The Weight of Water (5 page)

Thomas peers into the front window as if he might recognize something beyond the drapes. With a casualness and tenderness
I suddenly mistrust, he bends and kisses me on the cheek.

Some weeks after Thomas and I met each other in the bar in Cambridge, we parked my car by the waterfront in Boston and walked
up a hill toward an expensive restaurant. Perhaps we were celebrating an anniversary — one month together. From the harbor,
fog spilled into the street and around our feet. I had on high heels, Italian shoes that made me nearly as tall as Thomas.
Behind me, I could hear a foghorn, the soothing hiss of tires on wet streets. It was raining lightly, and it seemed as though
we would never make it up the hill to the restaurant, that we were walking as slowly as the fog was moving.

Thomas pressed in on my side. We had been at two bars, and his arm was slung around my shoulder rather more passionately than
gracefully.

“You have a birthmark on the small of your back, just to the right of center,” he said.

My heels clicked satisfyingly on the sidewalk. “If I have a birthmark,” I said, “it’s one I’ve never seen.”

“It’s shaped like New Jersey,” he said.

I looked at him and laughed.

“Marry me,” he said.

I pushed him away, as you would a drunk. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you since the night I found you in my bed.”

“How could you marry a woman who reminded you of New Jersey?”

“You know I’ve never worked better.”

I thought about his working, the dozens of pages, the continuously stained fingers.

“It’s all your doing,” he said.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “You were ready to write these poems.”

“You let me forgive myself. You gave this to me.”

“No I didn’t.”

Thomas had on a blazer, his only jacket, a navy so dark it was nearly black. His white shirt seemed luminescent under the
street lamp, and my eye was drawn to the place where his shirt met his belt buckle. I knew that if I put the flat of my hand
there, the fabric of the shirt would be warm to the touch.

“I’ve only known you for a month,” I said.

“We’ve been together every day. We’ve slept together every night.”

“Is that enough?”

“Yes.”

I knew that he was right. I put the flat of my hand against his white shirt at the belt buckle. The shirt was warm.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“I’m serious,” he said.

He pressed toward me, backing me insistently into an alleyway. Perhaps I made a small and ineffectual protest. In the alley,
the tarmac shone from the wet. I was aware of a couple, not so very unlike myself and Thomas, walking arm in arm, just past
the narrow opening of the alley. They glanced in at us with frightened faces as they passed. Thomas leaned all of his weight
against me, and put his tongue inside my ear. The gesture made me shiver, and I turned my head. He put his mouth then on the
side of my neck, licking the skin in long strokes, and suddenly I knew that in that posture he would come — deliberately —
to show me that he had become helpless before me, that I was an alchemist. He would make of this an offering of the incontinence
of his love. Or was it, I couldn’t help but wonder, simply the abundance of his gratitude?

I am trying to remember. I am trying hard to remember what it felt like to feel love.

I enter the building with the tall, arched windows and shut the door behind me. I follow signs upstairs to the library. I
knock on an unprepossessing metal door and then open it. The room before me is calm. It has thick ivory paint on the walls,
and heavy wooden bookshelves. The feeling of serenity emanates from the windows.

There are two library tables and a desk where the librarian sits. He nods at me as I walk toward him. I am not sure what to
say.

“Can I help you with something?” he asks. He is a small man with thinning brown hair and wire glasses. He wears a plaid sport
shirt with short, crisp sleeves that stick out from his shoulders like moth’s wings.

“I saw the sign out front. I’m looking for material on the murders that took place out at the Isles of Shoals in 1873.”

“Smuttynose.”

“Yes.”

“Well… we have the archives.”

“The archives?”

“The Isles of Shoals archives,” he explains. “They were sent over from the Portsmouth Library, oh, a while ago. They’re a
mess, though. There’s a great deal of material, and not much of it has been cataloged, I’m sorry to say. I could let you see
some of it, if you want. We don’t lend out materials here.”

“That would be—”

“You’d have to pick an area. A subject.”

“Old photographs,” I say. “If there are any. Of people, of the island. And personal accounts of the time.”

“That would be mostly in diaries and letters,” he says. “Those that have come back to us.”

“Yes. Letters then. And photographs.”

“Have a seat over there at the table, and I’ll see what I can do. We’re very excited to have the archives, but as you can
see, we’re a bit short-staffed.”

I have then an image of Thomas with Adaline and Billie. Each has a vanilla ice-cream cone. The three of them are licking the
cones, trying to control the drips.

Thomas said, “I’ll go find Adaline.” He did not say, “I’ll go find Adaline and Billie,” or “Adaline and Rich.”

The librarian returns with several books and folders of papers. I thank him and pick up one of the books. It is an old and
worn volume, the brown silk binding of which has cracked. The pages are yellowed at the edges, and a few are loose. Images
swim in front of me, making an array of new covers on the book. I shut my eyes and put the book to my forehead.

I look at an old geography of the Isles of Shoals. I read two guidebooks printed in the early half of the century. I take
notes. I open another book and begin to riffle the pages. It is a book of recipes,
The Appledore Cookbook,
published in 1873. The recipes intrigue me: Quaking Pudding, Hash Made from Calf’s Head and Pluck, Whitpot Pudding, Hop Yeast.
What is pluck? I wonder.

From the folders the library has given me, papers slide out onto the table, and I can see there is no order to them. Some
papers are official documents from the town, licenses and such, while others are clearly bills of sale. Still other papers
seem to be letters written on a stationery so fragile I am almost afraid to touch them. I look at the letters to decipher
the old-fashioned penmanship, and with dismay I realize that the words are foreign. I see the dates: April 17, 1873; November
4, 1868; December 24, 1856; January 5, 1867.

There are a few photographs in the folders. One is a portrait of a family of seven. In the photograph, the father, who has
a beard and a full head of hair, is wearing a waistcoat and a thick suit, like a captain of a ship might have. His wife, who
has on a black dress with a white lace collar and lots of tiny white buttons, is quite plump and has her hair pulled severely
back off her head. Everyone in the photograph, including the five children, appears grim and bug-eyed. This is because the
photographer has had to keep the shutter open for at least a minute, during which time no one is allowed to blink. It is easier
to maintain a serious expression for sixty seconds than it is a smile.

In one of the folders, various documents seem interspersed with students’ papers and what look to be, to judge from the titles,
sermons. There is also a faded, flesh-colored box, a box expensive writing paper might once have come in. Inside the box are
pages of writing — spidery writing in brown ink. The penmanship is ornate, almost impossible to make out, even if the words
were in English, which they are not. The paper is pink at the edges, slightly stained in one corner. A water stain, I think.
Or perhaps even a burn. It smells of mildew. I stare at the flowery writing, which when looked at as a whole makes a lovely,
calligraphic design, and as I lift the pages out of the box, I discover that a second set of papers, paper-clipped together,
is at the bottom of the box. These pages are written in pencil, on white-lined paper, and bear many erasure marks, which have
been written over. They also bear one purple date stamp and several notations:
Rec’d September 4, 1939, St. Olafs College library. Reed 14.2.40, Oslo, forwarded Marit GuUestad. Reed April J, 1942, Portsmouth
Library, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

I look at the first set of papers and the second. I note the date at the beginning of each document. I study the signature
at the end of the foreign papers and compare it to the printed name at the end of those written in English.

Maren Christensen Hontvedt.

I read two pages of the penciled translation and set it on my lap. I look at the date stamp and the notations, which seem
to tell a story of their own: the discovery of a document written in Norwegian; an attempt to have a translation made by someone
at St. Olafs College; the forwarding of that document to a translator in Oslo; the war intervening; the document and its translation
belatedly sent to America and then relegated to a long-neglected folder in the Portsmouth Library. I take a deep breath and
close my eyes.

Maren Hontvedt. The woman who survived the murders.

TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY MARIT GULLESTAD

19 September 1899, Laurvig

It is so please the Lord
. I shall, with my soul and heart and sound mind, write the true and actual tale of that incident which continues to haunt
my humble footsteps, even in this country of my birth, far from those forbidding, granite islands on which a most unforgivable
crime was committed against the persons whom I loved most dearly in all the world. I write this document, not in defense of
myself, for what defense have those who still live, and may breathe and eat and partake of the Lord’s blessings, against those
who have been so cruelly struck down and in such a way as I can hardly bear to recall? There is no defense, and I have no
desire to put forth such. Though I must add here that I have found it a constant and continuous trial all these twenty-six
years to have been, even by the most unscrupulous manner of persons, implicated in any small way in the horrors of 5 March
1873. These horrors have followed me across the ocean to my beloved Laurvig, which, before I returned a broken and barren
woman, was untainted with any scandal, and was, for me, the pure and wondrous landscape of my most treasured childhood memories
with my dear family, and which is where I will shortly die. And so I mean with these pages, written in my own hand, while
there are some few wits remaining in my decrepit and weakening body, that the truth shall be known. I leave instructions for
this document to be sent after my death into the care of John Hontvedt, who was once my husband and still remains so in the
eyes of the Lord, and who resides at Sagamore Street in the town of Portsmouth in the state of New Hampshire in America.

The reader will need sometimes to forgive me in this self-imposed trial, for I find I am thinking, upon occasion, of strange
and far-away occurrences, and am not altogether in control of my faculties and language, the former as a consequence of being
fifty-two years of age and unwell, and the latter owing to my having completed my last years of schooling in an interrupted
manner.

I am impatient to write of the events of 5 March 1873 (though I would not visit again that night for anything save the Lord’s
admonition), but I fear that the occurrences of which I must speak will be incomprehensible to anyone who has not understood
what went before. By that I mean not only my own girlhood and womanhood, but also the life of the emigrant to the country
of America, in particular the Norwegian emigrant, and most particularly still, the Norwegian emigrant who makes his living
by putting his nets into the sea. More is known about those persons who left Norway in the middle of this century because
the Norwegian land, even with all its plentiful fjords and fantastical forests, was, in many inhospitable parts of this country,
unyielding to the ever-increasing population. Such dearth of land, at that time, refused to permit many households even a
modest living in the farming of oats, barley, mangecorn and potatoes. It was these persons who left all they had behind, and
who set intrepidly out to sea, and who did not stop on the Atlantic shores, but went instead directly inland to the state
of New York, and hence from there into the prairie heartland of the United States of America. These are the emigrants of our
Norway who were raised as farmers in the provinces of Stavanger and Bergen and Nedenes, and then abandoned all that they had
held dear to begin life anew near the Lake of Michigan, and in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin and in other states.
The life of these emigrants was, I believe and am sorry to have to write, not always as they had imagined it to be, and I
have read some of the letters from these wretched persons and have heard of the terrible hardships they had to bear, including,
for some, the worst trial of all, the death of those they loved most, including children.

As I have not ever had children, I have been spared this most unthinkable of all losses.

In our village, which was Laurvig, and which was well coasted and had a lovely aspect out to the Laurvigsfjord and to the
Skaggerak from many vantage points, some families who made their livings from the sea had gone to America before us. These
persons were called “sloopfolk,” as they had sailed in sloops in voyages of one to three months, during which some unfortunates
perished, and some new life was born. John and I, who had been married but the year, had heard of such folk, though we did
not have the acquaintance of any of these persons intimately, until that day in the seventh month of 1867, when a cousin of
John’s whose name was Torwad Holde, and who is since deceased, set sail for new fishing grounds near to the city of Gloucester,
off the coast of the state of Massachusetts in America, fishing grounds that were said to hold forth promise of great riches
to any and all who would set their nets there. I must add at this point that I did not believe in such fanciful and hollow
promises, and would never have left Laurvig, had not John been, I shall have to say it,
seduced
by the letters of his cousin, Torwad, in particular one letter that I no longer have in my possession but remember in my
heart as a consequence of having had to read this letter over and over again to my husband who had not had any schooling because
of the necessity of having had to go to sea since the age of eight. I reproduce that letter here as faithfully as I can.