Into The Realm E-Book

Todd Forrest

• Herausgeber: BooxAi
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Caleb Forrest, a twenty-two-year-old modern-day fisherman, has a tale to tell, a tale of justified murder, as he sees it. Experiencing a sort of amnesia from his last trip at sea, he pushes off aboard his prized Cat boat ‘Sea Gypsy’ for a one-day journey that will take him past his childhood haunts and the memories, both good and bad, that go along with them. The last descendent of a once proud seafaring family, Caleb’s left with a burden of land he does not need and cannot afford but must hold onto for tradition sake. Along with his heroic, albeit flawed grandfather, Caleb is pitted against an unscrupulous builder turned town politico who, bound by an ever-decreasing coastline, will do anything to get the land, even if that means using his first-born son as chess piece to do it.
The tale is set amidst the unimaginable beauty of an as yet unspoiled moorland and the ultimate sacrifice it will take to protect it. Culminating on the desolate, windswept dunes of Monomoy Island, the young fisherman must finally come to grips with his crime or face something much more daunting than any hangman’s gallows.

"Sit down with Todd Forrest Sherman and let him entertain you. He has crafted a powerful Cape Cod tale of families and jealousies and murder that feels as familiar as the sand in your shoes, yet as fresh as a bright beach day after a week of rain. So go to Cape Cod with Sherman and his characters. You won't want to come back." - William Martin New York Times Bestselling author of Cape Cod and December '41 .

"An intoxicating tale. Beautifully written and deeply reseached, place Todd Forrest's Into the Realm up there with the greatest books ever written about Cape Cod. It's that good!" - Casey Sherman, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Finest Hours and Helltown.

Leseprobe

INTO THE REALM

TODD FORREST

Todd Forrest

INTO THE REALM

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2022 by Todd Forrest

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by BooxAi

ISBN: 978-965-578-016-1

Contents

BOOK I

The Bluff

Valhalla

Secret Meadow

Cedar Swamp

Round Cove

Squall

The Horse Shore

The Narrows

Landless Gull

Inner Harbor

Strong Island

BOOK II

Pleasant Bay

Minister’s Point

Tern Island Sanctuary

The Salem Witch

Tiger

Tiger Squad

The Bar

Marine Layer

The Cut

Hammerhead

Sailing The Reach

Tiger’s Cabin

The Barrens

Black Dog

BOOK III

Point Rip

The Powder Hole

Generator House

Toby

Isle Of Nanoho

Tempest

Into The Realm

BOOK I

“Sunset and evening star

and one clear call for me.

And may there be

no moaning of the bar

when I put out to sea.”

sailor shanty

The Bluff

From out of a deep blue haze of time, I come awake on a patch of lumpy crabgrass, looking up at the worn tread of a tractor tire swaying above me like a clock weight. The tire is attached to a knotted tangle of frayed hemp running up to a deep grove notched in the former hitching limb of our South Seas pagoda tree. I reach for the tire and hook my right arm through its center. Pushing with my heel-ends against the mossy ground, I rise upwards and back, then swing out over an arching bluff. My body extends above a distant tidal wash littered with barrier rocks and the decayed remnants of a long-ago wharf. The fingers on my right hand stretch the tire’s lower lip, forming a drooping scream within its gaping maw, and for that one instant I am flying, attached to neither sea nor landmass, and there is no sound, like being inside a vacuum.

The world beneath me has rotated another thousand feet on its axis with the Earth itself having raced another twelve miles around its ellipse of the sun. Yet I have not moved. I am floating, Godlike, held aloft by a combination of velocity and something else that I’m about to put my finger on when the ever-reliable tug of crumbling rubber slings me back across the bluff and onto the lumpy sod.

“I hope to be at least sixty before that rickety old tire finally gives out,” I say to myself.

Tall beach grass whips about my knees as I walk out onto our bluff and stand on its precipice. Fresh sea air abounds as I caress my whiskery gullet. Raking back my rust-colored topknot with my nicked and battered hands, I look down at our small harbor that sparkles as if strewn with Christmas tinsel. It’s a view I never tire of: the swollen girth of the bay spreading to the horizon with its many small islands encapsulated within a thin strip of barrier beach. Beyond that, the frothing North Atlantic, or whom I like to call Second Mother, whose booming surf plays eternally in my mind. I’ve listened to Her flirt with Her landlocked lover since birth. I even hear Her when I’m pulling crab pots north of the Aleutians. She’s rhythmic, never-ending, with an almost percussionist-like cadence.

There’s a thunderous bass that sounds when She comes crashing to shore. Followed by a thrumming of cymbals as She carries up the beach. And it is the tinkling of wind chimes that I hear when She finally lifts Her creamy skirt and bashfully recedes, knowing that one day She’ll bury Her landlocked lover within Her kelp-laced smock only to have His future landmass rise up and toss Her back into Her depths, forever and ever repeating.

I feel lucky to have grown up on this bluff. The view from its precipice always strikes the back of my eyes. It is the same seascape eight generations of Forrest men and women have looked out at, and yet it remains new to me with each viewing. The bluff itself rises some sixty feet above our small harbor beach, where the now half-sunken wharf once fastened many a great schooner and whaling ship to its pilings. I continue to look out over the bay, watching the morning sun rise in the East to pull out the tide and make a frothy chop to call in the gulls.

“Good time to let out,” I mutter.

I turn my back on the azure splendor aswirl beneath me and start up the sloping hillside, the sorry bones in my feet cracking and popping from standing too many hours on steel decks, and yet I have just turned twenty-two, though my years working in the world of men having aged me. My head feels groggy, not knowing if I slept for a minute, a month, or a millennium. I must have jumped ship the night before, or was it the night before that? I cannot seem to recall, other than it is possible that I tied one on with the captain and crew, no doubt at the Chatham Squire, before passing out at the base of our pagoda tree. But it is of no importance as I mount a slight rise and come upon the ship’s bell mounted atop a fieldstone marker.

There’s no inscription on the bell, inside or out, and nobody knows how old it is or what ship it came from, not even my grandfather, and he knows everything, or at least I used to believe that he did. Taking a knee, I tip the bell sideways, and grab hold of its copper clapper; then, releasing the bell, I let go of the clapper and send deep-bellied tolls reverberating across the bay. I do this to let Gramp know I’m in port, so he can tidy up some before my arrival.

Coming over the first knoll, I catch sight of our dueling weathervanes turning listlessly in the light, hilltop breeze. Mimicking an in-flight harpoon angling downward at a breaching sperm whale. The vanes, made from hammered tin, are positioned at each end of the house with a widow’s walk conjoining the two. The ‘perch’ was put up so the women of the house could look out over the marine layer to see the tall ships as they sailed for port and thus get a head start to the taverns to drag their men home lest any debauchery be committed on their long-awaited return from the sea.

Not that my forefathers went unawares. Those seadogs knew their women as well as their woman knew them. So, whenever a long voyage deemed a reward of village grog, Captains Forrest would tie up in Wellfleet Harbor on the Cape Cod Bay side or, if they really wanted a scurrilous night ashore, they’d lash their lines to the fish-littered piers of Provincetown, or Hell town as it was known in those days, a place where the crew could gamble away their wages and hopefully get in a knife fight or two. Mostly though, Captains Forrest would sail in and tie up at the Chatham Fish Pier, where they would unload their catch, get paid, and return home, choosing the comfort of their women over any vile-tasting village grog.

I summit the last knoll and the house proper comes into view. With its storm shutters hanging at odd angles and roof and sides cloaked in silvery, weathered shingles with patches missing, the house appears to be abandoned, and it is in a way with only me and Gramp residing. I would fix it up if I had the time, but I’m mostly at sea these days. Truth be told, I would rather raze it all and start anew, only the house has been around a while, and I’d no doubt need an Act of Congress to replace the gutters, the Chatham Historical Society being who they are.

To Gramp, the house is a living mausoleum dedicated to those who went before, but to me, it’s a place where hallways dip and roll under your feet like a carnival fun house, with doors that won’t close properly and windows that let in drafts that chill to the bone come winter. And yet, with its sad and crooked smile, I am always heartened when come upon her, as I am on this day, in the Year of Our Lord 1988.

Approaching the house, I am again reminded of how every board, beam, and brick has a story to tell. It’s a known fact that the side of the house facing the bay once served in the British Royal Navy. The story goes that, during the War of 1812, an English gunboat dropped anchor in Nauset Harbor with captain and crew going ashore to drink grog in what they believed to be a Tory-friendly tavern in Eastham, and it was on that same night that my long-ago relations rowed out to the ship and cut its anchor line.

Upon their return in the early, predawn light, the brigade found their ship listing on her beam-ends, run aground on Barley Neck. Realizing their plight, they marched through the streets of Chatham with their muskets cocked and loaded, listening to the townspeople snicker at them from behind closed curtains. Walking along the darkened edges of the King’s Highway, now Route 6A, the brigade finally met up with a band of truly sympathetic Tories and boarded another British warship anchored safely off Blish Point in Barnstable Harbor. The Eastham tavern boys took the masts and sails with the men of the Forrest clan taking the rest, leaving only the ship’s bones to bleach in the sun and salt. In other words, it was business as usual on Cape Cod’s Outer Reach.

Fact was, much of the wood used for building houses in Chatham in those days came from the various schooners and frigates that would break apart on the ever-shifting shoals along the Cape’s ‘Backside’ whenever a hurricane or nor’easter hit, the timber and cargo carried by the wind and waves to the shore where area Mooncussers, like my forefathers, would hitch up their wagon teams and drag the booty across the moonlit dunes, never exchanging a word.

“The Dark Work” is how Gramp refers to it, saying to me once, “And if any of ’em poor scullions washed up on our harbor beach, you can bet their graves would’a been dug deep. This I know because every Forrest would want the same for his remains should he go over the side one day. Ain’t no sin to take what the sea offers, Caleb. Sin is not to take it. That don’t mean you should light a bonfire and dance around a-hoopin’ and a-hollerin’. No! You take what you need and make use of it! That-a-way the circle continues as it will when your day comes, many, many sunups from now.”

Brick, blood, and bone is how Gramp sees the house, and as I hike up the last knoll, I quicken my pace, fighting back the gnawing memory of a murder I committed on this very soil one year ago to the day, only I don’t see it as ‘murder,’ per se, but rather ‘survival of the fittest,’ and I believe Darwin would agree.

Valhalla

I jaunt up to our back porch and pole-vault over its two missing steps by way of a whaler’s gaff, then pull myself up with the help of an overhanging, deadeye block. The porch has seen better days, or it hasn’t. The same two steps have been missing as long as I’ve been alive. The porch itself sits about four feet off the ground on salvaged railroad ties, as does the rest of the house, and there is no cellar. A Wash-A-Shore might believe the house was built this way to let the King tides that we get from time-to-time flow underneath. But given the fact the house sits on an elevated bluff and is protected by a nine-mile barrier beach, this simply is not the case. Essentially, the stilts provide a way for the massive dune creeping across our front lawn to blow into the bay without taking the house with it. Not many building codes existed when the house was first raised. “Back then,” as Gramp likes to say, “folks just improvised.”

The primary structure was once a stately manor anchored to the cobblestoned streets of Nantucket; the island our family’s patriarch called home when not hunting the elusive leviathans east of the Azores. Around the time the mighty humpback and sperm were dipping into near extinction, whaleboat captain Nehemiah Forrest, or Captain Nehi, as he was known in ports the world over, shipped every board, brick, and nail across Nantucket Sound to Chatham’s grassy hillocks, with his many descendants adding rooms here, stairs there, and carpentered scrollwork everywhere.

My long-ago grandfather had foreseen the demise of whaling and moved his growing family to Cape Cod, where he’d purchased six-hundred-plus acres of rolling swath land for next to nothing. As a child I had a hard time understanding the reason behind such an epic move and would ask Gramp why the good captain didn’t just build another home here.

“Where’d him and his brood suppose ta’ live? In a thatch hut under a maypole? ’Tweren’t no trees back in those days. Most of ’em cut down for buildin’ the shipyards and salt works and such. Captain Nehi had his’self a vision to farm this land, which he done, till the last of his kin turned their backs on ’im and went to sea. And what good it do ’cept get us all killed with not a body to bury ’cept for our women, the poor darlin’s all dead from broken hearts.”

As a small boy, I always loved it when Gramp talked like a pirate, but what he said back then was mostly true. Those buried in our family plot are mostly women, along with the occasional infant who wouldn’t even garner a holystone, only a Plus One when mother and child died together in the birthing chamber. The real reason, however, that the men of the Forrest clan went to work behind the ship’s wheel, wasn’t so much the Call of the Sea, it was because the land purchased by Captain Nehi sat atop a shell midden created by generations of Monomoyick Indians dating back five thousand years. So, wherever an ancestor chose to sink his plow, a river of broken oyster and clamshell was sure to see the light of day, thus making the soil all but impossible to till.

The good captain was not one to give up easily, however. Instead of planting cash crops like corn and potato, which needed a foot or more soil to grow, he spread about sunflower seeds that could grow in any type of soil, shallow or otherwise. Once planted, however, the rest was deemed woman’s work.

In those days, the men living on the Outer Cape who remained on dry land either tended sheep, dried and cured fish, made bricks, or blew glass. Being the proud descendants of a Nantucket whaleboat captain, this simply would not do. So, my many great-uncles and cousins eventually all shipped out, only to freeze in the riggings high above the Hudson, get dragged down by giant sperms in the Pacific, become enslaved by the din of Algiers off the coast of Madeira or, if they did survive the rigors of a nomadic life at sea, they plain never came back.

There are tales of Forrest men staking gold claims in the Yukon and of one relation becoming a tribal king in the Solomon Islands. The latter eventually butchered when he failed to meet the tribe’s daily catch expectations. His barely legible marker still exists on an outlying atoll, or so says Gramp, the tombstone reading:

Her’n Lays Jaab Forrest

A True Pagan!

With No Hope of Redemption!

Beware!

The tombstone was carved by a Spanish missionary who had landed on the atoll in the winter of 1822 and is said to lie next to my great-uncle in an unmarked grave topped with empty coconut husks.

Some might believe these lives wasted, but I do not, and I can prove it. There aren’t many families on this sandy spit who can boast of having a collection of shrunken heads once attached to Māori tribesmen, or that ours was the first and only family to land a kangaroo ashore. For weeks the large marsupial terrified every dog in town, until the local constable came to our front stoop and shot the roo dead for biting off the nose of a Quaker bishop.

“Damnable bishop showed up at our front stoop one morn demanding your great-grandpap, Jeb Forrest, pay his town-ordered church tax, and when the clergyman wouldn’t leave our parlor door, after Jeb tellin’ him to ‘go smoke a pipe,’ Old Jeb sicked Roo on ’im! Now that Roo was a mean son-of-a-gopher, and if it were not for the bishop’s gold crucifix getting caught up in its maw, Roo would have bitten his head clean off! I only wish I was there to see his expression. I bet that stiff-necked, hymn-bellowin’ Come-Outer thought it was the devil his’self let loose from the Netherworld! Old Jeb never did pay that town-ordered church tax,” Gramp likes to reminisce.

Setting aside the hinge-less screen door, I call out, “Hey, Gramp! It’s me! I’m home!” Getting no answer, I call out again. “Hey, Gramp! Are you here or what?” Giving up, I hurry through the kitchen and head for the pantry, kicking away empty cans of Narragansett beer as I go. With walls constructed of horsehair and oyster shell plaster, the pantry is the oldest room in the house, dating back to when it was a sheepherder’s cabin. Captain Nehi liked what he saw when he first walked the land and put his Nantucket house down around it, preserving this room and the beehive ovens in the kitchen. Upon entering the pantry, I run my right hand over our long, beach-wood cutting table, stained red from past family feasts. I have a hard time remembering the last one.

There aren’t many of us left these days. It’s just Gramp and me, far as I know. I would like to have had siblings, only my parents never got around to it. They didn’t have time; both having died at a relatively young age. Gramp likes to talk about me one day filling the house with screeching rug rats, but all I ever wanted was to strike out on my own. Only I can’t. Not yet. I have to take care of Gramp and keep paying down our delinquent town property tax. Either that or get another Roo.

Before entering the house proper, I pass under a plank of worm-eaten driftwood brought back from a long-ago marooning, on which our family motto is written:

‘MAN PRAYS ON HIS KNEES WHILST HIS SALVATION LIES IN HIS HANDS’

I can only imagine what it must have been like sitting on that lonely atoll whittling away and dreaming of rescue. But why the good captain wrote what he did, I haven’t a clue. The motto has always been a yoke around my neck, like Captain Nehi wrote it for me, a disenfranchised fisherman whose wealth surrounds him and yet whose belongings he can neither sell nor take a profit from.

Sliding the pantry doors apart, I enter a labyrinth of interconnecting hallways that thread through the house like ruptured arteries: doors ajar, bleeding dust-covered relics, old newspaper piled high for some future avalanche, along with other doors that are locked shut, the rusted hinges providing afterlife storage for their long-ago tenants. I step under an archway of seaman’s gear left behind by past boat crews that, were it to collapse on me, I’d be completely buried, and it would take pirate captain William Kidd himself to dig me out. Only the mice would know me, intimately I’m sure.

Many a day have I had our International Harvester lashed and loaded with musty rugs, blistered and battered furniture, broken appliances, and empty parrot cages, only to have Gramp lean from his bedroom window and shout down, “That’s our history you’re mucking with! Let it be and I’ll let you be!” Cursing under my breath, I’d drive the IH coughing and stalling back into the barn.

Continuing down a Z-shaped hallway, I pass a decades-old lobster trap encased in petrified sea lettuce and smelling of rotten fish. I intend to take the trap outside and burn it after I get back from my visit with the ranger, Gramp’s protestations be damned! I haven’t seen the ranger since my hasty exit on a misty night over a year ago. He lives in a cabin on the southernmost tip of the Monomoy Island Wildlife Sanctuary. We have some unfinished business to discuss, and I want it to be a surprise. I have my reasons.

Looking down, I spot a coiled loop of braided hemp lying under a moth-eaten spool of sailcloth. I pick it up and check the line for tension, finding the line to be salt-encrusted and stiff, so much so that it would take a mule team pulling from both ends to straighten it. Having no use for it aboard my boat, I drop the line and let it sit for another century, then continue onward through the clutter.

I round a tight corner and our Grand Hall comes into view. I named the hall “Valhalla” after our Viking ancestry, though I’m not sure we go back that far, but I like to think that we do. Taking up the center of the house, the hall rises three stories to where chunks of coral taken from the world’s great oceans gather dust amid the crisscrossed rafters. It’s a massive assemblage of board and beam resembling what Noah’s ark must have looked like belowdecks, only without the animals. Though we do have a few cats whom Gramp calls his ‘familiars’ that prowl about the house without need of attention or feeding. The cats are a special breed of Siamese that have a diamond-shaped spot on their foreheads with litters going back to the Grand Palace of Siam.

I look above me to where a narrow gangplank runs along the second story in a boxlike formation past small, single bedrooms the size and shape of shipboard saloons. The rooms are uninhabited now, but that wasn’t always the case. In the past they were let out to foreign-born fishermen and those hired on to help with the harvest when the house was part of a working farm. Closing my eyes, I can almost picture how it was: the constant clamoring up and down the gangplank, the tall tales told in foreign tongues, the exotic spices of which to salivate over wafting from the beehive ovens. What rouses there must have been and revelry after a bountiful harvest or a successful trip at sea! I was lucky to have caught the tail end of it when I was a boy.

My father, Captain ‘Mad’ Jack Forrest, would quarter his crew when dragging the bay for scallops, and I recall how it was when we had a full house: the manly jousting and jawing, getting passed from one strong hand to the next, then set atop a butcher’s block and fed raw scallops by the grimy handful. I’d often thought of letting out the rooms to tourists and summer workers, but that would only invite building inspectors, fire marshals, and such, and we don’t need that.

It’s as quiet as a graveside funeral as I cross the cedar floorboards scarred with aged patina. Approaching our two-sided hearth, built of staggered brickwork in which a man can stand, I reach onto the rosewood mantle and take down a sepia-tinted photograph of my mother, framed in sterling silver. I never knew her, my mother, she having passed from viral pneumonia soon after I was born, except for the stories my father would tell of how a Charlestown girl of southern aristocracy ignored her parents’ pleas and married a long liner from the Cape, even going to sea with him on occasion.

“That woman could gut and clean a fish faster than any man I had on board, including me,” my father would say before falling silent.

“Seems all of us Forrest men are good for is putting our women in the ground before their time,” Gramp would glumly add.

Having no way of knowing my mother, I rarely give her much thought except when I look at her picture. Dressed in all white, as she will always be in my mind, with long black hair pulled back in a fashionable braid of the times. The woman in the picture is small-boned with a pretty face which is unrecognizable to me, but for her eyes, which are sloping and deep-set as are mine, though I don’t know their true color.

Replacing the picture, I recross Valhalla breathing in the musty odor of Persian rugs in need of a good beating. An octagonal table, once used for spreading maps, sits on top of the rugs like some kind of sacrificial altar. Broad in circumference, the table takes up the center of the hall, surrounded by a circular bookcase holding the great works of their day. Most are first editions and written in their native tongue. I’ve read the majority, but there’s always a literary treasure waiting to be dusted off and discovered. I let my right hand run over the back of our Spanish leather couch, bruised with age yet heavy in its austerity. While doing so, I pass under a ship’s figurehead jutting out from the north wall.

The ‘Sea Witch’ is cloaked in a short chemise accentuating a swollen bosom. She was rescued by Captain Nehi after the taking an English gunboat while privateering for the colonies. And though she belonged to a British warship, the beguiler looks more like a Native American princess than she does a London pub maiden, which is why I’d taken to calling her ‘Poca,’ after John Smith’s Pocahontas. Whenever I’d pass beneath her, she’d always return my smile. Passing beneath her on this day, however, Poca appears strangely aloof and fails to give me her blessing.

Whaleboat captains of yesteryear are thought of today as daring and adventurous, but in their time, they were considered a scurrilous sort along with their crews. “Bottom of the Barrel” was how the Admiralty referred to them, but I’ve been told Captain Nehi was different. He was an explorer before he changed his sails over to whaling, so he knew the value of a fast, clean ship, and he had a brother. That’s where my family tree gets a bit cloudy. According to Gramp, rumor had it the brother sailed with Captain Cook when he rounded the Horn, and he had mapped his own charts in the South Seas before returning to the Cape and becoming a pirate, buccaneering many a Dutch, Moorish, French, and English vessel.

He supposedly ended his days languishing on the shores of the Ile Sainte-Marie, also known as the ‘Island of Wanted Men,’ located off the coast of Madagascar, and his name has been banished from the family’s history ever since. I don’t know it and neither has Gramp ever been told, though tales of him have sifted down through the generations even though the subject has always been taboo. One of these days I plan on taking a trip to the island and making a search of the cemeteries. Someone should say a few words over the poor sod. Hopefully, I’ll find my great-uncle and spill some rum over his grave and perhaps toss down a Spanish doubloon or two.

I start up the spiral metal staircase, itself salvaged from a captured WWI German U-boat stowed at Groton’s Naval Shipyards, where Gramp worked as a welder. Once a Mooncusser, always a Mooncusser! Stepping onto the narrow gangplank, I head for my room and am about to enter when an oblong object catches my eye. Placing both hands on the railing, I peer across the hall at a large oil painting hanging askew on the far wall, and although there are many such paintings adorning the house, I’ve never had the inclination to study this particular painting. It’s like I’m seeing it for the first time. Although I do recall Gramp saying to me the painting was completed in the early 1800s by an artist who may have been a relation, but we’ll never know because it went unsigned.

The painting appears larger than I remember it, more lifelike and grandiose. From my vantage point on the gangplank, I make the sailor to be a young man, perhaps my age, though his back is to the viewer with his face obscured, looking up at his wind-bent mast. Standing atop the stern, the sailor appears to be pushing the tiller to port using his left foot, with the mainsheet wrapped tightly around his right forearm. A sudden flash of lightning illuminates the sailor’s profile, and I can now make out the beginnings of a right eye socket along with the outline of a pronounced Roman nose. I notice the mains’l flutter near the masthead and I believe that I see a plume of sea spray break over the bow. More chain lightning flashes within the painting, followed by a delayed thunderclap. I tighten my grip on the railing and watch in denial as the sailor’s lone eyeball sweeps across the hall before locking its gaze on me.

I step away from the railing and pinch the bridge of my nose to clear my vision. Reopening my eyes, I see the painting how it actually is, only smaller and completely inanimate, with the sailor’s identity remaining obscured. It’s a neat trick and I’ll have to remember it when I have more time, but to be honest, the reality of it leaves me a little seasick, and I never get seasick.

Any and all nausea leaves me as I step into my bedroom and draw open the curtains. It’s not much of a room, and I wouldn’t call it grand, but it’s the only bedroom I’ve ever known except for the numberless pits I’ve bunked in whenever I’m at sea. I catch my reflection on my dresser’s attached mirror and stare at the ghostlike apparition looking back at me from within the foggy glass. I see that I’m not so tall, but rather on the short side, with a ruddy, sunbaked complexion from working long hours abovedecks. My hair has grown long and now balls about my shoulders from my year at sea, and I have a high bridge that I wouldn’t call Roman.

I’m not hard to look at, or at least I’m unique in appearance, and you wouldn’t know it by my wiry frame, but I’m as strong as a Flemish coil. The blood coursing through my veins seems to want to shoot from my fingertips, and I’ve often thought that if I were to grab a fistful of topknot, I could lift myself in the air and hold myself suspended indefinitely. It’s the kind of strength my father had, and Gramp has still and he’s pushing eighty. A family trait, you might say. It helps when I’m hauling hundred-pound gill net over the sides, but other than fishing, I’ve never had much use for it until a year ago. Only it wasn’t my strength that failed me, it was my conscience, and it’s been eating away at me every day since. What’s done is done, I keep telling myself and hopefully, after my meeting with the ranger, I’ll start to believe it.

I go to the sea chest at the foot of my bed and open it. I expected to find my oilskins folded neatly inside, only the chest was empty. I must have left them behind when I jumped ship last night, or was it the night before? Again, I don’t remember. No matter as the sun is up, the air balmy, and the July seas warm enough to take a plunge. What I will need on this day is my speargun that I find under my bed where I put it the night I hastily shipped out. Using great care, I bring the loaded gun up to sight and, cautiously unhooking the titanium-tipped spear from its aluminum housing, pull the trigger and release the vulcanized rubber slingshot, letting it slap harmlessly at the dusty air. Sheathing the spear in its webbed carryall with its five siblings, I grab my spare seabag and leave the room, closing the bedroom door as I found it.

Running down the spiral staircase, I recross Valhalla and take a sharp turn into Gramp’s storied Chart Room. Slipping around a large, standing globe, showing how the world once looked to seventeenth-century navigators, I sneak up to Gramp’s rolltop desk and take down his antique spyglass from its top slot. I’m not really sneaking per se, but I always feel that I am, and if I were to call the spyglass an antique in front of Gramp, he’d likely rap me over the head with it. I loop the brass chain over my head and let the spyglass dangle from my neck as I leave the room, making sure to close the door lest any of Gramp’s familiars gets inside and spray his precious charts. It’s the only room in the house they’re not allowed.

Reentering the kitchen, I am again struck by the squalor in which we bachelors allow ourselves to live: dirty dishes stacked in the sink to the point of overflowing, tiles stained brown, cupboards chipped and peeling, etc. Gramp tries to tidy up some, but it’s just not in him. He was a well-respected ship’s captain after all, and he’s getting on in years. What the house needs is a woman’s touch. Not that there hasn’t been a woman in the house, there have been plenty, but none recently.

Gramp’s wife, Flossy, was the last, and I’d heard from him and others that she ran a tight ship. It was Flossy who mostly raised my father when Gramp was away at sea, and it was my “Nana,” as I called her, who changed my diapers and fed me from the bottle when my father shipped out. But it was after Flossy passed from the ‘the cancer’ that Gramp began pulling at the cork. He’s no doubt at the Chatham Squire right now, drinking away the ‘grocery money’ I send him at the end of every month. If I were to fall into a bottomless pit, it wouldn’t matter much to him as long as he got his grocery money. I don’t believe this, of course, but I sometimes wonder.

I go to our refrigerator and open it. There’s not much there in terms of freshness so I close the door. Finding an empty milk jug in the trash can, I rinse it out and fill it with tap water, then, stepping up to our cupboard, I take out a round loaf of sourdough bread. Checking the bread for mold and finding none, I stuff the loaf into my seabag. Happening upon a bowl of apples, I take three. “Least he’s buying fresh fruit,” I say to myself, then toss the apples on top of the bread and leave by way of the hinge-less screen door, carefully replacing it, so as not to invite flies inside.

Secret Meadow

I stand on our back porch, itself a nautical waste heap of chocks, blocks, buoys, gaffs, and empty nail kegs, and whatever else has washed up on our harbor beach, and pluck my slime knife from its tackle block housing. Slipping the thin blade behind my belt, I step over a more recent culling, a Mercury outboard with a bent prop. I recall the day I carried the engine on my shoulder from the town landing, where it had been abandoned, or so I believed, to our back porch, where it now sits. I did this three years ago and I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it, other than it’s all mine. This addiction to salvage obviously runs in my blood. Spotting a coil of rope lying in the mire, I sling it over my right shoulder, for, as Gramp always warns, “No amount of preparation is uncalled for when sailing into the Realm.”

I exit the back porch by way of the whaler’s gaff. Passing the pagoda tree, I hike through an unkempt field of sunflowers, the bushy blond halos craning in unison toward the early morning sun. Fat bumblebees zip about my head, oblivious to my presence, as I wind my way through the eight-foot stalks in search of the deer run that will bring me to our landing in the Cedar Swamp. Only I can’t find it. I am lost, the spring rains and summer sun having transformed the sparse Cape Cod moraine into a Congolese jungle.

With our landholdings spread over three townships, to this day there are hollows and thickets that I have yet to explore and who knows, behind every tree and rock cropping might be the remnants of an ancient Indian village or a smuggler’s hideaway or, if I’m lucky, a Viking Cromlech jutting from the ground, buried under a bushel of poison ivy.

An army of paratrooping grasshoppers takes wing as I scramble over an ancient stake and rider, and I am on the lookout for lowland gorillas when a ruffed grouse breaks from the heath and sprints down a matted rabbit run. I give chase, making a path an elephant could follow but lose sight of the small bird as it flees over a fieldstone fence. I seem to recall trying to keep my balance on a similar stone wall as a youth, and if memory of a badly sprained ankle serves, the fence eventually peters out onto a secret meadow abloom in Oriental poppies. It was the ancestral women of the family who tended this crop, partaking of the Asiatic herb to get them through the harsh winters and their husbands’ long absences at sea.

I recall the day I came upon a graze of raccoons sprawled about the meadow, lying on their backs and scratching their bellies like a bunch of winos in a hobo jungle. I had my new rifle slung across my shoulders, gifted to me by my father on my tenth birthday. With the rifle came responsibility, my father had told me, only he didn’t elaborate, and I never asked. The coons languished under scarlet bulbs and did not stir at my approach. I was sure these were the same swamp cats who had raided our tomato garden and tipped over our trash bins the night before. Could it be the responsibility my father spoke of meant protecting our crops? Standing in the meadow that day, I had a decision to make.

* * *

Sliding my red Keds over the wet grass, I creep up on a slumbering raccoon. Slipping the rifle’s strap from my right shoulder, I lower the barrel at the coon’s face as it continues smiling blissfully up at the midday sun. Cocking back the hammer, I take a breath, I hold it, then exhale and pull the trigger. The bullet impacts the animal’s right cheek, blowing back its fur. The coon makes a gurgling sound deep in its throat while holding out its childlike hands as if to blot out the sun. I look on in ghastly horror as the coon’s mouth fills with blood, and it begins to choke. Lifting the coon with the toe of my right sneaker, I turn the animal onto its belly, where it dies in a series of raspy gasps. Wiping away hot tears, I push onward through the meadow, reloading my rifle and repeating the process until the whole graze lay dead. Raccoons don’t play possum. Gathering the dead coons, I pile them into a rusted, red wheelbarrow, then slog it through the wood and up the sloping hillside to our back porch, where my father sits in his favorite rattan chair, smoking a cheroot.

“That our suppa’ you bringin’?” he asks, smiling handsomely down at me. I set the barrow next to our splitting stump and saunter up to the back porch aglow with pride.

“Did what you told me. Took aim, held my breath, and shot!”

“Attaboy!” exclaims my father, slapping his knees and hopping from his chair, and he is beside me in a single stride. Wrapping his strong arms around my slender shoulders, he pulls me close. “Remember to clear the chamber?” he asks. I proudly hand him my new rifle. Ratcheting back the action, he eyeballs the empty chamber approvingly and hands it back. Nodding at the barrow, he asks, “Whatcha’ got in there? Tom turkey? Peter Cottontail?”

I shake my head. “Bigger!”

“What’s bigger than a tom?” he asks ponderingly.

“Swamp cats,” I tell him.

“Coons?” he asks, clarifying.

“Yup,” I happily reply. “I got ‘em all!”

“What all you talkin’?” asks my father, his brow sagging slightly.

“The lot.” I beam. “They were lying in the grass like they were asleep or something.”

“Where exactly were you shootin’?” asks my father, his mouth drawing into a frown.

“In a meadow…near where the old fence lets out…had these red bulbs all over.”

My father hurries down the slope. I chase after him. Falling in at his flailing boots, I shout, “Thieves in the night steeling our food! That’s what you and Gramp called them!”

Coming to a stop at our splitting stump, my father reaches into the barrow and takes out a dead raccoon. Examining the pelt, he asks, “All ’em shot up close like this?”

“They wouldn’t run!” I mewl, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Why wouldn’t they run?”

“Kil’t the whole graze by the looks of it,” my father grumbles. “Now how ’em babies spose’ to eat back in their dens?”

“But they stole our tomatoes,” I whimper.

Holding me roughly by my shoulders, my father replies harshly, “’Them coons got a right to live unda’ the same trees we do. So what if a few red-toms go missin’? We can afford it!”

“I thought that’s what you wanted?” I say, openly weeping.

My father’s grip on me softens. Placing me atop the splitting stump, he cups my quivering chin in his strong hand and says to me, “Fishermen take from nature what She gives to him in plentiful supply. We feed the world, Caleb, not just ourselves. It’s wrong what you did.”

Struggling to speak, I say to my father between sniffles, “I only wanted…to be like you.”

“You’re a good boy, Caleb. Never do ya’ have to prove ya’self to me,” says my father. “That’s my job to you. Killin’ don’t make a man. I fill the hold, sure, but I ain’t out there sportfishin’, and if it’s not on my catch list, I throw it back. I figure the more I let live today, the more they’ll be in the future, your future.”

“Are you going to take away my rifle?”

Looking at the 10 gauge leaning against the porch steps, my father considers it for a moment, then turns to me, saying, “Always take what you need, and not what you can take, and I’ll leave it at that.” Nodding at the wheelbarrow, he adds, “The two of us will bury the coons before I leave in the morn.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” I reply, pulling at the grass at my feet. “I wish that stupid boat of yours would sink.”

Standing abruptly, my father walks onto the bluff, where he remains for some time, looking out across the bay. With his back to the splitting stump, he finally speaks. “Me being away is hard on you. That I know. Hard on me, more than you realize, but it’s what we do. What we’ve always done. Doesn’t make it right, just makes it so. Reason I keep bringing you ’em books and tellin’ ya’ to pay attention in school is so you’ll have a choice when the ship’s whistle blows.”

“Didn’t mean it,” I say to my father, running the back of my hand across my runny nose. “About your boat sinking.”

Turning to me, my father smiles. Walking back to the splitting stump, he ruffles my shaggy hair with his large hand, saying, “Hell, I know that. Never figured any different.” Lifting me high in the air, he swings me onto his back, and together we gallop down the sloping hillside. Cutting through the sunflower field, my father easily knocks down the sturdy stalks, and I am in the throes of uncontrollable laughter when he runs the length of our harbor beach with my feet sailing from his back like a windsock. Clamoring up the bluff on all fours without breaking stride, he then sprints the two of us up the sloping hillside and throws our pairing onto the back porch, where we disappear into Gramp’s prepared galley. My father never needed no whaler’s gaff!

I awoke early the next morn and ran to my father’s room, where I found his door ajar and his sea chest open. Leaping down the spiral staircase in my PJs, I stepped onto the back porch and ran to where the red wheelbarrow sat empty next to a patch of freshly upturned earth. My father didn’t leave a marker. He didn’t have to. Captain ‘Mad Jack’ Forrest went missing two months later when the fishing boat he captained sank mysteriously somewhere on the Grand Banks. No distress call was sent and there were no survivors. And neither was the boat or any wreckage of it ever found, as if the boat and crew were sucked from the top-water to join Atlantis. I never shot my rifle after that day.

For the rest of that summer, I searched for the raccoon dens, dragging a backpack filled with table scraps down every warren and rabbit run that I came across, then scattering the spoils wherever I believed the dens might be. I never saw a single raccoon during that time, baby or adult. I continued my quest well into the fall, rubbing baking soda on the poison ivy and picking brambles from my clothes and topknot long after the sun went down. Before going to bed each night, I’d place a tomato on my windowsill and lie awake watching it until the Sandman came to call. Crows would usually find the tomato in the early morn and, after punching holes in the skin with their sharp beaks, carry it away, leaving only a scattering of silky black feathers in their wake.

Thanksgiving of that year was a particularly sad one inside the Forrest house. Instead of the usual three plates, there were now only two. Gramp put out a big spread anyway: twenty-pound bird crammed with oyster stuffing, creamed onions with pan-dripped gravy topping lumpy mashed potatoes, along with homemade cranberry sauce with big, juicy cranberries. It felt like we were eating at the table of some Viking king! After supper, I took a plate of leftovers up the spiral staircase and to my room. Holding the plate one-handed, I crawled from my bedroom window and onto a gabled awning. Light snow had begun to fall when I placed the plate under a low-hanging bough.

That night I lay awake thinking of my father and the many lessons he taught me, but more importantly, of the time we spent together fishing the Powder Hole and sailing the inner harbor. But my favorite pastime with him was watching the Chatham Athletics play semipro summer baseball from our perch behind the home run fence. There wasn’t a ball hit that my father couldn’t run down and catch, no matter how far over the home run fence they went. He was good enough in high school that he could have played college ball and who knows, he might have even gone pro. But when the ship’s whistle blew, he was on it, leaving the baseball and hockey scholarships sealed in their envelopes on the kitchen table. Mostly though, he sits on his haunches watching me miss more home run balls than I caught, but always offering encouragement. He never found fault with the obvious, that I wasn’t inclined to team sports, that I wasn’t fast enough or coordinated like he was. That I was born short and stocky, like my mother, and not long-limbed and fleet of foot like he and Gramp.

That night I went to sleep with hot tears in my eyes. It was the first time I cried since my father was officially declared lost at sea. The following morn, I got up and took a bath, then returned to my room to dress for school. I’d forgotten about the plate I left out until I saw the curtains stirring. Going to the window, I expected to see a tangle of beaks and wings fighting over the scraps, but to my wonder, I found the plate licked clean with not a single black feather littering the freshly laid snow. Examining the plate, I noticed a set of humanlike hand prints leading to and away from the plate and onto the low-hanging pine bough. I stared at the plate for longer than I can remember. Crawling onto the awning, I brought the plate inside and placed it under my bed, choosing not to wash it. Returning from school later that afternoon, I loaded the plate with more table scraps and placed it on the same spot under the low-hanging pine bough, only to find the plate again licked clean the following morn. I continued to load the plate through the fall, never quite sure if I was feeding the entire forest or a single dweller.

Christmas of that year brought some cheer back to the Forrest house as one of Gramp’s familiars had a litter. He invited the town elders over along with their grandchildren to pick out a kitten, and as the eggnog flowed, the old stories were told. I was sitting alone in our parlor, staring aimlessly out the frosted windows, when I noticed the many firelit eyes staring back at me from the tree line in eager anticipation. I laughed out loud for the first time in months, causing Gramp to cut short his reminiscing and walk over to me.

“Thought ya’ had some lass stashed up in yar’ room there for a while. Truth is, I been leavin’ a plate out m’self from time to time. ’Em coons will sleep good this winter. Your dad would be proud of ya’, Caleb. Real proud. Now, why don’t ya’ see if ’em thievin’ rascals like sweets.” Patting my arm, Gramp left a platter of Christmas cookies at my elbow before leaving my side to rejoin his pals.

* * *

I reach the end of the fieldstone fence. The sunflowers here are shorter, more spread out, with their wilting blond halos tilted not at the sun but at the ground, seemingly devoid of happiness. I walk onto the gently lolling meadow long ago culled of the scarlet poppies. My ankles are damp with early morning dew as I slink along with my head down and come to the spot where I shot the first raccoon. I take a knee and run my hand over the wet grass, checking for any lingering sign of the crime, but of course, there’s no blood. There wasn’t that much to begin with. Another crime occurred not far from where I’m kneeling, only I consider it more a matter of conscience than I do murder, and though I don’t believe in ghosts, that’s where you’ll find one, roaming the deep woods near the biggest of our three kettle ponds.

I walk to the edge of the meadow and find myself facing a thicket of bearberry and wild rambling rose. A landscape artist’s dream, to be sure, and I am awed by its beauty, but I also know that I must pass through it to get to my boat. Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turn. But to retrace my steps now would take precious time away from my planned day on the water, so I continue into the bramble, carefully picking my way past the thorny stems.

Cedar Swamp

A sharp-tailed sparrow trills its strange torch song as I come tumbling out of the prickly rubbish, bleeding from a slew of shallow cuts and a handful of deeper ones. The ground swath here has changed from a footing of grass and stick to that of cone and needle as I step into a pine grove, where a massive granite boulder blocks my way. I begin climbing the rock, no doubt left behind from the retreating Wisconsin glacier that helped form the Cape ten thousand years ago, along with the wind and the waves.

Reaching the summit, I squat on my haunches and survey the grove that responds like a cathedral, the boughs of the trees acting as arches with the quietness within recalling that of a church’s nave. I try to imagine an Indian brave doing the same hundreds of years ago. Would his problems be similar to mine, and if so, what would he do? Only I can’t think for him. Whatever insights he may have had, he took with him when he went to where the native Wampanoag Nation call the “Cummaquid” or “The Other Side.”