The Weight of Water (11 page)

“I love you, Mommy,” Billie says.

“I love you, too,” I say.

Early reports of the murders were hastily written and full of inaccuracies. The first bulletin from the
Boston Post
read as follows: “Two Girls Murdered on Smutty Nose Island, Isles of Shoals. Particulars of the Horrible Butchery — Escape
of the Assassin and Subsequent Arrest in Boston — The Murderer’s Object for Committing the Deed — Attempt to Kill a Third
Person — Miraculous Escape of His Intended Victim — Terrible Sufferings from the Cold — Appalling Spectacle at the Home of
the Murdered Females, Etc., Etc. — [SPECIAL DISPATCH TO THE BOSTON POST] Portsmouth, N.H., March 6. Our citizens were horror-struck
soon after noon to-day, when a fisherman named Huntress, whose home is at the Isles of Shoals, by landing his boat at Newcastle,
and taking them thence to this city, hastened to inform our police that murder most foul had been done at the Shoals.”

According to the same report, a “rough young man named Lewis Wagner” was seen walking down to the wharf the previous night
with an ax in hand. The next morning at seven o’clock, while Wagner and “Huntress” were “having breakfast together” in Portsmouth,
Wagner told the unfortunate Huntress (who had not yet returned home and did not know of the murders) that something was going
to happen to him (Lewis Wagner). Anetta Lawson and Cornelia Christenson were the victims. A third woman, Mrs. Huntress, had
escaped. Portsmouth City Marshall Johnson was already on his way to Boston to try to apprehend the fugitive murderer, who
had, earlier in the day, been seen boarding a train for Boston.

I go below to help Rich in the galley. He has a lobster pot on a burner on the stove, another on a hibachi on the stern. He
is heating bread in the oven, and he has made a salad.

I begin to lay out the table. Rich and I move awkwardly about the cramped space, trying not to bump into each other or reach
for the same utensil simultaneously. Through the companionway, I can see Billie lying faceup on the cushion I have vacated.
She seems to be studying her fingers with great intensity. Across from her, framed in the rectangle, are Thomas’s legs in
their trousers, and his hand reaching for the bottle he has set by his right foot. The boat moves rhythmically, and through
the west-facing portholes, watery reflections flicker on the bulkheads. I am searching for lobster crackers and picks in the
silverware drawer when I hear three achingly familiar words:
Wainscot, redolent, core-stung.

Adaline’s voice is deep and melodious, respectful, forming words and vowels — perfect vowels. She knows the poem well. By
heart.

I strain so that I can see Thomas’s face. He is looking down at his knees. He doesn’t move.

I remember the bar, the way Thomas read the poem. I remember standing at a window and reading it in the streetlight while
Thomas slept.

“Thomas,” I call. The edge in my voice is audible, even to me.

Billie sits up and leans on her elbows. She seems slightly puzzled. Adaline stops reciting.

Adaline’s wrists are lightly crossed at her knee. In one long-fingered hand, she holds a wineglass. I am surprised suddenly
to realize that this is the first time I have seen her drinking.

“Thomas, I need you,” I repeat, and turn away.

I busy myself in the silverware drawer. He puts his head inside the companionway.

“What is it?” he asks.

“I can’t find the nutcrackers, and I don’t know what you’ve done with the wine we’re having for dinner.” My annoyance — a
weaseling, sour note — is unmistakable.

“I’ve got the wine right here,” Rich says quietly next to me. He opens the tiny refrigerator door for me to see.

But it is too late. Thomas has already turned and walked away. He stands, looking out over the water. He holds his glass in
one hand; the other he has in the pocket of his trousers. Adaline has twisted her body around, so that she, too, is gazing
out over the water, but away from Thomas.

Rich goes above to put the corn into the pot on the hibachi. I see Thomas move aside and hold the lid for Rich. After Rich
has dumped the ears into the steaming kettle, he wipes his hands on a dishtowel, and then bends and pours himself a glass
of wine from another bottle on the cockpit floor. Thomas and Rich, their backs to me, speak a few words to each other, like
husbands who have gone to stand by the grill in the backyard. I lean against the lip of the counter in the galley and sip
my wine with concentration.

Billie looks at her father, then at me. She rolls over onto her stomach and puts her hands to the sides of her face, as if
she were peering at something very tiny on the cushion. Rich turns around and gestures to Adaline to move over a bit. He sits
next to her and rests his fingers on her thigh. He slips them in under the slit of her skirt, under the black cloth.

Thomas, who has made a half turn at that moment and is about to speak, sees Rich touch Adaline. He stands as if transfixed,
as if not knowing where to put his body. He takes an awkward step forward. He hits Adaline’s wineglass, which she has set
down on the floor. The glass falls and shatters.

“Jesus,” Thomas says.

Louis Wagner was arrested at eight-thirty on the night after the murders at the home of an acquaintance in Boston by both
Portsmouth and Boston police. Wagner seemed stunned by the accusation of the murders and swore that he had not been on Smuttynose
since November of the previous year. He said he could not have done such a thing because the Hontvedt women had been good
to him. He had heard the train whistle at nine o’clock that morning, and, since he was down on his luck in Portsmouth, he
thought it might be a good thing to try Boston.

News that the police were bringing Wagner back to Portsmouth on the ten o’clock train on Friday morning swept through the
town, and the train route was lined with angry, screaming mobs. Fearing for their prisoner, the police had the train stopped
a quarter mile short of the station to take Wagner off, but the crowd spotted him anyway and began to pelt the prisoner —
and the police — with stones and ice chunks. They called out “Lynch him” and “String him up.” The Marines were summoned, and
the police drew their guns. Wagner spent the night in the Portsmouth jail, but was transferred the next day to Saco, Maine,
since Smuttynose is technically not in New Hampshire, but in Maine. Again police were confronted with thousands of demonstrators
who once more tried to stone Wagner, who was wounded in the head. One of the men in the mob was Ephraim Downs, the fisherman
who had once saved John Hontvedt’s life.

The prisoner was arraigned at the South Berwick jail and then kept in the Portland jail. He was transported to Alfred, Maine,
when the trial of
The State of Maine
v.
Louis H. E Wagner
opened on June 16, 1873. Louis Wagner stood accused of delivering ten mortal wounds with an ax to the head of “Anethe M.
Christen-son” and thereby causing her instant death.

After Rich and I clean up the broken glass, he lifts the lobsters from the pot, and we all sit down at the dining table to
eat. Thomas, who has drunk even more than he usually does, struggles clumsily with his lobster, spraying bits of white chitin
around the table. Billie, as anticipated, loses her appetite for lobster when she watches me crack the shells and extract
with a pick the spotted, pink meat. Adaline does not dip her meat with her fingers into melted butter as do the rest of us,
but rather soaks it in a bowl of hot broth and eats it from a fork. She works her way methodically through the bright red
carapace, missing not a piece of edible flesh.

Thomas goes above to the deck when he cuts his thumb on a claw. After a time, Rich, who may feel that Thomas needs company,
also goes above. Billie, too, leaves us, happy to turn her back on the pile of claws and red detritus that is forming in a
stainless steel bowl and is becoming vaguely repulsive. Across the table, I watch with fascination as Adaline pulls tiny bits
of meat I’d have overlooked from the body of the lobster. I watch her suck and chew, one by one, each of the lobster’s spindly
legs, kneading the thin shells with her teeth.

“Did you grow up on a farm?” she asks. “Were your parents farmers?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, they were,” I say. “Where in Ireland did you grow up?”

“Cork,” she says. “It’s in the south.”

“And then you went to university.”

“Yes,” she says. “Billie is wonderful. You Ye very lucky to have her.”

“Thank you. I do feel lucky to have her. How did you end up in Boston?”

“I was with someone,” she says. “When I was in London. He worked in Boston, and I came over to be with him. I’ve always liked
Boston.”

“How did you come to know so much about Thomas’s poetry?” I ask.

She seems surprised at the question.

“I think I’ve always read Thomas,” she says. “Even at Dublin, I thought he was extraordinary. I suppose, after the prize,
everyone reads Thomas now, don’t they? That’s what a prize does, I should think. It makes everyone read you, surely.”

“You’ve memorized his work.”

“Oh, not really”

There is an accusing tone to my voice that seems to put her on the defensive.

“The thing about Thomas is that I think he wants to be read aloud,” she says. “One almost has to, to fully understand.”

“You know he killed a girl,” I say.

Adaline slowly removes a lobster leg from her mouth, holds it between her thumb and finger as she rests her hands on the edge
of the table. The blue-checked oilcloth is dotted with bits of flesh and yellow drips of butter that have congealed.

“Thomas killed a girl,” she repeats, as though the sentence doesn’t scan.

I take a sip of wine. I tear a piece of garlic bread from the loaf. I try to control my hands, which are trembling. I believe
I am more shocked at what I have just said than she is. By the way I have said it. By the words I have used.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

She puts the spindly leg on her plate and wipes her fingers on the napkin in her lap. She holds the crumpled napkin in one
hand.

“The car accident,” I explain. “Thomas was driving.”

She still seems not to understand.

“There was a girl with him. In the car. Thomas went off the road, caught his rear wheel in a ditch, and flipped the car.”

Adaline reaches up and, with her finger, absently picks at a piece of lobster between her teeth. I look down and notice I
have a spill of lobster water on my jeans.

“How old was she?”

“The same age as he was, seventeen.”

“He was drunk?”

“Yes,” I say.

I wait.

I see it then, the moment of recognition. I can see her processing the information, reciting lines to herself, suddenly understanding
them. Her eyes move to the stove and then back to me.

“The Magdalene Toems,”
she says quietly.

I nod. “But her name wasn’t Magdalene. It was Linda.”

Adaline flinches slightly at the word
Linda,
as though the commonness of the girl’s name makes it real.

“He loved her,” she says.

“Yes,” I answer. “Very much. I don’t think he’s really ever gotten over it. In a way, all of his poems are about the accident,
even when they seem not to be.”

“But he married you,” she says.

“So he did,” I say.

Adaline puts her napkin on the table and stands up. She walks a few steps to the doorway of the forward cabin. She has her
back to me, her arms crossed over her chest.

Rich bends his head into the cabin. “Jean, you should come out here,” he calls. “The light is perfect.”

He stops. Adaline is still standing in the doorway with her back to me. She doesn’t turn around. Rich glances at me.

“What’s up?” he asks.

I uncross my legs under the table. “Not much,” I say.

I fold my hands in my lap, stunned by my betrayal. In all the years that I have been with Thomas, I have never told a single
person. Nor, to my knowledge, has he. Despite our fears when he won the prize, no one discovered this fact about Thomas’s
youth, as the records were well sealed. Now, however, I know that Ada-line will tell others. She won’t be able to keep this
information to herself.

I can’t have done this, I am thinking.

“Rich, leave this,” I say quickly, gesturing toward the mess on the table. “I want to go up. With Thomas. With the light still
good. I’ll do the dishes later.” I push away from the table. Rich comes down the ladder and stands a moment with his hands
over his head, holding on to the hatch. He seems puzzled.

Behind me, Adaline goes into the forward cabin. She shuts the door.

The Honorable R. P. Tapley of Saco, Maine, was the lawyer for the defense of Louis H. F. Wagner. George C. Yeaton, Esq. was
the county attorney. The Honorable William G. Barrows was the presiding judge. The members of the jury were Isaac Easton of
North Berwick, George A. Twambly of Shapleigh, Ivory C. Hatch of Wells, Horace Piper of Newfield, Levi G. Hanson of Biddeford,
Nahum Tarbox of Biddeford, Benajah Hall of North Berwick, Charles Whitney of Biddeford, William Bean of Lim-ington, Robert
Littlefield of Kennebunk, Isaac Libbey of Parson-field, and Calvin Stevens of Wells.

Although all of the jury, the lawyers, and the judge were white men of early American — that is to say, English — stock, neither
the accused nor the victim, nor the woman who survived, nor even most of the witnesses, was an American citizen.

In the cockpit, Thomas comes to sit beside me. Billie leans against Thomas’s legs. My hands begin to shake. I feel an urge
to bend forward, to put my head between my knees.

The three of us watch the sun set over Newcastle and Portsmouth, watch the coral light move evenly across Appledore and Star,
leaving in its wake a colorless tableau. From below, Rich switches on the running lights.

I want to tell Thomas that I have done something terrible, that I don’t know why I did it except that I couldn’t, for just
that moment, bear Adaline’s certainty that she knew Thomas well — perhaps, in a way, even better than myself.