Cry for the Strangers Page 0,59

himself get caught in bis own nets. And Miriam—well, she knew what she was getting into when she married Pete. Any woman who marries a fisherman knows. So when something like that happens they don’t go out and kill themselves.”

“Well, what’s done is over with,” Tad replied. “I don’t know why we’re wasting time talking about it. Pete Shelling never did fit in around here, and I for one don’t give a damn about it one way or another. As for Miriam, well, Harn Whalen says she killed herself, and that’s that.”

“Is it?” Mac Riley’s quavering voice inquired. “I wonder.”

He’d set his pipe down as he listened to the two younger men talk, but now he picked it up and relit it. He puffed on it for a few minutes. Clem and Tad had begun to suspect that the old man had drifted off in his own mind when he suddenly started speaking again.

“I remember something that happened a long time ago, not so very long after you two were born. There were a couple of people here, a man and his wife. Don’t know where they came from—fact is, I might never have known—but anyway, he was a fisherman. And one day I found his boat drifting off Sod Beach, just about where that feller found Pete Shelling’s boat. He was caught in his nets, just like Pete Shelling.”

“So?” Tad Corey asked. “I don’t see what’s so strange about that. The currents off that beach get pretty wild sometimes, and it isn’t that hard to lose control of your nets if you don’t know what you’re doing. So two people die there the same way in forty years. I don’t see how that means anything. If it were two people in a month, say, or maybe even a year, that’d be one thing. But forty years? Shit, Riley, the only thing that surprises me is that there haven’t been more.”

“You didn’t let me finish my story,” the old man said patiently. “A couple of days after I found that man his wife died.”

“Died?” Tad asked. “What happened to her?”

“Hanged herself,” Riley said quietly. “I ain’t going to say it was from the same tree as Miriam Shelling used, but you can believe me when I tell you it wasn’t far from it.”

The two younger men stared at the old man, and there was a long silence. Finally Clem spoke.

“Were they sure it was suicide?”

“Nobody had any reason to doubt it,” Riley said. “But if you ask me, what happened to them and what happened to the Shellings is a little bit too close for comfort.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Clem Ledbetter said softly.

“Doesn’t it?” Riley mused. “I wonder. I just wonder.”

Tad and Clem exchanged a worried glance, but Riley caught it.

“You think I’m a senile old man, don’t you?” he asked them. “Well, I may be, and then again, I may not be. But I can tell you one thing. That sea out there, she’s like a living thing, she is. And she has a personality all her own. The Indians knew that and they respected her. The Indians believed that a spirit lives in the sea and that she has to be appeased.”

“That’s bullshit,” Corey said.

“You think so? Well, maybe you’re right. But what the Indians said mates a lot of sense when you think about it. We get a lot from the sea, but what do we ever put back? Not much of anything. It’s not that way with, say, farming. Farmers take a lot out of the soil, but they put a lot back in too. Well, the Indians thought the same thing was true of the sea. You had to offer it something in return for all it gave you. And they did. Out there on what they used to call the Sands of Death.”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Clem said.

“About what they used to do to strangers out there? Sure, everyone’s heard those stories. But there are other stories, stories that aren’t talked about so much.”

“For instance?” Clem asked.

“When I was a little boy, I remember my father telling me the old Klickashaw customs. One of ’em had to do with fishermen that died at sea. The Indians didn’t believe in accidents. Not a’tall. If somebody died there was always a reason, likely an offended spirit. The story was that if a fisherman died, it meant the spirit of the sea was angry.”

“What did they do?”

“They made a sacrifice,” Riley said quietly. “They took