Three days after almost getting caught, Lyman Creel came to our house, holding a Winchester deer rifle across his chest. There are things you remember in vivid bursts from your childhood, things you shouldn’t be able to recall but that still linger with exacting detail. They can haunt you, and they can comfort you. Sometimes they can do both at the same time.
Our house was an indistinct left turn off the paved state road onto a gravel two-track, nearly overgrown by ostrich ferns, goldenrod, asters, and staghorn sumac. Speeding by the turn on the paved road, you might glance suddenly to the left for no real reason and see a shaft of hazy sunlight exploding from the woods. It simply beckoned. The two-track wound down through the woods for a mile before it reached the river, and because it beckoned, my father put a cattle gate up at the half-mile point and nailed a painted sign to it: No Trespassing. Water Moccasin Farm. Though the gate was never locked and often left open, few people came down the road. When some curious stranger risked trespass, my father, brimming with jocularity, would show them around, have a beer with them, and then tell them to get out. Others—Reggie, Moses, friends of my mother—lifted the gate and came and went as they pleased, and I thought my parents were a very strange breed of hermit.
Great oaks and hemlocks curled over the road. The canopy was so dense and green that sunlight was completely absent as we drove back and forth from town. At the river the two-track became more of a path, until it met the drive my parents had skidded out along the peninsula.
It was a Saturday when Lyman came. Link and I were upstairs, Simon and our father downstairs. Our mother was out on the back porch, reading. Unless you came up the river by boat, it was virtually impossible to reach our house without being seen. Sam and Daphne started to bark furiously. Simon rose from the table, nodding at our father. It was as if they already knew what was happening. Lyman was coming down the road. Why he moved in a slow saunter up that road in that false posture of joviality, whistling slightly, spinning his head about to follow the darting birds, all the while cradling a rifle as lovingly and innocently as though it were a loaf of bread he’d come to bestow upon us, escaped me in the moment, but later I came to understand that Lyman was a great actor, a master of artifice who could manipulate camaraderie and threat with chilling ease.
Our father took his time, watching until Lyman was just yards away from the house. He finished his mug of coffee. Went to the sink and washed the cup and turned it over on a dish towel to dry. Then he put on the heavy charcoal sweater he liked to wear out in his shop in the mornings before he took us to school and went into the boatyard office. He pushed his heels into his boots, bent down and tightly tied the laces. Then he opened the front door.
“Arnoux,” Lyman said.
“Lyman,” my father replied.
Lyman was standing in the light in the yard with his rifle, my father standing unarmed. There was such absurdity in the cordiality of their greeting. From upstairs, frozen, mesmerized, I studied the way Lyman was holding that rifle, up under his arm, not over his shoulder or down at his side, as if at any moment he meant to raise the barrel on my father.
“Your boys ought to be the ones out here. They’ve been cutting my traps.”
The only crack I saw in my father’s composure came not from any rising fear at standing before an armed man, but from the sudden shame he felt over our behavior. “It’s over now, Lyman,” he said. “Let it go and turn around.”
“Did you know?” Lyman asked.
“No.”
“Get them kids down here, then.”
“That’s not going to happen,” my father calmly said. I thought of how in the woods you had to squat down and deaden your breathing to keep from startling a deer, how you had to work to make yourself small and calm. The smaller you become, the easier it became to think, our father often told us. “I’ll do a year of work for you for just the cost of materials,” he said. “As compensation.”
“What kind of work?”
“Building. Boat maintenance. Winterizing. Engine work. Whatever you need to erase the debt. All the debts.”
Lyman lifted the rifle over his shoulder and then seemed to think better of it, lowering the gun again. My father stepped closer to him. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t sound like a fair deal.”
Lyman was staring off at the trees. He seemed preoccupied, as if he were reading something in the woods only he could see. I was surprised he hadn’t looked up at the windows. “It’s an offer with merit,” he finally said.
“Then here’s the part of the conversation where you turn around and don’t come down my driveway ever again.”
Whatever peace had materialized cracked again, as it always did between our father and Lyman.
“You would be foolish enough to threaten an armed man.”
“The only threat here is you, Lyman. I’m just trying to enjoy a Saturday morning at home with my wife and my kids.”
Sometimes I still dream of that day Lyman came to us. I see myself at fourteen years old, on a crisp September morning. Beyond my windows I see the things I then loved most: the woods and the river going out to meet the ocean, and the pale silhouettes of the mountains. I have my room arranged with the bed’s pillows level with the window, so I can simply roll over in the morning and open my eyes and slide from sleep into the sight of those other worlds. With me in the house are other things I love but are easier to take for granted: my mother and my father, my brothers, Sam and Daphne. Outside there’s a sound, the scraping of boots, and I rise from the bed and go to the opposite window, which looks back toward the driveway. With my face pressed near the glass, I see a man coming down the driveway.
In my dreams, as it was in life, my father is without fear, standing unarmed before a man who is armed. In a conflict there is a force of will one person can feel in another person. Lyman, his square hard jaw methodically grinding away at a plug of tobacco, understood this. Had he not turned around and left, had he insisted on confronting us, our father might have killed him. While he was a lovable miscreant to us, with his fantastic stories and claims of transmutation, his odd financial decisions, and his peculiar love notes written on boards, he was a hard man as well, a soldier, a man who had been indoctrinated into a life of violence in order to survive. And though he had left that life before it consumed him, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still there. He had distracted days. Short-tempered days. Days when the slightest clap of sound collapsed him in panic or sent him flying into action. A threat to his family, real or perceived, would have lit all my father’s worst fears.
Simon arrived upstairs in my bedroom as our father went out into the yard. While our father was eerily calm, my brother was winded and shaky. “Stay in your room,” he blurted.
Down the hall a door slammed.
Simon turned from my doorway and stood in front of the stairs.
Link was coming toward him. “Move, Sy.”
“Go back to your room.”
“Knock that shit off. You’re not Dad.”
When Simon didn’t move, Link rushed ahead and lowered his head into my older brother’s chest. Link was low-built and compact, where Simon was tall and drawn out, but Simon was four years older. He pushed back against Link and swept his legs out from under him. Their bodies turned over each other in the tight upstairs hallway. I was scared they would both fall down the stairs.
Simon rolled over on top of Link and pinned him to the floorboards. I’d never seen Simon, who was gentle and often a little aloof, act aggressive. “You’re staying here,” he said.
Link got one arm free and pressed his hand up against Simon’s chin. Then Simon hit Link twice, hard and fast, his right and then his left fist connecting with each side of his jaw. Link tried to get free again, lunging for the stairs, and Simon hit him a third time. This time, the snap of my brother’s nose echoed through the house. The blood came in a wave, pooling for an instant atop his lip, then running around both sides of his mouth.
Simon was panting. “Just stop,” he pleaded. “Each time I hit you, I’ll hit you harder if I have to.”
Link’s white teeth flashed behind his swollen gums. The air went sour and metallic around us. “Why?” he asked, and held his grin as though he were deliciously proud of his mangled face.
“Oh Jesus Christ, Link.” Simon pulled off his shirt and balled it up and bent down to put pressure on the wounds. “Because I love you.”
Then Link made a great show of sitting right there in the middle of the hallway. He crossed his legs and sat on his hands and let the blood run down his chin and the shirt. “I know, Sy. I love you too.”
Our father was shaking when he came inside and found Simon packing ice and gauze around Link’s broken nose.
“I raised quite the thieves,” he whispered. In his anger, I saw the fear of potential loss. He’d come through a war and built a tiny sanctuary down in the woods on the river partly to protect us, only to see us do this.
Then he simply walked past us without saying anything else, leaving us more ashamed than any scolding could. I was partly stung by the gesture and partly embarrassed at the performance of it. Of course we had been raised to be better, whatever precisely that meant. Lyman’s treatment of our mother was simply no excuse.
There are sins for which not even children are excused. Those sins differ in different places. They are often tied to honor and loyalty and livelihood. Pulling pots and cutting traps was an unforgivable offense in a place like Seal Point. It didn’t matter that Lyman had transgressed as well. We’d taken from another man’s living and made his life more difficult, something our father knew wouldn’t be easily forgotten.
School had started again. On a rainy morning later that week, midway through my second-period humanities class, Cal Hayes walked into my classroom and pulled me out. Rain was lashing the windows, and the hallways were wet and cold. Cal took his coat off and wrung it out into the drain of a nearby water fountain.
“That’s nasty,” I said.
“I didn’t ask you.”
“So I guess this has to happen now,” I said.
“I guess so.” Cal sighed and slid back into his damp coat.
He had timed it perfectly so the bell rang just moments after we stepped into the hall. Other students flooded out from doors all around us. Walking through them, I made sure to make eye contact with everyone who stared at us, but I couldn’t look up at Cal, who had been friends with my father and mother since before I was born.
In the east wing of the school Cal pulled me to the side by the lockers. “Stand here,” he said. “Don’t run off like they do in the movies. Don’t be dramatic. Don’t be dumb. Act like the kid your parents raised you to be, and just stand there and be quiet.”
He went into another classroom. When he came back out, Link was with him. My brother and I walked a step ahead of Cal as he herded us through the hallways and put us in the back of his cruiser.
We spent half an hour at the sheriff’s station in Cal’s office, giving an unofficial statement about what had happened with Lyman’s traps. No one was pressing charges, but Cal said he needed to know what had happened. Tensions were too high, and he was worried someone was going to get hurt. We detailed everything that had happened except for Wren’s involvement. While Cal was writing up our statement for his records, a deputy ducked into the room and mentioned a call that morning about some footprints and a garden in the woods near Loomis Hill.
“Who cares?” Cal said, looking up from his desk.
The deputy shrugged apologetically. “I didn’t know if it might have something to do with the fire.”
Cal sighed and stared at both of us in turn. “What doesn’t anymore,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”
Leaving the sheriff’s station, Cal drove out to the Douglas Road and up through the woods to Loomis Hill. He seemed to enjoy having us along as company. There was a large yellow abandoned colonial mansion up there, slowly being swallowed by the land. The garden was reportedly somewhere in the woods around the property. A hundred years ago a ship captain named Park Loomis had owned the house, which sat up on a hilltop clearing with a magnificent view of the same ocean that ultimately shipwrecked and drowned Loomis. Fifty years of unchecked growth had closed in the view now. In another fifty, the woods would fully consume the place. Up until the 1970s or so, people had gone out to the aging mansion to photograph it and smoke dope and mess around, but then it became too much of a chore to reach, and people forgot.
Rain was lashing down against the windshield and echoing off the cruiser’s roof. I studied the driveway. It was a long, overgrown thicket, all brambles and broken earth and flowing mud. We could barely see the house through the mist and the rain. Cal stopped the car and waited. “You get the point, right. Of me making a big stupid show of picking you up at school.”
A swarm of starlings moved between two maples in a swooping and perfectly spaced wave that curled through the rain. Link shrugged, and I said I understood.
“Enlighten me then,” said Cal.
“Stop being knuckleheads.”
“Well stated.” Cal watched the birds move from one maple to another, back in the shadows. “They must roost in that one.” Then he shrugged and put the car back in reverse.
“Aren’t you going to look around?” I asked. “Find the garden or something.”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to get stuck or wreck the undercarriage out here, it’s practically hailing, and your stupidity has exhausted me. No one has come out here for years. We missed lunch. You hungry?”
I’m not sure we were, but Cal drove down to the waterfront anyways. He parked the cruiser behind The Fish House, ducked into the side entrance, and came back fifteen minutes later with two large paper bags. “I was never very good at being the bad guy,” he said. Sitting in the cruiser, we ate big greasy cheeseburgers from their wax-paper wrappings and hot salty fries, watching it rain on the misty water and listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan on the blues station out of Bangor. “Some of this will pass,” Cal said. “But you fucked up pretty bad.”
That afternoon, as the rain trailed off to a light mist, we came home to a bonfire roaring in our yard. At the center of the rippling orange flames we saw what was left of our bateau. I was hurt and confused. Link clenched his fists until his fingernails cut bloody half-moons into his palms. At the edge of the yard Cricket stood in the glow, her head lowered to her chest.
Our father was standing in the fire glow too. For a moment he looked made of flames. “I build boats for a lot of things,” he said. “But I don’t build them to steal from fishermen. Stand there and watch it until there’s nothing left. The mist will put the ashes out.”
Then our father walked away from the fire and into the house, leaving us alone. Link and I stood there, watching the flames. We never spoke. An hour later, when our father came back outside and doused the fire with a five-gallon bucket of water, we were still standing there in the growing dark.
“I made dinner,” he said. His voice was uncertain. I thought it held a note of regret. “Go scrub the smoke off your skin.”
I walked over to the horse paddock and stroked Cricket’s neck through the cedar rails. I stayed there for a long time, unable to look back at the ashes. Then I wiped the soot from my cheeks and followed my father inside to wash and eat and begin to atone.