“Herbie, that’s real interesting, but I don’t think it’s got much to do with—”
I interrupted, not a very polite thing to do but sometimes it doesn’t pay to be polite. “I told you, Jake, some of the wharf pilings are still there. They’re underwater, but Neddie said you can still see them if you know where to look. He and Gussie Murphy were partners once, weren’t they? And the water’s deep there. You could drop forty pots or forty crates of guns in watertight containers and no one’d find them. No one’d know they’re there. You could even mark them with an underwater buoy, attach it to one of the pilings that’s still standing, and unless you looked straight down, and knew where to look, you’d never find them.”
“I’m not sure, Herbie, the current’s pretty swift that side of the island.”
“Mr. Hacker told me he pulled a ghost trap out of there, or he called it that, a ghost trap. But I bet it was being used to hold guns.”
“I suppose it’s worth a look. But you are staying here. I’ve just finished convincing two—” he stopped short, was a breath away from telling me whom he’d been working with, but smiled instead “—colleagues, that you’re a harmless little kid — a stupid little kid — who just happened to be with Neddie when he made his discovery. So you are staying put. Right here, my boy. Besides, your mother’s going to need you later.”
It was only with great reluctance that I had to agree. I wished him luck before he left.
I don’t get satisfaction from knowing things others don’t. I don’t enjoy the fact that I sometimes appear smarter than a good many of the adults around me. Because I do realize there are an awful lot of people smarter than me. It’s just that it sometimes happens that the adults who are supposed to know certain things too often just don’t. And I really think that if you’re part of a federal task force and your assignment is to infiltrate some Irish-American gun-running gang it might help to have more than twenty years’ experience working undercover and an Irish name.
It might just help to know the area, too, and the fact that this particular gang was merely borrowing on a history that, having proved effective in the past, was proving to be similarly so in the present. Because if Mr. Liam O’Reilly had known that seventy years ago Joe “Smiley” Corrigan, known as one of the biggest bootleggers along the whole Eastern seaboard, had smuggled liquor into the country by way of fishing boats and lobster traps, and had even set up a complex network of buoys and nets strung out across what would be in the future the entrance to the Cape Cod Canal, well then, maybe he wouldn’t have gone out that night, wouldn’t have trusted the two men who claimed to have “some information” for him. Not that he could have known what would happen to him, that he would be tied up, body weighted down, minus one arm — an arm that would subsequently be used to “insure” Gussie Murphy’s further cooperation except they put it in the wrong trap — then anchored to the bottom of a piling on a wharf most people never even knew had existed, just north of Smiley’s Island...
Alongside a cache of forty crates of guns, ammunition, and explosives, destined for Northern Ireland.
No, maybe if he’d known a few more things, Mr. O’Reilly might have changed his plans for that night. Just maybe he might have.
Roses, Rhododendrons, and Ruth
by Mike Owens
From her refuge by the compost pile, Ruth heard the mechanical screech accelerate. The living wood popped as it strained to hold its posture against the ripping steel teeth. She could almost feel the rush of the great cedar as it plunged through the air, and the shattering violence of its crash staggered her. Silence expanded to fill the vacuum created by the switched-off saws.
Ruth pushed the shovel into the soft loam and left it. She walked reluctantly around the house. The lot next door was bisected by the massive cedar. The men stood around it, silent. Then one of them said something. She saw the others smile.
She wanted to storm in among them. It was my tree! she screamed in imagined rage. Her hands hung helplessly at her sides. They wouldn’t care, those rough workmen. They would see only a trembling old woman. They would laugh. She walked back, putting the house between herself and the slaughtered tree.
On the other side of the fence, beyond the compost pile, Vera Frye peered from her curtained window. She stared at the empty sky above Ruth’s house, plump lips arranged in a prolonged pout of surprise as she waited to be noticed.
Ruth pretended she didn’t see. All these years with the tree on one side and Vera on the other. She’d sooner lose Vera.
That night Ruth dreamed of the cedar’s toppling. Safe in her bed, she could hear the sigh of the conifer’s sweep as it rode the air. It enveloped her and her gardens. Roses, rhododendrons, and Ruth, snuggled deep within the cedar’s great heart.
The cleared lot stood empty for so long that Ruth got used to it. It helped that she’d moved her kitchen table so she looked out on the back. She hadn’t had to spend the long wet winter staring at an emptied landscape.
She sat now at that table planning her gardens. The season was fast approaching in spite of the rain misting out of a grey sky. Movement caught her eye, and she looked up to see Vera approaching her back door. Hatless, as usual, and wearing that thin wool coat.
A stocky woman, covered with aggressive fat, Vera moved through the rain as though she were a ship of the line. It always amazed Ruth that one so shallow could move through life with such firm buoyancy. She got up to let her in.
“Well, they are finally going ahead,” Vera said, sweeping through the door.
“Going ahead with what?”
Vera hooked her damp coat on the peg by the door and settled herself at the table. “That vacant lot. They are going to build on it,” she said as the unpleasant smell of wet wool filled the kitchen.
Ruth put the kettle on for tea and, not for the first time, considered giving Vera her old poncho. Not for the first time, she decided against it. Vera would resent having to be grateful. Still, it would rid the kitchen of the smell of damp wool. “I wonder why they waited so long,” she said mostly to herself.
“Well! They had to wait for the wood to dry.”
Ruth sighed and turned her attention to the kettle. Vera rarely ever said anything straight out. She measured tea into the pot. “What wood?” she asked finally.
“From the tree! From that big old cedar!”
Ruth stopped dead in the process of pouring boiling water into the teapot. “Ruth?” Vera’s voice broke the spell, and she finished pouring.
“Well,” said Vera after her first sip. “It will be nice to have a decent house on that lot. It’s an eyesore as it is.”
Ruth pointed out that Vera couldn’t see the lot from her house.
“Oh, it’s you I’m thinking of, dear.” Vera’s face arranged itself along pious lines. “It’s been so awful for you with that big ugly scar right outside your window. Only your gardens left for comfort.”
Vera’s forecast proved accurate. Within the week, activity began next door. The passage of time had healed Ruth’s heart and her tree was being reassembled. It would again occupy the space next to her house.
During the construction she met the owners. “A very nice couple,” she told Vera. “The Lowells.”
By August the work was completed, and the owners moved in. All during the month they wanted to make a home out of their house, while Ruth kept an eye on them, making sure they took meals with her when it seemed the work was getting to be too much.