The Season of Open Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

wrist, dirt settled in the deep long lines that wrap his palm. She can smell the soil and the muck, the rotted hay from the icehouse, the baked dusty mud off the wagon paths he drives, delivering ice. She can smell the places he roams through, the casual detours he takes off his route when he grows annoyed or bored: the sassafras wood, the pine grove, the eelgrass of the marsh. She loves him this way most, when he is deep asleep, beyond waking, when she can dig through his roughness and find him for what she knows he is—tender as blackskin, easily scraped down by a fingernail.
    He stirs, and his body turns to curve around her. She will give herself a quarter of an hour to lie this way. She will listen to the wind hack against the roof as it breaks up the last of the fog. She will listen for the slighter sound of the mouse scurrying back and forth on small tough claws between the plaster and the beams as the sun climbs and marks her time.
    He shifts in his sleep. Out the window, the trees seem to be growing down from the sky. Their roots hook deep into the soil. She hears the sound of a car in the drive, an unfamiliar sound, the steady low coil of the engine and the push of wheels over the marl. The car stops below the window. She hears a short hard rap on the kitchen door, her mother’s voice, and another voice, a man’s voice. Gently, she lifts Luce’s arm and slides out from underneath.
    When she comes downstairs, the kitchen is empty. Through the window, she can see four men, three strangers and Honey Lyons, standing around a newly waxed black Model S Mercedes parked in the drive. Her mother, Cora, is crossing the yard, her arms full of the wet wash. She walks around the men, a wide circle, her eyes cast down to the left, her feet holding tight to some invisible curve on the ground, with that strange and skirting way she has had since her oldest child, Rose, fell through an eel hole axed out in the ice and was taken by the current underneath that foot-deep frozen surface all the way to the river mouth.
    As Bridge stirs a cup of water into the white-cornmeal batter, she takes in the three strangers, their dark suits, polished shoes, gray soft-hats, Honey Lyons in his coarse leather jacket and khaki trousers, a stain at the knee. His face is ruddy, shaved too often, skin full of a light red rash. He glances up at the window, catches her watching them and shifts the ball of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. He grins, his teeth long and yellow, one chipped close to the gum. He walks over to the side of the car, leans to the window and says something to the man in the driver’s seat. He walks with a slight limp, left over from a jump he took once off the Point Bridge at low tide. He struck hard bottom, and his anklebone shattered like milkweed.
    Cora comes back inside.
    â€œWho are those men with him?” Bridge asks.
    â€œDon’t know.”
    â€œWhat do they want?”
    â€œThey’re waiting on Noel.”
    â€œWhat for?”
    â€œDidn’t ask.”
    â€œYou didn’t ask?”
    â€œNo.”
    Her mother takes an armful of white shirts and puts them to soak in the first tub. She shaves in a handful of soap.
    â€œMary Milliken wants these shirts by afternoon,” she says.
    â€œWhy didn’t you ask them what they want from Noel?”
    Cora shakes her head. “I’m not sure today’s wind’ll turn warm enough to dry them by afternoon.”
    Bridge sighs. She fries up the johnnycakes, eats one and wraps three for Luce to take with him to work. Then she tells Cora she is going up to Shorrock’s store at the Head for a sack of flour.
    â€œHow be ya, Bridge?” says Honey Lyons as she steps off the porch. He touches his cap.
    She nods at him, says nothing. She doesn’t look at the other men. She walks past the boat shop into the woods toward the river.
    She passes by the path that leads up to the old burial ground on Indian