OMEGA–4

THE TRUTH IS THAT AFTER THE STRAIN OF ALL THIS ICY TRACTION, I WAS now handling the car with such unholy ease I had to wonder at the felicity of my condition. The road was a riverbed to my thoughts, and carried me down the dark highway between Bucksport and Ellsworth. As I passed through Sears, the houses looked as white under my headlights as the bones of Indians long dead.

On I went past shuttered Doughnut Dairy Queens and the last outpost of McDonald’s. The shopping mall at Ellsworth went by my windshield like light from a shattered glass, the oil-soak of the empty parking lot gleaming in new steams and mists. At twelve miles an hour I traversed the short bridge from Tremont to the island of Mount Desert and entered a cloud again. Once more, I could not see past the silver droplets of fog that danced before me in the car beams. I would have to crawl the last ten miles along the road that goes by Prettymarsh where the centerline is worn away.

The western half of Mount Desert does not offer such fine towns as Northeast Harbor, Bar Harbor, or Seal Harbor; our western half is not notable. In daylight, the road winds through miles of second-growth trees and thicket; our nearby mountains are wooded and offer few lookouts. Our marshes and ponds are likely to be covered with acid-yellow algae. Our villages—Bass Harbor, Seal Cove—are hardworking, the hamlets are poor. Often, no more than four or five trailers, two or three frame houses, and a cinder-block post office will squat by the highway. The routes are not often favored by a sign.

All the same, knowing every curve, I was ready for the unmarked right turn onto the two-mile dirt road that leads to the wharf where our dinghy is stowed. On I drove, past lobstermen’s front yards full of old tires and rusted iron of every description. Everyone’s lights were out. I passed a house I never liked—it consisted of two trailers connected by a shed. A father, Gilley Butler—the man who brought the envelope to Kittredge earlier today—and his son, Wilbur Butler, lived on the premises with their mates, whelps, and assorted oafs, cold categories of description, but the Butlers would have been hung as poachers three centuries ago in England, and put in stocks right here. Now, I will not say more than that the father had had a series of savage arguments with my father, and the son, Wilbur, had done as well with Hugh Montague. In recent years, Wilbur had been a familiar to the police and the courts—he had belted an old woman around pretty badly when she discovered him robbing her trailer. I did not even know as I passed whether Wilbur was still in the state penitentiary. I had heard rumors at the post office that he would soon be free, and I did not enjoy the possibility. On those separate occasions when his vehicle used to meet mine on our mutual dirt road, he always looked at me with a squint of such quintessential hostility that I also spent an hour in the Bar Harbor Library on the genealogy of the Butlers. They were an old Mount Desert family, paupers and near-paupers for fifteen generations, and half of the children were dubiously christened. So I could not satisfy the suspicion that would connect them by illegitimate blood to Augustus Farr, but I did find, at least, the diary of Damon Butler, first mate of Farr’s crew, the one who wrote of Farr’s “practize of piracie.”

In any event, each time I drove by those two trailers linked by their slatternly shed, I was prepared for unpleasantness. The pall of old drunken nights and heavy-handed yard fights with crotch-shots, stomping boots, old blood, and old puke, hovered around the broken lobster pots. Beer cans empty as clamshells abounded.

It was two long miles to reach the wharf. Our back roads are rutted. Along my camp track are furlongs of bramble by either ditch, and you pass many a feverish profusion of weeds that have sprouted over old battle trenches—in this case, the foundations dug for cheap homes whose walls never went up. The miasma of insufficient funds pervades the space. Bottle-green horseflies as large as bumblebees harass you in summer, and loathsome winged slugs imperil your hair should you jog. Through March, if the snow melts, the ground looks like a Bowery beggar sleeping it off. A heavy thaw introduces you to the mud of World War I. There were times when I could not traverse the two miles from the highway to the wharf without winching our jeep forward a hundred feet of cable at a time, but tonight the mud was still crusted, the ice, mixed with gravel, gave a base, and I went down that deserted route past small and desolate barrens. In one raw clearing, the skeleton of an old boat trailer lay rusted in two. Even in the dark, I knew these sights. I knew them well, and was glad to reach the last delta of lanes and tracks that went off to different camps on the backshore.

At our wharf, I pulled into the car shed, but before I even shut my motor I could hear the bay water taking its churn through the channel. The roar was louder than it had ever been. I could have been listening to the ongoing growl of an earthquake. It was then I took off my topcoat and left it in the car. It would hardly be automatic to row the dinghy across the channel tonight.

I am used to living with fear, I suffer such occupational stresses the way a good businessman worries about cash flow and his breaches of government regulations, his lawsuits, his health, and where he should be buried. No, it is worse for me. I live with a prime fear. My specific professional assignment invariably becomes my first fear. There is also, however, what Harlot used to call Queen-for-a-Day. It is the old heart-in-throat on the day of battle.

I was now full of Queen-for-a-Day. I did not wish to row from the backside of Mount Desert over to Doane’s—only a couple of hundred feet, as I have stated, but how often had the water looked this bad? The wharf planks shook. Out there was no chop, but a horripilative race. If the dinghy overturned, I might not survive for a minute in such freezing water. Could I swim even twenty yards before my lungs locked? So, I debated whether to retrace my route to the state road and drive on to Southwest Harbor, where I could find a motel for the night. The thought was unsatisfactory, but the dinghy might be worse.

I did not debate it long. Since I wished to see Kittredge now, I had to try the channel. Bless Harlot. If I made it, I’d feel a lot better. And if I never got to shore at all, well, cleanse my soul of Chloe, I might be absolved between the oarlock and the ocean ground.

Into our dinghy I got. We have several that are aged, wooden, leaky, and as seaworthy as an old sailor, but stowed on the wharf right now was our newest, a fiberglass with walnut seats and shiny fittings. While it had its vices, including the tendency of all plastic shells to bob like a bubblehead, it reacted quickly to the oars. Sometimes you need a handsome fool to take you through a storm.

I slid the boat off the wharf into the quieter churn on the lee side, leaped in myself to face the bow, slammed oars into locks, and, in a flurry, set out to cross the seventy yards of the channel without careening more than three hundred yards downstream. More than that, and Doane Island would be lost, the dinghy loose in the reaches of Blue Hill Bay, an impossible prospect on this night.

Let me say it was the purest example of rowing with one oar, blade to port, that I had ever tried. The starboard oar was hardly more than an outrigger. I bucked up and down like a Yankee on a Houston rodeo machine. A full splat of ice water, heavy as the tail of a ten-pound fish, smacked me across the face in the middle of a stroke. I kept rowing with my left arm. One misjudged pull and we’d be running downstream through the middle of the channel. The water came at me in a froth, slamming its imprecations against that stupid plastic shell. Speak of getting wet—I was drenched. I had a first premonition of drowning. The bow slammed down into a trough and up a wall of water, which shattered on my face, gorged my throat. I coughed, I rowed, I would have prayed but I heard a fisherman singing in Greek. It was no Greek I knew. More fearsome than Gaelic were the sounds. They turned my head. They twisted the bow. For the second time this night, I went into a spin and lost my oars, which is to say, for one stroke I lost all sense of which blade to use. I had reversed my inner switches—some fatal flaw within!—and went hurtling downstream, hurtling is the word, stern first downstream, and shipping water. Mad strokes with the starboard oar, both oars, port oar again—I came out of the spin. I was within ten yards of the shore of Doane, and had pushed through the channel. I was now between two large offshore rocks.

In that placid pool I rested. I had five more yards of water to cross, and but thirty yards left to me of the island of Doane. I was freezing and my lungs burned like a grass fire, but it would take one more effort. Sitting between the rocks, backing on the oars to keep position, how I heard the wind! I was coming back to Kittredge, to my good grass widow Kittredge, and in my mind I saw her features twist. A fury was on her face. “Go away, Harry,” said the wind.

I laid hands on the oars. “Doane is where I am supposed to be tonight,” I told myself with all the simplicity (and unaccountable confusion) one brings to a ticket window when purchasing a long-arranged journey, and pushed off, took five good strokes with the port oar and two with both before the bow banged into a dark ledge, caromed off, and lifted onto a strand of stone and pebble. The sound of those small rocks grinding under the weight of the bow was as satisfying to my ears as the crunch of a bone for a dog. I was on my land. The gamble had been eminent and worthwhile. I felt no less bombarded than the Prince of Wales after a night in World War I trenches, and felt no less a prince. I was also heaving, trembling, and soaked to the bone.

I pulled the boat out, dragged it up beyond the last fretwork of seaweed into the tall grass at the southern point of Doane’s. Given the wind, I not only turned the dinghy over, but cached the oars beneath and tied the painter to a tree. Then I staggered up Long Doane, the main trail on the island, all of four hundred yards long, in the direction of the Keep, which sat in the waist looking westward across Blue Hill Bay.

If the barrens on the other side of the channel are blighted and marsh-ridden, Doane has beauty. Our small forest is favored with the deep velvet of many a mossy cave. Dark green is our prevailing color in spring, summer, and fall; our trails are red needle. Stands of spruce tower over hackmatack while pitch pines bend to the solicitations of the wind. They pray to the seas with one limb and raise a sword with the other. They undulate to the flight of gulls and shake with the passage of the geese. They stand with the mist on the edge of shore.

Considering that I had come so near to foundering in the dark, this must seem a calm description of our island by day, but then, it is the silences of an island that prevail. I had no more than to step ashore and my senses began to quiet. I could see the island as it would appear to me in daylight, and knew each green chamber I approached, each porch of ledge I passed along the shore. The island was like a house. We felt as if we inhabited a dwelling within a dwelling. I am near to exaggeration, I know, but the Keep with no one but Kittredge and myself in winter would have been cavernously large if not for Doane’s surrounding embrace. To inhabit a circle within a circle is to enter a spell.

What do I attempt to say? In our era of heartless condominiums, Kittredge and I still lived like a bankrupt count and countess. As real estate, the Keep was much too vast for two. Onto the first building, a stone farmhouse built as a fort for Farr, my great-great-grandfather, Doane Hadlock Hubbard, attached a barn. Other generations added plumbing and partitions. The barn served as a camp for family overflow in summer, and then there was the year when my mother brought her lavish taste to the property and managed to dragoon my father into hiring an architect to design us a long, blonde-wood, much-glassed living room that cantilevered out from the second floor to arch over Blue Hill Bay. When finished, we looked across the water to the west and could glimpse other islands rising luminous in the dawn or slipping away like ships down the horizon into the nocturnal mist; we saw tropical sunsets in Maine. This modern room was so reminiscent of a small first-class lounge on a well-appointed ocean liner that we came to call it the Cunard.

I was then returning to a house whose parts were so separately named as the Cunard, the Camp, the Vault, and the Keep (which last title denoted the original farmhouse, but, to preserve confusion, was employed equally for the whole). We dwelt in the Old Keep—what else could one title it?—by winter, and inhabited everything but the Vault in summer when Kittredge’s cousins arrived and their children, as well as my cousins and their wives with their children. Then the rites continued as before. In boyhood, I used to spend two weeks each summer with my father on Doane. One trial of passage in adolescence had been to muster enough family madness to jump off the balcony of the Cunard into the waters of Blue Hill Bay below. That was a time-consuming plunge of thirty-plus feet which gave you ample measure of the eternal distance down. It took forever to reach the water (otherwise equal to a second and a half ). It was pure happiness, however, to come bubbling up to the ice-cold surface again. What virtue hummed in your blood as you swam to shore! My cousins and I were heroes to ourselves on the memorable first day when we could break out of terror and take the leap.

That had now become the first feat of summer for another generation of children. How full of sound was the house as they came racing up the stairs for one more go! In winter, however, while Kittredge and I might occasionally use the fireplace in the Cunard and work on warm days by the afternoon light that came through its full windows, we kept for the most part to the rooms of the Old Keep, just the two of us, living in such calm and silence that each chamber became steeped in its own mood and could not have been more particular if it had had a signature. Sometimes I felt as if I knew my rooms in the way a farmer knows his livestock. But for fear that few would understand, I might suggest that I spoke to them, and they replied to me. Leave it at such. I make the point only to insist, for those who would believe us, that Kittredge and I were not lonely.

I, however, was still outside, and aware suddenly of how close I was to frostbite. The heat of rowing ashore, the glow of navigating Long Doane in the dark, was gone. Abruptly, I was running. I had plunged with no warning from inner warmth to spasms of cold, and I came up to the main door of the Keep with such stiff hands, I could hardly mate the key to the lock.

Once inside, I looked about for Kittredge, but no one answered my call. I could not believe that she was sleeping in our bedroom instead of waiting up for my arrival. As disappointed as a boy who is refused a dance, I did not climb the stairs but went wandering down the hall to a mud room off the pantry. There, I stripped my wet gray flannel suit, and put on an old shirt and gardening pants with a faint but unmistakable whiff of sweat and fertilizer, a mixed odor I would hardly applaud, but maybe I was full of the need to pay wages for the pleasure taken tonight. Or did I not wish to see Kittredge in the clothes I wore while with Chloe?

I put down a tot of Bushmills Irish, which required taking three steps from the mud room to the private stores in the pantry, and my shivering eased. I threw in another shot, and began to feel like a workable manifest of myself. Famous words, uttered by legions of Americans, came to my lips: Let’s get it over with.

The fortitude of the whiskey was watered by the stairs. The hall began to seem as long as my childhood memory of it. The door to our bedroom was closed. I tried the knob softly. The door was locked. A bolt went through my heart equal to that moment when the accused is found guilty in court. I rattled the knob. “Kittredge,” I cried aloud.

I heard a rustle on the other side. Or did I merely suppose I had? My ears were confused by the wind. It was pounding and blathering on the storm windows outside, chattering, chewing like birds on a corpse. “Kittredge, for God’s sake,” I called out and had an image, immediate and inerasable, of Kittredge in pale crimson bleeding waters. The bathtub, where I had found her once, was still the same tub.

I was ready then to break the door, but her voice spoke at that moment. I heard clear articulated vowels that might come from a neat old lady who is altogether dotty. She sounded exactly like her mother.

“Oh, Harry,” she said, “do wait a minute. Oh, dear man, don’t come in. Not yet.”

If my body had suffered chills tonight, now my mind suffered the cold. Something was certainly wrong.

“Darling,” she said, “I just heard frightful news. I can hardly tell you.” Was it the wind? I did not know whether it was the wind. There seemed some lament in the air.

“Harry,” said Kittredge through the door, “Hugh is dead. They killed him, I fear. Gobby is dead.”