Letters

Et cetera, vertiginously, till near midnight, while my last full moon (the Sturgeon) whitened, crossed Martin Cove, and penumbrally eclipsed. Herons squawked. My conjectures bored me; I was spinning them out, I began to suspect (just as I’ve spun out this last letter to you), in the way Dante tells us that Florentine assassins, placed headfirst into holes in the ground and condemned to live burial, spun out their last confessions to the bending priest — inventing, to delay their end, even more sins than they’d committed. My concern was real — for Jane, for Drew, for Jeannine, for (for that matter) the Star-Spangled Banner and suchlike national symbols — but it was limited. What’s more, at that hour in that private place where a certain old friend and I had watched many a moon sail westwards, I missed her awfully. I was in fact fairly seized by horny, lonely boredom, to the point where (at age 69, Dad!) I fished out my penis to masturbate — but ended by pissing over the taffrail instead, and turning in. Good night, Polly.

They might all, of course, be conning me. An elaborate conspiracy among Jane, Drew, and Jeannine, assisted by Cook and Castine, to eliminate me (i.e.,

the T.F.) from the Mack sweepstakes. Why not? With secondary plots against one another once I’m out of the running. I considered this possibility through the Thursday — another dull scorcher, with fitful breezes that made sailing a slow but busy business. My last anchorage, in Trappe Creek (La Trappe on the chart, but no Eastern Shoreman ever called it that), was a mere eleven miles down the Tred Avon and up the Choptank. To kill time I reviewed and adieu’d the other elegant Tred Avon creeks — Peachblossom, Maxmore, Goldsborough, Plaindealing — and tied up at Oxford for lunch and supplies before tacking out into my river for the afternoon and running into Trappe Creek for the evening. By when I found it hard to care who was conning whom.

Trappe Creek, Dad, is the favorite of my favorites on the Chesapeake. (Did you ever see it, I wonder? You never spoke of what you loved.) The placid essence of the Eastern Shore: low but marshless banks, a fringe of trees with working farms behind, houses few but fine, clean sand beaches here and there, and two perfect anchorages: the large unnamed cove to port behind the entrance point, sheltered from the seas but open enough for air on muggy nights; and, a mile farther up, also to port, magic Sawmill Cove: high-banked, entirely wooded, houseless, snug, primeval. There I went, never mind the humidity, to close another circle on my Last Night Out: it is where I spent my first youthful night aboard a boat (someone else’s), sleepless with excitement at the contiguity of the world’s salt waters, yearning to go on, on, to Portugal, to Fiji! I shall not ever see those places; have long since (i.e., since 1937) put by such yearnings. But Sawmill Cove is still a place to make one miss the world.

Ordinarily. This night too it did its part — bluefish thrashed after minnows in the shallows, great blue herons stalked and clattered, ospreys wheeled, raccoons scrounged along the low-tide flats, crows and whippoorwills did their things, turtles conned and glided in the moonlight, there was not one human sound — but I could not do mine. Good-bye, good-byes! On, not to Portugal, but to the end! I began this letter, to say good-bye to you; put it by after an hour’s sweaty scribbling. Too much to tell; too much of consequence not yet tellable. To bed, then, to get on with it, on with it.

In the early hours my sleep was broken by a shocking noise: from somewhere alongshore, very nearby, as feral a snarling as I’ve ever heard, and the frantic squeals of victims. A fox or farm dog it must have been, savaging a brood of young something-or-others. For endless minutes it went on, blood-chilling. Insatiable predator! Prey that shrieked and splashed but for some reason could not escape, their number diminishing one by pathetic one! I rushed on deck with the 7x50’s, shouted out into the pitch-darkness (the moon had set), but could see and do nothing. The last little victim screamed and died. Baby herons? Frogs? Their killer’s roaring lowered to an even growl, one final terrible snarling coup de grâce, then almost a purr. There was a rustling up into the woods, followed by awful silence. Long moments later a crow croaked; a cicada answered; a fish jumped; the night wood business resumed.