Time: 5:45 A.M. Low ceiling. Wind: north-northeast, 12 knots and freshening. Barometer: 29.8 and falling. Temperature: 68°. Sky: leaden and darkening.
It did not look promising. The scattered rows of stratocumulus clouds of the previous day that had almost cleared had regrouped into an ominous thick gray goop. The barometer and wind gauges also foretold unpleasant weather. The wind was turning eastward by the minute, and an east wind almost always is "an ill wind that blows no good."
Over after-breakfast coffee Mary and I decided to flee the Cape and head back to the main domicile in Concord for the a day. There were assorted bits of house husbandry that needed taking care of, and Mary had a batch of pots and ceramic sculpture that needed glazing and fixing. So we went. I mowed the lawn, collected mail and magazines, and developed the film I'd shot over·the. past two weeks. I didn't make prints; just left the celluloid strips hanging in the dust-free dryer until I had more time. Mary busied herself in her workshop annex. She does this thing called rock salt glazing which takes immense heat and long periods in the kiln. We built specially constructed kilns for the process in the backyard, beehive-shaped domes that draw their heat from bottled gas. When the temperature reaches some astronomical figure, and certain clay cones inside the structures bend and dissolve,
Mary throws in handfuls of coarse kosher rock salt, which promptly vaporize and affix themselves., in the form of a slick finish, to the pots on the racks above. It is an ancient glazing process, she tells me, but produces pots and vases with a finish that is distinctive, simple, and very handsome.
After lunch we headed back and picked up our three dogs who had just been dipped to prevent ticks, which are common on the Cape. They attack Angel and Flack, the two wire-haired dachshunds, especially, since they are low-slung and furry. Danny, the yellow Lab, is more immune. Anyway we gathered them in the car, all smelling like new telephone poles, and headed for the cottage.
Call it intuition, a hunch, or clairvoyance. Whatever it is, I sensed it as we swung into the driveway at half past three.
Something wasn't right.
Sure enough, Jack was pacing the deck when we showed up. He didn't wave as usual. Instead he waved his arm backward, motioning us to hurry. He met us in the front hallway.
'Allan Hart's dead," he said. "He drowned in the harbor."
I was hearing him but I wasn't; his voice was coming to me from far, far away, as if he were speaking into one end of the Alaskan pipeline up in Barrow and I was sticking my head in the other end down in the Lower Forty-Eight. I remember looking at the lampshade and thinking how nicely they'd rendered the nautical chart on it, and that I had some tobacco ash still left in my pewter ashtray. I realized everything but what was actually told me. Like a time-delay fuse, my mind had stopped momentarily to absorb the jolt. Then Jack handed me a paper.
Then I was looking at the article-at the picture of Allan. But I wasn't at the cottage when I found myself reading it; I was half a mile down the beach. My three dogs were staring up at me, concerned. They whined and wagged their tails slowly, tentatively, as if in fear of rebuke.
I shooed them away and walked, read, walked again,
I sometimes slapping the paper against my thigh. The gulls were low, diving and wheeling about. The dogs scampered after them, barking. It was all a dream. I returned to the wooden stairs, and suddenly was up them, all thirty-nine of them, without doing it.
Then the two of them were sitting in the living room staring at me.
Mary's crying brought me back to the real world for good. I sat next to her on the couch and we read the article together, overland over again. But no matter how many times we read it, it stayed the same.