Mark Mills - Amagansett

He helped out down at the shanty whenever he could, but he felt foolish and alone. Elevated to the rank of surfman, Antton was eager to drive home his superior knowledge and expertise. Their father, sensing Conrad’s frustration, told him to be patient; in a couple of years he too would be part of the crew.

This was not a consolation he relayed to Maude.

The showdown, when it came, was explosive, and all the more shocking for the fact that he’d never known their father and Maude to argue before. The thump of the exchange carried clear through the woodwork to his attic bedroom. He only made out one word, and only then because it was repeated several times—aintzinekoak—‘those who have gone before us’. Or in this case: what was good enough for me and my father is good enough for him.

Maude urged Conrad to fight his corner, to insist on seeing through his studies, to eighteen and beyond, on to college. What could he say? He couldn’t betray the vision that had come to his father all those years before on the Amagansett sands, made concrete with the money from Eusebio—a man and his two boys fishing side by side, following the sea. Besides, he was threatened enough already by his father’s special relationship with Antton. It had always been there, but it had deepened considerably of late. Foolish though it now seemed, he could remember thinking at the time that even his name was proof of his father’s favoritism—Conrad, his mother’s father, the only non-Basque anyone could recall on either side of the family.

Maude withdrew in order to fight another day, but she hadn’t counted on her husband’s stubborn Basque temperament, and her cause wasn’t helped by the onset of the Depression. Along with a number of his Amagansett friends, Conrad exchanged the classroom for the fish shanty.

His time on the ocean beach was sweet and very brief. A third set of hands was not always required. It became an indulgence as the Depression deepened, and Conrad was dispatched to join the pack of other local men roaming the South Fork in search of work at a few dollars a day. He helped pour the first concrete sidewalks in Amagansett, he filled holes in the cinder roads, and he cut ice from the ponds during the winter freeze. He teamed up with Hendrik on laboring jobs, he crewed with Billy on the draggers out of Fort Pond Bay from time to time, and almost everything he earned went into the family purse. He fished with his father and Antton whenever they needed him, but it was his friendships with others that sustained him. And this is how it stayed, right up until Antton was taken from them by the sea.

It was a January morning, not so different from any other, raw and gray. The wind had come around northwest, stiffening overnight, and everyone knew the cod bit best in a nor’wester. When the wind was off the land it usually flattened out the surf, but that day there was a strong ground swell running, driven by some force far out in the ocean, and the seas rose up in defiance, breaking over the outer bar, their crests whipped into white mares’ tails of freezing spray. By the time they’d loaded the tubs and dragged the dory down to the water’s edge both the wind and the swell had eased a little, and some of the other crews were going off through the clean, sharp breakers curling toward the beach.

There was no question of not following suit.

They gritted their teeth against the jolt of that first dowsing and wrestled the dory through the white water, their woollen mittens already beginning to harden with ice. Hauling themselves aboard, Antton took the bow oars, Conrad amidships, both setting their stroke, their father still in the water, gripping the bucking transom to keep the dory headed seaward, his eyes reading the surf.

‘Pull, boys, pull!’ he yelled, shoving off and hooking a leg over the port gunwale. The oars bit in unison; the dory surged forward, gaining headway, rising up the face of the capping sea. The bow split the wave as it broke around them, green water tumbling and crashing past on both sides, a fair quantity of it finding its way over the boat’s high sides and down the back of their necks, washing into the bilges; but nothing unusual, nothing that couldn’t be bailed out easily once they were clear of the break.

The bow dipped into the trough, nosing into the next sea as they bent their backs into the stroke. The dory rose and fell, clearing the wave as it crested, shipping less water this time. None the next. The surf line receding behind them.

He saw it first in his father’s eyes, a cloud of confusion that also furrowed his brow. A moment later, he felt it beneath the boat, a building swell that should have dropped away. But didn’t, it just kept on coming, surging up from below. His father gripped the gunwales, the confusion in his eyes now replaced by the unmistakable glare of fear. And Conrad turned.

A wall of water already making up about eight feet reared up behind Antton, a glassy ridge, deep green in color, shutting out the ocean beyond. And he could recall his sense of indignation. It had no place being here, no right.

‘Eyes in the boat!’ screamed his father.

Conrad yanked on the oars as he turned back, fear running through his arms now, and his starboard oar popped clear of its oarlock.

Later, he would spend endless hours reliving the next few moments, clinging to the fractured memories, replaying them in his mind, refiguring them: both his oars in the water this time, that instant of hesitation written out, along with the moment he committed the cardinal error known to all surfmen, the moment he turned to look at the ocean.

He would try to factor in the words of consolation from those who actually saw that freak sea, that rogue wave which had started life hundreds, thousands of miles away, and which only found some meaning to its existence in its dying moments off the ocean beach. They said they’d never seen the like before, they said no crew on the beach would have cleared that wave, they said popping an oar had made no difference to the outcome.

The dory was near-vertical when Antton leapt clear, passing by Conrad’s right shoulder. Conrad released the oars and made to follow him, but he was too late. The dory, snatched up in the curl, pitchpoled backwards, stem over stern, upended with such force and speed that Conrad had no time to set himself for the impact with the water. He hit it face on while still drawing breath.

He spun and twisted in the darkness beneath the upturned boat, lunging for a hold. He seized what must have been the thwart, but it was wrenched from his grasp as the wave powered on inexorably towards the beach. Something struck Conrad a blow in the side of the head: a limb, an arm or a leg belonging to his father. He pawed helplessly, trying to latch on, but it was past him now, leaving him tumbling in its wake, all sense of orientation gone.

He felt a line whip past him and he clutched at it. It was the cod trawl, unraveling from one of the tubs. It offered no purchase, though; it simply began to wrap itself around him, the barbed and baited hooks at the end of the little snood lines catching in his oilskins, binding him up tight.

That’s when he felt the downward drag—the weight of the water filling his waders—and he knew then that he was done for. Even if he hadn’t been ensnared by the trawl, it was too late to kick them off. And as he sank away, his lungs gave up the fight, allowing the ocean to flood in.

There was no tunnel, no shining light to guide his path. Nor was there any pain. Only blackness, sudden and absolute.

The Kemp crew was fishing just to the east, and it was Rollo—relegated to the beach as always—who was first to arrive on the scene. He pulled Conrad’s father, unconscious but alive, from beneath the dory and dragged him up beyond the wash. Seeing that the other rescuers were still some distance off, stumbling along the shore, Rollo stripped off his oilskins and his waders and struck out through the breakers. It was a foolhardy thing to do, suicidal even—he must have known that just as well as the next man—yet he managed to snatch at some lines of cod trawl before being driven back by the cold and the surf.

So it was that Rollo hauled Conrad’s lifeless body from the ocean, reeling him in, hand over hand, oblivious to the hooks tearing at his bare hands, his flesh. He later claimed that he’d only done as his grandfather, Cap’n Josh, had once instructed him: forcing the drowned man’s knees to his chest and bearing down hard on his midriff.

Conrad came to, the last of the water convulsing from his lungs, to find Rollo’s blurred face filling his field of vision.

‘Hello,’ said Rollo through chattering teeth, while rubbing Conrad furiously with his hands.

It soon became clear that Antton was lost. They searched for his body, handlining with grappling hooks, setting gill nets straight offshore and hauling seine. At midday the swell picked up again, dangerously so, and even Conrad’s father was obliged to concede defeat.

Conrad was warming himself at Doc Meadows’ hearth, nursing a mug of steaming broth, Maude at his side, when his father showed up. That’s when Conrad saw the look, the one that said more than any words: ‘You were to blame.’

It was a fleeting moment, and the question of Conrad’s responsibility for the tragedy was never once voiced by his father. Indeed, he laid the blame squarely at the feet of that freak sea. But Conrad always knew what he believed in his heart, and it stood between them like a mountain range shrouded in mist.

Two services were held for Antton—one a memorial, the other a burial some three weeks later, when a few scraps washed ashore near Gurney’s Inn. During this period there was not one day when Conrad’s father didn’t walk the beach, searching for the remains of his firstborn son.

Close-knit as they were, the fishing families were hit hard by Antton’s death. But things picked up again, as they had to. Come May, when the first of the striped bass appeared and struck in at the beach, Conrad found himself hauling seine again, with Sam and Billy Ockham making up the rest of their crew.

Conrad’s father shrugged off his mantel of gloom. Conrad did his best to mimic the charade, but it was over a year before he was able to visit Antton’s grave, by which time the arguments for and against America’s entry into the war were on everyone’s lips. Pearl Harbor settled the matter. Conrad was drafted and ordered to report to Camp Upton at Yaphank. The day his parents saw him off at East Hampton railroad station he sensed it was the last time he’d ever see his father.

The letter from Maude arrived during his recuperation at Barton Hall in England. Conrad had recovered sufficiently in the eyes of his doctors to be allowed out from time to time, along with a couple of the other patients. He carried the letter with him on the bus to Norwich, opening it in the shady cool of the Cathedral cloister while his two companions prayed inside.

He felt curiously removed from the words on the page—the stomach pain, the diagnosis of cancer, his father’s sudden decline. Maude said she was putting the house on the market, but that she would deposit the greater part of the proceeds with the Osborne Trust Company for his use. Her brother had suggested she join him in California. He was wealthy, quite capable of supporting her, and she intended to take up teaching again. She urged him to reconsider a college education on his return, to which end she would be leaving him her library of books.

He could tell from the deterioration of her normally neat italic hand that she was devastated and fighting hard to hold herself together.

When his companions joined him in the cloister, Conrad made some excuse and went in search of a pub. He drank several pints of strong Norfolk ale then picked a fight with a loud American bombardier on twenty-four-hour stand-down from one of the local airbases.

It was a few weeks before he realized that the greatest fear of his childhood had finally come to pass, that as he waited in line at Ellis Island, fresh off the boat from France, the doctor had indeed marked him with that stick of blue chalk, leading him away, never to see his father and Antton again.

It came to him then that he was alone in the world.

Conrad woke with a start, orienting himself. He brushed the straw from his clothes and climbed down the ladder from the hayloft. He had planned on slipping away a little before daybreak, but the morning sun was already casting long shadows in the garden as he crept from the barn.

He could make out the sounds of the doctor and his family stirring in the house, obliging him to duck below the level of the window sills as he left.

He felt sharp, alert, which was good. The sleep had helped, sweet and unexpected.

He asked Earl Griffin to drop him off at the head of the track, and he settled the fare.

He saw the tire marks in the sand immediately. Closer examination revealed that there were two sets—the same vehicle coming and going, suggesting that the visitor had left. But his hand still closed around the gun in his hip pocket as he set off through the pitch pines towards his house.

The vehicle had pulled to a halt just before the trees gave way to the dunes. The track was too narrow at this point to turn a motor car around, and the visitor had been obliged to reverse it back to the highway, but not before abandoning it first and continuing on foot.

The footprints stood out clearly in the sand, the area around them smoothed unnaturally flat by Conrad the evening before. It hadn’t taken him long to perform the task: simply a matter of dragging some heavy, tarred pound-trap netting behind the Model A.

The footprints veered off to the right, into the dunes, but Conrad made no attempt to follow them. Neither did he glance in their direction in case he was being observed. It wasn’t important; he knew where they were headed.

He picked them up again in the broad sweeps of leveled sand in and around the buildings. The visitor had entered the compound from the west, skirting the shack, making for the whaleboat house. He had then crossed to the barn, entering it. From here he’d returned to the shack, circling, keeping his distance, approaching only twice—once to examine the small lean-to at the back which housed the generator, the second time to inspect the corner of the roof where the telephone cable entered the building.

Conrad knew then that, if they had to, they were willing to go all the way in order to silence him.

He should have felt fear, some modicum of anxiety at the very least, but he didn’t. It was with a pleasing sense of anticipation that he reached for the phone and asked the operator to put him through to a number in Sag Harbor.

Thirty

‘Tom? Are you there?’

The voice entering his head through the earpiece of the receiver had grown distant, hollow, strangely remote.

‘Tom?’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Hollis.

‘I checked each sample twice against the master. None of them match.’

‘One of them has to.’

‘They’re not even close. Believe me.’

‘Okay,’ conceded Hollis.

‘Are you on to something?’

‘I was. Thanks anyway, Ed.’

‘Any time, you know that.’

‘Sure.’

He hung up, pleased to silence the unmistakable note of pity creeping into Ed’s voice.