Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God

by Joe Coomer

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Nine weeks after losing her husband, Charlotte escapes to a wooden motor yacht in New Hampshire, where her shipmates are an aging blue-haired widow, an emotional seventeen-year-old, and the ugliest dog in literature. A genuine bond develops among the three women, as their distinct personalities and paths cross and converge against the backdrop of emotional secrets, abuse, and the wages of old age. Off the boat, Charlotte, an archaeologist, joins a local excavation to uncover an ancient graveyard. Here she can indulge her passion for reconstructing the past, even as she tries to bury her own recent history. She comes to realize, however, that the currents of time are as fluid and persistent as the water that drifts beneath her comforting new home.

Release date: May 7, 1997

Publisher: Touchstone

Print pages: 256

Sample

Chapter 1

I came across a love of moving water, an ebbing tide parting on the plumb bow of an old boat, and the sea passing swiftly along the waterline carried bits of seaweed, the body of a dead bird, a dark brown leaf, and a love that seemed necessary to me, to be near that abrasive current, the green swell and nascent gurgle. I thought I'd never be able to love anything again, anything other than the memory of my husband, and so I felt ashamed and queer kneeling there on the dock, my bag over one shoulder and a kitten inside my coat, looking down into the water of Portsmouth Harbor, and feeling for a moment, not sad. He'd died at Christmas, nine weeks earlier.

The kitten mewed and, using my skin as a boarding net, tried to crawl up between my breasts. I reached for him but didn't take my eyes from the water till I had him nose to nose, round pupil to narrowing pupil, and said to him, "We'll stay here for a while: I'd found him at a rest stop in West Virginia and hadn't named him yet, though I was leaning toward Peytona Pawtucket, two small towns near my home: PP for short. Jonah never liked cats, and at the roadside it suddenly occurred to me that I could rescue this kitten without any recrimination. It wasn't the kitten's fault that Jonah had died. It was, I realized, his dumb luck. But perhaps this kitten had somehow killed my husband so I'd save him from his miserable abandonment. Maybe Jonah had died so I'd rescue the kitten. If Jonah had been there at the rest stop I wouldn't even have considered...well, it was another strange hallucination of my rage. I was still mad at my dead husband for dying. I like to lay blame and it seemed as if something as huge as Jonah's death ought to be someone's fault.

I tucked the kitten's angular tendon-taut body away again, and stood up, walked back in the March cold to my car. I'd driven east till I beached at the ocean and then splashed north along the coastline till I decided there wasn't any reason to turn away. We indulged ourselves that first night, the cat and I, and stayed at the Portsmouth Sheraton in a room that looked out over a monumental pyramid of salt to the river, the tide-wracked Piscataqua, whose mouth was the old harbor. I'd asked an old woman on the street what all the salt was for. I learned later it was simply road salt. But that afternoon she looked at me sadly and explained, "Why, dear, when the rains are heavy and too much fresh water flows down to the sea, we add salt back to the ocean so the fish won't expire."

I came across a love of moving water kneeling in the current of Caudel Run, the small creek behind our home in Kentucky, whose waters were as dear and cold as my fear, falling over black ledges of slate, gathering in white sluices of anguish, numbing my feet, blueing the skin. I could hold the water in my hands and bring it to my mouth.

By morning I'd changed the kitten's name to Piscataqua. He'd scratched up a few carpet fuzzies and taken a dump under a chair. After I cleaned it up I hid him in the bathroom and ordered room service: eggs and milk. We ate at the window and watched the working of the gulls over the river, trailing behind a boat. It was warm in the room, but I could tell it was cold beyond, cold on the street below and colder still at the water. So I bundled up and put Piscataqua between my shirt and sweater, where he dropped to my stomach and soon fell asleep. When I reached the sidewalk it dawned on me that there was nothing I had to do. There were things I should have done and things other people wanted me to do, but nothing necessary beyond breathing.

I felt as if I'd escaped. I hadn't called it that before, but an escape it was, through a tunnel, over walls. I'd left home with a wad of cash, to avoid using my credit cards to buy gas or food so I couldn't be tracked by the bills. I felt guilty. I'd left my parents a note saying I was just getting away for a few days, but I knew at the time that I had no intention of returning permanently. I'd even contacted a real estate agent to list the house. I'd call Mom later, I thought. It wasn't fair to Mom and Dad, because I wasn't running from my parents, but from his, Jonah's, the Montagues. If I told my folks where I was, I knew Richard and Mary would somehow find out. They were ravenous, and I no longer had the strength to fend them off. Jonah was their only child, and after his death they fed off my memories. I'd seen them every day since the wreck. They drove the thirty-two miles from their home to mine to keep me company, but I soon realized they were scavengers and I was their last hope for food, the only carcass on an endless stretch of desert, and that they wouldn't leave me till my bones were hollow and bleached. They seemed to have no memory of their own. Mary washed all of Jonah's clothes, even those that were already clean, going through the pockets in search of a scrap or seed that might be explained by some story I could tell. A ticket stub from a movie was a mine to her and in her grief she'd torture me asking question after question: "How was the movie? Did Jonah like it? Did you have popcorn? Where did you sit? Did he laugh? Tell me where he laughed. We could rent the video and watch it, the three of us. You could tell us where he laughed" I found Richard in the attic reading my letters to Jonah and Jonah's to me. I left the day after Mary, blowing into a cup of coffee, her eyes on the cup's rim, said, "There in the hospital, before he died, when we knew he was going to die, we should have had the doctors take the sperm from his testicles. We could have frozen it. You could have had his baby yet." I left. I loved him too.

I looked over my shoulder, Richard and Mary weren't behind me, and then walked up the street into old Portsmouth. I'd been here before as an undergraduate, attending an archaeological field school at the Isles of Shoals, five miles off the coast. I spent two weeks uncovering the foundations of a seventeenth-century fishery. The ferry to the islands left from Portsmouth, so I had frequent opportunities to roam the streets and waterfront of the city, to visit Strawbery Banke (Portsmouth's original name and now a museum collection of early houses near Prescott Park), to sit in the many restaurants and cafés, to browse the used and rare bookstores and antique shops. But most of my spare time was spent with my eyes on the water, simply watching the tide and the boats. That's what I'd come back to. And although I knew I should have begun to search for a place to live, my feet carried me back toward the piers on the river. I wanted to see the sun's reflection off the water. I crossed Market Street in front of the Moffat-Ladd House, passed through a small garden to Ceres Street, eighteenth-century warehouses turned twentieth-century gift shops on one side and tugboats on the other, climbed up along Bow Street, more waterfront brick warehouses that were now restaurants and boutiques.

Portsmouth seems to be washed with age, worn by touch and breath. Its streets, like animal paths, lead down to the river and then mimic its banks. The city is comfortable here, relaxed, as unconsciously nestled in this point of land as the last bone in my finger. What's brick is red and what's wood is white and what's stone is gray granite. Cobbles and sills are footfall worn, cupped like waiting palms. The glass of many mullioned windows flows toward the river, distorting interiors. The shops and cafes are small and eclectic, with merchandise-weary walls and light-poor corners. Layers of old patina, layers of faded paper over horsehair plaster, levels of plank flooring, all seem burnished like the head of a cane. Behind the counters, in between sales, clerks read with cats in their laps, dogs at their feet. Above them, copper dormers modeled to frame a human face look out to sea. Slate roofs, rust streaked, widow's walks and witch's peaks: the skyline crouches under the lighted steeples of old churches.

I whistled past St. John's Church with its sidewalk-level burial vaults, and finally crossed Daniel and State Streets to Prescott Park and a clear view of the river. This city is so close to the sea it's hard to put your hand in the water.

When I was here before, during the summer, the streets of Portsmouth were thronged with tourists, but in early March at eight in the morning I was alone in Prescott Park. Wind came in from the sea and down the mouth of the harbor, blowing patterns in the bare branches of the trees above me and rasping the surface of the river. I leaned on a railing at the seawall and looked down into the green but bright water, looking through shards of light and scattered leaves on the surface to the current beneath, the tide coming out of its slackness. Lobster buoys, lolling with broken necks and then swinging uptight, began to take the strain. Boats tugged at the lines holding them to the dock below, and the dock itself with rusty groans moved as far seaward as its pilings would allow. All the water was being pulled from the river. It happened, high tide and low, every six hours or so, this great back and forth, the earth shuddering, a slow shake of cleansing, over and over. Here the tide was particularly strong, the current as fast as six knots, the rise and fall as much as nine feet. I never knew a more active environment, as if the skin of the world was loose as a cat's. If the creek behind our house in Kentucky turned around and raced uphill as fast as it coursed down, and rose and dropped eight or nine feet in the process, if it did this just once, the entire human species would come and sit on its banks in hopes to see it happen again.

The sound of steel on steel came across the water from Seavey's Island and the navy yard. There were submarines flanking each side of a pier. Men stood on the rounded black hulls, pulling lines, gesturing. They seemed to have purpose.

A lobster boat puttered through the gut between Pierce Island and Prescott Park past me to a buoy on the edge of the main current, just off tiny Four Tree Island. A man in yellow bib overalls turned the bow of his boat into the ebbing tide and adjusted his speed to match the current, leaving the boat at a standstill. He reached down, picked up a buoy, and wrapped its line around a small winch. Spray flew, and soon a green rectangular metal cage appeared alongside, and he stooped over with gloved hands and pulled it aboard. He reached inside the cage and brought forth a lobster waving semaphore and then, to my great dismay, chunked it overboard. He proceeded to throw away three more, rebait the trap, and drop it back over too. I thought, perhaps lobstering is not only a business but also a sport. The smell off his bait rose to me on the wind that moved against the tide and I walked away along the railing.

The gangway to the Portsmouth Public Landing led down to a dock. Entrance was allowed only to boat owners and guests, but the small guardhouse was empty, so I crept down the aluminum incline to the green lumber of the dock. Most of the slips were empty. Two small sailboats nested near shore and further out a lobster boat was backed into its berth. I walked past Elizabeth Ann II to the end of the dock, kneeled down, held one palm under the weight of the kitten, and plunged my free hand into the water. It was colder than I could believe, colder than ice cream in the sinuses, so cold I jerked my hand back and hit myself in the face with my already blue knuckles. It didn't seem to me that anything could live in such extremes and that perhaps the lobsterman had been throwing back dead, frozen lobsters. I smelled my fingertips after rubbing them dry on my coat. It was a precise smell, thick, pungent, like moss or loamy soil but not those, more like the worm itself, like fur and skin and pee and death and rocks, but beyond all of these, on top of and suffused through them, was a sense of cleanliness. I took a handful of water, bearing the needles of pain, and saw it dear, unlike the body of the river, clear and without movement, as clear as the whorls and lines of my palm, as if it didn't exist at all without the rest of the ocean and so I threw it back.

There was a shrill peep and I looked up to see two tugboats nosing a huge ship around Henderson Point on Seavey's Island. I'd read in a guidebook at the Sheraton how the big ships came up and down the river at slack tide, when the water was at its deepest or shallowest. A loaded ship came in at high tide so her bottom would clear the rocks and an empty ship left at low tide so her superstructure would clear the bridges. As I watched the tugs push the ship around the tight corner, a great blast from the horn on Memorial Bridge lifted me an inch off the lumber of the dock and brought Piscataqua alive between my shirt and sweater. He crawled, marsupial-like, up the front of my blouse to my neck, peeked out at the collar of my coat, and so we watched the show together. After a moment or two, gates dropped in front of the traffic on the bridge above us and the center section slowly rose on steel cables. The tugs, alternately whistling and tooting in their spare, plaintive language of air, guided the ship with what seemed like inches to spare between the twin towers of Memorial and on up the river to meetings with the two other bridges that cross the Piscataqua between Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery, Maine. The ship was out of Venezuela and didn't seem to have a soul on board. I couldn't conceive of what might be in its hold, but thought myself blessed to welcome it after such a long journey.

I rose and turned back up the dock, gazing into the cockpits of the lobster boat and sailboats as I passed to see if there were any secrets there. I walked to the north end of the park and watched, for at least an hour, the tide backing out from underneath a restaurant, the Smarmy Snail, perched over the river on pilings. The receding water left mudflats and shallows, blanched barnacles, tires and splintered lumber, the remains of two wire traps, and still the water fell, revealing a tattered nylon fishing net clinging to the pilings like a forgotten web, a fragmented Styrofoam buoy and plastic bottles caught in its filaments. I could think of no word to weave in my web that would have saved him.

Another dock led out from the Smarmy Snail's deck, a private float where two larger boats were tied. I'd explored that dock the evening before. I entered the glass-enclosed dining area of the restaurant, ordered a cup of hot tea, and sat with my face to the sun looking down on the boats. Downriver was the old prison, a stone Victorian edifice now used for storage by the navy, but whose prisoners once must have looked forlornly out to sea. It was warm here, and Piscataqua began to purr heavily. I dropped two dollars on the table and carried my tea out on the restaurant's deck. One of the boats alongside the dock was obviously a work boat of some kind. There were coils of rope on board, buckets and plastic bins, nets on a huge reel. The boat across the dock was an old motor yacht, perhaps fifty feet long, varnished mahogany gleaming in the sun. On the sternboards: Rosinante and Palm Beach, Fl. There was an even older woman on board, in bright orange galoshes and jacket, hosing down the deck of the boat. As she moved around to one side, bending over with a sponge to wipe woodwork, I saw a small sign leaning on the sill of one of the many windows of the raised cabin. At first glance I thought it read, BOAT FOR RENT, but it clearly became, ROOM FOR RENT. I hadn't seen the sign the evening before because I'd been down on the dock next to the boat. This sign was intended to be seen by patrons of the restaurant. I thought for a moment, and then somewhat awkwardly yelled, "Room for rent?"

She didn't hear me. Maybe the sign meant she had a room in her house for rent. Maybe there wasn't a room on the boat at all. I looked for more evidence that the boat was a live-aboard. Electrical lines leading from the dock plugged into an outlet at the base of the cabin. There were curtains behind all the windows and portholes. A small air conditioner, similar to one on a motor home, sat on the roof of the raised cabin. Weathered clothespins hung from a stretched line like dead sparrows.

"Room for rent?" I yelled again.

She rose up slowly from the deck and looked up at the railing of Memorial Bridge, thirty or forty feet above her.

"Over here," I yelled, and for some reason held my tea high in the air.

She looked at me, and cupped her ear while she walked with the running water hose. If it was possible, her skin was whiter than bone, so translucent it seemed glazed like ironstone. Then I realized her face seemed brilliant because her hair was like the soft blue glow of a television in a house across the street. I could make out the bones in her hands, even at that distance, and the blue veins tracing over them. She walked all the way around the cabin with her mouth open and turned off the water. Then she screamed, "What?" at me with such force the hot tea sloshed over onto my wrist.

"Room for rent?" I said again, gesturing toward the sign. "Do you still have a room for rent?"

"Yes, yes" she nodded, "There's the sign."

"I'm looking for a room."

"Well, come have a look," and she swept the sky with a hooked arm. I put the cup on the railing and walked down the ever-increasing steepness of a gangway in an ebbing tide. The dock itself rose and fell with the water, sliding on iron hoops around pilings, so the boats and the dock were always at the same level. The gangway rolled on rubber wheels farther out on the dock as the tide rose, lessening its angle, and back toward the restaurant as the tide ebbed, increasing its angle. There was a set of steps for boarding the boat and as I moved up them the old lady held out her hand. I took it as gingerly as I would a bird's wing, and put the sole of my shoe on a brass step plate that said, ELCO. I felt the boat move under my foot. It was hardly perceptible, but the boat gave when I stepped on it, as if it were alive. It made me tremble. I stepped down to the deck, looking for handholds. Still grasping my hand, she tapped the back of it three times with her index finger, and asked, "Honey, can you swim?"

"Yes" I said.

"Should have asked you before you stepped aboard. Life jackets are in the deck lockers forward and aft. Fire extinguishers in the main salon, engine room, galley and under the awning aft."

She was thin, her nose so fine it seemed brittle. Her skin wasn't loose but relaxed, as if it were thinking of something other than skin.

One of the intrusive and particularly rude habits I have acquired as a result of my work is my interest in teeth: overbite, underbite, caries, fillings, etc. This old lady was missing both of her upper canines, the dog teeth. These teeth are frequently missing in archaeological specimens and are often found in trash pits. They have only one long root. Her teeth would leave a telling bite. I thought if she were a vampire, she'd pulled the evidence.

She slid open the door that led into the many-windowed salon, and stepped over the high sill. "Bilge pump switch is here. I leave it on automatic." She pointed to a toggle next to the ship's wheel. The cabin, or salon, was the only living area above the boat's deck. A settee filled one corner, behind a table mounted on a brass pedestal at eating height. "OK, that's the safety drill. Room's below." I followed her down a flight of five mahogany steps past a bathroom and the door to the engine room, to a cabin that filled the rear third of the boat. There was a bunk on the port and the starboard, and a dresser at the stern with a large mirror above. A closet, or hanging locker, stood at the head of each bunk. The room was paneled in a rich red mahogany.

"You'd share this cabin with Chloe. She's at work now. You'd get this bunk, half this dresser, this locker, and use of the head of course, and have galley and salon privileges. The galley is forward of the salon, down the companionway, and my cabin is forward of the galley."

She demonstrated how a curtain could be drawn between the two bunks to provide some privacy.

"No smoking is allowed on board. The rent is fifty dollars a week. If you're prone to seasickness, this isn't the home for you. We do get some wake at times from the speedboats. If you're religious, that's fine, keep it to yourself. Do you drink?"

"No, not really" I said.

"That's a shame; I do. Do you use profanity?"

"A little."

"It's welcome on board," she said. "Sometimes it gets cold or hot. Do you complain a lot?"

"I've got a sweater."

"Do you have the two hundred a month?"

"Yes, I can manage that."

"Do you want to live here with Chloe and me? We're good people. Chloe's some fat and inclined to inquisitiveness, but she's all right. She's been here for three months and likes it fine. She pays two hundred a month too. I pay eight hundred a month to keep the boat here so it's a good deal for you. I wouldn't try to cheat you."

"Oh, no," I nodded. "It sounds fair." I could hear water gurgling around the hull and feel the bumping of the fenders between the boat and the dock.

"Men" she said, but didn't continue.

"What about them?" I asked.

"You're young," she said.

"Yes, but I'm not..."

She'd already turned, hadn't heard me. "Aren't they pleasant?" she said, and she turned back to me smiling. "Just try to keep it down past eleven, and remember: this is a boat. It rocks."

I wrote her a check for a month's rent on the table in the salon. Her name was Grace. As I stepped out onto the deck, going after my suitcases, I asked, "What happens when you go out on the boat?"

"Honey, Rosinante hasn't left this dock in four years, not since Sweet George passed away."

I paused. My eyes whispered the name.

"Sweet George was my husband," she said, and turned away again, stepping down the companionway into the galley. I dosed the door behind me and trembled again over the six inches of falling space between the boat and the dock. It was the next morning before I realized I'd written her a check, and by the time I offered Grace two hundred in cash for its return, she'd already deposited it. I didn't want to make anymore of it, afraid that she'd be suspicious. Instead I sent a change of address to my bank, asking them to keep this information confidential. I'd asked my mother in my note to pick up my mail but I knew there was a possibility that Richard and Mary were waiting for my postman to intercept what information they could.

I was, on that afternoon of moving aboard Rosinante, as happy as I'd been in two months. I'd hoped to find an apartment close enough to walk to the river, but hadn't even considered living on the water itself. I took quick short hops, interspersed with frantic searches for Piscataqua in my clothes, back to the Sheraton, packed my soft bags, threw them in the trunk of my car and raced back to Prescott Park as if I'd lose my place if I didn't hurry. Piscataqua barely had time to establish himself on the car's headrest before I was tugging his sprung claws free from the upholstery again. I shouldered all three of my bags and my knapsack but decided to leave my box of tools, trowels, brushes, and dental picks in the car.

The car itself would be my biggest storage problem, I thought. I'd have to find a place for it. I agonized over the quarters the meters would cost me and over the price a garage might charge for a permanent space. I still wasn't used to having money. Jonah and I had struggled from month to month to pay the mortgage on our old farmhouse and the twenty acres around it, not to mention car payments and the usual bills. Ironically his death left me financially comfortable. Jonah's health insurance had a twenty thousand dollar accidental death rider and insurance at the bank not only paid off both of the cars, but the remainder of our house mortgage. I had assets totaling over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, thirty thousand of that in cash, and didn't owe a penny to anyone. I just didn't have a husband.

For the moment I filled the parking meter and then thumped my way down the wooden sidewalk that led around to the Smarmy Snail's deck and on down the gangway to Rosinante. I tapped lightly on the pane of glass in the door. When no one came, I let myself in, almost tripping over the coaming. I found I couldn't go down the narrow companionway with all my bags and so pitched them below one at a time. I pulled back the curtain partitioning the cabin and set about filling my three drawers in the dresser, and hanging shirts and one dress in my locker. There were more drawers under my bunk that I put papers and notebooks in, and a bookshelf above my bunk, beneath a row of three windows, where I put field manuals and a few cherished texts. The bathroom, or head, had the smallest toilet I'd ever seen, a porcelain doll's throne with a mahogany seat. There was a tiny brass corner sink with four small shelves above where I put my soap and toothbrush behind low railings. I opened the door leading into the engine room but found only a huge diesel engine there. I was looking for a bathtub or a shower and was beginning to worry that I'd be walking to the local Y every day for the next month. I walked back across the eighteen-inch hallway to the head, closed the door and latched it, unbuttoned my pants to sit down, whereupon Piscataqua fell to the floor. I was sitting on the cool mahogany, watching Piscataqua's ears flit about when I glanced up and saw the shower head in the corner near the ceiling, pointed directly at me. This was the shower too. There was a drain set into the floor between my feet. To say the least I was surprised. I searched for the toilet paper and found it wedged under the rim of the sink, the only place in the room where it would avoid the spray from the showerhead. As I spread my legs to wipe, I bumped one knee into the sink drain and the other into the inward curve of the boat's hull. There was hardly enough room to pee in there, much less turn around while showering. It didn't take me long to appreciate the efficiency with which space is used on a yacht. When I stood up and turned around I had to hold my arms at my side like a tin windup soldier. There was no obvious flush handle on the tank, because there was no tank. A long brass arm protruded from the toilet's base though, with a shiny knob at its end that looked like it had been rubbed by human hands for good luck. I pumped on this, slowly once and then more quickly as I felt the suction, and this seemed to do the job. The bowl emptied and refilled. It would be hard to explain the satisfaction this gave me.

I wanted to explore the rest of the boat so I left the kitty in the head and dosed the door. The engine room was large but with a low ceiling since it was directly beneath the raised salon. There were electric lines stapled to the walls, a bank of huge batteries, a generator in one corner, a tool chest in another. The center of the room was occupied by the engine itself, a gray brooding behemoth with a shaft leading out toward the stern of the boat. And although I could tell the engine was pristine because there was no rust or oil or grime of any sort, I could also see that it probably hadn't been used in years. There was a thick coat of dust on its upper surfaces and limp cobwebs swung from the engine to the floor. The belts were cracked and dry.

The floor, or sole, as Grace corrected me later, of the salon was covered with hooked rugs: sirens on a rock, a forested island, a sailing ship, all from the thirties and forties. Blue vinyl covered the corner settee. The curtains above were also blue, but lighter, faded and stained, a watercolor sky. The windows themselves slid in tracks; every other one could be opened. On the left side of the salon hung a mahogany ship's wheel about two feet in diameter with a big brass compass and other instruments between it and the flat, vertical windshield. Two control levers were clearly marked FORWARD/REVERSE and THROTTLE. It seemed simple enough. The only things that looked complicated were three modern instruments mounted on the ceiling over the compass. One was clearly something like a CB radio, another had the logo SEALORAN and the third was a radar. What looked like the original brass key, worn smooth but dull from disuse, was in the ignition. I wanted to run my hands over everything here to come in contact with some of the experience. It was such a tiny room to contain so much possibility. I felt it was coming and going at the same moment that it had arrived.

Stairs on the right front of the salon led down in an L turn to the galley, which surprised me because it was completely modern. The sink was almost full-size; a microwave hung from an upper cabinet; a three-burner gas stove with oven and a small but modern refrigerator sat below a tile counter. All of the upper cabinets were fronted with stained glass.

As I poked through the cans in a lower cabinet, and just as I spotted three large bars of chocolate, I heard a muffled something, a squelched...something, a snore or a gurgle, but surely a sound made by a living creature other than me. I thought I was the only one on the boat. Grace hadn't come to my knock and I hadn't heard a sound till that moment. I stood up and stepped forward. Another head to starboard and a large locker to port. There was a door between this area and Grace's ca