THE WIND HAD BLOWN IT IN.
A stiff sou’wester was in charge that day, shoving the waves against the shore like a big impatient hand. Jeddy’s head never could keep a cap on in a blow. I remember how he walked bent over, holding his brim down with both hands. I stalked beside him, eyes on the sand.
“Clean beach,” I’d say gloomily whenever we rounded a corner.
We’d been hunting for lobster pots since lunch and would have gone on till dinner if not for the interruption. Marked pots returned to their owners paid ten cents apiece. We were fourteen years old and in dire need of funds. You couldn’t get a red penny out of your parents in those days. They didn’t have anything to spare.
“There’s got to be some! It blew like stink all night,” Jeddy shouted over the wind.
“Well, it’s blowing like murder right now,” I cried back, without an inkling of how true this was about to become.
We rounded a spuming sand dune to a burst of noise. Down the beach, braying seagulls circled at the water’s edge.
“Something’s driving bait. Maybe a shark,” Jeddy said. “Those gulls are getting in on the kill.”
I shaded my eyes. “No, it’s something else. I can see something floating in the water.”
“Dead shark, then.”
“Or a dead seal. Too small for a shark. Come on.”
We took off at a jog, wind tearing at our clothes. When we got there, though, all we saw was a busted-up wooden crate knocking around in the waves. Nothing was inside, but we recognized its type. It was a bootleg case, a thing we’d come across before on the beach. If you were lucky, and we never were that I can recall, there’d be bottles still wedged inside—whiskey, vodka, brandy, even champagne—smuggled liquor that could bring a good price if you knew what to do with it. Jeddy and I weren’t lawbreakers. We’d never even had a drink. But like a lot of folks along that coast we weren’t against keeping our eyes open if there was a chance of profit in it.
“Coast Guard must have been sniffing around here last night,” Jeddy said. “Looks like somebody had to dump their cargo fast.”
“Maybe. Could be it’s left over from a landing. They’ve been bringing stuff into the dock down at Tyler’s Lane.”
“How d’you know that?”
“Saw them,” I boasted, then wished I hadn’t. It was no secret that Jeddy’s dad was on the lookout for rumrunners. Police Chief Ralph McKenzie was a stickler for the law.
Jeddy gave me a look. “You saw somebody landing their goods? At night?”
I shut my trap and inspected a schooner passing out to sea. I knew something Jeddy didn’t.
“What were you doing at Tyler’s at night?” he demanded. “It’s way across town from your house. Ruben Hart! You’re fibbing, right?”
“Well.” I gave the crate a kick.
“I thought so! Next you’re going to say it was the Black Duck.”
“Maybe it was!”
“You’re a liar, that’s for sure. Nobody ever sees the Duck. My dad’s been chasing her for years and never even come close. She’s got twin airplane engines, you know. She does over thirty knots.”
I glared at him. “I know.”
“So did you see her or not?”
“Maybe I heard somebody talking.”
“When?”
“Couple of days ago. It’s dark of the moon this week. That’s when they bring the stuff in.”
“Who was talking?”
“I better not say. You’d have to tell your dad.”
“I wouldn’t. Honest.”
I shrugged and gazed across the water to where the lighthouse was standing up on its rock, high and white as truth itself.
“Come on. I’d only have to tell him if he asked me direct, and why would he do that?” Jeddy said. “Did somebody see the Black Duck come in at Tyler’s dock?”
“Listen, I don’t know,” I said, backing off. “I heard a rumor there was a landing, that’s all. Whoever did it could’ve cracked some cases to pay off the shore crew that helped unload. That’s one way they pay them. Everybody gets a few bottles.”
“Well, you should know,” Jeddy said, sulkily. “Your dad is probably in deep with the whole thing.”
“He is not!” I drew up my defenses at this. “My dad would never break the law. He might not agree with it, but he wouldn’t break it.”
My father was Carl Hart, manager of Riley’s General Store in town. He was a big man with a big personality, known for speaking his mind in a moment of heat, but there was nothing underhanded in him. He dealt fair and square no matter who you were, and often he was more than fair. Quietly, without even Mr. Riley knowing, he’d help out folks going through hard times by carrying their overdue accounts till they could pay. He wouldn’t take any thanks for it, either, which is why my mother would find a couple of fresh-caught bluefish on our front porch some mornings, or a slab of smoked ham or an apple pie.
“Now, Carl, what is it you’ve done to deserve this?” she’d ask, raising an eyebrow.
He’d shake his head like it was nothing, and never answer.
My father was tough on me growing up. He was an old-fashioned believer in discipline and hard work, far beyond what was fair or necessary, it seemed to me. There never was much warmth or fun between us, the way some boys have with their dads, but one thing I was sure of: he was an honest man. Whatever mischief was going on along our shores at night—and you’d have had to be both blind and deaf back then not to know there was a lot—it wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
Jeddy knew it, too. “Your dad wouldn’t break any law,” he admitted. “I was only saying that.”
“I knew you didn’t mean it,” I said.
We almost never fought. Whatever Jeddy thought or felt, I understood and respected, and I’d step back and make allowances for it. He watched out for me the same way. I guess you could say we’d sort of woven together.
Our mothers had grown up in town and been friends themselves all the way through school. When they married our dads, they became friends, too. In the early days there was a steady stream of lendings and borrowings, emergency soups and neighborly stews between our houses, the sort of thing that goes on so easily in a small town. Then, in the middle of one winter, Jeddy’s mother got sick. It turned out to be the flu that took so many that year.
Her death stunned everyone in town, but it struck the McKenzies like an iron fist. Eileen was her name, and she’d been the heart of the family, the strong one in the house. Jeddy’s dad just collapsed. For a while, he didn’t go anywhere or do anything.
Jeddy was seven at the time, in the first grade with me. I remember how I’d walk over in the afternoons after school and sit on his front porch in case he wanted to come down and play. Sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. I’d stay awhile—the place was too quiet to even think of knocking—then go off if he didn’t appear. We both knew without saying it that I’d be back the next day. It was a way we’d worked out to help him get through.
Jeddy’s dad had been head man on a local chicken farm, but soon he quit that and began to commute over to Portsmouth to train for police work. The state force was just starting up. It pulled him away from old connections, including my parents, and maybe that’s what he wanted. Even when he was hired a year later for the job of our police chief, he kept his distance from us. He never spoke to anyone about the blow he’d suffered, but thinking back, I wonder if he wasn’t still trying to depend on his wife for a strength he didn’t have. Anyone visiting at the McKenzies’ could’ve seen it. He was keeping her around, strange as that sounds.
Her coat and hat hung on a hook in the hall, as if she’d only stepped out for a moment. Her wedding china was on display in the parlor cabinet. Her sheet music sat on the piano. Her bold handwriting filled the book of recipes that lay open, more often than not, on the counter in the kitchen where Marina, Jeddy’s older sister, was now in charge. She’d been a frightened nine-year-old when her mother had died. Seven years later, at sixteen, she was running the house.
It was Marina who served us supper when Jeddy asked me to stay over evenings. It was she who washed up after, darned her father’s socks, hung the laundry and took it down. She changed the beds, swept the floors, hauled in coal for the stove. With the sleeves of her school blouse rolled tight above her elbows (at this time, she was still only a high school sophomore) and one of her mother’s cotton aprons wrapped double around her waist, Marina handled all the jobs a grown woman would. I couldn’t get used to that, seeing a girl that age taking on what she did. Only a certain watchful gaze she leveled at the world gave a glimpse into what it must have cost her.
“I’d tell you if I knew who it was at Tyler’s, really I would,” I said to Jeddy that day on the beach, to make things right between us.
He nodded. “I know you would. And I wouldn’t tell my dad.”
“Of course not.”
“It’d be just between us.”
“Always has been, always will be,” I announced. I couldn’t meet his eyes though. I’d already broken that trust. There was something I wasn’t telling him, something I couldn’t.
Maybe he suspected, because he gave me a long stare. Then he let it go, didn’t say any more about it. I wonder, though, when he thinks back—as I know he has done plenty of times over the years, just like me—does he remember that conversation the way I do, as the first crack in our friendship? I wish I could ask him.
What happened next that spring afternoon is something I know Jeddy remembers. I can see us standing there, two raw-boned boys beside the bootleg crate, seagulls wheeling overhead, making dives on a tidal pool up the beach from us. Almost as an afterthought we wandered toward this pool, not expecting to see anything. It came into view with no more drama than if it had been a sodden piece of driftwood lying on the sand: a naked human leg.