The Weight of Water (16 page)

“Like what?”

“Scrub pine. Rose hips. A window of the Haley house, the footprint of the Hontvedt house. I should have done this yesterday
when I had the chance. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he says. “We have time.”

“Me too!” says Billie excitedly.

Rich shakes his head. “You stay here with your dad and Adaline.” He reaches over and pulls my daughter from my lap. He whirls
her around and tickles her at her waist. She begins to laugh with that unique helplessness that borders on hysteria. She tries
to wriggle away from his grasp and screams to me to help her. “Mommy, save me! Save me!” But when Rich suddenly stops, she
turns to him with an appreciative sigh and folds herself into his lap.

“Whew,” she says. “That was a good tickle.”

George E. Ingerbretson, a Norwegian immigrant who lived at Hog Island Point on Appledore Island, was called to the stand.
He, like many who were summoned, spoke in a halting and imperfect English that was not always easy to transcribe. He was asked
by the county attorney what he observed between seven and eight o’clock on the morning of March 6, 1873. He replied that he
had two small boys and that they had come into his house and said, “They are halooing over to Smutty Nose.” He was then asked
what he saw when he got to the island.

“I saw one bloody axe; it was lying on a stone in front of the door, John Hontvet’s kitchen door. The handle was broken. I
went around the house. I saw a piece knocked off the window. Then I stopped. I saw John was coming. I did not look into the
window. I only saw the bloody axe and blood around.”

After John Hontvedt arrived, along with several other men, Ingerbretson went inside the house.

“Evan Christensen went just ahead of me; he opened the door. Evan is the husband of Anethe.”

“Who else went with you at that time?” Yeaton asked.

“John Hontvet and Louis Nelson and James Lee, no one else. John’s brother, Matthew, was with us. I do not know whether he
went into the house or not.”

“State what you saw.”

“It was Anethe, lying on her back, head to the door. It looked to me as though she was hauled into the house by the feet.
I saw the marks.”

“Of what?”

“From the south-east corner of the house into the door.”

“Traces of what?”

“Of blood.”

“Was there any other body there?”

“Yes. Then we went out and went into another room in the northward side, north-east of the house. We came in and there was
some blood around, and in the bed-room we found another dead body.”

“Whose body was that?”

“That was Karen Christensen.”

“Did you notice any wounds upon the body of Anethe?”

“Yes; there are some scars on the head.”

“What part of the head were they?”

“In the ear most, just about the right ear. She had some scar in her face there.”

“Scar on top of the head?”

“We did not look much after that time.”

Yeaton then asked Ingerbretson some questions about the well that belonged to the house and its distance from the house, and
whether he had disturbed any of the bodies. Ingerbretson said that he had not. Yeaton asked the fisherman if he had seen any
tracks, and Ingerbretson said no, he had not seen any tracks. Before Yeaton dismissed the witness, he asked if, when he had
arrived on Smuttynose that morning, there was any living person on that island.

“Yes,” the fisherman replied.

“Who was it?”

“Mrs. Hontvet and a little dog.”

“State condition in which you found her.”

“In an overbad condition. She was in her night-dress crying and halooing, and blood all over her clothes, Mrs. Hontvet’s clothes.
I got her into the boat.”

“Do you know whether her feet were frozen?”

“Yes. I searched her feet right off and they were stiff. I carried her over to my house.”

Before a shoot, I will prepare the cameras — check my film and the batteries, clean the lenses — and I begin these tasks in
the cockpit. Billie has gone below to wake Thomas. I can hear them talking and laughing, playing on the bed, although the
wind, with its constant white noise, steals their words.

Adaline emerges from the companionway. She smiles and says, “Good morning.” Her legs are bare, and she is holding a towel
around her, as if she had just stepped from the shower, although she is not wet. Her hair is spread all along her back in
knots and tangles. I can see a small bit of red beneath the towel, so I know that she has on her bathing suit, and I wonder
for a moment why she has the towel around her. How strange we women are in the mornings, I am thinking, this modesty, this
not wanting to be seen. Adaline turns her back to me and puts her foot up on the cockpit bench, inspecting her toes.

“I hear Billie got a cut,” she says.

“Yes. She did.”

“Bad?”

“Not too.”

“I’m going for a swim.”

She lets the towel drop to the cockpit floor. She keeps her back to me, and I notice things I have not before. The plate-shallow
curve of her inner thigh. The elongated waist. The patch of hair she has missed just above the inside of her right knee. I
think about what her skin would feel like. This is painful curiosity. She steps up to the back of the stern, positions herself
for a dive. She skims the water like a gull.

She does not come up sputtering or exclaiming from the cold, as I might have done, but rather spins in a lovely barrel roll
and swims with an economy of strokes, her feet barely moving at all. I see wisps of red amid the chop. She swims for about
ten minutes, away from the boat and back. When she is done, she climbs up over the stern with ease, refusing my outstretched
hand. She sits opposite me in the cockpit and picks up the towel to dry herself. She is slightly winded, which is somehow
reassuring.

“You kept your maiden name,” she says.

“Jean Janes had an infelicitous ring to it,” I explain.

I notice that the water beads up on her skin.

“It wasn’t for professional reasons then?”

“Not exactly.”

She sets the towel down beside her and begins to brush out her hair.

“Did I hear Rich say there might be a storm?” she asks.

“We may have to leave before this afternoon.” The thought of leaving the harbor fills me with swift, sharp regret, as if I
had left something significant unfinished.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Portsmouth possibly. Or Annisquam.”

She bends her head to her knees, letting her hair fall forward to the floor. She brushes upward from the nape of her neck.
She throws her head back and begins to brush from the sides of her face. In my camera bag is a Polaroid camera I use in test
shots. Often, when I have a scene I like, I take a Polaroid first, so that I can examine the composition and the light and
make adjustments if necessary before shooting the real thing. I take the Polaroid out of my camera bag and aim it at Adaline.
I quickly snap a picture. She blinks at the click. I rip the film out and hold it in my hand, waiting for the image to appear.
In the photograph, Adaline is holding a brush to her head. Her hair, which has dried in the sun, has streaked itself a light
blond, or perhaps it is a photographic deception. Her skin looks dark by contrast, deeply tanned. I hold the picture out to
her.

She takes it in her hand and examines it.

“A mere negative of my former self,” she says and smiles.

In Haley’s Cove, a pier supported a long warehouse and fish processing plant. The men of Smuttynose invented the process of
drying fish called dunning. Large vessels would tie up inside the pier to load and offload goods and fish, which were then
stored in the building known as the Long House. The area that comprises the pier, the Long House, Captain Haley’s House, and
the footprint of the Hontvedt cottage is not much bigger than a modest suburban backyard.

Dunfish sold for three or four times the price of regularly prepared fish. So many fish were harvested by Shoalers that in
1822 the national price of fish was quoted not from Boston but from the Isles of Shoals.

When Thomas comes up the ladder, he brings with him the smell of bacon and pancakes.

“Billie and I made breakfast,” he says. “Adaline’s setting the table.”

I am rereading one of the guidebooks to see if I have overlooked a landmark, an artifact that I should not miss when I go
across to Smuttynose to finish the shoot. In my lap is Maren Hontvedt’s document and its translation, as well as a thin pamphlet,
one of the accounts of the murders.

“What’s that?” he asks. A conciliatory gesture. Interest in my work.

“This?” I ask, holding up the guidebook.

“No, that.”

I lay my hand on the papers with the brown ink, as if protecting them. “It’s the thing I got from the Athenaeum.”

“Really. Can I see it?”

Without looking precisely at him, I hand the papers to Thomas. I can feel the color and the heat coming into the back of my
neck.

“It’s not in English,” he says.

“There’s a translation.”

“This is an original document,” he says with some surprise. “I’m amazed they let you have it.”

There is a silence.

“They didn’t,” I say. I push my hair behind my ears.

“They didn’t,” he repeats.

“I knew they wouldn’t give it to me, so I took it. I’ll give it back.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a memoir. By Maren Hontvedt.”

“Who is?”

“The woman who survived the murders.”

“It’s dated 1899”

“I know.”

He hands the papers back to me, and I look up at him for the first time. His hair has been combed off his forehead with his
fingers and lies in thinning rows, an already harvested crop. His eyes are bloodshot, and his skin, in the harsh, flat light,
looks blotchy.

“You don’t need this stuff for your assignment,” he says.

“No.”

He is about to turn and go back down to the galley, but he hesitates a moment on the steps. “What’s going on with you?” he
asks.

I shade my brow with my hand. “What’s going on with you?” I ask.

At the Shoals, men have always fished for haddock and for hake, for porgies and for shad. In 1614, Captain John Smith first
mapped the islands and called them Smythe’s Isles, and he wrote that they were “a heape together.”

Halyards slap against the mast, an insistent beat we can hear at the double bed-cum-dining table in the center of the cabin.
Thomas and Billie have made pancakes — kidney shaped, oil glistened, and piled high upon a white platter. There is also bacon,
which Adaline declines. She chooses toast and orange juice instead. I watch her, nearly naked, lift her mug of decaffeinated
coffee to her lips and blow across the rim. I am not sure that I could now sit at a breakfast table in my bathing suit, though
I must have done so as a younger woman.

Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures?

Billie, next to me, still has on her Red Sox pajamas. She smells of sleep. She is proud of her misshapen pancakes, and eats
six of them. I think it is the one certain way to get Billie — any child? — to eat a meal. Have her cook it herself.

I have on my robe. Rich his bathing suit. Thomas the shirt he slept in. Is it our dishabille that creates the tension — a
tension so pronounced I find it hard to swallow? Rich wears the weather report on his face, and we seem excessively focused
on the food and on Billie, in the manner of adults who have not found an easy entrée into the conversation. Or who are suddenly
wary of conversation: “These are wonderful, Billie. I can see the bear now.” “What kind of coffee is this? It has an almond
flavor.” “I love bacon. Honestly, is there anything better on a camping trip than a bacon sandwich?”

Sometimes I watch the way that Thomas watches me. And if he catches me at this, he slips his eyes away so gracefully that
I am not sure he has seen me. Is this simply the familiarity of bodies? I wonder. I no longer know with any certainty what
he is thinking.

“Do you keep a journal?” Adaline asks Thomas.

I am surprised by the question. Will she dare a reprise of Pearse?

Thomas shakes his head. “Who has so many words that he can afford to spend them on letters and journals?” he asks.

Rich nods. “Tom’s a terrible letter writer.”

I haven’t heard the nickname in years.

“His literary executor will have it easy,” Rich adds. “There won’t be anything there.”

“Except the work,” I say quietly. “There’s a lot of the work.”

“a lot of false starts,” says Thomas. “Especially lately.”

I look over at Thomas, and I wonder if what I see is the same face I knew fifteen years ago. Does it seem the same to me?
Is the skin the same? Or is the expression now so different than it was then that the muscles have become realigned, the face
itself unrecognizable?

“Is it definite that man did it?”

Adaline’s question startles all of us. It takes me a second to catch up. “Louis Wagner?” I ask.

“Do they know for sure?”

“Some think yes,” I answer slowly, “and some think no. At the time, Wagner protested his innocence. But the crime created
a tremendous amount of hysteria. There were riots and lynch mobs, and they had to hurry the trial.”

Adaline nods.

“Even now, there are doubts,” I add. “He hadn’t much of a motive for the murders themselves, for example, and that row from
Portsmouth to Smuttynose would have been brutal. He’d have had to row almost thirty miles in the dark. And it was the first
week in March.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” says Rich. “I couldn’t do it. I’m not even sure I could do it on a flat surface.”

“Also, I’ve read parts of the trial transcript,” I say, “and I can’t figure out why the prosecution didn’t do a better job.
Maren Hontvedt’s clothes were blood-soaked, but the defense didn’t really pursue this. And the coroner was very careless with
the murder weapon — they let the sea spray wash off all the fingerprints and blood on the journey back to Portsmouth.”

“Surely, they had fingerprinting techniques then,” says Rich.