goddamn wholesaler was a miserable bastard, all of which she had heard before in careful detail. She drifted out of the conversation, such as it was, and considered how odd it was that her father, who had not seen her in several months, did not think to ask about her graduation ceremony. Not that she cared. But it was odd.

The boat ride back to Fort Niles took more than four hours, during which Ruth and her father did not converse much, because the boat was loud and because she had to slip around in the stern to make sure that the boxes of groceries didn’t tip over or get wet. She thought about her plans for the summer. She had no plans for the summer. While loading the boat, her father had informed her that he’d hired a sternman for the season—Robin Pommeroy, of all people. Ruth’s father had no work for his daughter. Although she griped at him for leaving her out, she was secretly pleased not to be working for him again. She would have acted as his sternman strictly on principle, had he asked, but she would have been miserable out there. So it was a relief. Still, it meant she had nothing to do with her time. She was not sufficiently confident of her abilities as a sternman to approach any other fisherman and ask for a job, even if she had really, really wanted one, which she really, really did not. Besides, as her father had also informed her, everyone on Fort Niles already had help. All the partnerships had been negotiated. Weeks before Ruth showed up, every old man on Fort Niles had found a young man to do the muscle work in the back of the boat.

“Maybe you can pick up if other kids get sick or fired,” her father shouted to her suddenly, midway through the journey back to Fort Niles.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” Ruth shouted back.

She was already thinking ahead to the next three months and—who was she kidding?—to the rest of her life, which had absolutely no shape to it.
Good God!
she thought. She was facing backward, sitting on a box of canned goods. Rockland was long since out of sight on this misty day, and the other islands, inhabited or not, that they passed so slowly and so
loudly
looked as small and brown and wet as lumps of shit. Or so Ruth thought. She wondered whether she could get another job on Fort Niles, although the idea of a job on Fort Niles that didn’t involve lobstering was something of a joke.
Ha-ha.

What the hell am I going to do with my time?
Ruth thought. She felt an awful and familiar sense of boredom rise within her as the boat chugged and bumped over the cold Atlantic bay. As far as she could see, there was nothing for her to do, and she knew exactly what that meant. Nothing to do meant hanging around with the few other islanders who had nothing to do. Ruth could see it coming. She was going to spend her summer hanging around with Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon Addams. She could see it coming clearly. It wasn’t so bad, she told herself. Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon were her friends; she was fond of them. They’d have lots to talk about. They’d ask her all about her graduation ceremony. It wouldn’t be so boring, really.

But the uneasy, unpleasant sense of approaching boredom remained in Ruth’s belly, like seasickness. Finally she drove the boredom—
already!
—down by composing in her mind a letter to her mother. She would write it that night, in her bedroom. The letter would begin, “Dear Mom: As soon as I stepped back onto Fort Niles, all the tension drained out of my body and I took the first deep breaths I have taken in months and months. The air smelled like hope!”

That’s exactly what she would say. Ruth decided this on her father’s lobster boat precisely two hours before Fort Niles was even in sight, and she spent the rest of the trip mentally composing the letter, which was most poetic. The exercise cheered her up a good deal.

 

Senator Simon Addams was seventy-three years old that summer, and he had a special project going. It was an ambitious and eccentric project. He was going to search for an elephant’s tusk that, he believed, was buried in the mudflats at Potter Beach. The Senator thought there might even be two tusks buried out there, though he’d announced that he would be happy to find just one.

Senator Simon’s conviction that 138 years of seawater would not have impaired such strong material as pure ivory provided him with the necessary confidence for his search. He knew the tusks must be somewhere. They may have been separated from their skeleton and from each other, but they would not have decomposed. They could not have dissolved. They were either buried in the sand far out at sea or they had washed up on a beach. And the Senator believed they may well have found their way to Fort Niles Island. Those rare elephant tusks may have been swept by currents—as wreckage had been swept for centuries—right up on Potter Beach. Why not?

The tusks the Senator sought were from an elephant that had been a passenger aboard the 400-ton steamboat
Clarice Monroe,
a vessel that went down right outside Worthy Channel in late October of 1838. It was a famous event at the time. The steamer, a wooden side-wheeler, caught fire just after midnight, during a sudden snowstorm. The fire itself may have been caused by so simple a mishap as a tipped lamp, but the storm winds caught and spread it before it could be contained, and the deck of the steamer was quickly blanketed in flame.

The captain of the
Clarice Monroe
was a drinker. The fire was almost certainly not his fault, but it was his undoing. He panicked shamefully. Without waking the passengers or crew, he ordered the one sailor on watch to lower a single lifeboat, in which he, his wife, and the young sailor rowed away. The captain left the doomed
Clarice Monroe,
his passengers, and his cargo to burn. The three survivors in the rowboat became lost in the storm, rowed for a full day, lost the power to row any further, and drifted for one day more. When they were picked up by a merchant marine vessel, the captain was dead of exposure, his wife had lost her fingers, feet, and ears to frostbite, and the young sailor had completely lost his mind.

Without her captain, the
Clarice Monroe,
still burning, had drifted against the rocks off Fort Niles Island, where she broke up among the waves. There were no survivors among the ninety-seven passengers. Many of the corpses drifted over to Potter Beach, piling up in the brine and mud alongside the charred and battered wooden wreckage of the steamboat. The men of Fort Niles gathered the corpses, wrapped them in burlap, and stored them in the icehouse. Some were identified by family members who came to Fort Niles throughout the month of October on ferry boats to collect their brothers and wives and mothers and children. Those unfortunates who were not claimed were buried in the Fort Niles cemetery, under small granite markers inscribed, simply, DROWNED.