The Weight of Water (30 page)

I have discovered in my life that it is not always for us to know the nature of God, or why He may bring, in one night, pleasure
and death and rage and tenderness, all intermingled, so that one can barely distinguish one from the other, and it is all
that one can do to hang onto sanity. I believe that in the darkest hour, God may restore faith and offer salvation. Toward
dawn, in that cave, I began to pray for the first time since Evan had spoken harshly to me. These were prayers that sprang
from tears shed in the blackest moment of my wretchedness. I prayed for the souls of Karen and Anethe, and for Evan, who would
walk up the path to the cottage in a few hours, wondering why his bride did not greet him at the cove, and again for Evan,
who would be bewildered by the cluster of men who stood about the doorstep, and once more for Evan, who would stagger away
from that cottage and that island and never return again.

And also I prayed for myself, who had already lost Evan to his fathomless grief. For myself, who would be inexplicably alive
when John saw the bodies of Karen and Anethe. For myself, who did not understand the visions God had given me.

When the sun rose, I crawled from the rock cave, so stiff I could barely move. The carpenters on Star Island, working on the
hotel, dismissed me as I waved my skirt. Around the shore I limped on frozen feet until I saw the Ingerbretson children playing
on Malaga. The children heard my cries and went to fetch their father. In a moment, Emil ran to his dory and paddled over
to where I was standing on the shore of Smutty Nose. My eyes were swollen, my feet bloody, my nightgown and hair dishevelled,
and, in this manner, I fell into Emil’s arms and wept.

At the Ingerbretsons’, I was laid upon a bed. A story came out, in bits and pieces, the pieces not necessarily in their correct
order, the tale as broken as my spirit. And it was not until later that day, when I heard the story told to another in that
room, that I understood for the first time all that I had said, and from that moment on, this was the precise story I held
to.

I kept to my lurid story that day and the next, and throughout the trial, but there was a moment, that first morning, as I
lay on a bed in the Ingerbretson house, and was speaking to John and was in the midst of my story, that my husband, who had
been holding his head in his hands in a state of awful anguish, looked up at me and took his hands away from his face, and
I knew he had then the first of his doubts.

And what shall I say of my meeting with Evan, who, shortly after John left, stumbled into the room, having been blasted by
the scene at Smutty Nose, and who looked once at me, not even seeing me, not even knowing I was there in that room with him,
and who turned and flung his arm hard against the wall, so hard he broke his bones, and who howled the most piteous wail I
have ever heard from any human being?

The white button that was found in Louis Wagner’s pocket was an ordinary button, quite common, and only I knew, apart from
Louis, although how could he admit to the manner in which he had come by it without showing that he was capable of an attack
on a woman and thus aiding in his own conviction, that the button had come loose from Anethe’s blouse on the day that he had
feigned illness and had made advances to her in his bedroom. Following the discovery of the button, which was widely reported,
I removed the buttons from the blouse, which I subsequently destroyed, and put them on my nightgown.

I often think of the uncommon love I bore my brother and of how my life was shaped by this devotion, and also of John’s patience
and of his withdrawal from me, and of the beauty and the tenderness of my brother’s wife. And I think also of the gathering
net Evan threw into the water, and how he let it sink, and how he drew it up again, and how it showed to us the iridescent
and the dark, the lustrous and the grotesque.

Last night, lying awake with the pain, I could take no nourishment except water, and I understand that this is a sign of the
end, and to be truthful, I cannot mind, as the pain is greater than the ability of the girl who attends to me to mollify it
with the medicine. It is in my womb, as I always knew it would be, knew it from the time I lay ill with the paralysis and
my womanhood began. Or perhaps I knew it from the night my mother died, knew that I, too, would one day perish from something
that would be delivered from the womb, knew that one day my blood, too, would soak the sheets, as it did that night, so long
ago, that night of my mother’s death, when Evan and I lay together in the bed, and occasionally I am addled and confused and
think myself a young woman again and that my monthly time has come, and then I remember, each time with a shock that leaves
me breathless, that I am not young but am old, and that I am dying.

In a few weeks, we will have a new century, but I will not be here to see it.

I am glad that I have finished with my story, for my hand is weak and unsteady, and the events I have had to write about are
grim and hideous and without any redemption, and I ask the Lord now, as I have for so many years, Why was the punishment so
stern and unyielding? Why was the suffering so great?

The girl comes early in the morning and opens the curtains for me, and once again, as I did each day as a child, I look out
onto Laurvig Bay, the bay constantly changing, each morning different from the one before or indeed any morning that has ever
come before that. When the girl arrives, I am always in need of the medicine, and after she has given it to me, I watch from
the chair as she changes the filthy sheets, and goes about the cottage, tidying up, making the thin soup that until recently
I was able to drink, speaking to me occasionally, not happy with her lot, but not selfish either. And in this way, she very
much reminds me of myself when I was at the Johannsen farm, though in this case, she will have to watch me die, will have
to sit beside me in this room and watch the life leave me, unless she is fortunate enough to have me go in the night, and
I hope, for her sake, that it will be an easy passage, without drama and without agony.

26 September 1899, Maren Christensen Hontvedt.

I
SIT IN
the small boat in the harbor and watch the light begin to fade on Smuttynose. I hold in my hand papers from the cardboard
carton.

Not long ago, I had lunch with Adaline in a restaurant in Boston. I hadn’t been in a restaurant since the previous summer,
and I was at first disoriented by the space — the tall ceilings, the intricately carved moldings, the mauve banquettes. On
each table was a marble vase filled with peonies. Adaline was waiting for me, a glass of wine by her right hand. She had cut
her hair and wore it in a sleek flip. I could see more clearly now how it might be that she was an officer with Bank of Boston.
She was wearing a black suit with a gray silk shell, but she still had on the cross.

Our conversation was difficult and strained. She asked me how I was, and I had trouble finding suitable words to answer her.
She spoke briefly about her job. She told me she was getting married. I asked to whom, and she said it was to someone at the
bank. I wished her well.

“Have you seen Thomas?” I asked her.

“Yes. I go down there… well, less now.”

She meant Hull, Thomas’s family home, where he lived with Rich, who looked after him.

“He’s writing?”

“No, not that any of us can see. Rich is gone a lot. But he says that Thomas just sits at the desk, or walks along the beach.”

I was privately amazed that Thomas could bear to look at water.

“He blames himself,” said Adaline.

“I blame myself.”

“It was an accident.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“He’s drinking.”

“I imagine.”

“You haven’t seen him since…?”

She was unable to say the words. To define the event.

“Since the accident,” I said for her. “We were together afterwards. It was excruciating. I suppose I will eventually go down
to see him. In time.”

“Sometimes a couple, after a tragedy, they find comfort in each other.”

“I don’t think that would be the case with me and Thomas,” I said carefully.

During the hours following the discovery that Billie was missing, Thomas and I had said words to each other that could never
be taken back, could never be forgotten. In the space of time it takes for a wave to wash over a boat deck, a once tightly
knotted fisherman’s net had frayed and come unraveled. I could not now imagine taking on the burden of Thomas’s anguish as
well as my own. I simply didn’t have the strength.

“You’re all right, then?” she asked. “In your place?”

“The apartment? Yes. As fine as can be.”

“You’re working?”

“Some.”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve always been concerned…” She fingered the gold cross. “Well, it doesn’t seem very important now.
But I’ve always been concerned you thought Thomas and I…”

“Were having an affair. No, I know you weren’t. Thomas told me.”

“He held me once in the cockpit when I was telling him about my daughter.”

“I know. He told me that, too.” I picked up a heavy silver spoon and set it down. All around me were animated women and men
in suits.

“And there’s another thing,” she said. “Thomas indicated that you thought… well, Billie must have misheard a casual invitation
from Thomas to me. Billie somehow thought I might be coming to live with you.”

I nodded. “You were lucky,” I said. “Not having a life vest.”

She looked away.

“Why did you leave her?” I asked suddenly, and perhaps there was an edge of anger in my voice.

I hadn’t planned to ask this of Adaline. I had promised myself I wouldn’t.

Her eyes filled. “Oh, Jean, I’ve gone over and over this, a thousand times. I didn’t want to be sick in front of Billie. I
wanted fresh air. I’d been looking through the hatch all morning. I didn’t think. I just opened it. I just assumed she wouldn’t
be able to reach it.”

“I don’t think she went out the hatch,” I said.

Adaline blew her nose. I ordered a glass of wine. But already I knew that I would not be there long enough to drink it.

“She was a wonderful girl,” I said to Adaline.

I think often of the weight of water, of the carelessness of adults.

Billie’s body has never been found. Her life jacket, with its Sesame Street motif, washed up at Cape Neddick in Maine. It
is my theory that Billie had the life jacket on, but not securely. That would have been like Billie, unclipping the jacket
to readjust it, to wear it slightly differently, backwards possibly, so that she could satisfy herself that some part of her
independence had not been lost. It is my theory that Billie came up the companionway looking for me or for Adaline to help
her refasten the waist buckle. I tell myself that my daughter was surprised by the wave. That it took her fast, before thoughts
or fear could form. I have convinced myself of this. But then I wonder: Might she have called out
Mom,
and then
Mom?
The wind was against her, and I wouldn’t have heard her cry.

I did not return Maren Hontvedt’s document or its translation to the Athenaeum. I did not send in the pictures from the photo
shoot, and my editor never asked for them.

This is what I have read about John Hontvedt and Evan Christensen. John Hontvedt moved to a house on Sagamore Street in Portsmouth.
He remarried and had a daughter named Honora. In 1877, Evan Christensen married Valborg Moss at St. John, New Brunswick, where
he had gone from Portsmouth, and where he worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. After his marriage, the couple moved to
Boston. They had five children, two of whom died in infancy.

I think about the accommodations Evan Christensen would have had to make to marry another woman. What did he do with his memories?

Anethe and Karen Christensen are buried side by side in Portsmouth.

I sometimes think about Maren Hontvedt and why she wrote her document. It was expiative, surely, but I don’t believe she was
seeking absolution. I think it was the weight of her story that compelled her — a weight she could no longer bear.

I slide the handful of papers into the water. I watch them bob and float upon the water’s twitching surface, and I think they
look like sodden trash tossed overboard by an inconsiderate sailor. Before morning, before they are found, the papers will
have disintegrated, and the water will have blurred the ink.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

I could not have written this book without the aid of the various guidebooks to the Isles of Shoals as well as the several
published accounts of the Smuttynose murders, in particular
Murder at Smuttynose and Other Murders
by Edmund Pearson (1938),
Moonlight Murder at Smuttynose
by Lyman Rutledge (1958),
The Isles of Shoals: A Visual History
by John Bardwell (1989),
The Isles of Shoals in Lore and Legend
by Lyman Rutledge (1976), “A Memorable Murder” by Celia Thaxter (1875),
A Stern and Lovely Scene: A Visual History of the Isles of Shoals
by the Art Galleries at the University of New Hampshire (1978),
Sprays of Salt
by John Downs (1944), and, of course, my much thumbed copy of Ten Miles Out: Guide Book to the Isles of Shoals by the Isles
of Shoals Unitarian Association (1972). To these authors and to others who have written about this wonderful and mysterious
archipelago, I am indebted.

I am also extremely grateful to my editor, Michael Pietsch, and my agent, Ginger Barber, for their incisive comments and advice.

Finally, I am most grateful to John Osborn for his tireless research and emotional intelligence.

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