Louise

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 11: Louise

Louise Pelletier boarded the 8:30 on a Wednesday in October carrying a handbag, a raincoat folded over her arm, and the particular expression of a woman who is going to the doctor and who does not want to go to the doctor and who is going anyway because the going is necessary, because the body has made a request that the body's owner cannot refuse, and the request is for attention, for investigation, for the specific kind of looking that doctors do, the looking-inside, the seeing of what the body's surface does not show.

She was seventy-four. She had been seventy-four for three months and she would be seventy-five in January and the distance between seventy-eight and seventy-nine was, at this age, not a year but a question, the question that every year after seventy asks, which is: will there be another, and the asking is not morbid but practical, the practicality of a woman who has taught three generations of children and who knows that all stories end and that the ending is not the story's failure but its completion, and completion is what stories do, what lives do, what crossings do.

She sat in the passenger cabin. She chose the seat she always chose — third row, port side, the seat closest to the window, the window that faced Dunmore as the ferry departed, so that she could watch the island recede, could watch it pull away or, more accurately, could watch herself pull away from it, the distancing a slow visual process that began with the harbor's details — the pilings, the dock, the terminal building — and progressed to the harbor's shape and then to the island's profile and then, if the air was clear, to the island's whole form, the low green ridge of spruce and granite that was Dunmore seen from the channel, seen from the middle distance, seen from the water that surrounded it and defined it and that was, in the visual sense, the thing that made the island visible, because an island is visible as an island only from the water, only from the surrounding, and the surrounding was the channel and the channel was the crossing and the crossing was the ferry and the ferry was where Louise sat, in the third row, port side, watching the island become itself by becoming distant.

Harlan saw her from the wheelhouse. He saw the way she held herself in the seat — upright, careful, the posture of a woman who had stood before classrooms for forty-three years and who had developed the erect bearing that teaching requires, the spine straight, the shoulders back, the body an instrument of authority and of attention, and the bearing persisted even in retirement, even in illness, even on a ferry ride to a doctor's appointment, because the bearing was not a posture but an identity, was not adopted but inherent, the way the Constance's particular list to port in calm water was not a defect but a characteristic.

He descended from the wheelhouse after the departure, after the channel was entered and the course was set and the autopilot — a simple system, not true autopilot but a course-hold function that kept the Constance on a heading and that Harlan used only in calm conditions and only for brief intervals — held the wheel.

He entered the passenger cabin.

Louise looked up. She had been looking at the window, at the island receding, at the fog that was not fog today but haze, the October haze that was thinner than September fog and that did not conceal but filtered, that made the world not invisible but translucent, and the translucence was the season's quality, October's particular light, the light that was clear but not sharp, that showed everything but showed it through a scrim of moisture and declining angle.

"Captain," she said.

"Louise," he said.

He sat across from her, in the aisle seat of the third row, starboard side, and the sitting was not unusual — he sat with passengers sometimes, with the regulars, with the people whose crossing was not just transportation but social, the daily or weekly encounter with the captain that was part of the crossing's texture, part of its human dimension — but the sitting with Louise was different because Louise was different, because Louise was the island's oldest continuous resident and the island's retired schoolteacher and the woman who had taught Harlan in fourth grade and who had taught Mere in fourth grade and who had taught Tommy in fourth grade and who had, in the process of teaching three generations of the same family, accumulated a knowledge of that family that was deeper than the family's own knowledge of itself, because Louise had seen each of them at the age when character is forming, at the age when the person is emerging from the child, and the seeing had given her a perspective that the family members, who saw each other as adults, did not have.

"Doctor's appointment," she said. She said it as a statement, not an explanation, because the explanation was unnecessary — Harlan knew, Mere had told him, Mere knew because Louise had mentioned it at the store when buying bread, and the mentioning was the telling and the telling was the island's way, the information traveling from person to person the way water travels through the channel, by the path of least resistance, filling the available spaces.

"Everything all right?" Harlan said.

"We'll see," Louise said. "We'll see is what I say because we'll see is what there is. The X-ray showed something. Something is the word they use when they don't want to say the other word. Something on the lung. Something they want to look at more closely. Something that might be nothing or might be the word they don't want to say, and the not-wanting-to-say is the doctor's way of being kind, and the kindness is appreciated but it is not information, and I am a teacher, Harlan, and I prefer information to kindness, because information can be dealt with and kindness can only be received."

Harlan nodded. He did not say he was sorry because sorry was the word people said when they had no other word and the word's emptiness was its own kind of unkindness, the unkindness of insufficient language, and Louise deserved better than insufficient language, deserved the precision that she had demanded from her students for forty-three years, the precision of the right word in the right place, and the right word for this moment was not sorry but was silence, the silence of a man sitting with a woman on a ferry in a channel, the silence that was not absence but presence, the being-there that was more than any word.

They sat. The Constance moved through the channel. The haze admitted the shores in both directions — Dunmore behind, Port Clement ahead — and the double visibility was unusual, was the gift of clear October air, the ferry suspended between two visible shores rather than between two invisible ones, and the visibility made the channel seem shorter, made the 1.4 miles seem less, and the seeming-less was an illusion because the miles were the miles and the minutes were the minutes and the distance did not change with the weather, only the perception of the distance changed.

"Your father," Louise said.

Harlan waited.

"I was thinking about your father this morning. I was thinking about him because I was thinking about the ferry and when I think about the ferry I think about your father because your father was the ferry before you were the ferry, and before your father the ferry was someone else, and before that someone else it was Josiah Clement, and the line goes back to 1891, and the line is the crossing's history, and the history is the thing I carry, the thing I have always carried, the thing I was hired to carry when I came to Dunmore in 1969 to teach at the school."

She had come in 1969. She had come from Orono, where she had studied education at the university, and she had come to Dunmore because the island school needed a teacher and because the island school was a one-room school and a one-room school was the thing she wanted to teach in, the thing she believed in, the one-room school where every grade was in the same room and the teaching was not sequential but simultaneous, not one thing at a time but all things at once, and the all-at-once was the pedagogy she believed in, the mingling of ages and abilities that produced, she believed, a different kind of learning, a learning that was not linear but communal, not individual but social.

"Your father met me at the ferry," she said. "I came on the 10:00 from Port Clement. I had a suitcase and a box of books and I was twenty-one years old and I did not know what an island was. I thought an island was a place. Your father told me an island is not a place. An island is a condition."

Harlan had heard this story. He had heard it from Louise and from his father and from Mere, who had heard it from their mother, and the story was part of the family's lore, the island's lore, the story of the young teacher arriving and the ferry captain defining the island in a single sentence, and the sentence had become famous on the island, had been repeated and refined and elevated into the kind of statement that a community adopts as its motto, its self-description, its answer to the mainland's question of why anyone would live on an island when the mainland was right there, twenty-two minutes away.

An island is not a place. An island is a condition.

"He ran the Clara B.," Louise said. "The Clara B. was smaller than the Constance. You remember."

"I remember," Harlan said. He remembered the Clara B. the way a child remembers a house — not by its dimensions or its features but by its feeling, the feeling of being aboard, the feeling of the engine's vibration and the diesel's smell and the wheelhouse where his father stood, the wheelhouse that was smaller and lower and warmer than the Constance's wheelhouse, the warmth from a kerosene heater that his father kept beside the wheel in winter, the heater that the Coast Guard had told him to remove and that he had not removed because the cold was real and the regulation was theoretical and the real always won.

"The crossing used to take thirty-five minutes," Louise said. "The Clara B. was slower. The channel markers were different — fewer of them, no lights on most of them. Your father navigated by memory. Not GPS, not radar — the Clara B. didn't have radar until 1975. Memory. He knew where the ledges were because his father had told him and his father's father had told his father, and the telling was the chart, the verbal chart, the map carried in the mind rather than on the paper."

"He had charts," Harlan said.

"He had charts and he didn't use them. The charts were in the drawer. I asked him once — I was riding the ferry in my first winter, 1970, January, and the channel was iced and the fog was thick and I was terrified, I was a girl from Orono who had never been on a boat in winter, and I went to the wheelhouse and your father was standing at the wheel and I asked him how he knew where he was going and he said 'I know where I am' and the answer was the difference between my question and his knowledge, because I was asking about going and he was talking about being, about knowing where he was at every moment, in the channel, in the fog, in the ice, and the knowing was not navigation but location, not the plot of a course but the sense of a position, and the sense was in his body, in his hands, in the thirty years he had been on the water."

Twenty-six years. James Goss had captained the crossing from 1962 to 1988, twenty-six years — and Harlan had now exceeded his father's tenure by eight years, the son surpassing the father without intending to, the way a tree's rings exceed their predecessor's without intending to, each ring a response to conditions rather than a plan. James had started at twenty-six, when the Clara B. was launched, and had retired at fifty-two, younger than Harlan was now, retired because his hip had failed him, the hip that had carried him up and down the wheelhouse stairs through twenty-six Maine winters, the hip that had absorbed the Clara B.'s vibration and then the Constance's vibration and that had, eventually, refused, had said no more, had forced the retirement that James had not wanted and that Harlan had inherited, the captaincy passing from father to son not by ceremony but by necessity, by the hip's refusal, by the body's veto.

"He was a precise man," Louise said. "Precise in the way you are precise. The precision was not fussiness but respect. Respect for the channel. Respect for the vessel. Respect for the passengers. The precision said: I take this seriously, I understand that you are in my care for twenty-two minutes — thirty-five minutes, in his case — and I will deliver you safely because the delivery is my responsibility and I do not take my responsibility lightly."

She paused. She looked at the window. Port Clement was visible now, the town's waterfront emerging from the haze, the buildings and the docks and the ferry terminal taking shape.

"He talked about you," she said. "Not often. Your father was not a man who talked often. But he talked about you when you were a boy, when you were a student in my class, and what he said was: the boy listens to the water. And I did not know what this meant because I was a teacher and teachers listen to words, to the language that children produce, and the language your father was describing was not a language I knew, was the language of the channel, the language that the water spoke and that the boy — you — could hear."

Harlan looked at his hands. His hands were on his thighs, palms down, the fingers spread, and the hands were roughened by salt and cold and rope and wheel, the skin thickened and cracked and weathered to a texture that was not skin's ordinary texture but was the texture of skin that has been in negotiation with the sea for thirty-four years, the negotiation written on the surface the way the tide's negotiation with the shore is written on the rocks, in wear, in erosion, in the slow transformation of the original material into something harder and less smooth and more durable.

"He was proud of you," Louise said. "He did not say proud. He said: the boy will be all right on the water. And the all right was the proud, and the water was the crossing, and the crossing was the life he was giving you, the life he had received from his father and was passing to you, and the passing was the constancy, the thing the ferry's name promised, the unbroken line from Josiah Clement to James Goss to Harlan Goss, and the line was the crossing's history and the history was the island's identity and the identity was the thing I carried, the thing I taught, the thing I told three generations of children: you are islanders, you are people who live across the water, you are people whose lives require the crossing, and the crossing is not an inconvenience but a definition."

The Constance was approaching Port Clement. Harlan stood. He needed to return to the wheelhouse for the docking. Louise looked up at him.

"The bridge," she said.

He waited.

"An island connected to the mainland is not an island," she said. "It's a peninsula."

He looked at her. She looked at him. The statement was not new — she had said it before, at the store, at the school board meeting, at the public hearing where the bridge had been discussed and debated and ultimately approved despite the objections of Louise and Earl and the others who opposed it — but the statement was different now, on the ferry, in the channel, in the crossing itself, because the statement was not an argument but a description, not a position but a fact, and the fact was geographical and it was ontological and it was the fact that the bridge would change, would render false, would convert from truth to history.

An island connected to the mainland is not an island. It is a peninsula.

Harlan returned to the wheelhouse. He docked the Constance at Port Clement. Louise disembarked. He watched her walk up the ramp and across the parking lot, her raincoat over her arm, her handbag in her hand, her posture erect, her walk the walk of a woman who is going to the doctor and who does not want to go but who goes because the going is necessary, and the necessity is the body's demand, and the body's demand is the body's right, and the right cannot be refused, not by the will, not by the fear, not by the preference for not-knowing over knowing.

She walked out of the terminal lot and turned left on Main Street toward the medical building, and Harlan watched her until she turned and then he looked at the channel.

The channel was the same channel. The haze was the same haze. The October light was the same light. The Constance was the same Constance. The crossing was the same crossing.

But the words were in the wheelhouse now, the words Louise had spoken — about his father, about the boy who listened to the water, about the island that was a condition rather than a place, about the peninsula that an island becomes when the water's meaning changes — and the words sat on the console and the wheel and the tide table the way the salt sat on the windows, a film, a residue, a deposit left by contact, and the deposit could not be wiped away because the words were not on the surfaces but in the air, in the wheelhouse's atmosphere, in the space where Harlan stood and steered and crossed and recrossed, and the words would be there for every subsequent crossing, would be part of the wheelhouse's cargo, invisible, weightless, permanent.

He poured coffee from the thermos. He drank it. He waited for the next departure.

Louise returned on the 2:30. She boarded quietly, sat in her seat — third row, port side — and held her handbag on her lap and looked at the island approaching through the haze, the island that was still an island, that was still surrounded by water, that was still twenty-two minutes from the mainland, and the still was the word, the operative word, the word that held the present tense in place against the future tense that was pressing against it.

She did not come to the wheelhouse on the return. She did not tell Harlan what the doctor had said. She disembarked at Dunmore and walked up Island Road toward her house, the house on the hill above the harbor, the house where she had lived for fifty-three years, since 1969, since the day she arrived on the 10:00 ferry with a suitcase and a box of books and was met by a captain who told her that an island is a condition.

Harlan watched her walk. He watched until she disappeared around the curve.

The something on the lung. The word they did not want to say. The information that Louise preferred to kindness and that the doctor may or may not have provided and that Harlan would learn eventually, would learn at the store from Mere who would learn from Margaret who would learn from Louise or from Louise's neighbor or from the pharmacy where the prescription was filled, the information traveling the island's network the way all information traveled the island's network, by conversation, by proximity, by the daily exchanges that were the community's circulatory system, carrying the news and the worry and the hope and the fear from person to person, from house to house, from the store to the harbor to the church to the school, and the carrying was the community's work, its essential labor, the work of knowing each other's lives and bearing each other's burdens and sharing each other's fear of the word that the doctors do not want to say.

The Constance idled at the dock. The next crossing would begin in forty-three minutes. The tide was rising. The channel was filling. The island was still an island.

Still.