The Dagger Man of Whistler Bay


From the unpublished memoir by Wilder Harlow June, 1989

I’m looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and thinking about love, because I plan on falling in love this summer. I don’t know how or with whom. Outside, the city is a hot tarry mess. There must be someone in New York who … I wish I wasn’t so weird-looking. I’m not even asking to be loved back, just to know what it feels like. I make a face in the mirror, pulling my lower lip all the way down so the inside shows on the outside. Then I pull my lower eyelids down so they glare red.

‘Hello,’ I say to the mirror. ‘I love you.’

I give a yell as my mom bursts in without knocking. ‘Mom! Privacy!’ A startled roach breaks from behind the pipes and runs across the cracked tile floor, fast and straight like it’s being pulled by fishing line.

‘You want privacy, you lock the door.’ She grabs me by the arm. ‘Come on, monkey. Big news.’

She drags me to the living room where the air conditioner roars like lions. Dad holds a piece of paper. ‘Probate is finished,’ he says. ‘The cottage is ours.’ The paper trembles; I can’t tell if it’s from the air-con or whether his hands are shaking. He looks exhausted. Good and bad can feel like the same thing, I think, if they’re intense enough.

Dad takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. Uncle Vernon died in April. Dad really loved him. He goes up every summer to visit – well, he did. We never went with him.

‘Vernon’s crabby,’ Dad always said. ‘Doesn’t much like women or kids.’ Uncle Vernon was the last of that side of his family. We Harlows aren’t much good at staying alive so Uncle Vernon did better than most; he made it to his seventies.

‘We have to list it right away,’ Dad says. ‘Sell while the summer’s still fine. I know that.’ We all know that. The envelopes with red on them come through the door all the time.

‘Tell you what,’ Mom says. ‘Let’s go up there first, OK? Before we sell.’

‘What?’ Dad keeps wiping his glasses. His eyes are pink and naked.

‘Let’s have a vacation,’ Mom says. She tucks a strand of imaginary hair behind her ear, which is a sign that she’s excited. We haven’t had a vacation since that trip to Rehoboth Beach when I was seven. ‘What do you say, Wilder?’

‘That could be fun,’ I say, hesitant. The ocean sounds like a good place to fall in love. Plus, if we take a vacation maybe my mom and dad might stop fighting. They think I don’t hear but I do. In the night a certain kind of whisper sounds louder than yelling.

‘You deserve a vacation, monkey,’ she whispers. ‘We’re so proud of you.’ The phone call came yesterday – Scottsboro Prep are renewing my full-board scholarship. I let her hug me. The truth is that things at Scottsboro got pretty bad by the end of term. I was at breaking point, walking to class as quickly as I could so as not to be caught in the hallway by others, or taking a book to lunch so no one could catch my eye. That way I could at least pretend not to hear what they said about me. My hands got red and sore from wringing out clothes, ties that were soaked wet with toilet water and bleach, sometimes other stuff.

My scholarship makes it possible for me to go to Scottsboro, which is very expensive. All I have to do is hold on for a couple more years. It has to end one day. Just hold on, I tell myself over and over, in my head. I’ll go to college and from then on, everything will be different. I’m going to write books.

I don’t tell my parents about what happens at Scottsboro. It might make things even worse between them.

* * *

We leave the city in a warm June dawn that promises another sweltering day, and drive up through the woods. We move backwards through the season, travelling through time, the summer growing younger and cooler as we make our way north.

In the late afternoon we leave the highway. The grass gets tall and green. There are wildflowers I don’t know, the sound of crickets. The warm wind is full of salt.

Evening’s falling as we pull over at the foot of a green hill marked by a shingle path. The cottage perches above like a gull on the cliff. We walk, sweating, up the green swathe of land, suitcases leaving tracks in the rough grass. The house is surrounded by a white picket fence with a gate. It’s white clapboard with blue shutters, and I think – I’ve never seen anything so neat, so perfect. There are rows of seashells on the porch and twisting silver driftwood hangs above the door. The leaves of the sugar maple whisper – under it, there’s a high-pitched whine, a long shrill note like bad singing.

This is the first time I hear it, the whistling for which the bay is named. It sounds like all the things you’re not supposed to believe in – mermaids, selkies, sirens.

I come to with my mother’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on inside, Wilder,’ she says, and I realise I’ve been just standing there, mouth open.

‘What’s that sound?’ It seems like it’s coming from inside me, somehow.

Dad pauses in the act of unlocking the door. ‘It’s the stones on the beach. High tide has eaten away at them, making little holes – kind of like the finger stops on a flute – and when the wind is in the east, coming over the ocean, it whistles through. Neat, huh?’

‘It’s spooky,’ I say.

‘Come to think of it,’ Dad says thoughtfully, ‘the way Uncle Vernon was found was pretty spooky, too. He was just sitting up on those rocks as they whistled around him, eyes staring. Like he’d been taken before his time, whistled to death by Whistler Bay…’

‘Dork,’ I mutter as I follow him inside. I know Uncle Vernon died in hospital of a heart infarction.

Inside the cottage everything is bare and white and blue, like a shore washed clean by the ocean. My room has a single bed covered in rough wool blankets, and a round window like a porthole.

‘Keep the windows closed at night,’ my father says. ‘There have been some break-ins around here. I’ll get locks in the morning.’

‘And careful in the water,’ my mother adds, anxious. ‘There’s a drowning almost every year.’

‘Yes, mother dearest.’

She slaps my arm. Sometimes she gets mad when I’m what she calls fresh, but mostly she likes it.

I open the porthole and fall asleep to the sound of the stones and the sea.

* * *

In the morning I wake before my parents. I realise as soon as I put them on that my swimming shorts are way too small. I’ve grown a lot since last summer. I didn’t think of it before we left New York. So I put on some underwear and flip flops, grab a towel and slip out the back door.

The red ball of the morning sun is burning off the last sea mist. I go down the path, gravel skittering from my sandalled feet, towel slung over my shoulder.

On the beach the pebbles are already warm from the sun. I take off my glasses and rest them gently on a rock. On an impulse I slip off my underwear too and go into the sea naked. The water takes me in its glassy grip. For a second I wonder, riptide? But the sea is still and cool. It’s a homecoming. I think, I’m a sea person and I never even knew it. Even underwater I can still hear the wind singing in the rocks. And I hear a voice, too, calling. I break the surface, coughing, water streaming from my head.

A girl and a boy stand on the shore. I think they’re about my age. She wears overalls and a big floppy hat. Her hair is a deep, almost unnatural red, like blood. She wears a man’s watch on her wrist, gold and clunky. It’s way too big and it makes her wrist look very slim. I think, frick that was fast, because I am in love with her right away.

I see what she holds: a stick, with my underwear hanging off the pointed end. She wrinkles her nose in an expression of disgust. ‘What kind of pervert leaves their underwear lying around on the beach?’ Her scorn mingles perfectly with her accent – she’s English. Not the sunburned kind who throng round Times Square, but the kind I thought existed only in movies. Classy.

The wind billows in the fabric of my shorts, filling them. For a second it looks like I am still in the shorts – invisible, struggling, impaled.

‘Hey,’ the boy says. ‘He didn’t know anyone else was here.’ Heah. Is he British, too? He’s tall with an easy, open look to him. I think, it’s boys like that who get the girls. As if to confirm this thought, he puts a hand on the girl’s back. ‘Give ’em, Harper.’

Harper – it seems an odd name for a British girl but it suits her. Maybe her parents are big readers.

Reluctantly she swings the stick around at him. He takes off his shirt, plucks the underwear off the end of the stick and wades into the shallows. He doesn’t seem to mind his shorts getting wet. ‘Stay there,’ he calls. ‘I’ll come out.’ He swims out in long slow strokes to where I bob in the centre of the cove.

‘Here you go.’ Heah ya go. Not British. He hands me my shorts. Then he swims back towards the shore. I struggle into the underwear, catching my feet in the fabric. I begin the endless swim back.

The boy is talking to the girl – she’s laughing. I think with a bite of fear, they’re laughing at me. But he puts another gentle hand on Harper’s back and turns her away, pointing inland, towards something on the cliff. I realise he’s being kind to me again, making sure I can get out of the water in privacy.

I huddle, cold, in my towel. I’d thought there was something special about this place this morning but there isn’t. The world’s the same everywhere. It’s all like school.

‘See you around,’ I say and make my way back up the path. I feel their eyes on my back and I stumble on the incline. The rocks make their evil whistling and I hurry away from the kids’ gaze and the sound, which seem part of each other. I go straight indoors and stay there until long after I hear them come up from the beach and past the cottage, long after their footsteps have faded away down the hill, towards the road.

I wonder what the relationship between them is, if they’re dating, if maybe they’re doing it. I don’t know enough about it to tell. He touches her with a casual assurance but they didn’t behave romantically towards one another – not the way the movies have led me to expect.

I had planned to journal each day, here. But I don’t want to write down what happened this morning. I wash my face over and over again with cold water before breakfast, so Mom and Dad don’t see redness around my eyes or any other traces of tears.

I want to go home so badly I can taste it. I think of my usual seat at the library in the city, near the end of one of those long tables, the lamps with their green glass shades throwing circles of warm light. Everyone helps you understand things, there.

* * *

‘Come on, sport,’ my father says. ‘Good for you to get out. You can’t sit in your room all vacation.’ So I go with him to run errands in Castine. What else am I going to do?

Waiting for him to finish at the post office, I gaze glumly at the sacks of chickenfeed piled outside the general store, wander up the main street. It’s lonely being with family sometimes.

A pickup pulls up with a screech on the other side of the street, outside a cheerful white and blue shop. Fresh Fish, reads the sign overhead. The truck is battered and rusty with panels beaten out badly where they’ve been staved in by collisions. Probably a drinker, I say to myself, knowing. A line comes to me. Living by the sea is tough on paint, and just as hard on the mind. Maybe I’ll write it down later.

A thin man in a vest gets out of the truck. He busies himself with coolers and crates, and a moment later, the rich smell of raw fish reaches me. I watch the man with interest. He’s so easy in himself, unloads the truck in quick, decisive movements, every now and then spitting a thin vein of brown juice into the gutter. A man of the sea, I think. He’s weather-beaten, skin as brown as shoe leather, but his eyes are a warm blue, striking in his worn face. I imagine him living in a board shack, bleached silver by the sun and salt, down by the water, going out in his boat every day before dawn. Some tragedy lies in his past, I’m sure of it. He has a rough, sad look like a cowboy in a western. But he’s a sea cowboy, which is even cooler. I back into the shadow of a little alley. I don’t want to be seen staring.

A bell jingles, and a young woman comes out of the blue and white store and greets him, friendly. He nods back. Her eyes are swollen, her nose red. She’s been crying, I realise, and I feel a spurt of hot sympathy for her. Or maybe she has a cold. She blows her nose heartily and stuffs the Kleenex back in her pocket. She takes the crates into the jingling doorway and brings them back empty, swinging from her hand. The bell announces her exits and her entrances, jaunty. It isn’t a cold; she’s been crying, for sure. In fact she’s still crying. Fresh tears shine on her face. She dabs them dry with tiny movements.

‘Sorry,’ I hear her say to the fisherman, as if she’s offending him somehow. The man nods gently. The world is full of sorrow, his silence seems to say. Maybe they were lovers, I think, excited. Maybe he left her.

When the contents of all twelve crates are inside, she hands him a wad of bills. He takes them and turns back to the truck. As she goes into the store for the last time the Kleenex she’d dried her tears with falls from her pocket. He must see it in the corner of his eye, because he turns quickly, and picks it up before the wind can take it. The man slips the tissue into his pocket. I feel how kind it is, his act of humility, to pick the tissue up for the crying girl and take it away, so it doesn’t blow down the street and out to sea.

As if feeling my eyes on him, the man looks around, slowly surveying the street. When his eyes light on me he smiles, amused. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Who you hiding from?’

I come out from behind the house, bashful.

‘You want to take a ride? Help me get the next load from the dock?’

He indicates the passenger seat in a careless, amiable way. People around here don’t seem to talk much but they like to do small kindnesses.

‘I can’t,’ I say, regretful. ‘I have to wait for my dad.’

He nods slowly, and then he gets in the truck and it roars away, up the street, in the direction of the ocean. I wish I’d gone with him now. It would have been fun to see the dock.

Someone says ‘boo!’ and I jump.

The boy from the beach says, ‘You took off pretty quick the other day.’ He looks even more relaxed and golden than I remembered. ‘I’m Nat,’ he says. ‘Nathaniel.’


Copyright © 2023 by Catriona Ward