TOM MORRISON WAS EXPECTING US. A LARGE oil lantern was hanging on a hook outside his door, casting a faint light across the cluttered yard. I was dead tired by this time. My head had started bleeding again and I had a hard time of it just to walk inside. I remember Marina sitting me down at Tom’s table and offering me a steaming cup of her very own clam chowder. She’d made up a batch at home and brought it to leave with Tom so I’d have something she knew I liked to eat. But that morning I could hardly stay upright in the chair.
“Leave him be for now,” I heard Tom say. “He’s gone through the grinder. You and Billy go along. I’ll look after him, don’t you worry.”
The next thing I knew, the room was empty, and Tom was taking off the towels that were wrapped around my head. He bathed my wound in warm water, and wrapped it again in some kind of cloth. Sadie tried to lay her head in my lap, but Tom told her to keep off me. I believe I finally ate a little, and drank a quantity of water before sleep took me out on a great dark tide. Not until evening did I open my eyes and find myself in Tom’s bunk. And there he was a minute later, looking down on me as gentle as a nurse.
“Looks like the three of us is going to be shipmates for a spell,” he said.
He was including Sadie in his count, and well he might. She was right there leaning over me with him, only lower down, drooling sympathetically on my face.
I pushed her snout away. “Is Sadie living with you now?”
“She’s consented to have me for the time being,” Tom replied, ruffling her ears so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt at being shoved off. “Billy don’t want her on the Duck no more. Says it’s getting too hot out on the water, what with the shooting and double-crossing going on these days.”
“Did she used to do his jobs with him?”
“Oh, Lordy, yes! She’s an old smuggling hand. Get Billy to tell you about her sometime. She can smell a Coast Guard cutter around a bend. Sets up to yipping. Out on West Island, there’s a drop she guards. The thieves keep away, knowing she’ll tear them to shreds if they so much as put one foot ashore.”
“The Black Duck’s got a place out on West Island?”
At this, Tom clapped his hand over his mouth. “I’m talking too much,” he said. “You just forget what I said. This isn’t your business and you don’t want to know about it.”
For once, I didn’t mind that at all. I really didn’t want to hear any more about smuggling or rumrunners at that moment. Tom went off to fix me a bowl of Marina’s chowder, leaving Sadie and me to start getting to know each other better.
That was the beginning of what I look back on now as one of the happiest times in my life. For the next couple of weeks, I stayed with Tom and he took care of me. I was up and about in a day or so, though I had to be careful not to move too fast or my head would spin. We’d crossed into December by then and the days had a frigid edge to them, though a bright sun seemed always to be beaming down around Tom Morrison’s chicken coops. Maybe it was just being out from under my old life, away from the humdrum of schoolwork and Riley’s General Store, but I felt like a bird escaped from a cage.
We spliced rope and wove crab traps on the stoop the first few days. Then, though the season was drawing to a close, I went out crabbing with Tom on his raft. Sadie came, too. He was teaching her to spot crabs underwater, the job Viola’d had.
“One-eyed folks like me don’t get a read on depth the way most people do,” Tom explained. “The world’s kind of flat to us, though you get so’s you fill it out with some imagination of your own. The trouble with crabs is, there’s no room to imagine ’em if you want to catch ’em. They’re either there or they’re not. Am I right, Sadie?”
She’d just then come out of the water after a dive off the raft, and her answer was to start shaking herself from head to tail, thoroughly dousing us with freezing pond water. It got so bad, we had to push her back in.
When we weren’t on the raft, we skulked around on the beach, looking for interesting objects that might’ve washed up. I told Tom about a bride’s hope chest Jeddy and I had found one time full of sheets and towels and ladies’ silk underthings. We were so embarrassed that we dug a hole and pushed the whole mess in before anyone could catch us with it.
Tom said that was by no means the most unusual thing. A crate of Florida oranges had washed up on his shore once, ripe and delicious. He’d eaten every one.
More darkly, he told me of a boot he found with a human foot still in it.
“Was it the mob, do you think?”
He said it might’ve been, though this was a few years before their kind of murderous activity was widespread.
“Could’ve been sharks or ocean currents or any number of things,” he went on. “You never know with the sea. It’s a place unto itself. There’s baby seals who get parked here on this beach by their mothers. They’ll be migrating down the coast, usually early in spring, and the little ones grow tired. The pup’ll be here a day or two, laying over, then the mother’ll come back to pick him up and they’ll start off on their travels again.
“Gives you a strange feeling coming across one of those pups. They’ve got a human child’s eyes, but how they look at you, it’s unnerving. Like they’re in touch with some wildness no human could ever know. They’re from an undersea world that’s far beyond our knowledge, with rules and reasons that have nothing to do with ours. A privilege it is to live alongside such a mystery, and have the chance once in a while of staring it in the face.”
In the evenings, Tom would light his kerosene lantern and cook up some supper. There wasn’t ever much doubt what it would be. I had crab in just about every way a crab can be made edible, in soup, grilled, poached, stewed, steamed, fried, baked, fricasseed and then some. Sadie ate right along with us.
After dinner, we’d sit with our feet up on the warm cast-iron stove and talk or not, whatever we felt like. There was no need to be polite or say something you didn’t mean just to fill up space in the conversation. Nobody was harping on anyone to wash up or take off his boots. Nobody was watching the clock about when to go to bed. It was heaven to me, and an eye-opener, too, that Tom had found a way to live that was the right way for him, even if it wouldn’t agree with what other people might think.
Never once did Tom dig into the reason why I was there, and that was good of him since I didn’t want to think about the fool I’d been to get myself kidnapped. My head wound was healing and my heart was, too, I guess, because the darkness that had been in me for weeks, worrying about my father and the store and where I was headed in life, cleared off. I was whistling on my way to the woodpile—it was cold enough so the stove in Tom’s shack was going by then—and ruffling Sadie’s ears right along with Tom.
December moved on, and Christmas came and went without anyone bothering much about it. Tom had his own take on seasons and holidays that was completely out of time with the rest of the world. Billy’s crewman Alfred Biggs came down and brought me a sweater my mother had knitted for me, and a book from Aunt Grace, and that was about all there was to it. No tree or decorations or singing or turkey dinner. What I found out was, they didn’t matter to me as much as I’d thought they did. I was happy without. It occurred to me that some of Tom Morrison was beginning to rub off on me.
It wouldn’t last, of course. Couldn’t last. Out to sea, I’d watch laden schooners tacking upwind, or fishing sloops sneaking into coves beyond Coulter’s at dusk. I’d hear a seaplane buzz over the bay and I’d know that real life was out there with its shifting fogs and confusion, ready to come in on me again given the slightest excuse.
One bright, unusually warm afternoon at the end of December, it came. I was down on the beach by myself looking for washed-up fish heads the inshore trawlers might have dumped that would do for a soup. Crabs had begun to disappear with the cold and Tom was moving on to his winter menu. From the direction of West Island, a dark speck appeared on the water. In short order it became a boat heading toward the mainland at a high rate of speed, a white plume of water rising off her stern. Right away, I knew she wasn’t headed for the harbor or any other place. She was coming straight in to Coulter’s. I took off back to Tom’s shack to warn him.
He’d spotted her already and was out front, up on a dune, squinting against the sun. Sadie was standing tense beside him, preparing to bark her head off as usual. As I came up, Tom laid a hand on her snout and said:
“Looks like we got visitors.”
“Is it . . . ?” I was afraid to say. All I was thinking about was thugs and machine guns.
“No. Not them.” He cupped his hand like a spyglass around his good eye. “I believe it’s a craft you don’t often catch a glimpse of in the light of day.”
A minute later, as we both watched, the speedster roared into Coulter’s at full throttle, cut engine and turned sideways to the beach. At the helm, the dark outline of the skipper was visible in his captain’s cap, working the controls. Even at that distance, I knew him.
Billy Brady was one of those fellows that stand out a long way off. As the Black Duck drifted softly in toward the beach, I saw a girl come up beside him in the wheelhouse, a red bandana tied over her long, brown hair.
“Marina!” Tom exclaimed. “Go meet ’em, Sadie.”
He let the dog free and followed her down the path as fast as he could hobble. Last of all, I went, eager to see them, too, but sad as well, guessing this arrival meant my happy days with Tom Morrison were nearing an end.