Dark Nantucket Noon (23 page)

27

“But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat.”

Moby Dick

It was almost hot. Wet and hot. A mist steamed up from the ground, mingling with the fog that hung in the middle air, and the fog in its turn blended with the heavy low-hanging clouds that obscured the sky. There had been foghorns baying in the night. Kitty put on a shirt and a pair of jeans over her bathing suit, picked up her bucket and trowel and her notebook, and drove to a beach called Dionis on the north shore of the island. One of her tourist pamphlets had described it as a popular bathing beach. On a day like this she could have it to herself.

The low bluff was like a rough forehead sprouting hair. The bluffs to left and right were lost in mist. Kitty put her things down on the sand and looked at the low waves seething softly at the bottom of the beach. Beyond them there was no line to tell where the water ended and the gray sky began. The world was all one substance, fog, bog, shaggy and ragged and moist, dripping, drenched, flooded, engulfed. The island today was like a sponge, laden with water, floating in the salt sea under this ocean of thick fog.

She took off her shirt and jeans and waded out into the water and dove in. After the first shock of cold she felt at home, and she swam with strong strokes parallel to the shore, then turned and swain back. After a while she began to feel cold again. She headed toward the beach and rose dripping into the heavy air. With her hair streaming and her nose running and her eyes weeping, she walked back to her discarded clothes. It occurred to her to think of herself, too, as a kind of sponge, a swampy tissue flowing with rivers and inland seas. She began to list and catalogue them, the seas and rivers, and soon she was excited, delighted with the knowledge that she was beginning to organize and arrange a poem in her head—a long one; it was going to be quite long—for the first time since the day of the disaster. She pulled her clothes on over her waterlogged bathing suit and sat down on her wet towel, scribbling in the damp notebook in which she had been drawing pictures of sea lettuce and sea squirts and the arrangements of needle clusters in various kinds of pine trees. It was a list, of course, just a list to begin with.

Many rivers flow inside a man.
He is a pouring and an emptying,
A dark rushing of underground streams,
A hollow vessel brimming at the lip,
A cave of ancient jars of precious ointment,
A fountain,
A cask with a dripping bung.
His flesh is a bog,
His liver and lungs are spongy with water.
The red organs flash back a glistening film
At the surgeon's lamp.…

Kitty laughed, exhilarated. There was no end to them, the liquids in the body. There were digestive secretions and blood and urine and sweat and sexual fluids and menstrual blood and mother's milk. And the warm moisture of the breath from the lungs. And tears. She didn't know yet where she was heading. There would have to be some point to it, some watery meaning. And the whole thing would have to be nailed together tight as a ship's hull, because a single lapse of power was a puncture through which the whole thing would leak out, and then the poem would founder like a wooden ship on perilous seas. Kitty brushed splashes of rain off the page and scribbled some more. Those biles and humors she had been wanting to do something with—here at last was the place for them.

And do not forget the various biles,
Yellow and black,
Akin to the bilious and melancholic
Humors of the soul,
Nor the phlegms and sputums of diseasex,
The stinking effluvia of wounds and sores,
The vomit of final convulsion,
The black seepages of death.

Oh, horrible, horrible, glorious. Grinning, Kitty mopped at the wet page, slapped the notebook shut and stood up, shivering from the clamminess of the wet bathing suit against her skin. She-gathered up her belongings dreamily, walked back to her car and drove home slowly through patches of mist lying over the road. There was a note impaled on the thumb-latch of her front door, and a dandelion drooping from the rusted knocker. Kitty left the dandelion where it was and brought the note inside to read.

Joy! Joy! Somebody was trying to kill her before! Call me!

Homer

“Somebody was trying to kill her before?” said Kitty, when Homer answered the phone.

“You bet your boots somebody was trying to kill her before.” Homer was shouting into the telephone. Kitty had to hold the receiver away from her ear. “Thanks to an automobile mechanic named Boozer Brown I can now inform you, Katharine Clark, that somebody tried to kill Helen Green three weeks before you set foot on Nantucket Island. Listen to this: Joe Green has a new car. Why does he have a new car? Because his old car was wrecked—I just happened to stumble on it this morning. And this man Brown tells me that somebody had untwisted a nut from a bolt in the front wheel linkage, so the next time the car was driven the thing came apart and the car ran into a telephone pole. Green's car! Joe Green's! How do you like that?”

“Was Helen in it? Was she the one who had the accident?”

“No, but she was supposed to be. Here's what happened. Joe left in the morning for the mainland to give a speech somewhere. Helen stayed home to attend an important meeting of the Nantucket Protection Society, because they were making plans for that big town meeting when they wanted to put the new bylaw through. Only then at the last minute she stayed home sick, and her neighbor Tillinghast borrowed the car, because his own car was on the fritz. He set off for the meeting in it, and so he had the accident on the way to town. He came out alive by a stroke of luck. I'm so happy, I'm dancing around the house, upsetting all of Alice's porcelain figurines and Chinese vases—aren't I, Alice? Well, birds' eggs and bottles of rat poison, then. Oh, no, that's not right either. Don't glare at me, Alice. I shouldn't have said rat poison, because rats after all are a part of the great chain of being, marvelous in their own ratty way, aren't they, Alice, dear? Reverence for life, and all that. Forgive me.”

Kitty stared doubtfully at the shells on her-mantelpiece. “Do you think anybody will believe that, Homer?”

“Who do you mean? The judge? The jury? Well, it's true they might not believe Boozer Brown, but I'll go right to the top, I'll get the world's greatest experts on auto mechanics, people who have taken advanced degrees in spark plugs and carburetors. I'll get some guys like that to testify that Joe Green's front-wheel linkage bolt didn't work loose all by itself. I've just called Boozer, and he's promised to wrap the thing up in an old sock and stick the sock in a can of axle grease and keep the can of axle grease in his Coke machine along with his bottles of booze.”

“I don't know, Homer,” said Kitty gloomily. “It sounds too good to be true. One small bolt compared with all they've got against me.”

“Oh, have no fear. I'm going to fasten my whole argument together with that bolt. And look here, if somebody failed to kill her once, they may have tried and failed another time. There's” that loose stair carpet after all, and her fall down the stairs. I'll bet there were more things like that. I'm going to look into it.”

“Homer …” There was a pause, and then Kitty spoke up shakily. “Do you know how a starfish eats a clam?”

“No. How?”

“It forces the clam apart with its arms and then eats it with its expelled stomach.”

“No!” There was another pause. Kitty could feel Homer wondering about her at the other end of the line. “Say, look, Kitty Clark, are you all right? Maybe you'd better stop reading about clams and starfish and so on. Nature in the raw is pretty strong medicine for tender sensitive natures like yours. Those books ought to be kept in locked cases in the library along with the pornography, in my opinion. Do you want Alice and me to come over? No? You're sure? Well, all right. So long.”

Kitty hung up. It had suddenly become electrifyingly clear to her while Homer was talking that
somebody
had killed Helen Green,
somebody real
, and that whoever had done it had acted with malice and deadly intent. And not only that, but this person was now destroying a girl named Kitty Clark as well, by letting her take the blame. And still more, this malevolence and violence were a part of the natural order of things. And that was the whole trouble. Homer had understood about the starfish and the clam. He had said they should lock up those books with their horrible stories. Well, maybe they should.

Kitty sat down at her kitchen table and looked at the scribbled words in her notebook. But the euphoria of her morning's work was gone. All she could think about was the savagery of nature. It was all very well for nature lovers like the Doves to have a reverence for life, but they should understand that their reverence was not shared by the life forms they revered. The life forms themselves were concerned with one thing only—murder. Every one of those fragile delicate creatures at the edge of the tide and down under the water, each individual being that was itself so wonderfully made and marvelously complex, was existing and surviving from one day to another only by a horrifying grasping at the death of other fragile complicated creatures—and the sum of all this grasping was a billion simultaneous tragedies, taking place at that very instant in the oceans of the earth. Kitty shuddered and found herself wondering how
they
felt about it, all the multitudinous mollusks which were at that moment having their shells drilled into by moonsnails, all those forms of sentient life that were now being ground up or torn asunder or clawed and punctured in their soft mortal parts. Were they afraid? Were they screaming with terror and pain in some part of themselves? Or was there instead some sort of vast and cosmic resignation that assuaged the horror of this immense incalculable slaughter?

That was what she should say to herself, Kitty told herself bitterly. She should simply resign herself, vastly and cosmically, to whatever was going to happen to her She should simply remind herself that she was expiring in order to satisfy some necessary appetite in the world. She was part of Mother Nature's great untidy plan.

But it wasn't going to work. She was not resigned. She couldn't help asking what, exactly, was the nature of the necessary appetite in her own case?

28

To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this Leviathan!

Moby Dick

Dearest Mary,

Behold, my love! Your mild soft-spoken gentle shy retiring husband is now a new Ahab! his eyes hot coals! his ivory leg apace upon the deck! in his breast one fierce desire, to drive this ship across the world to the den of the sea where lurks the white whale in all his murderous immensity! To find (in short) who it was that killed that woman Helen Green. I smite my chest, and it rings most vast, most hollow! I shall drive ‘round the whole terraqueous globe before I'm done! to find that murdering bastard for whom poor Kitty Clark is to become a pendant pearl at the yardarm end, like Billy Budd The trouble is, she's a lamb for the slaughter, she's just the sort to step up to the hangman's noose like Billy and cry, “God bless Captain Vere!”

Well, anyway, I'm off to a fair start. I'm as sure as I can be in my own mind that someone was patiently trying to kill Mrs. Green for at least a month before the day of the eclipse, with a series of carefully planned accidents. I don't know if I can make this tenuous stuff convincing to anybody else Kitty doesn't take much stock in it herself. Here's the list—

1. Somebody tinkered with Helen's car in such a way that it caused a nasty accident. Her husband managed to be away that night, which looks a little queer.

2. She fell downstairs one day because someone had loosened the stair carpet.

3. A railing collapsed under her. She was invited to lunch at the neighbors' house, and they were out on the porch looking at birds through a small telescope mounted on the railing, Helen and Mrs. Tillinghast, when the railing gave way, and Helen almost fell twenty feet to a stone terrace, but Mrs. T'hast grabbed her and pulled her back.

I just ran that last one down this morning. Mr. Tillinghast was pretty upset about it, apparently, because his wife had been complaining about the rickety porch for some time and he hadn't done anything about it, and she was mad as hell, as who wouldn't be, but I wonder whether somebody didn't make it still ricketier for this particular occasion when Helen was going to be there.

You see, what I'm supposing is that somebody was trying to get rid of Helen Green in a
passive
way, by merely arranging pitfalls for her to fall into amiably all by herself. No crude stranglings or vulgar confrontations with pistols or shotguns. But then when all of these passive perfectly respectable things failed, it was unfortunately necessary to be more direct.

The point is, of course, all these earlier attempts on the life of Helen Green happened while my client was peacefully teaching classes in versification at Boston University.

Ah, well, damn. It's just so many feathers in the scale compared with the lead weight of those pictures of Kitty standing there with her bloodstained knife. I'm afraid I haven't got enough yet. Not enough. And here it is June.

Which means, thank God, there are only ten more days until you come. One for each finger of my two hands. I think I'll chop off one digit as each day goes by, rejoicing in the increase of bloody stumps.

Your loving husband,
Homer

29

Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.