Lyman Creel drifted up the inlet cautiously. The eastern channel of the river opened before him, the golden waters breaking around the bottom of Verona Island. He turned the throttle down and hesitated. The boat softly rocked from side to side on the swells, and the feeling of being on the sea lifted his spirits. It was a world of contradiction. Being on the ground but afloat at the same time. Being rocked and soothed and just as suddenly pushed and tossed if the waves picked up.
And here was yet another contradiction, a Penobscot Bay lobsterman going up to check on his traps in the river. Not unheard of, no. But not common. Not loved, for sure. It was only a few traps, he’d told himself. Just a test.
Lyman stretched and rubbed at his eyes. The sun, low and rich on the horizon, had only been up for an hour, and this too was part of what he loved. Being out in the world as the world came back to life. There was a simple pleasure in having the light and the heat and the sounds and smells of the dawn come to him as opposed to going to them. So daybreak found him having coffee with Grace each morning, then feeding the ravens, before heading for the water.
Grace knew about his experiment. He’d never been one to keep much of anything from her. “It’s not being fished,” he’d told her when he first started thinking of setting a few traps in the channel.
“Doesn’t mean you should,” she told him.
These lines were often vague: where river ended and sea began, where sea ended and river started. It was the same water, rushing down from the north to mix with the ocean, and then rising back up the river on the tides. The same water. A weak excuse. Of course Grace was right. This wasn’t where he normally fished, and territory meant everything. You didn’t go to places that weren’t yours. Yet, here he was.
That morning Grace had looked at him strangely over her coffee before kissing him goodbye. “Be safe out there,” she said. “Don’t be greedy.”
He dumped four aspirin into his palm and chewed them slowly between his back molars, gagging at the bitterness. His knees screamed this morning, and lately his right shoulder had started to grind and lock sometimes when he lifted a trap. There was too much tension in the job, but what job wasn’t a battle? Coming out of the winter, he’d started thinking about fishing up near the river as opposed to pushing deeper out to sea. He wondered now if he was just being lazy. Still, a couple weeks ago, he’d run a half dozen traps up the river. He’d been waiting for some backlash from the Eastport fishery, but it had yet to come, and a certain sense of being in the right had slowly supplanted his doubt and his guilt.
Lyman washed the aspirin down with the bottom of a cup of black, silty coffee. Flinched at the acidity of it, wondered if it was really worth it. Bad body parts, bad medicine, bad coffee, and bad meals, these days at sea that ran together like an unbroken line. But then you’d see the sky in a certain awe-punching light, or a seal pup playfully following your wake, or pull a jackpot trap, and hope would suddenly be there again, not dancing just a few miles out of reach like it loved to do, but right there with you. Lyman shrugged off his feeling of unease and powered the boat forward. The familiar lift of the hull, the stink of gasoline, the aiding push of the rising tides, all soothed him.
He saw something in the water then, a few dozen yards from his first trap. A homemade circular carved-stick fishing weir had been set up near the mouth of the channel. The sun was bright and directly in front of him, making it hard to see clearly. He slowed at the weir, studying it, and as the boat drifted around the structure, Lyman caught a glint of something else in the distance. Out near his first buoy, a person was leaning out of a canoe and pulling up one of his traps.
Like an answer to a dark insult, the anger came on instantly. “Hey!” he yelled. Of course the words wouldn’t make it across the water. “You. What the hell are you doing?”
Then he was throwing the outboard into a full, whining roar and spinning the boat forward into the sun. Fury rising through his body like gasoline.
He squinted into the glare and winced, the ache in his knees and shoulder splitting up to his skull. The person had noticed him. They were moving faster now. He couldn’t tell if they were emptying the trap into the canoe or just trying to get it loose of the gunwale and back into the water. Closing the distance, he realized the person was young, and a girl. He remembered the weir, noted the canoe, the dark skin, thought of the cooked remains of the mill just up the river. He couldn’t believe the bravado. Setting up a fish weir and poaching his traps just a few miles away from the scene of the fire. He was almost on the canoe now, and he kept waiting for the girl to cut the warp line and just take the trap. It would have been faster. But she didn’t.
He was just feet away now, and he realized he’d kill the girl if he hit the canoe. He threw the throttle down to nothing and cut the steering wheel hard. The big lobster boat spun sideways and tipped almost ninety degrees to the water, riding up on the crests. Lyman had to hang on with all his strength to keep from sliding overboard. The wake of the breaking boat barreled forward. In an instant the canoe was flipped, girl and trap gone overboard.
“Shit,” Lyman muttered, working to steady the boat. He grabbed the gaff hook and scrambled to the side. Black waters churned and folded all about. He saw the girl thrashing, bobbing up and down, and wondered if she could swim. He caught hold of her sweatshirt with the hook. She was screaming and swearing at him as he pulled her in.
Hauling the girl to the edge of the hull, he yelled, “What were you doing to it, the trap?” He tried to grab hold of her, but she pulled away and slashed at his hands with a pocketknife she’d brought up from somewhere in her soaked clothes. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he swore. “I’m trying to save you.”
She laughed then, coughing water, managed to say something he couldn’t make out. Her eyes were all rage, and blood covered her chin. She slashed again, and Lyman danced back, narrowly avoiding the blade. This time the girl’s momentum carried her under the water, and he grabbed hold of her again with the gaff before she could drown or flee. Tired of the game, he violently hauled her up the side of the boat, flailing and screaming in panic, and knocked the knife out of her hands. Lyman reached out and grabbed the girl by the throat. She stilled instantly. Then he pinned her down against the deck, felt her neck flattening against his palm. It was like crushing a plastic bottle, so easy, just a gentle squeeze. He felt her breath moving under his hand. Saw her nostrils flaring like an animal’s. She arched her throat up against his palm and he could feel her daring him to do it. For years after he would be shocked by how badly he had for the briefest awful moment wanted to crush the windpipe of a child.
“Not yours,” he managed to say, gasping for breath himself and loosening his grip.
“Or yours,” she hissed back at him.
The whine of a second engine suddenly filled the air. Another fishing boat was coming down the other end of the channel. He recognized Moses Jupiter’s boat in the shape of the hull. A blast rang out, deep and full, and it took Lyman a second to realize that it was a shotgun firing. Moses Jupiter had shot at him. The other lobsterman had a shotgun lain over the helm windowsill as he steered with the other hand. A second shot rang out, and Lyman ducked, felt the shot sing through the air above him, thought he heard a crack somewhere but wasn’t sure. “Fuck,” he swore, and got even lower, forgetting the girl for a moment. As he tried to get to the cabin, where he kept the little sawed-off, a third shot caught the water right in front of the boat. This was madness, all of it. Moses Jupiter had him pinned to the deck of his own boat.
The girl was unfazed. She stood tall and carefree at the bow. When her eyes caught Lyman’s, he swore she was enjoying this. He watched helplessly then as the girl turned and raced across the deck. Without slowing at all, she launched off the side of the boat in a full dive, split the water with astonishing force, and disappeared. Ten seconds passed before she broke the surface, swimming as smoothly and quickly as anyone he had ever seen. She dove again and came up under the drifting canoe, somehow managing to flip the boat over and swing her body into it in one powerful, continuous motion. He’d never seen anything like it. A fourth shot broke his trance. Moses had slowed and pulled his boat around between Lyman and the girl, effectively shielding her. The girl and canoe were gliding to the shore. It was only when Lyman grabbed his radio that he realized that one of Jupiter’s seemingly random warning shots had taken off his antennae. Radio static and the hard racing of his own heart surrounded him as he turned and powered back toward the bay, the hand that had momentarily gripped the girl’s neck shaking with a combination of adrenaline and fear that he thought might never still.
All spring, rumors trickled in to the newspaper office. Sightings of a man and a girl out among the woods, here and then there. Deer killed out of season. Snare traps and fishing weirs set around brooks and marshes. Poaching itself wasn’t odd. Hunger, survival, want, never having enough food, or money, or time—these were influences many of us understood. It didn’t take long for a connection to be drawn between the fire and the sightings. What was abnormal about the man and the girl was their ghostliness. There was only one credible report of actual contact. A state game biologist studying bat colonies along the lower neck of the river had come out of a cave with a bag of guano samples and seen a girl and a man standing before her. The man’s eyes had widened in surprise, and then the girl had stepped in front of him as if she, just a child, might protect him. The woman set her sample kit down on the ground and raised her hands. Before she could speak, they were gone, faded or vanished back into the woods. The report added a second layer to the story we had all been caught up in: the girl who had started the fire, if this girl was indeed the same one, was not alone after all.
What the game wardens, local hunting guides, and newspaper people like our mother couldn’t unearth—the location and nature of the man and the girl—Link and I took it upon ourselves to discover.
By June I had become convinced that the two were forest creatures who grew hungry, turned human, and stepped out of the woods each night to take food. As far-fetched as that was, it seemed to me the best explanation. Only something made of the earth could ingest the bones and gristle and hide of an animal and return to the earth without leaving more evidence. Part of me knew better—there’s the magical, and there’s the impossible—but it was into summer then, that season of possibility and wonder. I stared out at the woods beyond my bedroom window every morning, imagining a man and a girl stepping out of the trunk of a red oak or a northern white cedar, my two favorite trees.
Link believed the two had holed up like outlaws in one of the caves notched into Hatchet Mountain, where bear denned and raptors nested. Years earlier we’d discovered a nesting pair of gyrfalcons on Hatchet. Reggie claimed we were full of shit, said gyrs didn’t nest this far south. When we tried to take him up the mountain to prove our claim, he just shook his head. “I’d rather sit right here and beam with pride that my nephews are already starting to spin tall, shit-stuffed tales,” he said. As for the gyrfalcons, I’d never seen an animal so stunning. We went up the mountain every clear afternoon after school to sit with them, to watch them. They were bright white and dappled by hundreds of small, dark-brown teardrop-shaped spots. In flight their wings opened as wide as a car. And when they took off from the cliffs, air blasted down off their wings like the exhaust from a furnace. Somehow they’d wandered down from the northern reaches of the Maritimes, and we watched in amazement as the majestic couple returned to their cliff nest each spring for three years before they suddenly disappeared, and we knew they’d been shot by a fisherman or poisoned by a farmer. Over time the nest had grown massive: five feet deep and nearly ten feet wide. It didn’t seem right to let it be taken over by anything when it had once housed something so rare and stunning, so Link and I climbed all the way up the cliff and dismantled the nest stick by stick. Reggie met us at the bottom of the mountain after all and helped us pile the sticks into the back of his truck. “I won’t tell you I’m sorry,” he said. “Every fool knows a falcon keeps moving, even in death.” Then we drove ten miles up to Prospect, where the river narrows around Verona Island, and we floated the nest, piece by piece, down the Penobscot as an offering to the departed falcons. “Why the narrows?” Link asked. Something I couldn’t quite voice about the spot had made sense to me: the thick, thundering river bending into the narrowed gorge, squeezed on its banks by towering spruce and pines, the massive green and blue glacial boulders that heaved their river-rounded backs up through the cold trickling water, the way fish leapt into being after mayfly hatches, spinning just above the surface in the long orange afternoon light. “Some places are like portals to eternity,” Reggie said after a few moments of silence. “You stand in them and look around, and you feel how long and unending the world is. You become a part of something beyond time. Maybe this is one of those places.”
It was the type of answer we expected from our uncle: a bit profound and a bit baffling. Reggie lived in a small house stacked floor to ceiling with books and was a constant source of warmth, obscure knowledge, delightful bursts of profanity, and at times disturbing peculiarity. After his parents died, he had flirted with law school, then attended divinity school for a year, developing a fascination with eschatology that ultimately led him to drop out, start farming apples, and embark on a long and semi-dignified career in eccentricity.
While my uncle wasn’t some doomsday prophet wildly predicting the end times, the ending of things did fascinate him. He didn’t believe the end of a life could be as simple and cruel as Christianity claimed, where one’s final experience in the physical world was one of judgment—death, followed by an odd, divine verdict: heaven for you, hell for you. Instead he was convinced every ending was followed by some kind of reunion with the divine, whether that was a simple return to the earth or a wild celestial journey to some other plane of existence ruled by a grand, theistic being we’d yet to prove existed. In his eyes the end of the world, or the end of living, as we understood it, was not a terrifying premise at all but the first tilt toward reunion.
This isn’t to say his eccentricities didn’t become problematic at times. He once shot out an unplugged television with a Winchester deer rifle because he was afraid the droning voices of advertising had found a way to transmit their signal even when the machine was powered down. And after his parents’ death, he became increasingly obsessed with the doomsday clock created by the Atomic Scientists of Chicago after World War II. The clock tracked the level of continuous danger humans were creating for themselves with their preposterously large, inventive, violent, and misguided brains by monitoring the world’s proximity to midnight, a metaphorical number-time representing the tipping point of global catastrophe from which the species would not be able to return.
He became known in town for randomly giving those around him periodic updates on how close the world was to its end. I remember a year in the 1980s when I was just a child, and my uncle was red-eyed and jittery from too little sleep and too much gin. The Cold War was devouring the news cycle. Both the United States and Russia were stockpiling nuclear warheads. Reggie showed up unannounced on a Saturday in June, started a bonfire in our backyard without asking, and burned a truckload of garbage and apple waste. Then he sat down in our living room in a great, grandstanding whirl of trash-fire reek and announced that the world was “three minutes from midnight, according to the Atomic Scientists, and we best get our goddamned affairs in order.” I was only seven years old or so, and while I was scared, I was secretly grateful. If the world was ending, I believed I deserved a warning. Knowing the potential of death was present, that summer I set about memorizing every moment I could. I sat against the garden shed facing the woods, the hot cedar shingles rough against my back. The air smelled of river earth and sawdust. When I pushed my hands into the ground, the spongy carpet of moss sank just enough that my fingernails disappeared. Purple lilacs rose around the shed, hiding me from view, and it was here I sat reading books and imagining prehistory and the mammoths and giant beavers that once walked the land. The air filled with moisture as the tide moved in, and turned dry with heat as the sea went back out. I fell asleep and woke with the sun warming my feet and fell asleep again. I heard my father’s table saw buzzing and my mother’s heart singing. My brothers playing with a cap gun in the yard. They were all with me, and under the lilacs I closed my eyes tightly and knew I would never need anything else. And I never really have. My parents felt differently. They forbade Reggie from coming over until he got help. It remained the only time in my life that our door was ever closed to my uncle. A year later Reggie had gotten sober. He sold his apple farm and bought a hotel and attached bar downtown, near the newspaper office and our father’s boatyard. It was time to come in from the woods, he said, and be a little less alone.
That summer I spent as much time as possible at the hotel or the boatyard or the newspaper. I knew that at any of these locations, my mother would never be far from sight. The truth was, she was falling away from us, disappearing down into the story.
When she said “I’m going in to town,” we knew she meant she was going to visit the paper, and no one was to follow. Even when we were welcome, after school or during holiday breaks, we existed at the paper in a probationary limbo. The shelves of old books and ancient linotypes and tarnished printing equipment, the weight of dust and paper, the squares of hot orange light falling through the antique windows—all of them joined together to remind us we were intruders. She had never been a gentle woman, but here she was barely our mother at all. Once I picked up a water glass and crushed it in my fist to see if she’d react, and she sat right at her desk with her glasses slipping down her nose and went on editing a story as the blood oozed up between my fingers. At times like this, when some story came along and displaced the rest of the world, I believed it was up to us to sustain her.
As the rumors spread and our mother’s obsession grew, the land around the fire, somewhat stunningly, began to come to life. Willow shoots broke the charred earth around the mill. Fireweed shot up thick and flaming purple. Small families of hickory trees sprouted. Lupine emerged along ashy paths for forklifts and delivery trucks. Other plants came, too, rising into the summer. What had for more than a hundred years been a lifeless gray industrial landscape turned verdant. As people chased the arsonist and her father, looking for answers, for justice, the plants and trees ignored the noise and simply grew. Locals began to notice, then the news people as well. After that people began coming from all over the state. “We needed to see it,” visitors said of the mill site. “There’s something happening here,” a couple who came all the way from New Brunswick told my mother during an interview. “Don’t look away,” they said. “This is a work of life. Whoever did this had a plan.”
These people used the word pilgrimage, not knowing what else to call their journeys. “We just felt called.” Over and over a similar refrain was repeated in the diners, convenience stores, gas stations, coffee shops, hair salons, barbershops, beaches, river parks, and flea markets around Eastport as people came to see the land after the fire.
My mother had pointed out how rare the act really was. “White men blow things up,” she said. “Native American women don’t.” And she was right. If a Penobscot kid was going to perform an act that perhaps went against everything she’d ever been taught, there would have to be more to the story. Link and I sat at the newspaper office on a hot day in late June, reading more about willow trees, trees that just happened to clean and remove dioxin, heavy metals, and other toxins from the earth in which they grew.
“Imagine a tree doing that,” I said to Link. “Healing the ground around it.”
Link was about to respond when Cal Hayes walked in, carrying a deer skull under his arm. The sun had bleached the skull mostly white, but a few bloody strings of white fat and red gristle still clung to the jawbone.
“Those two have done it again, Falon,” Cal yelled on his way across the office. As Cal walked by, he turned the deer skull so it watched us the whole time. He was the smallest man we knew, so short in fact that from a distance it was easy to mistake him for a child.
Our mother had been working all morning on a story about pollution killing bald eagles along the river. “This game bores me, Cal,” she said, sighing. “I have better things to worry about than a deer skull. You could have at least cleaned the thing. It smells awful.”
“I was thinking you’d get mad if I did. Now you’re mad I didn’t.”
“Mad?”
“Pictures. I figured bloody pictures sell more papers. So I didn’t want to mess with it too much. If you’ve got a red marker, we could gore it up even more.”
Cal was joking, of course, but now our mother was actually mad. “That yellow-journalism garbage isn’t what I do.”
“I didn’t mean anything, Falon.”
After that our mother threw Cal out of the office, but only after angrily taking the skull from him and snapping a few pictures of it posed on the back deck, with the light and the ocean behind it. Cal looked at us knowingly and left with a satisfied bounce to his walk. It was hard to provoke a reaction from Falon Ames more potent than a dismissive sideways look over her glasses, and Cal had succeeded royally with the fleshy skull of a jacked deer.
“Where was it?” I asked.
“They found it along the river. Below Snub Point.”
Link went over to a desk in the corner of the room where USGS maps of the bay and the lower section of the river were spread out among a scattering of tacks, string, and sticky notes. The maps were marked and annotated with supposed sightings and call-ins.
“That’s fifteen miles up the river,” I said.
“Calls about sightings aren’t coming in from there anymore,” our mother said.
“You think they’re working their way downriver to the bay, don’t you?” Link said.
Our mother suddenly seemed far away and distracted. “I’m busy,” she snapped. “On a deadline. Go do something. Go be kids.” Then she disappeared into her office and closed the door, leaving Link and me alone with the maps and the musty smell of the deer skull.
Link left, but I stayed at the newspaper office for another hour, staring at the maps until the world around me had dissolved into visions of the river. According to the Penobscot people, years ago a giant frog monster descended on the river’s headwaters and selfishly gathered up all the water for himself. Dark, starving times gripped the land. People began to die in great numbers. The world became all shadow. The great Penobscot hero Gluskabe saw his people dying out and felled a tree on Akəlópemo, the frog monster, killing him. Then Gluskabe watched in awe as the crown and branches of the fallen tree slowly morphed into water, becoming the main stem of the river and its many streams and tributaries. Driven by thirst, some of the people jumped into the water, becoming fish, turtles, frogs, other sea creatures, and ensuring that the Penobscots would forever be related to the river and its animals.
Thousands of years later, white people began building dams across the Penobscot to generate power, again choking off the waters. Then something unprecedented in US history happened: the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act returned three hundred thousand acres of land to the tribes, awarded them $81.5 million for development, and extended federal recognition, moving the tribes out from under state agencies and closer to actual self-governance, though, many argued, not nearly close enough, as the state continued to try to govern the tribes like municipalities, instead of recognizing them as sovereign entities. It returned the ancestral waters and islands of the Penobscot, and acknowledged the tribe’s right to fish and hunt their lands as they saw fit. Small, bitter victories, but victories still.
Now these two were moving through the land, hunting and fishing when and where they wanted. No one here ever had enough, so the French hated the Irish and the Irish hated the English and the English hated the Penobscot, and everyone hated anyone they thought got better breaks. My mother argued that the man and the girl shouldn’t be considered poachers. As much as a person could claim ownership of earth, the river and the lands around it were theirs. Some agreed, seeing two people of a sovereign nation entitled to subsistence hunting and fishing rights throughout their ancestral grounds. Others saw two fugitives exploiting a loophole.
I sat with both opinions for a long time and let my mind go back through the history. Don’t be mistaken: the goal was always destruction of a whole people. In 1755 Spencer Phips, then lieutenant governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay, issued a proclamation declaring the Penobscot people enemies of the crown. Phips called on all “his Majesty’s Subjects of this Province to Embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing, and Destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.” That goal was quietly alive still in the minds of far too many here, I worried.
You drive through these small towns now and see gas stations and schools and idyllic waterfronts and nicely lit art galleries and stately libraries. Most people never know the truth, our true history: for instance, how there was once a small scalp station on the Sheepscot River near Wiscasset where British merchants paid colonists forty pounds for the scalp of a Penobscot man, twenty-five pounds for the scalp of a Penobscot woman, and twenty pounds for the scalp of any Penobscot child under the age of twelve years old. This was at a time when the average settler made less than a hundred pounds a year. And so the choice gradually set in: watch your children starve to death or rip away, maim, mutilate, and kill the babes of others.
Moses Jupiter was waiting in our yard with a horse when my mother and I got home. A tall gray-dappled mare. From the car, my mother and I watched in puzzlement. We were not horse people.
Moses had unloaded the horse from a trailer and was walking around alongside the animal. He led the horse into a trot, slowed, and made four big loops around the property. “Getting her ready for you all,” he called back to us.
The animal paused along the woods and nosed into a stand of witch-hazel trees to eat the berries, apparently taking a liking to their ancient, restorative qualities, and I grew a little fonder of the beast for her good taste in flora. Behind us, down the road back in the woods, my father’s saws buzzed and sang. Simon’s car was not in the yard, and Link wasn’t home either.
Moses brought the horse back into the dusty drive and produced a carrot from his pocket. “Think she’s getting there. I’ve been here for hours, letting her acclimate.”
My mother ignored Moses and started unloading groceries and boxes of files she’d brought home.
“You’ve just been hanging out in our yard?” I asked.
Moses shrugged. “No one came to greet me, and no one came to tell me to leave.”
Somehow I knew my father was aware of the scene playing out up at the house. “That’s pretty weird.”
Moses shrugged again. “Her name’s Cricket because she’s faster than the wind and quiet as a bug.” He turned to me with the carrot. “Hardly ever speaks.”
“Please tell me this isn’t actually happening.” My mother was scowling over the roof of the car. “That you didn’t actually bring us a horse.”
Moses stopped and collected himself. I could see him carefully working his way through his vocabulary, looking for another way to frame things. “I never was big on lying,” he finally said. “You want this carrot or not?”
“Just don’t.” My mother took the vegetable and threw it across the yard into the trees. The horse didn’t move from our side. “Where’s Arnoux?”
“Not here,” Moses said.
I pictured my father peeking out the northwest window of the shop, glimpsing Moses’s truck banging down the road, towing a horse trailer. He would have grinned and gone back to whatever he was working on. He wouldn’t have been foolish enough to immediately come out of the shop when he heard my mother’s car, either. It was one thing to pull in to see a horse in our yard. Another thing to pull in to see him standing beside a horse in the yard.
“That horse is a girl?” my mother asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank Christ. I’ll keep her then. This place is overrun with dicks and idiots.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re serious?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got more carrots.” I was amazed Moses could toy around like this and get away with it, but my mother had long been fond of him. “Wə̀lamto áhahso,” Moses said. “She’s a good horse, Falon. Pάlskʷawo. Proud. Just the right amount of rascally, too. She’ll eat all your tomatoes, but she’ll shit off to the side of the doorstep instead of right in front of it. She’s an Indian horse, though. If she doesn’t do something you ask, don’t get mad at her. It’s just the language barrier.”
“Why are you getting rid of her?” I asked.
“I didn’t say she was my good horse. Belongs to a friend who can’t afford to keep her.”
I tried to remember if any of the reports called in to the newspaper about sightings had mentioned a horse. “Where’s this friend now?” I asked.
“Look at the little journalist,” Moses said. “He’s taking after you, Falon.” His gaze slid through the tall green hemlocks standing in the yard. He raised his hand and fanned his fingers in the air. “Hard telling. In the trees, in the wind, here and there, I suppose.”
The sun had come west around behind the largest of the trees, a hundred-and-twenty-footer which towered over our house. I reached out, and Cricket nuzzled my palm. In the light my hand was green and the horse was green and her neck was warm with thumping blood. I felt the line between many worlds, animal and human, natural and man-made, collapsing. Her blood thumped louder, harder, under my hand, and mine beat back as well. She was full of unseen rivers. She was majestic.
“Falon,” Moses said. “We need to talk.” His tone had changed, and I felt suddenly afraid. Under my hand Cricket seemed to feel it as well, a long shiver quaking through her body.
“Moses,” my mother said, “I believe we truly do.”
My mother sat at the table while Moses moved about the kitchen, making coffee. The hard, dark smell of it filled the room. In the distance the saws had gone silent, and I figured my father had gone to pick Link up in town.
Moses stopped moving and turned to fully face us. “Lyman caught a Penobscot girl nosing around one of his traps two days ago,” he said. “She’d built a weir out there to fish with. Guess she got curious about why there was a Penobscot Bay lobster trap up in the throat of the Penobscot River.”
My mother looked over at me and was about to speak when Moses interrupted her. “He should stay.”
“Fine,” my mother said. “Keep going.”
“The kid was in a canoe. Lyman caught up to her before she could paddle back to shore. He had her around the throat when someone came down the river and started firing warning shots.”
“Where exactly was this?”
“In the narrows above Odom Ledge. Out around Verona Island, the eastern channel.”
“The narrows.” I could see my mother mapping the altercation out in her head. Picturing who fished where, what buoys were traditionally set in what spots. “Why’s he way up there?”
“Hard to say. Greed’s a long tradition for them, though.”
“That bastard.” My mother stood and slammed her fist down on the table.
“Don’t jump to outrage just because you don’t like him,” Moses said.
“I like him fine.”
“I get it’s complicated.”
“And not your business.”
“Ačélihoso,” Moses said. “Lyman can’t control himself, Falon. I fear he’s going deeper into a bad place.”
My mother looked through the woods. “Around in the eastern channel. That means the trap was in the river’s estuary, not the bay, and a Penobscot kid might have every right to what was in it.”
Moses grimaced. “That may be true,” he said. “But I didn’t come out here looking to stir things up that way. I came out here to tell you something wrong happened to a child. Word’s getting around, and I wanted someone with a reasonable head to have the facts. Lyman shouldn’t be setting traps in the river. But the kid shouldn’t be sticking her hands in them either. That’s dangerous business. Dumb business. And I don’t think this is a dumb kid. A scared kid. A pissed-off kid. But not a dumb one.”
“What you do is cut the warp line and sink it.” My brother’s voice was full of all the collected, honed, and misguided bravado an American boyhood could manage. Arnoux and Link were standing in the hallway off the kitchen. Reggie was with them as well. I hadn’t heard any of them come inside.
“Not if you’re starving,” Arnoux said. He was looking down at the floor.
“It’s illegal to set a lobster trap within three hundred feet of the mouth of a fish weir,” Reggie said, surprising us. “So the question might be what came first, the weir or the trap?”
“Who cares?” Link interrupted. “She should have sunk the thing. No more trap, no more fishing on your turf.”
“And a good way to get shot,” our father said and walked out of the house, trailing an anger behind him I didn’t fully understand.
Reggie gripped my shoulder. When my mother nodded, my uncle led me outside. My father was stomping around the yard with his fists balled at his sides. He stopped when he saw Cricket. Reggie and I watched as the horse leaned her heavy head into my father’s neck, nuzzling him, comforting him. I moved to join him, and Reggie pulled back against me, “Not just yet,” he said.
After a few moments pressed near the horse, my father laughed loudly, kissed Cricket’s neck, and walked her over to the woods to retrieve the discarded carrot from earlier.
“Ignore your brother,” Reggie whispered and let go of my shoulder.
I had always thought that land was land. Water was water. An island was an island. None were human-owned, up for occupying, raiding, or abusing. When the wind tore through the trees, I turned to the sky and tried to map the shapes it wrote into the branches. I put my hand to the damp grass in the morning and lifted it when I no longer felt thirsty. Smells were not just smells, but layers of smells, lovingly built like a painting. Twigs on top of leaves on top of moss on top of loam on top of dirt on top of root on top of rock on top of bone on top of basalt. On the forest floor I ran through time. Old leaves under new leaves. Dry needles at the bases of pines. When I scratched the needles up with the toe of a shoe, gnats would whip through the light, flock to fresh scent. I slipped pine cones between my lips. Pressed my ear to the bellies of ancient cedars, heard blood that I believed in beneath the bark. It was in the aliveness of the world that I knew I was alive.
Now I was again reminded of how little I knew about the world’s actual workings. Everything had been taken by someone at some point, and those old hurts and wayward entitlements raged on, generation to generation, feeding sadness and violence.
Scared, I began staying closer to my mother at the paper. Two days after Moses brought Cricket to our house, I was there late in the afternoon. I’d just come back from The Fish House with dinner, a Styrofoam container of golden-brown biscuits and thick, spicy sausage gravy, when I saw Lyman Creel, wind-reddened and stumbling a bit. He moved across the harbor front, plunged into the road without looking, narrowly missing a passing car, and walked into the newspaper office.
“I want this printed,” he said, and set a sheet of paper down on my mother’s desk.
It was obvious that Lyman hadn’t slept in the days since the incident. He stunk of whiskey and sweat. Of camp smoke, pine needles, and dirt. Moses had been right. Word of Lyman’s act had spread quickly about the bay, and the community’s disgust at one of their own attacking a child had displaced their anger over the fire. Faced with all this, the defensiveness sank from my mother’s face. “Lyman,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I just want this printed.” He tapped a finger on the crumpled sheet of paper. “It’s an apology. To that kid I roughed up. No,” he corrected himself, “to everyone.”
“Lyman,” she whispered. “It doesn’t work like that. This isn’t a confessional. It’s a newspaper.”
He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his red hands. “Just take it, Falon. Read it. Please.”
“I won’t.”
“I defended you at The Fish House.”
“You’re here because of guilt and ego. Those are you problems. Nothing about that piece of paper interests me.”
Lyman swayed on his feet for a moment, turned his face up to the overhead lights, squinting. “You got cruel,” he said.
“Maybe I always was.”
“People need to know what really happened, and no one will listen to me. But you know how it was. Back then. You know me.”
Back then. Falon did know. She had been on the bluff the night Billy died. Seventeen years old, senior year. The middle of March on a Wednesday night, and she was at the edge of the world with two boys and a bottle of wine. She could see the hell the summer was going to bring. They both wanted her, worshipped her, and there was such a buzz in that, in knowing she had so much over them. The wine kicked that buzz up a notch, and she got full of herself, thought: This must be close to how it feels to be a man. A few days earlier they’d both bought her a bouquet of Easter lilies from the grocery store. Billy giving her the flowers on one day, and then Lyman showing up with the exact same flowers the next morning, holding them out in the yard, awkwardly nodding to the windows, where her brother Reggie and her mother were watching, and then getting back into his father’s big Cadillac and backing around, all of his performance, the formality of his pressed jeans and button-up shirt, the showiness of that rich man’s car, the statement of bringing the flowers, really quite hokey and yet endearing as well. It was obvious that he was nervous, had gone about gathering together this performance to give his brain something to fixate on other than what he might say and what she might say. She put Lyman’s flowers on the counter beside Billy’s flowers and went on with her life, wondering suddenly: What else would they do? Though she hated Easter, hollow gifts, and store flowers more than just about anything, she’d been seeing them both since, riding around, drinking their wine, and marveling at how strange her life had become, to be wanted so badly by two people who you were convinced you’d barely remember in ten years, when you were long gone from here and your real life had started. She watched Billy horsing around with Lyman on the rocks now. The two of them had been stacking up deadfall for a fire before they got tired and started singing Grateful Dead songs to each other. Now they were dancing with each other, a big old foolish drunken waltz like two pseudo-lovers at a bad wedding. She thought about being wanted, the danger in that sort of buzz, then she got angry at the thought that they only wanted her for her body, not everything, and angry that they both assumed they could drink themselves to waste tonight and she’d take care of them after, mother them. She lifted the bottle and drank until her tongue burned, wondered if she could steer them toward each other instead. When she looked back to the cliff, Billy was gone. Seconds before, he had been swaying in Lyman’s arms. Lyman was screaming. Running along the ledge, looking down into the waters. Two hours later, at first light, a team of volunteer firefighters hauled Billy Jupiter’s shattered body from the rocks. Three months later Falon was in California, trying to forget, and Lyman was headed to Vietnam with dreams of someday taking over a fishery.
“I don’t like to think about that night,” Falon said.
“They hate me because of it and because of my family.”
“You’re not a target.”
“And you’re not the one everyone called Indian Killer for the rest of their life. I got a history here with them.”
“You’re being paranoid, Lyman. I can’t stand it when you get this way.”
“My great-great-grandfather was one of the first people who dammed the river. Billy once told me that a lot of his people saw that as the beginning of the end. The frog monster returned, blocking the river, the fish passages, eating all the water up. All this fairy-tale shit. I didn’t even know that kid was Penobscot. I just saw someone around my traps and lost it.”
“That’s the thing, Lyman. She wasn’t just someone. She was a kid. Tell me you wouldn’t have killed her if Moses hadn’t shown up.”
Lyman blushed, eyed the floor. He didn’t answer, couldn’t figure out how to even begin to answer. He wanted to say, No, Falon, no it wasn’t like that. He wanted to tell her Billy’s death was an accident. He’d tried to have a good life here. Now old memories of violence and mishap swam up around him. For years he’d pushed the past down and moved forward by working his body to exhaustion. But when his hand curled around that kid’s neck, the wall he’d built over the years buckled. Then when he saw the kid’s eyes, filled with not fear but challenge, eyes saying, I’ve survived worse, and you’ve done worse, will do worse, that wall collapsed. Moses Jupiter came around the bend shooting. Might have saved his life. Might have saved everyone’s life. Lyman had gone home shaking with rage. Pulled away when Grace put her arms around him and asked what was wrong. When she pressed her hands down flat against his stomach, slid them beneath his belt, squeezed the head of his cock, bit his neck, tried to coax him back to the bedroom to lick and fuck the terror out of him, he fled. Said nothing to Galen and Wren, couldn’t even meet their eyes in the yard, where they stood kicking a soccer ball around. Headed out into the state forest, deep into the woods. Whirling sky spinning too fast and heavy with stars overhead. He kept coming in and out of time, wandering the woods, catching the dusk sound of whippoorwills, which terrified him because there weren’t supposed to be many left in the world here, and they sounded everywhere. Ate nothing, camped on the mossy earth deep in the light-swallowing hemlocks and spruces. He was closer to the free side of madness than he’d ever been. Too close. He wondered what type of breakdown he was having when on the second day, the long sling of heat and humidity snapped and rain fell like nails, painfully cold and gray. He found a bottle of whiskey some kids had left in the knothole of a tree years ago. Tried not to drink. Stared at the bottle for hours. But whatever resolve he once owned seemed to have slid out with the wall the girl had knocked down. The rain lasted the night, unrelenting, broken only by rips of lightning and echoes of thunder tumbling up and down the coast. Somewhere in the night he came to a decision, a moment of clarity, the only answer he saw to this mess: he would apologize. It was a simple solution, probably too simple, but its buzz cooked up in his head with a desperate certainty until he felt that old boyhood elation of knowing that things could be okay, would be okay, that the world was still good and safe. It drove him from the woods and back home, where he grabbed one of his daughter’s notebooks, wrote his amends, tore out the sheet, and walked into town, where he now stood inside the dusty office of The Lowering Days, shaking and red-eyed and realizing what a fool he was.
Falon had been watching Lyman through his long silence. She was trying to remember the boy she had known so long ago. “What are you really trying to apologize for, Lyman?” she said finally. “Because I’m guessing it’s a little more complicated than terrorizing some Penobscot kid. Just because you rejected your family’s money, that doesn’t make you clean from the damage they did.”
“It doesn’t make me culpable either.” Lyman’s voice was cold, measured.
“Maybe not.”
“That was twenty years ago.”
My mother pushed a stack of paper over on her desk in rage. “You piece of shit.” She laughed. “Talking to me about the past and being innocent, being misunderstood. If I was interested in empty words, I’d be down at The Fish House pissing the day away. We all lost, Lyman. We’re still losing.”
Lyman started to speak, but my mother turned to me. I had been quietly watching the exchange with the uncomfortable sense that I was looking into worlds that were not mine to see. “Don’t you ever become like him,” she said to me. “Don’t you dare. There’s nothing worse than a desperate man. Go home, Lyman.”
Lyman reached into his pocket and came up holding a small yellow ball. It took us a moment to realize it was a lemon. Lyman flipped open a pocketknife and pressed the blade into the fruit, deftly cutting it in half. Then he dug in with the blade again, carving off a thin slice. He slipped the bitter disc between his lips and began to chew. He lifted his apology from the desk and wrapped the remaining halves of the lemon in the paper. The entire time his eyes had not left my mother’s.
“You used to whisper my name awful sweet,” he said, talking around the lemon slice, his tongue working the rind. “I bet you still would.”
My mother glared at him, refused to look at the lemon in his hand, refused to look away from his face. “Just sweet enough to make you forget that little blade of yours. Just long enough to get my fingers around it.”
“You’ve got it all planned out.”
“I do, Lyman. It wouldn’t take more than a slice, a twist, and a little tug to cut your tongue clean out.”
“Billy said you were a whore,” Lyman said. “Too bad he had to die for everyone else to realize it.”
Then Lyman set the lemon, wrapped in the crumpled note, down on the desk and walked out the door, sinking back into the dusk and the gulls wheeling above the harbor. Enraged, I leapt up to follow him out the open door.
Falon knew she’d started something awful, could feel it stalking around the room, vengeful and angry. Knew too she had to stop it before her son went out that door and she never saw him again. “David Almerin Ames,” she snapped. “You will sit back down this singular instant. We have sausage gravy to finish, and news to print.”
It was my mother’s language that pulled me up just enough to forget chasing after Lyman. This singular instant—the phrase was pure Mom, both the grandiosity and the redundancy of it. I came back and picked up the Styrofoam containers.
But the office door was still open, and the hate leaching down the walls was making its way across the room now. Falon noticed it too late, watched it slide around her son, watched it rear up, and before she could rise to stop it, she watched as that old hate leapt through the doorway. She gasped, and when her son said “What is it, Mom?” she didn’t seem to know how to answer. It was out in the open then, free. She watched it lift like a faint red mist, grinning as it pushed up into the wind that went back and forth along the river, the wind that breathed life into their world.