Ellery Cudworth stood on the wharf with a jar of black coffee in his hand and the sun not yet up, and he made his decision. He was going to set traps past the last of the buoys, out into the stretch of water his people called the Furrow, where the bottom was said to be good and no man he knew had fished in living memory. He had sat three nights running with his ledger open on the table by the oil lamp, and the numbers had been going in one direction only. There was a mortgage on the little house on the road above the harbor, bills at the chandlery, bills at the post office, bills at the small shop that sold flour and salt pork.

The summer of 1922 had been thin, every man along the coast pulling half strings, and half of what he pulled small, the kind of lobster you toss back and hope to see again in two years. He told his sternman as they were casting off. Wescott Trundy did not say anything for a long time, and then said only, “We will haul them fast then. ” That was all Wescott said about it.

He did not argue. He did not object. He was a Vinalhaven man in a boat that was not his, and Ellery was the master, and Wescott was of the kind who understood the shape of things. Ellery Cudworth had been a lobsterman on the mid-coast of Maine for forty years by then, and he would fish for thirty-eight more.

He was fifty-four when he lived it, and ninety-four when he told it to me, one long evening in the summer of 1962, sitting on a wharf, tapping the stub of the missing top joint of his little finger against a coffee cup while he gathered his own permission to speak. His boat was called the Marne Bee, thirty-two feet on the waterline, built over one long winter with a man named Delmare Osgood out of green oak they had cut and cured themselves, with a make-and-break engine that everyone within a mile could hear coming across the bay. The B on her name was for Beatrice, who had been Osgood’s wife and who had died the spring before they finished the boat. Ellery never named a thing without a reason.

He said once that a boat with the wrong name will find the wrong water. He worked out of a small village on the mid-coast between Port Clyde and Tenants Harbor, a stretch that has no post office of its own anymore and has not since the war. In 1922 it had a chandlery, a chapel, a post office that opened three days a week, and about twenty houses set along the road that ran up from the harbor. The men there lobstered.

Their fathers had lobstered. Their fathers’ fathers had schooned for cod out of that same water in the 1860s. It was a village made by the sea, held together by the sea, and answerable in the end to the sea. Wescott Trundy was forty-seven that year.

He was not native to the mainland. His people were farmers over on Vinalhaven, and he had come across the water at seventeen, hired on to gut fish for an old man in Rockland, and never gone back. He had a laugh like a chain running over a gunwale, sudden and rough and warm, and Ellery had liked him for that laugh from the first day they worked together. He was big through the shoulders, with the gentle way large men have when they have learned early that people take fright easy.

He rented a room above the chandlery. He paid his rent on Fridays. He drank on Saturdays and went to the chapel on Sundays with more regularity than most men in the village and less faith than any of them. He had married once over in Boothbay when he was thirty.

It had not held. He did not talk about why. Ellery and Wes had fished together six seasons by the fall of 1922, and the two of them had grown into that easy, unspeaking partnership that lobstermen fall into after a few years of working the same boat. If you fish those waters, east and southeast of Monhegan Island off the mid-coast of Maine, you learn the rules.

Some of the rules are printed in the almanacs and the licensing bulletins. They concern tides and licenses and the legal size of the traps and how many pots a man may set. The spoken rules concern the water itself. The oldest of the spoken rules on that stretch, the rule every man of Ellery’s generation had heard from a grandfather and every man of his father’s generation from a great-grandfather, was this: you do not set traps past the outermost buoys of the stretch of water called the Furrow after Michaelmas.

Michaelmas is the twenty-ninth of September. It is a saint’s day, though most of the men in that village could not have told you which saint, and it would not have mattered anyway, because the rule was older than the saint. After Michaelmas, they said, the water of the Furrow belongs to something else. Different men put it different ways depending on how much they had drunk and how well they knew the man they were speaking to.

Some said the currents changed after the equinox and the traps would drift and be lost. Some said the fog off Monhegan came in thicker after Michaelmas and a boat could lose herself and never find home. Some said the compass would not read true out past the last buoy after the day turned. And some said nothing at all when the subject came up, and looked away, and changed the topic to weather or bait or debt.

Ellery Cudworth had followed the rule for forty years. His father, Jotham Cudworth, had followed it for forty-eight years before Ellery took over the boat. His grandfather, Ruben Cudworth, who had fished those same waters out of a schooner in the 1860s before the boats went to gasoline, had followed it for fifty-two years, and had told his son the one time the boy had asked why, that a man who wanted to keep his own name should keep to the buoys. That was the phrasing.

Keep to the buoys. It was said in that village the way a man might say pass the salt or good morning. They set the string on the first of October, two days after Michaelmas. The weather held.

October is a good month on that coast if the storms hold off, and the storms held off. On the fifteenth day of October 1922, they went out to haul. The morning began ordinary, and that is the thing about a day that turns. It begins the way every other day has begun for forty years, and you do not notice the turning while it is happening.

It only shows itself in the looking back. The Marne Bee left the harbor at four in the morning by lantern light, and the bay was flat as poured pewter, and the engine caught on the second pull of the flywheel, which Ellery took as a good sign. Wescott had brought a jar of black coffee as he always did, and the two of them drank it standing at the wheel while the shore went small behind them. It was cold in the way October is cold on the coast, not sharp yet, but with something waiting behind it.

There was a low mist on the water. Ellery had seen ten thousand such mists in his forty years. He thought nothing of it. They ran east-southeast for an hour and a half by the compass.

The mist thickened as they went out. Monhegan Island showed for a moment on the port bow, a black hump in the gray, and then was gone. Ellery cut the engine down to a low mutter, and they crept along the line of buoys until they came to the first of the string they had set past the last marker. He picked up the buoy with the boat hook.

Wescott took the line to the hauler. The rope came up dripping cold water into the tub, and the trap came up after it, and Ellery reached out with both hands to swing it over the wash rail. The first trap came up empty. Not with a small catch.

Empty. The lath door was sprung wide open on its hinges. The bait bag was gone. The bag itself, not just the bait inside it.

There were no lobsters. There were no crabs. There was not so much as a periwinkle. Ellery took it as a bad set.

It happens. A trap can land wrong on the bottom. He rebaited the bag, closed the door, and dropped her back down. The second trap came up the same.

Empty. Door sprung. Bait bag gone. He and Wescott looked at each other, and neither of them said anything.

The third trap did not come up empty. And this is where I have to tell you plain, because he told it to me plain, and it does not do to soften a thing a man has held for forty years and finally spoken. The third trap came up with the door sprung and the bait bag gone. And there was something inside the trap that neither he nor Wescott could quite name.

He said the shape of it was wrong. He said it was about the size of a small dog, and it did not have the color of anything that lives in the water. He said Wescott looked at it once and then away, and did not look at it again. He said he himself made his own hand steady enough to lift the lath door and tip the trap over the rail.

And he said he did not watch what fell out. And he said the water accepted it without a splash he could hear. Then he set the empty trap back on the wash rail and stood a moment looking at his own hands, and then said to Wescott, “We will haul three more, and then we will go in. ” Wescott nodded.

Wescott had already gone the color of the coffee jar. They hauled three more. Every one of them came up the same. Empty, door sprung, bait bag gone, nothing inside.

Ellery said later, when we sat on the wharf, that he had been grateful for the emptiness of those last three. Grateful is the word he used. He said, “I did not want to see whatever might have been in them. ” He did not rebait any of the six traps.

He stacked them on the deck, one on top of another. He took the wheel. He turned the Marne Bee for home. The fog had come in while they were hauling.

It was thick now, not the thin mist they had come out in, but a wall. He could not see the bow rail from the wheel. He set the compass for west by north, and he opened the throttle to a slow, steady turn. You do not run hard in that kind of fog.

You never run hard in that kind of fog. He called Wescott up beside him to listen. They ran west by north for what should have been forty minutes to make the shore of the mainland. At the twenty-minute mark, Wescott put his broad hand on Ellery’s forearm, and Ellery took the throttle back until the engine was barely muttering, and the two of them stood at the wheel and listened.

There was another engine somewhere out in the fog. A make-and-break engine like the one on the Marne Bee, though not quite the same rhythm. Slower, deeper, the kind of long four-cycle knock you used to hear on the old sardine boats when Ellery was a boy. And it seemed to be running parallel to them at their speed, at what Ellery guessed to be perhaps a hundred yards off the starboard beam.

He could not be sure of the distance in the fog. Wescott put his hand around his mouth and held the standard hail. Three long syllables into the gray. Then he waited.

The other engine kept its knock unchanged. Nothing hailed back. Ellery hailed a second time himself. Nothing.

He shut the Marne Bee’s engine off entirely. When his own engine stopped, the other engine stopped too, after a beat. When he pulled the flywheel and got his engine going again, after a beat, so did the other. He and Wescott stood at the wheel of a boat drifting in a fog thick as raw wool, and they listened to their own engine and the other engine.

And neither one of them said anything for a long minute. Wescott said at last, “We should throw the anchor and let her go on by. ”

Ellery said, “No. ” And then he said, “If she means to come alongside, she can come alongside, and I will speak to her master.

” And he opened the throttle and turned the wheel two points to starboard, straight toward the sound. He was a man of forty years on that water. He would not be herded on his own coast. The Marne Bee crawled sideways through the fog, cutting toward the other engine.

The other engine kept its knock at the same steady pace, at the same distance. He held his heading straight for it, and then when he judged he was within thirty yards, he pulled the throttle back, and the Marne Bee’s engine coughed down to nothing, and the fog opened, and there was a boat there right in front of them, materializing out of the wool. A lobster boat, about the size of theirs, painted fresh. The paint looked wet, though there was no rain that day, and there had been no rain for a week.

Her name was on the bow in black lettering: the Prudence Veil. She was drifting. Her engine was silent. It had been silent for a while.

There was no wake on her, no smoke off her exhaust, no shimmer of hot air over her engine box. Neither man spoke. They listened for the other engine, the one they had followed in. There was nothing to hear.

There had never been one to hear, Wes would say later, when he could bring himself to speak of it, which was not often. The Prudence Veil had no one at her wheel. Her running lights were dark, though the day was gray enough to want them lit. Her hauler was rigged and ready, as if for a haul.

There was a line coiled neatly on her stern. There was a heavy oilskin coat draped over her combing, as if a man had stepped out of it a moment before and would step back into it in another moment. Ellery hailed her. “Hello, Prudence Veil.

Anyone aboard? ” He called it clear and loud in the voice you use when you want a hail to carry through fog. His voice came back to him off her hull in a way voices do not come back off a wooden hull in fog. It came back too fast, and it came back at a slightly different pitch than the one he had used to send it out.

Wescott took a boat hook and pulled the Marne Bee alongside. The two hulls kissed with the soft creak of new wood on old, and Ellery stepped across the two rails without thinking about the stepping, which he would later say was the largest mistake of his life, larger than the setting of the string past the buoys, larger than any other thing he had done in his forty years. He came to stand on the deck of the Prudence Veil. Her deck was clean.

Not sea-clean. Polished. A lobsterman’s deck is never polished. A lobsterman’s deck is a deck of bait and slime and salt and worked wood.

This deck was polished. There was no smell of bait. There was no smell of gasoline. There was a smell like cold stone, like the smell you meet in a root cellar in February.

He walked to the little cuddy at the bow and put his head in. The oilskin coat over the combing was warm to the touch. Still warm, as if a man had just taken it off and would come back for it in a moment. There was a pipe on a small shelf inside the cuddy, and when he put his hand near the bowl, the bowl was still faintly warm, though there was no smoke rising from it, and no smell of tobacco in the small enclosed space.

On the little table under the cuddy window, there was a chart. It was a chart of the waters east and southeast of Monhegan. It was Ellery’s own waters. He knew every fathom line on that chart from having drawn versions of it on scraps of paper for forty years.

And on this chart, laid out on the little table, there was a coarse line drawn in pencil. The line ran out from the mainland, past the buoys of the Furrow, out to a set of coordinates in the empty water beyond the last mark on the chart. And beside the coordinates, in a careful, unhurried hand, someone had written in pencil six words:

If you are reading this, you are already here. Ellery read the coordinates twice.

He read them three times. He knew those waters the way you know the ceiling above your own bed, without looking, without thinking. The coordinates on the chart were, so far as he could reckon in the fog, the exact position of the Marne Bee at that moment. Not somewhere close.

Exactly. He stood there in the cuddy of a boat he did not know, whose master was not aboard, whose coat was warm, and whose pipe was warm, and whose chart named the position of Ellery Cudworth in the water. He would say later that he understood, standing there in that little wooden cuddy in the fog, that a man does not always live long enough to know what he is looking at. He said the understanding came into him like a cold hand laid flat on the back of his neck.

Then he heard Wescott’s voice from the deck of the Marne Bee. And Wescott’s voice said, “Ellery. Come off her. Come off her now.

”

He came off her. He would not remember later taking the step back across the two rails. He would remember only being on his own deck, and Wescott pulling the boat hook away, and Wescott’s hand shaking on the shaft of the hook. Ellery told Wescott to start the engine.

Wescott started the engine. Ellery pulled the wheel over hard and put the Prudence Veil astern of them, and opened the throttle wide, which was a thing you never did in a fog, and the Marne Bee lunged forward into the gray. They ran, and they ran hard. Ellery would say later that he ran for what he thought was three minutes, and that it was almost certainly more than three minutes, because he was watching the compass.

And the compass was doing a thing he had never seen a compass do in forty years. It was turning slowly, a steady, deliberate rotation, as if a hand had come up under the boat and were pushing the north point around clockwise by a degree every few seconds. He kept the boat pointed at what the compass told him was west, and the compass kept moving under him, so he was running not in a straight line but in a slow spiral. He was running around a center that was somewhere off in the fog.

He did not say this to Wescott. Wescott was watching the water off the bow, both his hands braced against the combing, and Ellery did not want to say a thing that would take Wescott’s attention off the water. The fog thinned. It did not lift.

Fog does not lift in three minutes on that coast. It thinned. It went from wool to gauze, and through the gauze, off the bow of the Marne Bee, they both of them heard at the same moment a bell. Ellery said aloud, “That is the Monhegan bell buoy.

” Wescott said, “No, it is not. ”

They were both of them right. It was the low, hoarse, three-note breath of the bell that hung off the northeast point of Monhegan Island. Every lobsterman on that stretch of coast knew that bell.

It sounded like an old dog coughing in a slow rhythm. Three notes, a pause, three notes, a pause. It was the bell of the Monhegan buoy. But it was ahead of them.

Ellery had been running west by north, or a spiral around west by north, and Monhegan, if he had been running any kind of true, was long behind them. And even if he had been running in a slow spiral for the three minutes or so he had been running, no spiral in three minutes would put Monhegan Island directly on the bow of the Marne Bee. It would not put Monhegan on the bow of anything. Wescott said again, “We should anchor.

We should throw the anchor now and wait it out. ”

Ellery said, “If we anchor here, we do not come off. ” He would think about that sentence for the rest of his life. He did not know why he had said it.

He had not, so far as he could remember, thought it before he said it. It had come out of him whole. He said, “We run. ”

He turned the boat toward the bell.

Because a bell is a sound of shore, and shore is a thing a lobsterman runs to. That is the first thing a man learns on that coast. He opened the throttle wider, and the fog thinned again, and through the thinning fog, off the bow of the Marne Bee, they saw what he would call until the end of his life, and I heard him call it four times, sitting on the wharf, the flat place. I want to tell you what he said about it exactly, because I have never in my life heard anyone describe a thing in quite that way before or since, and it has stayed with me.

He said the sea around it was moving as sea moves. There was a swell that day, a long, slow ground swell out of the southeast, and the sea rose and fell in the swell as sea does. But there was a patch of water ahead of the Marne Bee, perhaps two hundred yards across, perhaps three hundred, that did not rise and fall. It was flat.

Not flat the way a pond is flat. Flat the way a dinner plate is flat. The swell came into the edge of it and stopped. It did not lap at the edge.

It did not spill over the edge. It stopped. The flat place sat inside the swell like a hole cut in cloth. And the color of the water in the flat place was wrong.

It was darker than the sea around it, and it did not shine. There is always a shine on water, even in a fog, even on the dullest day. There was no shine on the water of the flat place. Ellery pulled the throttle back.

The Marne Bee slowed. She was still moving forward, drifting on her own way toward the edge of the flat place. He would say later that he did not decide to slow her further, that his own hand simply went to the throttle and pulled it back and back until the boat was making bare steerage way. And then he pulled it back one more notch, and the engine idled, and the boat drifted forward on her own way at the pace a man walks.

And then the smell came. He said the smell was not a smell of dead things. He had smelled dead things all his life. Whales rotten on the beach after a hard storm.

Fish left in the sun. Worse. This was not any of that. He said the smell was of a place where nothing had ever lived.

It was cold in the way a smell can be cold. It went in through the nose and it went down into the chest and it sat there behind the breastbone. He said Wescott, standing beside him at the wheel, made a small sound in his throat that Ellery had never heard a grown man make. Wescott stayed at the wheel.

He did not run, but he made that sound in his throat. And then the voices came. He said, “I heard my own voice coming across the water from the flat place. In my own voice.

I heard my own voice arguing with Wescott about the string, about whether to set it past the last of the buoys. It was the argument we had had in June in the chandlery over the ledger, the argument we had had before I had decided to set past the buoys, the one where Wescott had said we should keep to the rule, and I had said we could not afford the rule. Every word of it, in my voice and in Wescott’s voice. And I looked at Wescott, and Wescott was hearing it too.

His face had gone the color of the fog around us. It was white, the way a fog is white, not the color of a man’s face. ”

The argument played out to the end of it, to the moment where Ellery told Wescott, “We are setting the string past the buoys,” and Wescott said, “We will haul them fast then. ” And then it started over, word for word, from the beginning, in his voice and in Wes’s.

He said, “I don’t remember making the decision to run. I remember my hand on the wheel and my hand on the throttle. The wheel went hard over to starboard, harder than a wheel should go on a lobster boat. The throttle went open.

The Marne Bee heeled. And I mean, she heeled. You do not heel a lobster boat. They do not have the keel for it.

A lobster boat sits on the water flat, and if you push her too hard in a turn, she just goes sideways. She does not heel. She heeled. ”

Wescott went to his knees on the deck and hooked his arm through a cleat and held on.

Ellery ran her wide around the flat place. He did not go through it. He did not go across it. He went around it, keeping the flat place off his starboard side, keeping his eyes on the water off the bow, not on the flat place.

And he could hear those voices behind him the whole time he was running around it. His voice and Wescott’s voice, arguing the same argument over and over, in the same words, in the same order. He kept his hand on the wheel. He kept the throttle open.

He did not look at the flat place. He did not look at Wescott. The fog came back down over them thick again, and the voices stopped, and he kept running. He said, “I ran for I do not know how long.

I know I ran until the fuel was near out. I know that when the fog finally opened up around us, we were inside the harbor at Port Clyde. Not the little harbor of the village we lived out of. Port Clyde, miles up the coast from where we were, coming in past the outer ledge as neatly as if I had come in with a chart and a plan.

I don’t remember the run in. Wescott doesn’t remember it either. ”

They tied up at the wharf at Port Clyde, and Ellery could not stand up, and Wescott could not stand up, and they sat down on the deck of the Marne Bee right where they were. And Ellery did not know how long they sat.

And a man came down the wharf after a time and asked what boat they were and where they were bound. And Ellery could not think of an answer to give him. He sat there, and he could not think how to shape his mouth to say the name of his own boat. And then he looked at the deck, and the six traps he had hauled that morning were still stacked there.

Six traps, doors sprung, empty, except one. The third one, the one he had tipped over the rail out on the water. That trap was there on top of the stack. And when he looked at it, he made himself look at it.

He had to look. He had thrown the thing out of it hours before, but he had to look inside. The trap was empty. But the wood on the inside of the trap was scored, as if something had been in there since he had thrown it back over the rail out there in the fog, trying to get out.

There were marks going all the way around the inside of the cedar slats. Deep marks. Fresh marks. In a wood that had been dry that morning, in a trap that had been in the water only an hour of that morning.

Wescott looked at the trap, and Wescott said, “We are burning it. ”

They burned it that night on the beach below the wharf at Port Clyde. Ellery and Wescott, and a lobsterman out of Port Clyde named Ambrose Trask, who had kept the light out on Manana Island in his younger years, and who had seen his share of what those waters gave up, and who did not ask any questions at all when Ellery walked up to his door, and said only that they needed to burn a trap, and that the trap should not be looked into. The three of them stood around the fire on the beach until the trap was ash and passed ash.

And then Ambrose Trask threw a handful of coarse salt into the coals and said a short word Ellery did not know and did not ask about later. When the fire was cold, the three of them walked back up the beach in the dark, and none of them spoke. Ellery slept aboard the Marne Bee that night at the wharf at Port Clyde. Wescott slept on the deck beside him.

And in the morning Ellery ran the boat back down the coast to their own harbor, and he did not fish again that year. He fished the following year. He fished for thirty-eight more years after 1922. But he never once in those thirty-eight years set a trap past the outermost buoys of the Furrow.

He kept to the buoys. He kept his own name. Wescott Trundy did not fish another season. He moved inland to a cousin’s farm outside of Waldoboro before the following spring, and he worked with cattle and with hay for the rest of his life.

He would come down to the coast twice a year, in June and in September before Michaelmas, and he would sit with Ellery on the wharf, and the two of them would not speak of what had happened on the fifteenth of October 1922. Ellery said Wescott always brought with him a small jar of coarse salt when he came, and would leave it on the piling by the Marne Bee before he left, as if it were a thing that ought to be there. I asked Ellery Cudworth, that last long evening on the wharf in the summer of 1962, whether he had ever heard of the Prudence Veil, a boat by that name, painted fresh, with a hauler on her stern, from anywhere along the coast before or after. He said no.

He said he had asked. He had asked every lobsterman he knew, from Kittery in the south to Eastport in the north. Nobody had ever built, bought, sold, or lost a boat by that name in any harbor on the Maine coast in living memory. He said he had written once to the harbormaster at Gloucester, once to the harbormaster at Portsmouth, and once to the harbormaster at Halifax up in Nova Scotia.

No boat by that name in any of their registers. He said no wreck of her ever came ashore anywhere that he could hear of. He said it was as if the boat had never been on the water at all. I asked him about the coordinates on the chart.

He said he had gone back once, in the summer of 1923, the following year, with a hired man from another village whose name he did not tell me, on a clear day in flat water. He had made his run out from the mainland, past the buoys of the Furrow, out to the coordinates that had been marked in pencil on the chart on the Prudence Veil. He said the water at those coordinates was ordinary water. The bottom was where the chart said it should be.

The sea rose and fell in the swell. There was no flat place. He said, and I remember the way he said it, tapping the stub of his little finger against the coffee cup on the wharf, “And yet I did not stay long over those coordinates. I did not turn the engine off.

I kept way on the boat. I turned her around and I ran back in. If a thing has once made a hole in the water, I would not care to be over the spot on the day it made the hole again. ”

I asked him whether he had ever, in the years since, heard the bell of the Monhegan buoy when it was not the bell of the Monhegan buoy.

He looked at me a long time before he answered. He said once. He said one night in the winter of 1941, a still, cold night in February, standing outside on the wharf of his own village for a smoke before bed, he had heard the three-note breath of that bell, and it had been carrying from a direction that did not have the Monhegan buoy in it. It had been carrying from due east, out over the open water.

Monhegan is south of that village, not east. He said he went inside the house and shut the door and did not go out again that night. And then he said, “Sometimes a thing you have run from will come and stand at the edge of the water where you sleep, and it will not come any closer, and it will not go away. And a man learns over the years to bear it.

”

I asked him one last question, that last long summer evening in 1962, at ninety-four years old, tapping the stub of his finger against the empty coffee cup on the wharf between us. I said, “Mr. Cudworth, what do you think it was? ”

He tapped the cup a long time before he answered.

He looked out at the harbor, at the water going dark. He said, “I don’t think anything, because thinking will pull you toward it. I only know this. Some of what we haul up we don’t own.

Some of it owns us back. And a man who wants to keep his own name should keep to the buoys. ”

That was the last thing Ellery Cudworth ever said to me. He died in his sleep that winter in his little house on the road above the harbor between Port Clyde and Tenants Harbor.

He was ninety-four. There was no autopsy. The doctor who came out from Rockland said he had died of no cause he could name other than the cause of ninety-four years. There was a small notice in the paper.

It said he had fished those waters for seventy-eight years, and that he was survived by nobody in particular. There was a jar of coarse salt on the windowsill of his kitchen, over the sink, when they found him. It had been refilled that week. There was no one in the village who admitted to having refilled it.

The house has been empty for over forty years now, since he died in the winter of 1962. And a friend of mine who grew up in that village told me only last year that the jar of coarse salt on the sill in the empty house is refilled every week on a Sunday, and that nobody in the village claims to be the one doing the refilling, and that nobody in the village will say the name of Ellery Cudworth after dark.