Stern Men

2

NINE YEARS passed.

Ruth Thomas grew into a teenager, and she was sent away to a private school for girls, located in the far-off state of Delaware. She was a good student but not the firecracker she should have been, with her brains. She worked exactly as hard as it took for her to get adequate grades, and not one bit harder. She resented having been sent away to school, although clearly something had to be done with her. At that moment in the century, in the 1970s, Fort Niles Island educated its children only through the age of thirteen. For most of the boys (future lobstermen, that is), this was plenty. For the others-bright girls and boys with bigger ambitions-special arrangements had to be made. Generally, this meant they were sent to the mainland to live with families in Rockland and attend public high school there. They came back to the island only on long vacations or over the summer. Their dads checked up on them during trips to Rockland, when it was time to sell the lobster catch.

This was the system that Ruth Thomas would have preferred. Attending high school in Rockland was the normal path, and it was what she’d expected. But an exception was made for Ruth. An expensive exception. A private education was arranged for her, far away from home. The idea, according to Ruth’s mother, who was now living in Concord, New Hampshire, was to expose the girl to something other than lobster fishermen, alcoholism, ignorance, and cold weather. Ruth’s father sullenly and silently gave his permission, so Ruth had no choice. She went to the school, but she made her protest known. She read the books, learned the math, ignored the other girls, and got it over with. Every summer, she returned to the island. Her mother suggested other summer activities, such as going to camp or traveling or finding an interesting job, but Ruth refused with a finality that left no room for negotiation.

It was Ruth Thomas’s firm position that she belonged nowhere but on Fort Niles Island. This was the position she took with her mother: she was truly happy only on Fort Niles; Fort Niles was in her blood and soul; and the only people who understood her were the residents of Fort Niles Island. None of this, it must be said, was entirely true.

It was important to Ruth in principle that she feel happy on Fort Niles, although, for the most part, she was pretty bored there. She missed the island when she was away from it, but when she returned, she immediately found herself at a loss for diversion. She made a point of taking a long walk around the shoreline the minute she came home (“I’ve been thinking about this all year!” she would say), but the walk took only a few hours, and what did she think about on that walk? Not much. There was a seagull; there was a seal; there was another seagull. The scenery was as familiar to her as her bedroom ceiling. She took books down to the shore, claiming that she loved to read near the pounding surf, but the sad fact is that many places on this Earth offer better reading environments than wet, barnacle-covered rocks. When Ruth was away from Fort Niles, the island became endowed with the characteristics of a distant paradise, but when she returned to it, she found her home cold and damp and windy and uncomfortable.

Still, whenever she was on Fort Niles, Ruth wrote letters to her mother, saying, “Finally I can breathe again!”

More than anything, Ruth’s passion for Fort Niles was an expression of protest. It was her resistance against those who would send her away, supposedly for her own good. Ruth would have much preferred to determine what was good for her. She had great confidence that she knew herself best and that, given free rein, would have made more correct choices. She certainly wouldn’t have elected to send herself to an elite private school hundreds of miles away, where girls were concerned primarily with the care of their skin and horses. No horses for Ruth, thank you. She was not that kind of girl. She was more rugged. It was boats that Ruth loved, or so she constantly said. It was Fort Niles Island that Ruth loved. It was fishing that Ruth loved.

In truth, Ruth had spent time working with her father on his lobster boat, and it had never been a terrific experience. She was strong enough to do the work, but the monotony killed her. Working as a sternman meant standing in the back of the boat, hauling up traps, picking out lobsters, baiting traps and shoving them back in the water, and hauling up more traps. And more traps and more traps. It meant getting up before dawn and eating sandwiches for breakfast and lunch. It meant seeing the same scenery again and again, day after day, and rarely venturing more than two miles from shore. It meant spending hour upon hour alone with her father on a small boat, where the two of them never seemed to get along.

There were too many things for them to argue about. Stupid things. Ruth’s father used to eat his sandwich and throw the lunch bag right in the ocean, and that would drive Ruth crazy. He would throw his soda can in after it. She’d yell at him for this, and he’d sulk, and the rest of the trip would be tense and silent. Or he might get fed up and spend the whole trip scolding and berating her. She didn’t work fast enough; she didn’t handle the lobsters carefully enough; she was going to step in that pile of rope one of these days and get pulled overboard and drown if she didn’t pay closer attention. That kind of thing.

On one of their early trips, Ruth warned her father about a barrel drifting up on his “port side,” and he laughed in her face.

“Port side?” he said. “This isn’t the Navy, Ruth. You don’t need to worry about port and starboard. The only direction you need to worry about is staying out of my way.”

Ruth seemed to get on his nerves even when she wasn’t trying to, although sometimes she did so on purpose, just to pass the time. One wet summer day, for instance, they pulled up string after string of traps and found no lobsters. Ruth’s father got more and more agitated. He was catching nothing but seaweed, crabs, and urchins. Eight or nine strings later, however, Ruth pulled a good-sized male lobster out of a trap.

“Dad, what’s this?” she asked innocently, holding up the lobster. “I’ve never seen one of these before. Maybe we can take it into town and sell it to somebody.”

“That’s not funny,” her father said, although Ruth herself thought it was pretty good.

The boat stank. It was cold even in the summer. In bad weather, the boat deck jumped and popped, and Ruth’s legs ached from the strain of keeping her balance. It was a small boat and had barely any shelter. She had to pee in a bucket and empty it overboard. Her hands were always freezing, and her father would yell if she took a break to warm her hands around the hot exhaust pipe. He never worked with gloves, he said, even in December. Why couldn’t she handle the cold in the middle of July?

Yet when Ruth’s mother asked Ruth what she wanted to do with her summer, Ruth invariably replied that she wanted to work on a lobster boat.

“I want to work with my dad,” Ruth said. “I’m really only happy out on the water.”

As for her relations with the other islanders, she may not have been as perfectly understood by them as she told her mother. She loved Mrs. Pommeroy. She loved the Addams brothers, and they loved her. But because of her long spells in Delaware getting educated, she was pretty much forgotten by everyone else, or, worse, disowned. She was no longer like them. Truth to tell, she’d never been all that much like them in the first place. She’d always been an inward-looking child, not, say, like the Pommeroy boys, who screamed and fought and made perfect sense to everyone. And now that Ruth passed most of her time someplace very far off, she talked differently. She read an awful lot of books. And, to many of her neighbors, she seemed stuck up.

Ruth graduated from boarding school in late May of 1976. She had no plans for the future except to return to Fort Niles, where she so obviously belonged. She made no move to attend college. She never even looked at the college brochures scattered around her school, never responded to the advice of her teachers, never gave any notice to the shy hints of her mother.

In that May of 1976, Ruth Thomas turned eighteen. She was five feet six inches tall. She had shiny hair that was almost black, and it came to her shoulders; she wore it in a ponytail every day. Her hair was so thick, she could sew a button on a coat with it. Her face was roundish, her eyes were wide apart, and she had an inoffensive nose and long, pretty eyelashes. Her skin was darker than anyone else’s on Fort Niles, and she tanned to a smooth, even brown. She was muscular and a little heavy for her height. She had a bigger rear end than she wanted, but she didn’t fuss about it too much, because the last thing she wanted to sound like was those girls at school in Delaware who fussed over their figures annoyingly, uninterruptedly, odiously. She was a heavy sleeper. She was independent. She was sarcastic.

When Ruth returned to Fort Niles at the independent, sarcastic age of eighteen, she did so in her father’s lobster boat. He picked her up at the bus station in the rotten truck he kept parked down by the ferry landing, the truck he used for his business and shopping whenever he came to town, which was approximately every two weeks. He picked Ruth up, accepted a slightly ironic kiss from her, and immediately announced that he was dropping her off at the grocery store to pick up supplies while he had a goddamn talk with his goddamn wholesaler, the miserable bastard. (“You know what we need out there,” he said. “Just spend fifty bucks.”) Then he told Ruth the reasons that his goddamn wholesaler was a miserable bastard, all of which she had heard before in careful detail. She drifted out of the conversation, such as it was, and considered how odd it was that her father, who had not seen her in several months, did not think to ask about her graduation ceremony. Not that she cared. But it was odd.

The boat ride back to Fort Niles took more than four hours, during which Ruth and her father did not converse much, because the boat was loud and because she had to slip around in the stern to make sure that the boxes of groceries didn’t tip over or get wet. She thought about her plans for the summer. She had no plans for the summer. While loading the boat, her father had informed her that he’d hired a sternman for the season-Robin Pommeroy, of all people. Ruth’s father had no work for his daughter. Although she griped at him for leaving her out, she was secretly pleased not to be working for him again. She would have acted as his sternman strictly on principle, had he asked, but she would have been miserable out there. So it was a relief. Still, it meant she had nothing to do with her time. She was not sufficiently confident of her abilities as a sternman to approach any other fisherman and ask for a job, even if she had really, really wanted one, which she really, really did not. Besides, as her father had also informed her, everyone on Fort Niles already had help. All the partnerships had been negotiated. Weeks before Ruth showed up, every old man on Fort Niles had found a young man to do the muscle work in the back of the boat.

“Maybe you can pick up if other kids get sick or fired,” her father shouted to her suddenly, midway through the journey back to Fort Niles.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” Ruth shouted back.

She was already thinking ahead to the next three months and-who was she kidding?-to the rest of her life, which had absolutely no shape to it. Good God! she thought. She was facing backward, sitting on a box of canned goods. Rockland was long since out of sight on this misty day, and the other islands, inhabited or not, that they passed so slowly and so loudly looked as small and brown and wet as lumps of shit. Or so Ruth thought. She wondered whether she could get another job on Fort Niles, although the idea of a job on Fort Niles that didn’t involve lobstering was something of a joke. Ha-ha.

What the hell am I going to do with my time? Ruth thought. She felt an awful and familiar sense of boredom rise within her as the boat chugged and bumped over the cold Atlantic bay. As far as she could see, there was nothing for her to do, and she knew exactly what that meant. Nothing to do meant hanging around with the few other islanders who had nothing to do. Ruth could see it coming. She was going to spend her summer hanging around with Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon Addams. She could see it coming clearly. It wasn’t so bad, she told herself. Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon were her friends; she was fond of them. They’d have lots to talk about. They’d ask her all about her graduation ceremony. It wouldn’t be so boring, really.

But the uneasy, unpleasant sense of approaching boredom remained in Ruth’s belly, like seasickness. Finally she drove the boredom-already!-down by composing in her mind a letter to her mother. She would write it that night, in her bedroom. The letter would begin, “Dear Mom: As soon as I stepped back onto Fort Niles, all the tension drained out of my body and I took the first deep breaths I have taken in months and months. The air smelled like hope!”

That’s exactly what she would say. Ruth decided this on her father’s lobster boat precisely two hours before Fort Niles was even in sight, and she spent the rest of the trip mentally composing the letter, which was most poetic. The exercise cheered her up a good deal.

Senator Simon Addams was seventy-three years old that summer, and he had a special project going. It was an ambitious and eccentric project. He was going to search for an elephant’s tusk that, he believed, was buried in the mudflats at Potter Beach. The Senator thought there might even be two tusks buried out there, though he’d announced that he would be happy to find just one.

Senator Simon’s conviction that 138 years of seawater would not have impaired such strong material as pure ivory provided him with the necessary confidence for his search. He knew the tusks must be somewhere. They may have been separated from their skeleton and from each other, but they would not have decomposed. They could not have dissolved. They were either buried in the sand far out at sea or they had washed up on a beach. And the Senator believed they may well have found their way to Fort Niles Island. Those rare elephant tusks may have been swept by currents-as wreckage had been swept for centuries-right up on Potter Beach. Why not?

The tusks the Senator sought were from an elephant that had been a passenger aboard the 400-ton steamboat Clarice Monroe, a vessel that went down right outside Worthy Channel in late October of 1838. It was a famous event at the time. The steamer, a wooden side-wheeler, caught fire just after midnight, during a sudden snowstorm. The fire itself may have been caused by so simple a mishap as a tipped lamp, but the storm winds caught and spread it before it could be contained, and the deck of the steamer was quickly blanketed in flame.

The captain of the Clarice Monroe was a drinker. The fire was almost certainly not his fault, but it was his undoing. He panicked shamefully. Without waking the passengers or crew, he ordered the one sailor on watch to lower a single lifeboat, in which he, his wife, and the young sailor rowed away. The captain left the doomed Clarice Monroe, his passengers, and his cargo to burn. The three survivors in the rowboat became lost in the storm, rowed for a full day, lost the power to row any further, and drifted for one day more. When they were picked up by a merchant marine vessel, the captain was dead of exposure, his wife had lost her fingers, feet, and ears to frostbite, and the young sailor had completely lost his mind.

Without her captain, the Clarice Monroe, still burning, had drifted against the rocks off Fort Niles Island, where she broke up among the waves. There were no survivors among the ninety-seven passengers. Many of the corpses drifted over to Potter Beach, piling up in the brine and mud alongside the charred and battered wooden wreckage of the steamboat. The men of Fort Niles gathered the corpses, wrapped them in burlap, and stored them in the icehouse. Some were identified by family members who came to Fort Niles throughout the month of October on ferry boats to collect their brothers and wives and mothers and children. Those unfortunates who were not claimed were buried in the Fort Niles cemetery, under small granite markers inscribed, simply, DROWNED.

But the steamboat had lost other cargo.

The Clarice Monroe had been transporting, from New Brunswick down to Boston, a small circus made up of several remarkable items: six white show horses, several trick monkeys, a camel, a trained bear, a pack of performing dogs, a cage of tropical birds, and an African elephant. After the ship broke up, the circus horses tried to swim through the snowstorm. Three drowned, and the other three reached the shores of Fort Niles Island. When the weather cleared the next morning, everyone on the island turned out to see the three magnificent white mares gingerly picking their way across the snowy boulders.

None of the other animals made it. The young sailor from the Clarice Monroe, found in the rowboat with his dead captain and the captain’s devastated wife, driven to delirium by exposure to the storm, said upon his rescue-insisted!-that he had seen the elephant jump over the railing of the burning wreck and swim strongly through the waves, its tusks and trunk lifted high above the churning, icy water. He swore he had seen the elephant swimming through the salty snow as he himself rowed away from the wreck. He saw the elephant swim and swim and then, sounding one last mighty trumpet, sink beneath the waves.

The sailor, as noted, was out of his mind at the time of his rescue, but there were those who believed his story. Senator Simon Addams had always believed it. He’d heard the story from his earliest childhood and had been fascinated by it. And it was the tusks of that circus elephant which the Senator now sought to recover, 138 years later, in the spring of 1976.

He wanted to put at least one tusk on display at the Fort Niles Museum of Natural History. In 1976, the Fort Niles Museum of Natural History did not exist, but the Senator was working on it. He’d been collecting artifacts and specimens for the museum for years, storing them in his basement. The whole idea was his. He had no backers, and he was the sole curator. He believed a tusk would make a most impressive centerpiece to his collection.

The Senator, obviously, couldn’t search for the tusks himself. He was a sturdy old man, but he was in no condition to dig around in the mud all day. Even if he were younger, he would not have had the courage to wade out into the loose soup of seawater and shifting mudflats that extended from Potter Beach. He was much too afraid of the water. So he had taken on an assistant, Webster Pommeroy.

Webster Pommeroy, who was twenty-three that summer, had nothing else to do anyway. Every day, the Senator and Webster would head down to Potter Beach, where Webster would look for the elephant’s tusks. It was a perfect task for Webster Pommeroy, because Webster Pommeroy was not capable of doing anything else. His meekness and seasickness prevented his becoming a lobsterman or a sternman, but his problems went deeper than that. Something was wrong with Webster Pommeroy. Everyone saw it. Something had happened to Webster the day he saw his father’s corpse-eyeless and puffy-sprawled out on the Fort Niles dock. Webster Pommeroy, at that moment, broke; fell to bits. He stopped growing, stopped developing, nearly stopped speaking. He turned into a twitchy and nervous and deeply troubled local tragedy. At twenty-three, he was as slim and small as he’d been at fourteen. He seemed to be forever cast in a boy’s frame. He seemed to be forever trapped in that moment of recognizing his dead father.

Senator Simon Addams had a sincere concern for Webster Pommeroy. He wanted to help the boy. The boy broke the Senator’s heart. He felt the boy needed a vocation. It took the Senator several years to discover Webster’s worth, though, because it was not immediately clear what, if anything, Webster Pommeroy could do. The Senator’s only idea was to enlist the young man in his project for the Museum of Natural History.

The Senator initially sent Webster to the homes of neighbors on Fort Niles, requesting that they donate to the museum any interesting artifacts or antiques, but Webster was a shy and miserable failure at the task. He would knock on a door, but when the neighbor opened it, he was likely to stand there, mute, nervously tapping his feet. Every local housewife was disturbed by his behavior. Webster Pommeroy, standing on the doorstep, looking as if he was about to cry, was not a born solicitor.

The Senator next tried to enlist Webster in building a holding shed in the Addamses’ back yard to house the Senator’s growing collection of items suitable for the museum. But Webster, while conscientious, was not a natural carpenter. He was neither strong nor handy. His tremors made him useless in the construction work. Worse than useless, indeed. He was a danger to himself and others, because he was always dropping saws and drills, always hammering his fingers. So the Senator took Webster off the building detail.

Other tasks the Senator created were similarly unsuitable for Webster. It was beginning to look as though Webster could do nothing. It took nearly nine years for the Senator to discover what Webster was good at.

It was mud.

Down at Potter Beach was a veritable pasture of mud, revealed fully only at low tide. During the lowest tides, it was more than ten acres of mud, wide and flat and smelling of rancid blood. Men had periodically dug clams in this mud, and they frequently turned up hidden treasures-ancient boat parts, wooden buoys, lost boots, odd bones, bronze spoons, and extinct iron tools. The muddy cove apparently was a natural magnet for lost objects, and so it was that the Senator conceived the idea of searching the flats for the elephant’s tusks. Why would they not be there? Where else would they be?

He asked Webster whether he was interested in wading through the mud, like a clam digger, seeking artifacts in a systematic manner. Could Webster examine the shallower areas of the Potter Beach mudflats, perhaps, wearing high boots? Would that distress Webster too greatly? Webster Pommeroy shrugged. He didn’t seem distressed. And so it was that Webster Pommeroy began his career of searching the mudflats. And he was brilliant at it.

As it turned out, Webster Pommeroy could move through any mud. He could negotiate mud that was nearly up to his chest. Webster Pommeroy could move through mud like a vessel made for the task, and he found marvelous treasures-a wristwatch, a shark’s tooth, a whale’s skull, a complete wheelbarrow. Day after day, the Senator would sit on the dirty rocks by the shore and watch Webster’s progress. He watched Webster search through the mud every day of the summer of 1975.

And when Ruth Thomas came home from boarding school in late May of 1976, the Senator and Webster were at it again. With nothing else to do, with no work and no friends of her age, Ruth Thomas developed the hobby of walking down to the Potter Beach mudflats every morning to watch Webster Pommeroy scour the mud. She would sit with Senator Simon Addams on the beach for hours at a time, watching. At the end of each day, the three would walk back to town together.

They made a strange threesome-the Senator and Ruth and Webster. Webster was a strange one in any company. Senator Simon Addams, an unusually large man, had a misshapen head; it looked as if it had been kicked in at one time and had healed poorly. He teased himself about his odd fat nose. (“I have nothing to do with the shape of my nose,” he liked to say. “It was a birthday present.”) And he frequently wrung his great doughy hands. He had a strong body but was subject to severe bouts of fear; he called himself a champion coward. He often looked as if he was afraid someone was about to come around the corner and smack him. This was quite the opposite of Ruth Thomas, who often looked as if she was about to smack the next person who came around the corner.

Sometimes, as Ruth sat on the beach, looking at huge Senator Simon and tiny Webster Pommeroy, she wondered how she had become involved with these two weak, weird men. How had they become her good friends? What would the girls back in Delaware think if they knew of this little gang? She was not embarrassed by the Senator and Webster, she assured herself. Whom would she be embarrassed around, all the way out there on Fort Niles Island? But those two were odd ones, and anyone from off the island who might have caught a glimpse of the threesome would have thought Ruth odd, too.

Still, she had to admit, it was fascinating to watch Webster crawl around in the mud, looking for a tusk. Ruth had not a shred of faith that Webster would find an elephant’s tusk, but it was entertaining to watch him work. It was really something to see.

“That’s dangerous, what Webster’s doing out there,” the Senator would say to Ruth as they watched Webster head deeper and deeper into the mud.

It was indeed dangerous, but the Senator had no intention of interfering, even as Webster sank into the loosest, most collapsing, most embracing mud, his arms submerged, feeling about for artifacts in the blind muck. The Senator was nervous and Ruth was nervous, but Webster moved stoically, without terror. Such moments, in fact, were the only times his twitchy body was ever still. He was calm in the mud. He was never afraid in the mud. Sometimes he too seemed to be sinking. He would pause in his search, and the Senator and Ruth Thomas would see him slowly descending. It was frightful. It did look at times as if they were about to lose him.

“Should we go after him?” the Senator would suggest, meekly.

“Not in that fucking deathtrap,” Ruth would say. “Not me.”

(Ruth had developed something of a mouth by the time she was eighteen years old. Her father often commented on it. “I don’t know where you got that goddamn mouth of yours,” he’d say, and she would reply, “Now there’s a goddamn mystery.”)

“Are you sure he’s all right?” the Senator would ask.

“No,” Ruth would say. “I think he may be going under. But I’m not going after him, and neither are you. Not in that fucking deathtrap.”

No, not her. Not out there, where forgotten lobsters and clams and mussels and sea worms grew to godless size, and where Christ only knew what else hovered about. When the Scottish settlers first came to Fort Niles, they had leaned over those very mudflats from huge rocks and had dug out, with gaffs, living lobsters as big as any man. They had written of this in their journals; descriptions of pulling out hideous five-foot monster lobsters, ancient as alligators and caked with mud, grown to repulsive extremes from centuries of unmolested hiding. Webster himself, sifting with his bare, blind hands, had found in this mud some petrified lobster claws the size of baseball mitts. He had dug out clams the size of melons, urchins, dogfish, dead fish. No way was Ruth Thomas going in there. No way.

So the Senator and Ruth would have to sit and watch Webster sink. What could they do? Nothing. They sat in tense silence. Sometimes a gull would fly overhead. Other times, there was no movement at all. They watched and waited, and occasionally felt panic simmering in their hearts. But Webster himself never panicked in the mud. He would stand, sunk past his hips, and wait. He seemed to be waiting for something unknown that, after a long period, he would find. Or perhaps it would find him. Webster would begin to move through the sinking mud.

It was not clear to Ruth how he did this. From the beach, it looked as though a rail had risen from below to reach Webster’s bare feet, and he was now standing safely on this rail, which was taking him, slowly and smoothly, away from a dangerous spot. It looked, from the beach, like a clean, gliding rescue.

Why was he never stuck? Why was he never cut by clams, glass, lobsters, mollusks, iron, stone? All the hidden dangers in the mud seemed to shift politely aside to let Webster Pommeroy pass. Of course, he wasn’t always in danger. Sometimes he would dawdle around in the shallow, ankle-deep mud near the shore, staring down, expressionless. That could get boring. And when it got too boring, Senator Simon and Ruth, sitting on the rocks, would talk to each other. For the most part, they talked about maps and explorations and shipwrecks and hidden treasure, the Senator’s favorite topics of conversation. Especially shipwrecks.

One afternoon, Ruth told the Senator that she might try to find work on a lobster boat. This wasn’t entirely true, although it was exactly what Ruth had written to her mother in a long letter the day before. Ruth wanted to want to work on a lobster boat, but the actual desire was not there. She mentioned the idea to the Senator only because she liked the sound of it.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “of finding work on a lobster boat.”

The Senator instantly grew annoyed. He hated to hear Ruth talk of setting foot on any boat. It made him nervous enough when she went to Rockland with her father for the day. All during the times of Ruth’s life when she’d worked with her dad, the Senator had been upset. He imagined, every day, that she would fall over and drown or the boat would sink or there’d be a terrible storm that would wash her away. So when Ruth brought up the idea, the Senator said he would not tolerate the risk of losing her to the sea. He said he would expressly forbid Ruth to work on a lobster boat.

“Do you want to die?” he asked. “Do you want to drown?”

“No, I want to make some money.”

“Absolutely not. Absolutely not. You do not belong on a boat. If you need money, I’ll give you money.”

“That’s hardly a dignified way to make a living.”

“Why do you want to work on a boat? With all your brains? Boats are for idiots like the Pommeroy boys. You should leave boating to them. You know what you really should do? Go inland and stay there. Go live in Nebraska. That’s what I’d do. Get away from the ocean.”

“If lobstering is good enough for the Pommeroy boys, it’s good enough for me,” Ruth said. She didn’t believe this, but it sounded principled.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ruth.”

“You’ve been encouraging the Pommeroy boys to be sailors forever, Senator. You’re always trying to get them fishing jobs. You’re always telling them they should be circumnavigators. I don’t see why you shouldn’t give me a little encouragement, every now and again.”

“I do give you encouragement.”

“Not to be a fisherman.”

“I will kill myself if you become a fisherman, Ruth. I will kill myself every single day.”

“What if I wanted to be a fisherman, though? What if I wanted to be a sailor? What if I wanted to join the Coast Guard? What if I wanted to be a circumnavigator?”

“You don’t want to be any circumnavigator.”

“I might want to be a circumnavigator.”

Ruth did not want to be a circumnavigator. She was making small talk. She and the Senator spent hours talking nonsense like this. Day after day. Neither one paid too much mind to the nonsense-speak of the other. Senator Simon patted his dog’s head and said, “Cookie says, ‘What’s Ruth talking about, a circumnavigator? Ruth doesn’t want to be a circumnavigator.’ Didn’t you say that, Cookie? Isn’t that right, Cookie?”

“Stay out of this, Cookie,” Ruth said.

A week or so later, the Senator brought up the topic again while the two of them watched Webster in the mudflats. This is how the Senator and Ruth had always talked, in long, eternal circles. They had, in fact, only one conversation, the one they’d been having from the time Ruth was about ten years old. They went round and round. They covered the same ground again and again, like a pair of schoolgirls.

“Why do you need experience on a fishing boat, for heaven’s sake?” Senator Simon said. “You’re not stuck on this island for life like the Pommeroys. They’re poor slobs. Fishing is all they can do.”

Ruth had forgotten that she’d even mentioned getting work on a fishing boat. But now she defended the idea. “A woman could do that job as well as anyone.”

“I’m not saying a woman couldn’t do it. I’m saying nobody should do it. It’s a terrible job. It’s a job for jerks. And if everyone tried to become a lobsterman, pretty soon all the lobsters would be gone.”

“There’re enough lobsters out there for everyone.”

“Absolutely not, Ruthie. For heaven’s sake, who ever told you that?”

“My dad.”

“Well, enough lobsters for him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s Greedy Number Two. He’ll always get his.”

“Don’t call my father that. He hates that nickname.”

The Senator patted his dog. “Your dad is Greedy Number Two. My brother is Greedy Number One. Everyone knows that. Even Cookie here knows that.”

Ruth looked out at Webster in the mudflats and did not reply. After a few minutes, Senator Simon said, “You know, there are no lifeboats on lobster boats. It’s not safe for you.”

“Why should they have lifeboats on lobster boats? Lobster boats aren’t much bigger than lifeboats in the first place.”

“Not that a lifeboat can really save a person…”

“Of course a lifeboat can save a person. Lifeboats save people all the time,” Ruth asserted.

“Even in a lifeboat, you’d better hope to get rescued soon. If they find you floating around in your lifeboat in the first hour after a shipwreck, of course, you’ll be fine…”

“Who’s talking about shipwrecks?” Ruth asked, but she knew very well that the Senator was always about three minutes away from talking about shipwrecks. He’d been talking to her about shipwrecks for years.

The Senator said, “If you are not rescued in your lifeboat in the first hour, your chances of being rescued at all become very slim. Very slim, indeed, Ruthie. Slimmer with every hour. After a whole day lost at sea in a lifeboat, you can assume that you won’t be rescued at all. What would you do then?”

“I’d row.”

“You’d row. You would row, if you were stuck on a lifeboat and the sun was going down, with no rescue in sight? You would row. That’s your plan?”

“I guess I’d have to figure something out.”

“Figure what out? What is there to figure out? How to row to another continent?”

“Jesus, Senator. I’m never going to be lost at sea in a lifeboat. I promise you.”

“Once you’re in a shipwreck,” the Senator said, “you will be rescued only by chance-if you are rescued at all. And remember, Ruthie, most shipwreck survivors are injured. It’s not as if they jumped off the edge of a boat in calm water for a little swim. Most shipwreck survivors have broken legs or ghastly cuts or burns. And what do you think it is that kills you in the end?”

Ruth knew the answer. “Exposure?” she guessed wrongly, just to keep the conversation going.

“No.”

“Sharks?”

“No. Lack of water. Thirst.”

“Is that right?” Ruth asked politely.

But now the subject of sharks had arrived, the Senator paused. Finally he said, “In the tropics, the sharks come right up into the boat. They bring their snouts into the boat, like dogs sniffing around. But barracudas are worse. Let’s say you’ve been wrecked. You’re clinging to a piece of wreckage. A barracuda comes over and sinks his teeth into you. You can rip him off, Ruthie, but his head will stay attached to you. Like a snapping turtle, Ruthie. A barracuda will hold on to you long after he’s dead. That’s right.”

“I don’t worry about barracudas too much around here, Senator. And I don’t think you should worry about barracudas, either.”

“Well, how about your bluefish, then? You don’t have to be in the tropics for bluefish, Ruthie. We’ve got packs of bluefish right out there.” Senator Simon Addams waved past the mudflats and Webster, pointing to the open Atlantic. “And bluefish hunt in packs, like wolves. And stingrays! Shipwreck survivors have said that giant rays came right up under their boat and spent the whole day there, hovering. They used to call them blanket fish. You could find rays out there bigger than your little lifeboat. They ripple along under your boat like the shadow of death.”

“That’s very vivid, Senator. Well done.”

The Senator asked, “What kind of sandwich is that, Ruthie?”

“Ham salad. Want half?”

“No, no. You need it.”

“You can have a bite.”

“What’s on there? Mustard?”

“Why don’t you have a bite, Senator?”

“No, no. You need it. I’ll tell you another thing. People lose their minds in a lifeboat. They lose their ideas about time. They might be out there in an open boat for twenty days. Then they get rescued, and they’re surprised to find that they can’t walk. Their feet are rotting from waterbite, and they have open sores from sitting in pools of saltwater; they have injuries from the wreck and burns from the sun; and they’re surprised to find, Ruthie, that they can’t walk. They never have any understanding of their situation.”

“Delirium.”

“That’s right. Delirium. Exactly. Some men in a lifeboat get a condition called ‘shared delirium.’ Let’s say there are two men in a boat. They both lose their minds the same way. One man says, ‘I’m going over to the tavern for a beer,’ and steps over the side and drowns. The second man says, ‘I’ll join you, Ed,’ and then he steps over the side and drowns, too.”

“With the sharks lurking.”

“And the bluefish. And here’s another common shared delusion, Ruthie. Say there are only two men in a lifeboat. When they do get rescued, they’ll both swear that there was a third man with them the whole time. They’ll say, ‘Where’s my friend?’ And the rescuers will tell them, ‘Your friend is in the bed right next to you. He’s safe.’ And the men will say, ‘No! Where’s my other friend? Where’s the other man?’ But there never was any other man. They won’t believe this. For the rest of their lives they’ll wonder: Where’s the other man?”

Ruth Thomas handed the Senator half of her sandwich, and he ate it quickly.

“In the Arctic, of course, they die from the cold,” he continued.

“Of course.”

“They fall asleep. People who fall asleep in lifeboats never wake up.”

“Of course they don’t.”

Other days, they talked about mapmaking. The Senator was a big fan of Ptolemy. He bragged about Ptolemy as if Ptolemy were his gifted son.

“Nobody altered Ptolemy’s maps until 1511!” he’d say proudly. “Now that’s quite a run, Ruth. Thirteen hundred years, that guy was the expert! Not bad, Ruth. Not bad at all.”

Another favorite topic of the Senator’s was the shipwreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown. This one came up time after time. It didn’t need a particular trigger. One Saturday afternoon in the middle of June, for instance, Ruth was telling the Senator about how much she’d hated the graduation ceremony at her school, and the Senator said, “Remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, Ruthie!”

“OK,” Ruth said, agreeably, “if you insist.”

And Ruth Thomas did remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, because the Senator had been telling her about the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown since she was a toddler. This wreck was even more disturbing for him than the Titanic.

The Victoria and the Camperdown were the flagships of the mighty British Navy. In 1893, they collided with each other in open daylight on calm seas because a commander issued a foolish order during maneuvers. The wreck agitated the Senator so much because it had occurred on a day when no boat should have sunk, and because the sailors were the finest in the world. Even the boats were the finest in the world, and the officers were the brightest in the British Navy, but the boats went down. The Victoria and the Camperdown collided because the fine officers-fully knowing that the order they had received was a foolish one-followed it out of a sense of duty and died for it. The Victoria and the Camperdown proved that anything can happen on the sea. No matter how calm the weather, no matter how skilled the crew, a person in a boat was never safe.

In the hours after the collision of the Victoria and the Camperdown, as the Senator had been telling Ruth Thomas for years, the sea was filled with drowning men. The propellers of the sinking ship chewed through the men horribly. They were chopped to pieces, he had always emphasized.

“They were chopped to pieces, Ruthie,” the Senator said.

She didn’t see how this related to her story about graduation, but she let it go.

“I know, Senator,” she said. “I know.”

The next week, back at Potter Beach, Ruth and the Senator got to talking again about shipwrecks.

“What about the Margaret B. Rouss?” Ruth asked, after the Senator had been quiet for a long time. “That shipwreck ended pretty well for everyone.”

She offered up this ship’s name carefully. Sometimes the name Margaret B. Rouss would calm the Senator down, but sometimes it would agitate him.

“Jesus Christ, Ruthie!” he exploded. “Jesus Christ!”

This time it agitated him.

“The Margaret B. Rouss was filled with lumber, and it took forever to sink! You know that, Ruthie. Jesus Christ! You know it was an exception. You know it’s not usually that easy to be shipwrecked. And I’ll tell you another thing. It is not pleasant to be torpedoed under any conditions, with any cargo, no matter what happened to the crew of the goddamn Margaret B. Rouss.”

“And what did happen to the crew, Senator?”

“You know full well what happened to the crew of the Margaret B. Rouss.”

“They rowed forty miles-”

“-forty-five miles.”

“They rowed forty-five miles to Monte Carlo, where they befriended the Prince of Monaco. And they lived in luxury from that point forward. That’s a happy story about a shipwreck, isn’t it?”

“An unusually easy shipwreck, Ruthie.”

“I’ll say.”

“An exception.”

“My father says it’s an exception when any boat sinks.”

“Well, isn’t he a smartie? And aren’t you a smartie, too? You think because of the Margaret B. Rouss it’s safe for you to spend your life working on the water in someone’s lobster boat?”

“I’m not spending my life on any water, Senator. All I said was maybe I could get a job spending three months on the water. Most of the time I’d be less than two miles from shore. I was just saying I want to work on the water for the summer.”

“You know it’s exceedingly dangerous to put any boat on the open sea, Ruth. It’s very dangerous out there. And most people aren’t going to be able to row any forty-five miles to any Monte Carlo.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“In most conditions, you’d be dead from exposure by then. There was a shipwreck in the Arctic Circle. The men were in lifeboats for three days, up to their knees in icy water.”

“Which shipwreck?”

“I do not recall the name.”

“Really?” Ruth had never heard of a shipwreck the Senator did not know by name.

“The name doesn’t matter. The wrecked sailors landed on an Icelandic island eventually. They all had frostbite. The Eskimos tried to revive their frozen limbs. What did the Eskimos do, Ruthie? They rubbed the men’s feet vigorously with oil. Vigorously! The men were screaming, begging the Eskimos to stop. But the Eskimos kept on vigorously rubbing the men’s feet with oil. I can’t recall the name of the shipwreck. But you should remember that when you get on a boat.”

“I’m not planning on sailing to Iceland.”

“Some of those men on the Icelandic island fainted from the pain of the vigorous rubbing, and they died right there.”

“I’m not saying that shipwrecks are good, Senator.”

“Every one of those men eventually needed amputations.”

“Senator?”

“To the knee, Ruthie.”

“Senator?” Ruth said again.

“They died from the pain of the rubbing.”

“Senator, please.”

“The survivors had to stay in the Arctic until the next summer, and the only thing they had for food was blubber, Ruth.”

“Please,” she said.

Please. Please.

Because there was Webster, standing before them. He was coated in mud up to his skinny waist. He had tight curls sweated into his hair and dashes of mud across his face. And he was holding an elephant’s tusk flat across his filthy, outstretched hands.

“Oh, Senator,” Ruth said. “Oh, my God.”

Webster laid the tusk on the sand before the Senator’s feet, as one would lay a gift before a regent. Well, the Senator had no words for this gift. The three people on the beach-the old man, the young woman, the tiny, muddy young man-regarded the elephant tusk. No one moved until Cookie rose up stiffly and slouched toward the thing with suspicion.

“No, Cookie,” Senator Simon said, and the dog assumed the posture of a Sphinx, her nose stretched toward the tusk as if to smell it.

At last, in an apologetic and hesitant way, Webster said, “I guess he was a small elephant.”

Indeed, the tusk was small. Very small for an elephant that had grown to a mighty size during 138 years of myth. The tusk was slightly longer than one of Webster’s arms. It was a slim tusk, with a modest arc. At one end was a dull point, like a thumb. At the other end was the ragged edge of its break from the skeleton. There were deep black, cracked grooves in the ivory.

“He was just a small elephant, I guess,” Webster repeated, because the Senator had not yet responded. This time, Webster sounded almost desperate. “I guess we thought it would be bigger, right?”

The Senator stood up, as slowly and stiffly as if he’d been sitting on the beach for 138 years, waiting for the tusk. He stared at it some more, and then he put his arm around Webster.

“That’s a good job, son,” he said.

Webster sank to his knees, and the Senator eased himself down beside him and put his hand on the boy’s lank shoulder.

“Are you disappointed, Webster?” he asked. “Did you think that I would be disappointed? It’s a beautiful tusk.”

Webster shrugged, and his face looked stricken. A breeze came up, and Webster gave a thin shiver.

“I guess it was just a small elephant,” he repeated.

Ruth said, “Webster, it’s a terrific elephant tusk. You did a good job, Webster. You did a great job.”

Then Webster gave two hard sobs.

“Oh, come on, now, boy,” the Senator said, and his voice, too, was choked. Webster was crying. Ruth turned her head. She could still hear him, though, making those sad noises, so she stood up and walked away from the rocks toward the spruce trees lining the shore. She left Webster and the Senator sitting on the beach for a good long time while she wandered among the trees, picking up sticks and breaking them. The mosquitoes were after her, but she didn’t care. She hated to see people crying. Every once in a while she looked toward the beach, but she could see that Webster was still sobbing and the Senator was still comforting him, and she wanted no part of it.

Ruth sat herself down, with her back to the beach, on a mossy log. She lifted a flat rock in front of her, and a salamander scooted out, giving her a start. Maybe she’d become a veterinarian, she thought absently. She’d recently read a book, given to her by the Senator, about the breeding of bird dogs, and she had found it rather beautiful. The book, written in 1870, had the loveliest language. She’d been moved almost to tears by a description of the best Chesapeake labrador the author had ever seen, one that had retrieved a downed seabird by leaping over crashing ice floes and swimming far out past the point of invisibility. The dog, whose name was Bugle, had returned to shore, nearly frozen to death, but carrying the bird ever so gently in its soft mouth. Not a mark on it.

Ruth stole a glance over her shoulder back to Webster and the Senator. Webster appeared to have stopped crying. She wandered down to the shoreline, where Webster was sitting, staring ahead grimly. The Senator had taken the tusk to a warm pool of tidewater to rinse it off. Ruth Thomas went over, and he straightened up and handed her the tusk. She dried it on her shirt. It was light as bone and yellow as old teeth, its hollow inside packed with mud. It was warm. She hadn’t even seen Webster find it! All those hours of sitting on the beach watching him search the mud, and she had not seen the moment when he found it!

“You didn’t see him find it, either,” she said to the Senator. He shook his head. Ruth weighed it in her hands. “Unbelievable,” she said.

“I didn’t think he would actually find it, Ruth,” the Senator said, in a desperate whisper. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do with him? Look at him, Ruth.”

Ruth looked. Webster was trembling like an old engine in idle.

“Is he upset?” she asked.

“Of course he’s upset! This project kept him going for a year. I don’t know,” the Senator whispered in panic, “what to do with the boy now.”

Webster Pommeroy got up and came to stand beside Ruth and the Senator. The Senator straightened to his full height and smiled widely.

“Did you clean it off?” Webster asked. “Does it look n-n-nicer?”

The Senator spun around and hugged tiny Webster Pommeroy close to him. He said, “Oh, it’s splendid! It’s gorgeous! I’m so proud of you, son! I am so proud of you!”

Webster sobbed again, and recommenced crying. Ruth, reflexively, shut her eyes.

“Do you know what I think, Webster?” Ruth heard the Senator ask. “I think it is a magnificent find. I really do. And I think we should bring it to Mr. Ellis.”

Ruth’s eyes flew open in alarm.

“And do you know what Mr. Ellis is going to do when he sees us coming with this tusk?” the Senator asked, his huge arm draped over Webster’s shoulder. “Do you know, Webster?”

Webster did not know. He shrugged pathetically.

The Senator said, “Mr. Ellis is going to grin. Isn’t that right, Ruthie? Won’t that be something? Don’t you think Mr. Ellis will love this?”

Ruth did not answer.

“Don’t you think so, Ruthie? Don’t you?”