The Season of Open Water by Dawn Tripp Page B

pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Maybe I’m thinking about that fox,” he says.
    â€œIt was a beauty of a thing,” she admits.
    â€œWell, that’s what it is. I can’t stop thinking about that fox.”
    She laughs and brushes some dust off a seam between two of the planks. “That might be a lie,” she says, “but I can let it be that, if that’s what you want.”
    She is more composed now. She feels lighter, happy even. Her world seems to have turned right again. Her world is her world. She picks up the next plank and sets it down. “So you’re just going to sit there?” she asks him, rummaging through the box of nails.
    â€œI’m thinking I might.”
    â€œWell, why don’t you draw me a sketch on the panbone?”
    â€œI can do that.”
    â€œCut me a whale,” she says. She picks up the hammer. “Gallied. Big flukes sweeping eye to eye.”
    â€œYou want an iron in her?”
    â€œAs long as she scuttles the boat of the man who threw it.”
    Noel chuckles as he goes to the wall by the steam-box and picks up the panbone—a huge flat piece from the jaw of a sperm whale he hawked years ago from a shop near the Seamen’s Bethel in the city. He carries it back to his stool and rests it over his knees. He finds an empty spot in the broad center and, with a pencil, draws a light sketch. Then with his needle, he begins to cut. Over the years he has carved into the panbone, filling in the lines with black and colored ink: sketches of the voyages he took, the rafts of birds, buckling seas, the postbox on the turtleshell rock south of the Galápagos where a sailor might find a letter sent three years before. He has sketched the angled noses of the atolls just north of the Sandwich Isles, the pod of devilfish they glimpsed, the suckers finning close against the cows; scenes of drifting north through the pack ice in the Arctic, glaciers, musky light, the sloped eyes of the Inuit women, their dark faces roped by fur. He has sketched scenes of Kauai—the island he came to and could not leave, the island where he first met Hannah—the green water off the reef clear as gin, palm trees, red clay roads, the sheer drop of the black cliffs into the surf, the folding hills where the tribes lived west of Hanalei. Sometimes as he cuts, he will tell Bridge stories of where he has gone, of what he has seen, bony tales worn through years of being retold. The stories of the island are the ones that seem to make her happy, and in her happiness, he finds the place comes alive for him again: the fierce summer heat, the drenching tempers of the rain. On that island, he has told her, at every early dawn, there is an unthinkable calm, so still, so silent, one can hear the mountains breathe.
    He is spooked by the places he has been—the geographies he’s passed through—they gather around him in his shop—in the tins of bolts and drifts, in the shavings at his feet, chips of cedar, oak, pine. He sniffs in old smells with the sawdust through his nose—smells of creosote, coconut, oil.
    He cuts another line into the bone, the long straight end of a second harpoon, fleshed deep into the whale. They jut like pins from her huge body, breaking out of the sea. Another line.
    â€œDamn!” says Bridge. “I muxed it.”
    He looks up. She is standing in the corner, holding the ripsaw and a plank.
    â€œYou cut the wedge?” he asks.
    â€œI sawed out the wrong side.”
    He smiles. “And see, there it is—why I need to still be watching over you.”
    â€œWhat a waste,” she says, staring in dismay at the board in her hand.
    â€œIt’s just a plank. Set it out to air and cut another.”
    She is clearly upset. It surprises him she would be upset over something so trivial. She looks at him from across the room. Even from that distance, he can see her eyes fill. “I am no use today, Papa.