Dark Nantucket Noon (21 page)

“Listen to this, Alice. I don't understand about the tides:

During much of the year the spring tides drop down into the band of Irish moss but go no lower, returning then toward the land. But in certain months, depending on the changing positions of sun and moon and earth, even the spring tides gain in amplitude, and their surge of water ebbs farther into the sea even as it rises higher against the land. Always, the autumn tides move strongly, and as the hunter's moon waxes and grows round, there come days and nights when the flood tides leap at the smooth rim of granite and send up their lace-edged wavelets to touch the roots of the bay-berry; on their ebbs, with sun and moon combining to draw them back to the sea, they fall away from ledges not revealed since the April moon shone upon their dark shapes. Then they expose the sea's enameled floor—the rose of encrusting corallines, the green of sea urchins, the shining amber of the oarweeds.

I don't understand that,” said Kitty. “It sounds as though she's talking about the highest and lowest tides happening at once. What does she mean?”

“Give me a pencil and paper,” said Alice, “and I'll show you. Do you know how the moon makes the tides?”

“Gravitational attraction, isn't it? The moon pulls on the water.”

“Yes. The ocean bulges up in the direction of the moon. So as the earth turns under the moon on its axis every day, the bulge stays in the same place under the moon. The bulge is high tide.” Alice drew the moon and the earth with its bulge of water. “The earth is turning counterclockwise in this picture, so if you were on an island at the top there, right under the moon at twelve o'clock, having high tide, then six hours later you would be over here at the side having low tide. And the higher the high tide is, the lower the low tide the same day, because more water is pulled away from the low places. Do you see?”

“But what does she mean by spring tides?” said Kitty. “Is the tide highest in the spring?”

“No, no, the spring tides have nothing to do with the spring. The spring tides are the highest tides of the month. Don't forget, not only does the earth turn on its axis once every twenty-four hours, the moon is moving too. It orbits the earth once a month. That means that the angle between the moon and the earth and the sun is changing all the time. Here, I'll draw another picture. You see, the moon isn't the only thing that causes the tides. So does the sun. It's much bigger than the moon, but it's also much farther away, so it doesn't pull as strongly, but it still counts. So in the picture on the left, which shows the time of new moon, both sun and moon are pulling in the same direction, and you get very high tides. Those are called the spring tides. A week later the moon has moved partway around the earth, it's at the quarter, so that it's pulling in a different direction from the sun. The result is that both sun and moon are flattening out each other's pull, and you get the lowest high tides of the month, the neap tides.”

“I see,” said Kitty. “The spring tide means the sun and moon and earth are all lined up. Neap tide means the sun and moon are pulling at right angles to each other.”

“That's about it.” Alice put her pencil down. “Of course there are a lot of other complicated things about the tide—what happens at full moon, and so on, and the effect of shorelines, and the moon's elliptical orbit. What she's talking about there, when she speaks of the very highest tides of all in the spring and the fall, six months apart, is something else that happens only twice a year, when the moon is lined up with the sun, but also it's moving
in the same plane
as the sun's path in the sky, so they're pulling
even more closely
in the same direction. At those two times of year you get the highest spring tides of all. And the water ebbs out farthest of all, exposing parts of the ocean floor that otherwise never see the light. That's what she means there, where she says—let me have the book—the flood tides ‘fall away from ledges not revealed since the April moon shone upon their dark shapes.' That's the autumn spring tide she's talking about. It pulled the water farther back than it had been since the spring tide of April, six months before.”

“You're smart, Alice,” said Kitty.

“No, I'm not. If you make part of your living from the sea the way we do, you have to know about the tides.”

Kitty took the book back. “Listen to the rest of this: ‘At such a time of great tides I go down to that threshold of the sea world to which land creatures are admitted rarely in the cycle of the year.' Alice, I want to do that. When will that day be?”

“Not till next fall sometime. We'll have a look at Eldridge's tide tables back at my house.” Alice stood up and looked absently at the shells and stones on Kitty's mantelpiece. “Of course on Nantucket Island the differences between the various kinds of tides aren't all that great. It takes a combination of tide and storm to make a big difference. But on a long sloping beach you might get the effect she talks about, the uncovering of some of the sea floor once or twice a year. We'll look at the tide book, and then I've got a chart of the length of Nantucket's tidal beaches. Come on.”

But at Alice's house they couldn't find the tide tables anywhere. They weren't on the bookshelf where they belonged, beside the refrigerator. “It's your fault, Alden,” said Alice. “You never throw anything away. It's buried somewhere under all this stuff.”

Alden was resentful. “That's not my stuff. Most of this junk is yours.” Angrily he swept a pile of magazines to the other end of the table with a mighty shove.

“What does it look like anyway?” said Kitty.

“Yellow book, paper cover.” Alice was turning over stacks of mail, sorting through piles of things on the sofa—a pair of rubber boots, some mismatched gloves, a couple of scarves, some thermal underwear, a blanket, a pile of stiff laundry pinched up at the shoulders where it had been gripped by clothespins on the line behind the house. Under a cushion she found the paperweight with the initials AD, and an empty egg carton. She pricked herself on the cactus that was a china dog's tail and screeched and sucked her finger. Alden slammed out the door to look in the animal shed.

Kitty went outside too and tried the toolshed. There was a shelf inside the door. On the shelf were Alden's egg-delivery accounts, a kerosene lantern, some rolled-up charts and maps.

“Find anything?” said Alden, sticking his head in the door.

There was a yellow object on the floor beneath the shelf, under a gun of some sort, a shotgun. Half a shotgun—the barrel was missing. Kitty reached for the yellow thing. Alden got there first. He grabbed it and pulled it free. “Here it is,” he said.

“We found the book, Alice,” said Kitty, walking into the kitchen. “It was out in the toolshed. Under a gun.”

“A gun? We don't have a gun.”

“You know that gunstock I have out there,” said Alden. “That shotgun Joe Green gave me. It's just for a camera,” he said to Kitty. “I'm going to mount a camera on the gunstock sooner or later, when I get around to it.” Alden left to deliver eggs, and Alice and Kitty sat down at the table with Eldridge's
Tide and Pilot Book.

“We've missed the highest spring tide for this time of year,” said Alice. “It was last month, around the time of the eclipse. That makes sense. Both sun and moon were pulling together in exactly the same direction. So six months later means September. Let's look at September. Here it is, the first week in September. That's when you want to go looking at exposed pieces of the sea floor. Next we'll look at my
Selected Resources of the Island of Nantucket
to find the longest tidal beach. Now where did I put
that?”

“The first week in September,” repeated Kitty, aware of a core of icy chill within her lungs. The first week in September was when her trial was to begin. She clasped her cold hands and watched Alice claw through the piles of papers and books. Well, the first week in September would be all right. Looking at the dark sea bottom newly turned up to the light—it might be as good a way as any to spend the last day before her own inmost lining was to be turned outward like a glove.

26

Stab me not with that keen steel!

Moby Dick

Homer was spending a lot of his time tracking down the owners of the various craft that had been seen outside the harbor in Nantucket Sound on March seventh. Both Bob Fern and Charley Piper had provided him with lists of names to work with, and he had been plugging away at them, but the search was dull and dispiriting, it took him far afield, and it continued to be without result. He had talked to the three healthy young girls who called themselves the Cormorants, who had taken little sailboats out of the harbor on the day of the eclipse. They were scattered all over New England in three different private schools. Homer could think of no reason why any of them would have had it in for Helen Green.

Next he pursued the man who was beating his way back down the coast on rainy weekends in his small ketch, trying to get it home to New Jersey, and at last he caught up with him under the Triborough Bridge by setting out from the Bronx in a rowboat. The man, whose name was Alfred Klubbock, was hardly able to do more than curse and complain. What had started as a weekend's adventure had ended as a month-long nightmare of taking a train from Philiy every Friday night to wherever he had left his fucking boat the week before, and then freezing his ass off in the rain trying to get the fucking thing home again, and losing his way in the fucking fog, and running aground, and discovering he was out of gas, and trying to negotiate the Race into Long Island Sound on the ebb current, which was dead wrong. No, he hadn't seen anything at Great Point; where in the fuck was that? Homer bade bon voyage to Mr. Klubbock and rowed sloppily back to the Bronx, unutterably depressed.

In May Homer couldn't stand it anymore. He cabled his wife and met her for a holiday in Bermuda. After this brief respite, appeased in body and soul, he flew back to Nantucket and picked up where he had left off. First he checked up on Kitty. She seemed all right (although it was hard to tell about Kitty). Then he called an expert in the Coast Guard and arranged to take lessons in scuba diving and spearfishing. “Okay if we start right now?” he said.

“Now? Well, I don't know it's still kinda early,” said the expert.

“Well, how would it be if we had an extra lesson now, and you could just show me all the equipment and so on. I'm really interested in the whole subject. If you were off duty, maybe I could come over right now? I'll pay extra for this special lesson, of course. I didn't mean you should throw it in free of charge.”

“Well, all right, okay, I guess that's okay with me.”

The day was warm and moist. Below the bluff at Siasconset, Homer could see the ocean tumbling up the beach in a soapy foam, and when he turned off the staccato roar of his engine, which had lost its muffler, he could hear the softer roar of the surf breaking against the shore in long curling combers, flooding up the sloping sand and sliding back down and withdrawing, then rolling in again with an impulse weakened only by the interruption of the Old Man Shoal, a mile or so offshore. There had been wrecks out there in the old days—Homer had read about them—and the watchers who had manned the lifesaving stations had gone to the rescue, or had stood helplessly by while doomed mariners drowned. Now the Loran beacons and the charts of local waters and the vigilant Coast Guard kept navigators in safe channels on the pathless sea. Homer slammed the door of his car and walked up to the cement-block building that housed the men of the Loran station at Low Beach. He rang the bell. Ensign Kenneth Hawkins swung open the door and led Homer into the rumpus room at one end of the building, where he had laid out his diving and fishing apparatus all over a sofa and a Ping-Pong table.