Dark Nantucket Noon (30 page)

Alden was furious. He swore under his breath. Alice said nothing. She sat fiercely upright beside Kitty with her hands clasped tightly in her lap. But then she unclasped them, and made an effort, and smiled at Kitty as if to dispel the atmosphere of wrath. She began talking about the jars and buckets she had brought along to put things in, and how Henry Thoreau had collected things in his hat. Kitty knew perfectly well that Alice was really talking to Alden, reminding him that it was Kitty's last day, that they mustn't spoil it.

They drove along the shore of the harbor. At the outlet to Coskata Pond Alden stopped the truck and they all got out. Alden climbed up into the back of the pickup to get the buckets and jars, and Alice whispered to Kitty that she must forgive them for being upset. “Those surveyors are all over the place now, there are more of them every day, and we're both absolutely beside ourselves with worry.”

“Tide's low, all right,” said Alden, walking up with the buckets. “I don't know when I've seen it this low.”

They sat down on the pebbly shingle and took off their shoes. Kitty looked over her shoulder at the small house that belonged to Joe Green, but it was boarded up. Nobody home. She got up and examined the sloping beach. “If the tide is this low now, I wonder how high it went during the night,” she said. “All the way up to here, I guess. That's pretty high. I wonder if it washed over Coatue again.”

“Washed over?” said Alden, looking at her.

“There between Five-Fingered Point and Bass Point. When I was there in June I saw eelgrass all across that narrow place, as though the water had washed right over from the harbor into the ocean sometime or other. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been reading about the Haulover, that place on the other side where the tide broke down a big stretch of beach and connected the harbor with the sea, so they could haul their boats right across, way back in the eighteen nineties.”

“Can't break through there anymore,” said Alden. “The bluff's way too high now.”

“But there isn't any bluff over
there,”
said Kitty. “Not on Coatue. That little strip of land is narrow, and it's not much above sea level at all. So sometime last spring the harbor had another outlet to Nantucket Sound right there. I felt pretty pleased with myself to notice that. Maybe it will wash over there again this afternoon. Why don't we come back at high tide and see? When will that be? Three o'clock!”

Alice said nothing. And Alden was gone, running ahead of them toward the distant rim of water, swinging his bucket. The water in the harbor was flat and still under the gray sky, a mirror with a planar surface. The wet sand too reflected the sky, but only in parallel ribbons and stripes because it was ribbed like the roof of a dog's mouth.

They came to the end of the open beach and began splashing in the shallows. Alden was wading ahead of them, running back and forth. Alice found a sea worm and scooped it into a jar. Kitty hurt her foot on a broken bottle. She found an old scalloping dredge covered with barnacles. She found a string, a narrow rope, and pulled on it. The rope dragged, then stopped, refusing to give at either end. Somebody's lost mooring, probably. Kitty followed the rope and came upon a long dark object, its shape shifting and changing as the clear waves lapped over it. She picked up the rope again and pulled. The dark shape gave. It loosened itself from the sucking sand and became a heavy weight in air, streaming with trickling sandy water.

It was some kind of gun, some sort of fishing apparatus with a corroded gun barrel. It was a device for killing fish under water, with a spring mechanism to make it fire. Homer had talked about these things. He had been looking for one. Kitty hooked her bucket over her arm, held the spear gun in one hand and pulled the other end of the rope, which was stuck on an encrusted piece of driftwood. She bent down and loosened it. Ow! it was sharp. The sharpness was a rusted metal tip like an arrowhead. “Hey,” said Kitty, “look what I found.” She lifted the weapon high in her two hands.

Alden and Alice looked up. Then Alden began running toward Kitty. “Wait, Alden,” called Alice.

“Hallooooo!”
There was another shout. It was Homer, standing up in the front of his Scout, waving at them from the shore. He had parked beside the pickup. He was getting out.

They turned and headed for the shore. “Why don't you throw that old thing back?” said Alice. She was at Kitty's shoulder, her hand on the spear gun.

“No, no; I want to show it to Homer,” said Kitty.

“Let me carry it,” said Alden, slopping up beside her, breathing heavily in her face.

“No, really, I'm all right.”

Homer met them halfway. “Say, what have you got there?” he said to Kitty.

Kitty gave him the spear gun. He was delighted with it. “Will you look at that!” he said. “The thing has been tampered with. Wouldn't you say the gun barrel had been added to it, Alden? You know, now that I look at it, I can see it's exactly how you would solve the problem of getting a thing like this to fire straight in air. I think you've made a find, Kitty Clark. This is our lucky day. Where'd you get this thing?”

“Out there in the shallow water,” said Kitty, pointing. “We came out today to see what it was like at the time of highest and lowest spring tides, the highest and lowest in six months. The last time it was like this was during the eclipse, remember? At high tide today the water will be really high again. I want to come back to see if it will wash, over Coatue, the way it did before.”

“It did? You know, it's a miracle the harbor is here at all.” Homer drew the wet rope through his fingers and looked at the rusted spear tip. “What do you think, Alden? I swear, I think this must be the thing that killed Helen Green. Somebody must have dumped it out there in the harbor at high tide. Of course we still have no way of knowing whose it was, but maybe it will help to dangle it in front of the jury anyway.”

Alden pushed his sunglasses up on his greasy black forehead and stared at the spear gun, then shook his head dumbly.

“Do you suppose it was Spike Grap's?” said Kitty. “The one he said he lost?”

“It could be,” said Homer. “Of course his apparatus wasn't doctored up with a gun barrel like this, but whoever stole it could have fixed it up for himself. Of course if we could just find somebody who had a tidy little shotgun from which the barrel had been removed, that would be a tidy little discovery, but I suppose that's asking too much. And we haven't got time to go looking for one now.”

Kitty opened her mouth to speak, then stopped and glanced at Alden. Alden met her eye, then looked away. Kitty looked back at Homer, and bit her lip. Alden had a gun without a barrel. She had seen it in the toolshed. Alice knew about it too. And they knew that she knew. And they knew that she knew that they knew. And then a grim memory struck Kitty. Alden had got the gun from Joe. He had said the gunstock in the toolshed came from Joe.

“Well, I'll be on my way,” said Homer, climbing back into his truck. “And I'll just take this delightful thing with me, and keep it safe and sound. Listen, Kitty Clark, I came out here to tell you we've got to sit down this afternoon and talk about what's going to happen when they get you up there on the witness stand. How about two o'clock at my place? Matter of fact, right now I'm about to go to church. Congratulate me on my piety.”

And then he was off, careering along the open beach in his Scout. Kitty watched him go, encouraged as usual by his colossal self-confidence and by the sheer mass and size of him sticking up out of the front seat. Then she turned around, and found Alice and Alden gone.

That was funny. Where were they? She was all alone with a flock of sanderlings, dipping and soaring over the changing tide, and there were terns skimming along the surface, plunging after little fish. The terns must be the same ones who had dived at her before, but now they were no threat. Their eggs had hatched, or perhaps they had been crushed. The terns had forgotten. They seemed to bear her no ill will.

“Kitty!”
Someone was calling her. Someone was walking into the open door of Joe's small house, far away. It would be Alden, of course. Where was Alice? The call came again.
“Kitty!”

Once bitten, twice shy
, thought Kitty, remembering the last time she had tried to enter that house. But Alden was calling her. Amiably she walked along the beach until she came to the sandy wooden steps that led to Joe's front door. There she hesitated a moment, remembering the violence of his rejection on that miserable day in June.
Get out
, Joe had said.
Get out, get out.

Well, this time she was being invited in. Kitty peered blindly through the open doorway at the darkness, and then slowly, defiantly, she stepped into Bluebeard's chamber.

37

“Go to prayers, d——n you! To prayers, you rascals—to prayers!”

White jacket

Homer sat slumped on a narrow bench, staring sleepily at the high seats of the elders at the front of the small gray room where Nantucket's Quakers had sat of old: He was drowsier than he would have thought possible. Beside him Mary was deep in reverie, her head down, her hands crossed in her lap. Was she asleep? Around them in the Meeting sat a score or so of Friends, keeping a profound stillness. Homer wanted desperately to shift his position, but the last time he had tried it, the bench had shrieked in protest. Resignedly he tried to forget his discomfort and his sleepiness and center down like the others, if not on prayerful thoughts, at least upon a vision of the ancient breed of island Quakers who had sat here in the past. They had all been the spiritual descendants of that saintly old lady Mary Starbuck and her husband, Edward, and they had sent their God-fearing young sons out upon the deep in search of whales, and then later on they had excommunicated scores of rebellious boys who took ship on gun-bearing vessels during the Revolution, and then still later on they had fought among themselves, Hicksites and Wilburites and Gurneyites, and because of the schisms they had lost ground, and then they had all but disappeared. Now they had revived again, but these gentle people no longer engaged Leviathan.
Oh, God
, thought Homer,
I'm so damned uncomfortable. If I could only think of something spiritual to say I'd get up and stretch.
There! What was that? At last somebody was getting up, scraping back a bench, clearing her throat. Gratefully Homer uncrossed and recrossed his legs and glanced at his wife. Mary stirred, smiled at him, folded her arms across her chest and lowered her head once again to listen.

The speaker was Letty Roper. She had been doing some serious thinking, she said. She was troubled, she said, by the idea of vengeance. Tomorrow a trial was to begin, a trial for murder, and what was a trial, she said, but an act of vengeance? She was deeply troubled by the thought of vengeance. “ ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,'” said Letty, and sat down.

Slowly the silence gathered again and filled the room. It was not a mere absence of sound but a positive substance, a collective absorption, a general sober pondering of Letty's concern. The thick quiet went on and on. Homer wondered at it. Would no one else be moved to speak? Quaker Meeting had never been intended, he knew, to be a debating society.

Someone was rising, there in the back. There was a creaking of a chair and a dropping of an object and a blowing of a nose and a long explosive clearing of a throat to prepare the members of the Meeting for a quavering sermon from an old man in the last row. It was Obed Biddle. Homer had often encountered Mr. Biddle in the Whaling Museum, and he recognized his voice at once.

Mr. Biddle's inmost thoughts were the Lord's. “ ‘Moses stretched out his hand over the sea,'” said Mr. Biddle, “ ‘and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.…'”

Homer couldn't resist the temptation to turn his head around and look, and he was delighted with what he saw. The old man was taking the part of Moses. One lank arm was outstretched, exposing a dirty shirt cuff, his head was swaying forward, his glittering old eyes were fastened upon the waters of the Red Sea and upon the children of the Israelites standing upon the shore. Mr. Biddle was speaking about the vengeance of the Lord. He was answering Letty Roper's troubled scruples the best way he knew how.

“… And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. The Egyptians pursued, and went in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, and his horsemen. And in the morning watch, the Lord in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians, and discomfited the host of the Egyptians, clogging their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily, and the Egyptians said, Let us flee from before Israel, for the Lord fights for them against the Egyptians. Then the Lord said to Moses, Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen! So Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its wonted flow when the morning appeared; and the Egyptians fled into it, and the Lord routed the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not so much as one of them remained! But the people of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore!”