The Season of Beginning

The Season of Beginnings

It was Orrin's coughing that woke her. Annie slept lightly now anyway, one ear always tuned for the wheeze and hack that could make her heart almost stop in terror. She slipped into her chenille robe and followed the tift-tift of his slippers on the quarry stone floor, out the back door to the screen porch. Back home in Maine, in the only 1920s bungalow on Moose Island, she could dash around the house in total darkness, but here in Arizona she walked carefully, feeling her way. It'd been seven months, and this house was still a stranger--one she wasn't the least interested in becoming better acquainted with.

Orrin sat in a wicker chair on the screened porch, his bare barrel chest expanding like a bellows as he struggled for breath. Flat, infinite, the night-blooming Arizona desert stretched like an ocean to the distant moonscape foothills of the Rockies. In the wide western sky, the stars were strewn like diamond dust: cold and impossibly far away. From the front yard they could see the lights of Flagstaff, but here on the back porch this house seemed like the last outpost.

For Orrin, lungs ravaged by Maine's fog and sea and the steadily advancing emphysema, it probably was.

Annie laid a cool hand on his moist, warm shoulder. "You okay? Want your inhaler?"

He shook his head. A quiet doer, he never was much for talking, but since their October arrival he'd spoken less and less, wandering the rented house like a wraith. "I'm fifty-seven," he'd said once in a rare outburst. "I might as well be eighty, for all the use I am." He kept to the house. The desert sun burned his fair northern skin, and he was terrified of snakes. Mostly, he sat.

Sat, and, Annie was sure, remembered.

She poured two glasses of lemonade and pulled a chair close beside his. They drank without speaking, and his breathing quieted little by little. In the moonlight, his blonde hair glimmered like silver. Annie, used to the silence that had bound their lives, was surprised when Orrin said, more statement than question, "You miss teaching."

It was as though the broad desert made them draw closer, made things at once fragile and strong. She had promised herself she would not be nostalgic, would not think about the students who passed through her history classes at Quoddy High, the children of fishermen and factory workers, those whose dreams burned bright and those who had already given up.

Annie remembered Miss Nichols, Quoddy High's English teacher emeritus, eighty-five years old and still as keen as a filleting knife, saying years after her retirement, "It's not so much the teaching I miss, exactly, it's being around youth. Their energy, their hopes." And Annie had known, hearing it said, that it would someday be the same for her. She'd had no idea someday would come so soon.

"Well, yes," she said. "Of course I miss it. But not as much as in the fall. It's the season of beginnings that's hard to do without."

"Yes," he said. "The chance to start again." He pressed his lips together tightly and nodded, looking at the floor, and Annie told herself, Choose your words carefully. Don't summon the ghosts of things that cannot be.

It was now--late April--that the weirmen went out, net-filled dories, rafts piled with poles to repair the winter's damage. She remembered how he'd stow the scalloping gear away, anticipation rising in him like the high spring tide. His work the rest of the year was strictly for getting by, because it was the weir he'd loved, that huge circular maze of poles and net that trapped the herring. Boats changed, fishing gear changed, but a weir well-kept was eternal, a design that could not be improved on, efficient and beautiful.

He looked at his watch. "It's six o'clock in Maine," he said. "Calder's likely out already."

Calder Travis was Orrin's younger brother, his partner in the Shamrock weir at Sorrell Island. Annie knew the Shamrock was considered a lucky weir, had been so since Orrin's grandfather first built it back in the Twenties. Most of the old weirs were gone now, the herring fishery way down, the sardine factories except for Abernethy's a thing of the past. But the herring in Passamaquoddy Bay would still find the Shamrock, and the "Absarco" would come and pump them out, and Abernethy's whistle would still blow, summoning the packers. Around the American side of the bay there were only three weirs left, a few more on the Canadian side, and Annie knew Orrin was proud that the Shamrock was one that had survived.

"Calder will take good care of things," she said.

Orrin's nostrils twitched. "Calder's right smart about some things," he said, "but he can't mend twine worth a hoot in a gale. Stuff'll come apart on him the first time we get a good blow. At least Lonnie's finally got the knack." Lonnie was their son, their only child, approaching thirty now. He seemed as devoted to the weir as his father was, but Annie wondered if someday--a someday precipitated by an event she tried never to think about--he'd fly away from the weir and the island to a different kind of life.

Orrin shook his head and looked out across the desert. His eyebrows were getting shaggy, the way men's do with age, but his sky-blue eyes were still clear and bright. Except for some blurring of his jawline and the sun-squint lines around his eyes, he was still as good-looking as the boy she'd met at a Fourth of July dance the summer she was seventeen. It was opposites that attracted then: East Haven and Moose Island, summer girl and local fisherman. She was planning for college then, he for becoming master of his first boat.

"Everyone says you're the best net-maker in three counties," she said now, being careful to cast her words in the present tense.

That brought a smile, the first genuine one she'd seen since Lonnie had come at Christmas time. "Guess I could hold my end up with a shuttle, when I had to." It was as close as he'd ever come to a boast. "It's careful work, making and mending twine. Methodical. Takes patience." He ran blunt fingers through his thick, fair hair. "I don't seem to have much of that virtue anymore."

What could she say to that? Annie touched his bare shoulder, and his hand came up and covered hers. "Tell me the best day," she said, unwilling to let him lapse back into silence. "Tell me the best day at the Shamrock."

Orrin's square-jawed face softened and became wistful. "My favorite's the days when the June fogs are in. All those fish look like the weir's full of silver. And the gulls--so many, it's like a big, noisy cloud circling." He drained his glass and coughed harshly. "I talk too much."

"No," she said. "Oh, no, Orrin. Not after all these months when you’ve hardly talked at all."

He lifted his head, as though he were reading a message in the stars. Familiar silence stretched between them once again.

Annie couldn't tell how long they sat. The moon faded by degrees, and a thin golden line grew across the eastern horizon. Orrin stood, and rested square hands on the porch rail. "We're going home," he said. "I feel exactly like those herring: netted, and ready to get sucked into oblivion."

"The doctors said--"

He struck the railing. "I don't care what the doctors said. Damn fools. They think dying's all in the body. They don't know anything about really dying, when your soul dries up from uselessness and blows away."

"I don't want to lose you," she said. In the dawn half-light she could almost see his spirit take flight, a white seagull against a desert sky. What had been gained, bringing him to this desolate place? "All right," she said. "We'll go home. But come fall, I'll want to get away, find a school that needs a part-time history teacher. Someplace warm." Where the winters would be easy on tired lungs.

"Is it too early to call the landlord?" he asked. She could see the long-lost gleam returning to his eyes. "I imagine I have a lot of twine to mend."

Catherine J.S. Lee lives, reads, and writes on an island on the coast of Maine near Canada. In a variety of academic and arts programs, she has taught creative writing to students from ages 14 to 92. Her fiction has appeared in Potato Eyes, The MacGuffin, The Binnacle, and juked, among others, and is forthcoming in Amarillo Bay and Cezanne's Carrot. She recently completed her first story collection, Gone Like Sea Smoke: Stories From the Gulf of Maine, which explores the lives of characters caught between traditional ways of life and the changing face of Maine's working coast.

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Fish Weir with Seagull, Campobello Island, Canada courtesy of Art.com