Graveyard of the Atlantic
by Christopher Lee Chilton
My brother is a cylinder. My brother is about eight inches in height and four inches in diameter. My brother is made of heavy iron to sink down to the coastal shelf. I should say he is in the cylinder, but it comforts me to think of him as coterminous with, equal to, this heavy and substantial object sitting in my lap. The cylinder that is my brother was made for him—for me—at great cost. On such an overcast day as this, it seems made out of the same shining gray stuff as the sea.
Peg’s GPS is on the fritz. I’m on the fritz, too: I feel woozy and light-headed and more than a little ill. Peg’s boat smells like fish. I never liked boats, and I prefer my fish battered and fried. Peg says: We’re not too far now.
But of course, it all looks the same to me. It looks like the ocean.
My favorite thing about owning the Red Knot Hotel is writing the March letters. It used to be my second favorite thing. Now it’s my favorite.
The letters begin Dear Blank. I like to imagine that I’m writing to a family member who’s been away a long time, maybe overseas. I write about the little things only family could care about: the repaired trellis, the pruned ivy, the new soaps in the bathrooms, the secondhand spotting scope recently installed on the porch. The letters are mostly the same, but I like to add small personal touches. I hope the weather’s not too cold for you up there in Blank, ha ha.
They all end the same way: Room Blank will be waiting for you on Date to Date, just like last year. We can’t wait to welcome you back.
I have to rewrite all the letters now. That’s OK, because it’s my favorite thing about owning the Red Knot. It used to be my second favorite thing—my favorite thing was that I owned it with my brother.
***
There is a spot on the big map of shipwrecks in the lobby that’s been rubbed away. It reminds me of the photos you see in travel magazines of copper Buddhas with shining spots on their bellies.
This is the Samarkand, my brother would say—touching a place five or six miles offshore—a four-mast schooner en route from Baltimore to San Juan. In 1922, it carried two tons of linen, eight barrels of ball bearings, and a nineteen-year-old Philadelphia socialite named Evelyn Van Noost, who had bribed her way aboard. Her father, you see, would never have permitted her marriage to the penniless soldier who’d stolen her heart before being whisked away to the Caribbean. Eveyln believed that love would conquer all. But she could not have known about the hurricane, coiled up like a snake, hundreds of miles away in the Mid-Atlantic.
I must have listened to him tell that story a hundred times, my brother. He never grew tired of it, and people never grew tired of hearing it. Even guests who’d been coming to the Red Knot for twenty years stopped to listen. Tell us about the Samarkand, they would say, with their sunglasses pushed over their heads. Our vacation can’t start until we’ve heard the story.
He did all the voices. His Evelyn was gentle, then courageous, then terrified. His penniless soldier was brave, then bereft. He never seemed to tire of it, that story, those people. While he told it I took the bags to the room.
I don’t like ships so much. I like birds. I’m the one who put the scope on the porch. On a clear day you can see pelicans cruising above the horizon. You can see loons and pintails in the harbor, and spoonbills over your head, like umbrellas caught by the wind—if you’re patient.
There are two glass cabinets by the registration desk at the Red Knot. Mine is full of duck decoys, sanderlings on brass legs. My brother’s is full of smashed mirrors, pearl combs. Yellow things, dead people’s things, dragged up from the sea floor. They repulse me a little, but of course I can’t get rid of them now. From now on they’ll be with me, at the Red Knot, and he’ll be down at the bottom of the sea, with their owners. It’s funny, you know—a little funny.
I’ve brought my binoculars with me. I don’t think he’d mind me mixing birding and burying. And Peg says it’s a cute hobby for a man to have.
This far out, there are birds I’ve never seen, though I’ve lived just a few miles away all my life. Shearwaters, fulmars. Birds that live their whole lives at sea and go ashore only to nest, which they do on some other island, in some other sea.
I wonder if those birds grow resentful of their eggs, of the dark compulsion that leads them to shore to eject what must seem like some incomprehensible stone. It must be a relief to fly out again, to leave behind the juveniles, with fluff still on their faces, and return to the wind.
As it turns out, I don’t even need the binoculars. The birds are easy to find—they follow the boat like jackals.
A month or two ago, I caught him up on the widow’s walk, crying. I’d gone up there to beat a rug. Why are you crying? I said. He said he was thinking about Evelyn. It isn’t fair, he said. I just hate to think of her down there all alone.
I don’t know what I said. It’s sad to be alone, or something equally stupid. I think I said, It’s a good thing we have each other to fall back on. But I tried to say it in kind of an impatient way, because what I really meant was, You’re up here daydreaming about ancient history and I’m the one beating the rug.
I don’t think he heard the impatience. I don’t think he heard me at all. In his mind, I think, he was already down there. I think his mind was already sinking down into the sea, like a cylinder of heavy iron about eight inches in height and four inches in diameter. I hadn’t yet noticed how thin he’d grown, or how dark and deep the sockets of his eyes. I think by then his mind had been sinking for a long time, and it was already close to reaching the bottom.
And if I’d noticed, what would I have done? What could I have done?
After beating the rug, I installed new shower curtains and changed the mousetraps. While I did these things, he sat in the widow’s walk and cried.
Yesterday I went for a run. I don’t exercise as much as I’d like—who does?—but when I do, I go up the beach road, I take a right at Shiver Me Timbers Gelato & More, and I go out to the pier where the old men sit noon and night at their fishing poles. But yesterday, for some reason, I took a left instead and crossed the highway at the Publix, through the soundside neighborhoods where blackbirds fly startled out of the marsh like roman candles.
There are old family plots among the houses back there. The stones are wafer-thin and the names for the most part are rubbed away. Our great-grandmothers, great-grandfathers, are in those plots somewhere. Bunched together in poor sandy soil, like turnips that failed to grow.
Before they built the bridge, being buried like that was the only option. Our father, his and mine, is buried on the mainland in a plot of black rich earth, under grass as green and neat as a golf course. It’s only ten minutes away, although I don’t get out there as much as I’d like.
He had a lot of sense, our dad. He got old before he died, and then he left us the hotel. Then he removed himself to a sensible distance. I’ll be buried over there, too, one day, right next to him. I guess we’ll sell my brother’s plot to someone else—a stranger.
I sat down on the curb. I bit into my knuckles. I don’t know why it made me so upset, seeing those weedy plots, those effaced stones, with nothing left on them but the impression of a skull, like a keyhole. I’m usually more in control of my feelings. I guess I should have gone the way I always do.
When it happens, people come out of the woodwork. Legions of doctors, lawyers, policemen. It’s funny—in the off-season you can walk up and down the beach and not see a single other soul, but when it happens, they all come up out of the sand, like ghost crabs.
All right, I thought: Now they’re going to explain it to me. They’re going to make sense of it all. But it turned out they wanted me to explain it to them. So I told them about the map and the widow’s walk, about Evelyn and the penniless soldier. I told them about how he hardly ate or slept at the end, how he struggled to lift boxes or wield a broom, how I ended up doing it all.
I told them how he would pick up trash from the beach. Look at this, he’d say: Evelyn’s toothbrush, or Evelyn’s ring. And it would be something cheap, made of plastic and glue, already turned green.
I told them about how I’d heard him practicing his story the other day. Well, I’d thought, at least he’s getting ready for the shoulder season—in his way. But something about the voice sounded off. His Evelyn was much quieter, more wounded—and if he did the penniless soldier at all, I didn’t hear it. Well, I said to myself, you haven’t heard him do it in a long time, maybe you don’t remember what it sounds like. Or maybe it’s different because you’re listening through the office door.
He was saying: a lantern, a lantern—it’s too dark here—isn’t there a lantern?
When it happens, you think: where were the signs?
***
I always saw him at the library, Peg says. I always thought, hasn’t he read everything they’ve got by now? It’s such a tiny place, you know.
I don’t tell her that he was always looking at the same maps, the same letters.
And he would always go to those talks at the Island Historical Society when no one else would. He really loved this place, you know?
What are you talking about? I say. He hated it.
But the ocean, the boat, they’re too loud, and she hasn’t heard me. I’ve always had trouble making my voice heard in loud places—not like Peg.
She says: He asked if he could come out on a run with me a while back. He probably told you. He could name every shipwreck, just from the coordinates on the GPS. We’re passing over the so-and-so, now we’re near the so-and-so. He would say how many people died, and he always used the word souls. Ten souls, three souls, twenty-four souls.
I thought that was nice, she says. Not just people—souls.
They asked about an autopsy. What a word! Lurid, like a TV show. And like everything else, it was up to me to decide.
They said: Don’t you want to know? Was it suicide, was he sick, was it all in his head? But I already know the answers: yes, yes, and yes. And when I closed my eyes to think it over, I could only imagine saltwater pouring out from the incision, out of the lungs. My brother, the first man in the history of the world to drown in the open air.
In any case, he must have known what was coming. He wrote his last requests on the Red Knot stationery, the same paper I use to type the March letters. The heavy cylinder, the coordinates, the Samarkand.
There’s no legal force here, they told me. You don’t have to do any of it. But there was the woodcut image of the shorebird at top, and both our names. What could have been more authoritative, more official?
We’re close, Peg says, but I don’t think I can be any more precise.
My brother is a cylinder sitting in a life preserver on the floor of a boat. He’s got Peg’s hat flopped over top of him. When she saw him in my arms this morning, she said: Is that him?
How close? I ask.
A quarter mile, Peg says, maybe less. We could come back out here next week if you want. After I fix the goldurned GPS.
A quarter mile. It’s not that close. The practical thing would be to come back next week. The romantic thing would be to say: the current will carry him to her. But I know the cylinder is made to drop straight down.
My mind is already filling with things to be done back at the hotel. The washing of the beach towels, the scrubbing of the baseboards. Blank is on his way, and Blank, too, and Mr and Mrs Blank, all the Blanks. They’ll arrive soon enough, in new cars with new hairdos, with new luggage, new husbands or wives, new canes and teeth, new bruises on their paper-thin hands, but the same old needs. Somebody has to be there for them.
I take his hat off, and I drop him in the water. Almost instantly he’s out of sight. Peg takes my hand, and we say a little prayer. She says: Forever and ever, amen.
‘Pull Quote’
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