The Season of Open Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

paraphernalia, children, dogs hanging from the open car windows. The houses are empty. The beach is quiet. He settles back into the chair, a thick woolen blanket draped over his knees. He can feel the bones of the wood through the cushion. From the porch, he watches the seabirds as they wheel through the white and glaring light—crooked shadows, screeching cries.
    This is his morning. Morning after morning. Day after day. This is his life.
    He clings to his everyday order of waking, wash, shave. His everyday drive up Horseneck Road, then along the trolley route to the mill, where he will burrow for eight hours into a dark and stifling heat, the rhythmic strike and shutter of the looms. In the afternoons, he leaves at five, to retrace his morning route on the return trip home. He comes back to his chair on the porch and if the weather is fine, he will spend the rest of the daylight hours there, with a book on his lap, transfixed by the changing of the light, the changing of the water and the sky. And as the chair rocks back and forth, he will move outside that very careful, well-swept room he has built at his center. He will slide the lock, slip through, leave the door ajar behind him. He will move beyond himself, far beyond his own edges. At times he does not even know he has been gone until he finds himself returning, marked by the journey—grit in his eyes, wind-matted hair—the evidence of distances, the evidence of speed.
    At night he reads. Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus. Theories of geometry and light. Theories of physics and evolution, war, culture, medicine, class. Laws of gravity. Laws of matter. Laws of planetary motion and celestial mechanics, electromagnetic charge. Laws are a solace. His books, a solace. Reading strips the body from the mind. He takes a small pleasure, an occasional pleasure, in music and in art. The work of de Chirico, the work of Picasso—the refraction of the world into blue-grief, cubes.
    He sips his tea. It is cooling now. A tea leaf in the crude shape of a bird hits the rim of the cup. He picks it off.
    From the porch, he watches the pigs rooting through Elizabeth Hawthorne’s hydrangeas. He watches the old man farther down the beach. He has loaded his wagon full of sea muck, and now he walks along the tide line, gathering clams. Henry has seen him before. They have never spoken. Never exchanged greetings, words, names. The man’s skin is tarnished, deeply lined. He always wears the same woolen coat. Today the sun is behind him and he is cut to shadow. Henry cannot see his features. He cannot see the mountains in his face. But he recognizes the lopsided gait, the steady and deliberate way he works. He can tell from the limp, from how the old man bears his weight on his right leg, that perhaps when he was in his midthirties, Henry’s age, his left femur was broken, high, close to the hip. If it was splinted (and Henry doubts that it was), the position of the limb was deranged and so the break never properly set, never properly healed. But he is a tough old spider. This particular man. He comes down every day in every type of weather to work up what the tide hauls in.
    Henry was born in Boston, 1895, the only son of a cotton broker. He went to Harvard, then to medical school, then to France in early 1917 with a corps of students under Harvey Cushing. He started at the
ambulance
in Paris, then moved in soggy weather to the tri-age hospital close to the front, north of Armentières. He saw torn throats, wrecked faces, bleeding vessels that could not be secured, lungs shrunk to the size of a nickel by the gas. He sopped and shaved and cleansed maggot-crusted limbs. He stood on a plain above a chestnut grove under a clear and perfect sky, and when the sky exploded, they flattened themselves and hugged the earth.
    Once, as he was crossing from the operating tent to the tree for a smoke, a shell burst overhead and he saw a man twenty yards away split at the waist, his top