loam is black with the carcasses of insects that have dropped dead from the heat. Jilted by a traveling salesman, sixteen-year-old Edie Howland hangs herself in her father’s dry well, and the packed ice in Caleb Mason’s icehouse melts until the floor is six foot deep in warm soaked straw.
On the Fourth of July, Jake goes out with Wes to fish the run of blues in the rip off the Hassagnek reef. Blues are the sea wolves. They move in packs and will drop out of a region of the coast for years at a time. The last run of blues came in 1881, the year Blackwood washed up on Gooseberry Neck, the year Gladding’s long-handled horse-powered hay fork sold at Cory’s Store for eleven dollars with the claim that it could pitch two thousand pounds of hay in thirteen pitches in three minutes.
With a bag of beef sandwiches stashed next to the gear in the bow, Jake and his brother row out of the harbor. They leave on the ebb, when the wind comes from the southwest and the sky is dissolute. They use live silversides for bait. Wes rubs the leader and hook with pork rind to wipe out the human smell. As they drift along the rip, he stands in the bow. The line whips out behind him, coiling into itself before it splits, knifelike, and cuts the surface folds.
Jake sits down facing the stern and leans his back against the thwart. The hard edge of the seat digs into his spine. The clamming baskets are stacked in the corner next to the lantern, a coiled trawl, and the fishing box. The lid of the box hangs open. Hand-carved wooden lures spill out. The sun flashes off the grooved barbs of the hooks.
An inch of water covers the floor of the boat. It has leaked through the splits between the cedar planking. Jake runs his fingers through it. Fish scales, bits of line, a bottle cap, cigarette butts, and a pack of matches sift back and forth across the boards as the boat twists down the currents of the rip. The water soaks through his trousers. It washes over the copper rivets that bind the planking to the ribs of the hull. His father built the boat eight years ago and Jake remembers how bright the rivets were when his father first set them. Over time, theyhave been eaten by the salt, their edges worn down, and yet now, in the slight skim of water running over them, they glisten, a tropical, luminous green.
“You going to fish?” Wes asks.
“I might.”
“Got a line on one. She’s big I’d say. Tracking down the bait, but not biting.”
He talks the way their father talked. He clips his sentences off at the neck and he always refers to a fish as a female. Jake has noticed these things. He has noticed how his father’s hardness has begun to surface through his brother’s face, honing the skin to a tougher, older grain.
“Won’t touch anything you give her, somedays,” Wes says.
“They’ll always take an eel.”
“Not even that, somedays.”
Jake looks up across the bay to the Nubble rock that marks the harbor mouth. He can just make out the tip of the Point Church steeple behind the long strip of the barrier beach that buffers the town from the open sea. Figures move like small dark flak along the shore.
The oarlock set onto the gunwale next to him is tarnished. A hairline crack runs through the brass. It will break within a day if his brother bears down too hard.
He drops his hand over the side and trails his fingers through the swift, unsettled water of the rip. The sun pools on the surface, but through the shade cast by the boat, he can see the sand along the ridge ten feet below piled into underwater dunes. The blues will work against the current. They will keep to the lee side of the shoal. They will rest in the holes and the jogs. He stares down through the meager reflection of his face, down into that strange-moving geography underneath him, and he watches for them—bony glints of shadow—as the hull moves like a ghost across the ocean floor.
He lies down on the floor of the boat, his hair soaked in the warm musty
On the Fourth of July, Jake goes out with Wes to fish the run of blues in the rip off the Hassagnek reef. Blues are the sea wolves. They move in packs and will drop out of a region of the coast for years at a time. The last run of blues came in 1881, the year Blackwood washed up on Gooseberry Neck, the year Gladding’s long-handled horse-powered hay fork sold at Cory’s Store for eleven dollars with the claim that it could pitch two thousand pounds of hay in thirteen pitches in three minutes.
With a bag of beef sandwiches stashed next to the gear in the bow, Jake and his brother row out of the harbor. They leave on the ebb, when the wind comes from the southwest and the sky is dissolute. They use live silversides for bait. Wes rubs the leader and hook with pork rind to wipe out the human smell. As they drift along the rip, he stands in the bow. The line whips out behind him, coiling into itself before it splits, knifelike, and cuts the surface folds.
Jake sits down facing the stern and leans his back against the thwart. The hard edge of the seat digs into his spine. The clamming baskets are stacked in the corner next to the lantern, a coiled trawl, and the fishing box. The lid of the box hangs open. Hand-carved wooden lures spill out. The sun flashes off the grooved barbs of the hooks.
An inch of water covers the floor of the boat. It has leaked through the splits between the cedar planking. Jake runs his fingers through it. Fish scales, bits of line, a bottle cap, cigarette butts, and a pack of matches sift back and forth across the boards as the boat twists down the currents of the rip. The water soaks through his trousers. It washes over the copper rivets that bind the planking to the ribs of the hull. His father built the boat eight years ago and Jake remembers how bright the rivets were when his father first set them. Over time, theyhave been eaten by the salt, their edges worn down, and yet now, in the slight skim of water running over them, they glisten, a tropical, luminous green.
“You going to fish?” Wes asks.
“I might.”
“Got a line on one. She’s big I’d say. Tracking down the bait, but not biting.”
He talks the way their father talked. He clips his sentences off at the neck and he always refers to a fish as a female. Jake has noticed these things. He has noticed how his father’s hardness has begun to surface through his brother’s face, honing the skin to a tougher, older grain.
“Won’t touch anything you give her, somedays,” Wes says.
“They’ll always take an eel.”
“Not even that, somedays.”
Jake looks up across the bay to the Nubble rock that marks the harbor mouth. He can just make out the tip of the Point Church steeple behind the long strip of the barrier beach that buffers the town from the open sea. Figures move like small dark flak along the shore.
The oarlock set onto the gunwale next to him is tarnished. A hairline crack runs through the brass. It will break within a day if his brother bears down too hard.
He drops his hand over the side and trails his fingers through the swift, unsettled water of the rip. The sun pools on the surface, but through the shade cast by the boat, he can see the sand along the ridge ten feet below piled into underwater dunes. The blues will work against the current. They will keep to the lee side of the shoal. They will rest in the holes and the jogs. He stares down through the meager reflection of his face, down into that strange-moving geography underneath him, and he watches for them—bony glints of shadow—as the hull moves like a ghost across the ocean floor.
He lies down on the floor of the boat, his hair soaked in the warm musty
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