that life. The creation of a marriage, of a family, not because it has been ordained or is meant to be, but because we have simply made it happen. We have done this thing, and then that thing, and then that thing, and I have come to think of our years together as a tightly knotted fisherman’s net; not perfectly made perhaps, but so well knit I would have said it could never have been unraveled.
During the hours that pass between our return from Portsmouth and dinner, we each go our separate ways. Adaline shuts the door and reads Celia Thaxter in the forward cabin; Thomas dozes in the cockpit while Billie kneels beside him, coloring; Rich retreats into the engine compartment to fix the bilge pump; and I sit on Billie’s berth with guidebooks and notes and the transcript spread all around me. I open the flesh-colored box and examine the penciled translation. I know that I will read it soon, but I am not quite ready. I feel furtive in the narrow berth, and vaguely ashamed of myself.
I tell myself that the reason for my theft is simple: I want to know how it was, to find the one underlying detail that will make it all sensible. I want to understand the random act, the consequences of a second’s brief abandonment. I am thinking not so much of the actions of a single night as I am of the aftermath of years — and of what there would be to remember.
In the guidebooks, I read that history has only one story to tell about John Hontvedt, Maren’s husband, at Smuttynose, apart from all the events attending the murders on March 5, 1873. On a frigid day in 1870, three years before the murders and two years after Hontvedt arrived in America, John left Smuttynose for fishing grounds northwest of the island. We are told it was a particularly filthy day, ice forming on mustaches and oilskins, on lines, and even on the deck of Hontvedt’s schooner, which remains nameless. John stood on the slippery shingle of the small beach at Smuttynose, the sleet assaulting him from a slanting angle, trying to decide whether or not to row out to the schooner. We can only guess at what finally compelled Hontvedt to go to sea on such a day, among the worst the Atlantic had to offer that year. Was it poverty? Or hunger? Expensive bait that might rot if it wasn’t used? An awful kind of restlessness?
After setting sail and losing sight of Smuttynose, John was surprised by a gale that blew up, creating heavy seas and blizzard conditions. The snow became so thick on the sea as the hours wore on that John could not have seen much beyond the boat itself. Perhaps realizing his mistake, John did try then to turn back toward Smuttynose, but the swells were so high and the visibility so poor that he could make no headway. He was instead forced to drift in an aimless pattern in a darkish, white blindness. The danger of being swamped or of the schooner being gouged open on unseen rocks and ledges was very real.
A number of the islanders, chief among them a man named Ephraim Downs, who lived on Smuttynose himself, and who would later live with his family in the Hontvedt house after the murders (the landlord refusing to clean away the bloodstains, he said, because he could get more money from souvenir hunters than he could from a higher rent), thought John mad for having set out that day at all, and watched for him to return. When it became apparent that Hontvedt’s schooner must be lost, Downs set out in his own larger ship, aptly named the White Rover, to search for the disabled or stranded boat. Downs and his crew scanned the sea for hours until they themselves lost their bearings in the storm. After several hours, they finally caught sight of the smaller boat with Hontvedt aboard. Looping across fourteen-foot swells, Downs managed to collect the stranded seaman. After John was safely aboard the White Rover, Hontvedt’s schooner drifted away and was never seen again.
For many hours, the White Rover rode the waves, the men aboard her becoming frozen and covered with ice until they could no longer move. When the boat finally beached herself — and history doesn’t tell us where — the crew, who were able to use neither their legs nor their arms properly, hitched themselves