The Season of Open Water Read Online Free PDF

Hill. When she was a child, Noel took her there. He led her through the trees and showed her where they were put down—the seven crude and unmarked stones.
    The moon is the home of the dead, he has told her. They come down to earth on its light. They travel in boats and tie up in the trees. They crawl under bark and live among the leaves. They sprout and grow and turn, holding fast to their branches through the winds and summer storms. He has told her that when a leaf falls, there is a cry not easily heard. And as she walks the rut path along the river toward the Head, she listens for that sound. She treads lightly on their thin and brittle shapes, corpses rustling under her feet.
    Abiel Tripp is sitting out by the mail-stop, a sack of letters dropped off by the mail truck next to his chair on the porch. He bites down the stem of his pipe the way she has noticed that all blue-water men do, as if the years at sea had set a certain tremor in the jaw, a kind of restlessness that might have come from months of gnawing on hard bread, months of waiting, drifting through a nothing sea. It was a habit of Noel’s. The stem of his pipe would always give out before the bowl. Abiel jerks his head at her as she walks by. He takes in her boots, her brown arms. She is scrawny as an oar. She wears her brother’s cast-off overalls and an old cap. She is hand to mouth, he knows this. The family has been since the father died. But the girl wears it differently. There is no shame about her. No apology. Her boots are crusted with mud from walking the damp river ground. She takes the two steps up to the shade porch of Shorrock’s store and slips through the door. She lays it closed without a sound on the jamb behind her.

Henry
    The beauty of the world, he knows, is a dream, a trick, a sleight of hand.
    The shots wake him at dawn. He comes downstairs, cracks the front door. The fog has begun to loosen. He can smell slick pools of water on the rolled dirt road from the rain of the night before. He checks, then rechecks the lock on the screen; it is his habit, it has no purpose, he knows this. There is no one to keep in, no one to keep out, but he does it every morning this same way, and why should this morning be any different?
    He takes a sharp breath and draws in the rough smell of the sea, and for a moment he remembers the girl, the dark-haired girl he had seen at Millie Sisson’s house the night before. He had been standing against the wall, feeling out of place, and he had looked up and seen her. She seemed to be observing him—her eyes luminous and steady—then she had turned abruptly and walked out the door.
    He goes into the kitchen, measures out two cups of water, sets the pot to boil on the stove. He measures out the loose tea into the bob. His measuring is—has been since he returned from France—exact. He marks his watch. He will let the tea steep for four and a half minutes. No milk. A mite of sugar. He steps out onto the back porch.
    Sheets of fog press low against the water. The swallows flock in small droves over the cottage. They clutch their wings into themselves, dive into a trench of wind, and then rise up again.
    Henry sets his tea down on the side table, takes a clean rag from his toolbox, and sponges the salt and dampness from the seat of the chair.
    There is a volley of shots from the neck. Seafowl—eiders, skunk ducks—heading out toward the sea to feed. The men come down early—local men. They leak out of the fog with their shotguns, cross the bar to the neck, and crouch behind the rocks and in the scrub. They pass-shoot into the flocks as the birds fly overhead.
    It is a Thursday morning, October 1927—his fourth year living out the fall and winter in the cottage at the beach, his fourth year as a boss at one of the city mills. The summer people have left. Henry had watched them leave—a sudden exodus of touring cars stuffed with sun-umbrellas, trunks, clothes,