When Ida finally saw her husband’s dark shape coming up the track from town, she wasn’t ready to face him. She dove into the pantry and began hauling jugs and boxes and bags from the shelves as if she’d been midway into a good clear-out. She’d just set his whiskey bottle on the floor when she heard the knocking and straightened up. Ezra wouldn’t knock. She went to the door and flung it open on Chester Luce.
“Letter for you,” he said. “Just off the boat. From your husband. Thought I’d run it up in case you were waiting on news.”
Ida looked at Ezra’s sloppy writing on the envelope and wondered that Luce had recognized it. How many letters did Ezra ever write? She opened the envelope. The letter was dated Saturday, the day of the storm.
Ida—I’m writing you in a hurry Mose and I are about to board the Portland for that Maine job I’ll be back by weeks end Call Lem if you need help with the sheep—E—PS Sorry
The word that struck Ida first was the word sorry. He’d used it twice in a week now and it wasn’t as a rule a common presence in his vocabulary. And why the mention of Lem and the sheep? Didn’t Ida always turn to Lem when she needed help with the sheep? She read the letter again, and this time she stopped at the word Portland. That word was as strange as the word sorry. Ezra couldn’t have boarded the Portland. The Portland went down.
Ida looked at the date on the letter again, read it again, sure she’d taken some particular word wrong, but none of the words had changed into other words or clarified their meaning. She dropped the letter on the table and raced out the door down the track; no matter how old she might feel, Ida was still young enough to run, a skill she’d picked up since she’d moved to the island and begun to chase sheep. She caught Luce just as he was about to take the turn onto Main Street. He heard her and swung around, cautious on the ice, as slow as if she were dreaming him.
“What news of the Portland?”
“She went down.”
“I know she went down. Still no word on survivors? Ezra was on her. And Mose Barstow.”
Luce blinked, looked up, spoke to the clouds. “None’s I’ve got wind of. They’ve piled the unidentified at the Lifesaving Station at Cahoon Hollow, over in Wellfleet.”
“I’m talking of the passengers. The passengers on the Portland.”
Luce gave Ida an odd look. “Like I told you. Piled up in Wellfleet.”
“I don’t mean the bodies, Mr. Luce. I mean the passengers.”
Luce took his eyes from the sky and brought them down to Ida’s level. “One and the same, Mrs. Pease. All one and the same. I’m sorry as can be, but that’s the thrust of it. Terrible thing, I know. Whatever Mrs. Luce and I can do . . . You’ll be wanting to get to Wellfleet, I imagine. If we can help with any of the procedures—”
Ida fought down a wave of hysterical laughter. “I’m familiar with the procedures,” she said. She turned and started back up the hill. She made it as far as the kitchen stoop when her knees began to tremble. She sat down hard on the cold and the ice and this new truth that she couldn’t seem to wrestle to earth. Ezra. Drowned. On the Portland.
Ida sat on the stoop until the rest of her began to tremble from the cold.
Later, crouched before the fire, Ida still felt frozen—her body and her mind. What to do? Ezra would have told her, and she’d have ignored him more like, but even so, right now she’d have welcomed the telling. She sat some more, wishing something would thaw out so she could at least think if not feel, and when her brain did thaw the first thing she thought of was Chester Luce. You’ll be wanting to get to Wellfleet. Ida straightened. Yes, that was first. Or rather, second.
First was Ruth.
Ida climbed the uphill track to Ruth’s with greater ease than she’d managed the downhill slide after Chester Luce. As she reached the house she stopped to gather herself, to bundle up her own inner turmoil and pack it away someplace out of reach until a later time when she could pull it out and sort through it in privacy. Now was Ruth’s time. Hattie’s time. But still, Ida hovered on the step, turning to look out over the farm. Ezra’s farm.
Of the two farmhouses Ruth’s was the newer, built when Ezra took over the farm, perched on the top of the rise so that Ruth would remain part of the place where she’d been born and raised but at enough of a distance to keep her nose out of the actual workings. Of course it was never possible to keep Ruth’s nose out of anything, but Ruth’s house held the best view: the scope of pasture and hill demarcated by the serpentine stone walls, a wide swath of sea beyond, an even wider patch of sky. From that vantage point nothing appeared changed, as if Luce had never climbed the hill and handed Ida the letter, as if Ezra had never written the letter, as if he and Mose had never sailed off for Boston. She peered down the hill at the pastured sheep, the old house, the barn. Any minute Ezra could walk out of that barn door knocking manure off his boot and cursing, most likely at Ida, but still . . .
Still. There should have been something more after that still. Ida waited, but nothing came. She knocked, opened Ruth’s door, and stepped inside.
Of the two women, Ruth seemed to adjust to the news more quickly; Hattie looked blankly at Ida, but in due time the tears came. Ruth’s face looked as if it were meant to cry, the tracks already worn, but Hattie’s wasn’t yet laid out for it; Ida watched the tears flow willy-nilly over Hattie’s smoother cheeks for a time, but after a while she stood up.
“I need to go to Wellfleet and look for Ezra’s body.”
Hattie’s tears stopped. She stood also. “I’ll go with you.”
“No, you need to look after Ruth.”
Ruth snorted. “Who looks after who around here, I’d like to know?”
But Hattie dropped into her chair without argument.
Lem was waiting at the fence when Ida returned. He was about to speak but Ida cut in first.
“I’m off to Wellfleet to look for his body. Will you mind the farm? I should only be a night.”
“I’ll go to Wellfleet.”
“No, I need you to mind the farm.”
“Ida—”
“I guess I know what you want to say but I think I’d do better just now if you didn’t say it. Is that all right?”
Lem peered hard at her. “I’m taking you to the boat.”
“All right.”
Ida went inside, climbed the stairs to her room—Ezra’s room—and fumbled in the closet for her travel suit and travel boots, feeling under water. She looked down at the scuffs on the boots in disgust. Ida had been raised with pretty things; she liked pretty things; she painted—back when she’d painted—graceful still lifes and elegant portraits of men and ladies clad in their finery. But after her first soggy winter on the farm she’d returned her own silk dresses and satin shoes to the trunk where they still sat at the back of the closet, and—somehow—stopped even polishing her boots. But polish them for whom? Ruth would have missed the opportunity to cast a disapproving eye, and Ezra wouldn’t have noticed.
Lem helped Ida into the wagon and threw her bag in the back. They stayed silent the length of the ride until the wharf came into view, the schooner Newburgh still embedded in the middle of it; a crew worked nearby, taking the easiest route of rebuilding the wharf around the vessel. In the meantime rowboats still set off from shore to ferry the passengers to the steamer, and when Ida’s turn came she was glad enough of Lem’s hand, but not just because of the restriction of her corset. Oh, the dread she felt, sitting in that rocking boat, feeling every ounce of her own weight! Even without her mother’s stones, it would be a fast trip to the bottom.
“You call when you get back!” Lem hollered.
Ida nodded and could only hope he saw it because she couldn’t wave; she gripped the dory’s gunwale with both hands and stared at the crewman’s back as it strained, the past flying in and out of the waves around her.
For the better part of a year after Ida lost her family, she’d sat in her parents’ town house on Beacon Hill, pinned down under the sheer weight of her grief. It was too much; too many; how to pry apart one face or voice or heart from the solid mass of dead to register its loss? How to separate a single memory? She was unable to think or form a plan. Whenever she saw water it had seemed to press on her, suffocate her, much as it had suffocated her mother. The house, frayed and fading around encased treasures her shipmaster grandfather had brought back from China likewise oppressed her. She couldn’t seem to break out of the track she walked from room to room, dusting and re-dusting lifeless objects that had lost all meaning for her. When she finally attempted to paint even a simple floral it came out too dreary, too full of umbers and ochres; when she tried a portrait of a neighbor’s child, the poor boy came out looking like he’d drowned, so pale had she made him. Such was Ida’s state at the end of that first year that she might have taken up with any man who chose to notice her, even one far less charming than Ezra.
And Ezra was charming. Ida had met him at a schoolmate’s wedding and had noticed his taking her in from top to bottom: hair swept high and loose in keeping with the current fashion, mourning silk enlivened with French lace collar and cuffs, her mother’s diamond and pearl encrusted locket hanging between her breasts. At the time Ida had believed it was her face and figure that had captured Ezra’s eye; later she suspected that in fact it had been the locket. But when Ida intercepted that look of appreciation she’d felt a little spark of life for the first time since she’d lost her family; she smiled, and that was all it took to draw Ezra across the room to her. And, she would admit it, Ida had liked the look of him too: the well-cut suit, the strong shoulders, the confident smile. And she’d liked it even more that he’d apparently asked around about her and knew of her tragedy yet refused to tiptoe around it as if it were contagious. “Are you truly all alone now?” he’d asked. “There’s no family left at all?”
Later in their acquaintance, after he’d discovered she was an artist, Ezra had talked of his island home as an enchanted place; he’d described a rising tide of affluent tourists always on the lookout for art, an acclaimed summer institute that offered classes in the arts, more flowers than she could paint in a lifetime. But more important than all of that, Ezra was a man of the land. A sheep farmer. A man who would never be swallowed by the sea. And perhaps there lay the greatest evidence of Ezra’s charm: the fact that he’d managed to talk Ida into island life, that a woman who abhorred the idea of water now lived surrounded by it. But when Ezra showed her his Martha’s Vineyard farm—the rolling green hills dotted with sheep, the water at a picturesque distance, a late-day glow pinking the stone walls, she’d thought: peace.
When had that peace washed away? Perhaps when Ezra and Mose started the salvage business that would not only take them to sea but to “meetings” at Duffy’s at every odd hour. Perhaps when Ezra leased office space in Boston that seemed to serve more as an excuse to leave the island at will and without warning. Or perhaps, more simply, when he stopped trying to charm her. However it happened, one day Ida woke from her long fog of grief to find that the island tourists were looking for island landscapes, not portraits and still lifes; that the famed institute was nothing but a summer school for teachers; that the flowers growing wild along the road and in the meadows drooped thinly when imprisoned in a vase; that most months of the year the water and sky and even the farm itself pressed in and down and around Ida like a grave; that she was trapped in a life that she could never claim as hers and from which she could never escape.
And now Ezra was dead. An unexpected wave of anger hit Ida; Ezra had drowned and left her here to sort for him among the bodies—again, a thing that wasn’t his fault, and yet somehow she could blame him for it.
Ida clambered aboard the ferry and found a seat inside, fixing her eyes on the horizon. The surface of the sea appeared calm enough, but she could feel the swell and roll of it below, the remains of the storm washing in from farther out. Was it still washing in bodies? They’d never recovered the bodies of her father and brothers, but there were times when Ida had thought of that as a gift, especially after she saw her mother’s crab-eaten face and those stones in her pockets. For a time Ida had dreamed of her father and brothers still alive, shipwrecked on a remote barrier island, but she wanted no such fantasies with Ezra; she wanted to find his body, to bring it home, to enclose him in the ground along with this terrifying, unwelcome anger. That she should feel this, that it should rise up and wrestle down the grief she should have felt only made her angrier.
The Woods Hole harbor, as compared to the Haven, seemed to have suffered little damage; the wood pilings on the dock stood upright, the steamship office, warehouses, and train station all possessed their original roofs; a few tall trees still hovered starkly in the background. Ida stepped gratefully onto ground that didn’t shift under her and hurried to the train station; she purchased the latest Atlantic to shield herself from unwanted conversation and secured a window seat. But as the train labored its way down the length of the Cape, she found herself ignoring the magazine and gazing out the window at flat fields, marsh, stunted black pines, ponds skimmed with ice, a bedraggled cluster of houses, and finally, the wind-blasted dunes of Wellfleet.
At the station Ida negotiated a hack without difficulty, but as they drew closer and closer to the shore, her composure left her. It was still bitterly cold, which meant Ida would find no rotting flesh awaiting her, but she began to imagine other things that could happen to a body after it had been pummeled by the sea. She began to imagine her mother.
The Lifesaving Station sat perched on the edge of a dune, its roof steeply pitched to deter the wind, a lookout turret standing defiantly above it. The Atlantic stretched out long and seemingly calm beyond, but Ida could hear the rumbling of surf at the foot of the bluff and wasn’t fooled. She stepped out of the carriage onto ground that now seemed as unstable as the sea and strode toward the building. The lifesaving boats were lined up outside; Ida considered why and pushed the thought aside, but inside the cavernous space it was as she’d feared—the entire floor was covered with bodies draped in blankets.
Ida stood still and waited as three others completed a ponderous circle of the room. One couple could have been the Chilmark Hardings. A single man could have been a relative of Ira Briggs’s cousin or Bert Robinson’s niece. She didn’t want to draw too close to them, to find she was recognized, to be forced to speak, but even more, she didn’t want to get close enough to read the details of their grief. Only after they left the building, the man and woman holding each other upright, the single man striding fast, as if to outpace his disappointment, did Ida approach the surf man on duty and show him the picture of Ezra she’d brought with her.
Ida’s single image of Ezra was one he’d commissioned for a wedding portrait: Ida sat stiffly in lilac silk, again wearing her mother’s locket; Ezra stood with a knee cocked, looking into the distance, already focused on his exit. The surf man studied the photo at length but as if out of politeness, not wishing to dismiss it without at least feigning attention; in the end he handed it back and gestured to the rows of bodies.
“Best look for yourself, ma’am.”
Ida began at the nearest corner and paced the rows, looking for anything of Ezra, even among the Negroes, even among the women, distrusting the sea, distrusting her senses. At first she wasn’t able to see anything; next she was able to see nothing but death. At last she was able to see this beard or that coat or a slant to a nose, but nothing she could join up to form Ezra. When she reached the end she stood and breathed to settle herself, then started again, slower this time, holding up the picture, lifting the blankets, remembering to look for Mose too, but she could make no single piece of flesh into either man. She returned to the surf man, who now stood leaning against the wall. “Are you still collecting bodies?”
“Not since the wind shifted.”
“How many are still missing?”
The surf man shrugged. “Nobody knows. The passenger list was on shipboard. They’re guessing they shipped close to two hundred, it being a holiday weekend.”
Ida made a quick survey of the room, estimating not more than forty bodies, which grew the odds against her finding Ezra. She turned and saw the driver had waited for her at the door with what appeared to be real empathy shadowing his face; he held out his arm and she took it, allowed him to walk her to the carriage. It was well beyond dark when he left her at a rooming house at the center of town that he insisted was clean and safe for women alone; he tried to refuse the money for the fare, but Ida pressed it into his hand. She was not the grieving widow he believed her to be.
But odd as it was considering that Ezra’s wasn’t among them, seeing those rows of dead bodies in Wellfleet and hearing the groaning of the sea beyond confirmed for Ida the fact of her husband’s death. Ezra wasn’t going to walk out of that barn. He wasn’t going to walk up that hill. He wasn’t going to barge into the kitchen with Mose, jabbering about whatever it was he chose to jabber about at the moment. He would not now, ever, age into Lem Daggett. He was dead.
Ezra, dead. Ida got up and paced the room, repeating the words aloud: Ezra, dead. Ezra dead, waiting for that overwhelming crash of grief that she knew so well. Around and around she went, seeing nothing but the worn rug under her feet, but no matter how many turns she took she felt nothing but hollow, blank. That fact and the long night itself wore away at her in turns; she’d imagined nothing could ever be as difficult as grief until she came upon its absence.