Their housekeeper, Miss Smarden, promptly resigned in disgust—the first and only sign that she’d been carrying a torch all of her own for their father. They’d become so accustomed to the strict regime at home that they thought Miss Elliott must be joking when she insisted they invite their friends round to the house whenever they wanted. She rigged a rope from the tulip tree out back and the grass beneath was soon worn away to dirt by small feet. She accompanied them on the great spring and fall cattle drives along the ocean beach to and from the sweeping pastures of Montauk. On winter weekends she drove them to watch the gaff-rigged ice-boats rattling across Mecox Bay at improbable speeds, and she took them by ferry across Long Island Sound to the amusement park in New London. It was all too good to be true, and they suspected that it was just a ploy to win their hearts and impress their father, that it wouldn’t last.
She proved them wrong over and over again. With time they learned to return her hugs and other displays of affection, and they marveled at her ability to treat them no differently from the other kids once they’d crossed the threshold of the little white schoolhouse each morning. She drove them hard, Antton less than some because of his difficulties, Conrad far harder than most, slipping him extra books to read after school. She did this, she said, because she believed he had a gift.
To Conrad’s mind it was a thankless gift if it kept him from the new fishing shanty their father had built at the bottom end of Atlantic Avenue. Raised a few feet above the shifting sands on locust posts, it was little more than a long wooden box with a shingle roof and a pot-bellied stove. But to Conrad and Antton it was a palace, a place of wonderment, a symbol of their father’s advancement in the world.
Together with Billy, they would hurry there as soon as they’d wolfed down their supper, Maude shouting after them that exertion on a full stomach was a sure way to an early grave. If they were lucky they’d arrive breathless before the dory had come ashore, and they’d watch it negotiate the thundering surf, their father and Sam bent at the oars, moving in unison. In summer their father and Sam hauled seine and set bluefish nets way out beyond the bar, two or three miles offshore, and they would help lug the fish from the boat to the shanty, threading beach grass through the gills, their fingers too tender still for the sharp plates. They learned to dress and pack the catch, their clothes crusted with scales, the boards of the shanty slick with gurry beneath their feet. The big treat was to be taken a little way out beyond the surf—squeezed in together in the bow, white knuckles on the gunwales—and go drop-lining for fluke.
Held back in school, Antton was fifteen years old when Conrad joined him in the eighth grade. At the end of the school year Antton failed his Regents for the second time, but with his sixteenth birthday falling in August, he had seen through his obligations to the law. The same week that Conrad started at East Hampton High School, Antton joined their father on the beach, set-netting for the last of the bluefish. Times were tough—the fish had been down all season—and they worked long hours, longer still when the cod appeared around Thanksgiving.
On those gray winter mornings Conrad would wake to the sound of an icy nor’wester rattling the windows and he would know that his father and Antton were already on the ocean, setting trawls way out beyond the bar: well over a thousand fathoms of line carefully coiled down in the tubs the evening before, hundreds upon hundreds of hooks baited with steamer clams. And while they fought their way back to the beach, bucking the offshore blow, the cod in the bilges already stiffened out solid from the cold, he would breakfast with Maude in the warm glow of the stove. This was where she wished him to be—he could sense it—far from the sea’s toss and the wind’s kick, talking of other matters, of his studies, of his new friends and of books.
He helped out down at the shanty whenever he could, but he felt foolish and alone. Elevated to the rank of surfman, Antton was eager to drive home his superior knowledge and expertise. Their father, sensing Conrad’s frustration, told him to be patient; in a couple of years he too would be part of the crew.
This was not a consolation he relayed to Maude.
The showdown, when it came, was explosive, and all the more shocking for the fact that he’d never known their father and Maude to argue before. The thump of the exchange carried clear through the woodwork to his attic bedroom. He only made out one word, and only then because it was repeated several times—
Maude urged Conrad to fight his corner, to insist on seeing through his studies, to eighteen and beyond, on to college. What could he say? He couldn’t betray the vision that had come to his father all those years before on the Amagansett sands, made concrete with the money from Eusebio—a man and his two boys fishing side by side, following the sea. Besides, he was threatened enough already by his father’s special relationship with Antton. It had always been there, but it had deepened considerably of late. Foolish though it now seemed, he could remember thinking at the time that even his name was proof of his father’s favoritism—Conrad, his mother’s father, the only non-Basque anyone could recall on either side of the family.
Maude withdrew in order to fight another day, but she hadn’t counted on her husband’s stubborn Basque temperament, and her cause wasn’t helped by the onset of the Depression. Along with a number of his Amagansett friends, Conrad exchanged the classroom for the fish shanty.
His time on the ocean beach was sweet and very brief. A third set of hands was not always required. It became an indulgence as the Depression deepened, and Conrad was dispatched to join the pack of other local men roaming the South Fork in search of work at a few dollars a day. He helped pour the first concrete sidewalks in Amagansett, he filled holes in the cinder roads, and he cut ice from the ponds during the winter freeze. He teamed up with Hendrik on laboring jobs, he crewed with Billy on the draggers out of Fort Pond Bay from time to time, and almost everything he earned went into the family purse. He fished with his father and Antton whenever they needed him, but it was his friendships with others that sustained him. And this is how it stayed, right up until Antton was taken from them by the sea.
It was a January morning, not so different from any other, raw and gray. The wind had come around northwest, stiffening overnight, and everyone knew the cod bit best in a nor’wester. When the wind was off the land it usually flattened out the surf, but that day there was a strong ground swell running, driven by some force far out in the ocean, and the seas rose up in defiance, breaking over the outer bar, their crests whipped into white mares’ tails of freezing spray. By the time they’d loaded the tubs and dragged the dory down to the water’s edge both the wind and the swell had eased a little, and some of the other crews were going off through the clean, sharp breakers curling toward the beach.
There was no question of not following suit.
They gritted their teeth against the jolt of that first dowsing and wrestled the dory through the white water, their woollen mittens already beginning to harden with ice. Hauling themselves aboard, Antton took the bow oars, Conrad amidships, both setting their stroke, their father still in the water, gripping the bucking transom to keep the dory headed seaward, his eyes reading the surf.
‘Pull, boys, pull!’ he yelled, shoving off and hooking a leg over the port gunwale. The oars bit in unison; the dory surged forward, gaining headway, rising up the face of the capping sea. The bow split the wave as it broke around them, green water tumbling and crashing past on both sides, a fair quantity of it finding its way over the boat’s high sides and down the back of their necks, washing into the bilges; but nothing unusual, nothing that couldn’t be bailed out easily once they were clear of the break.
