After breakfast I dinghied up to Old Trinity Churchyard and said good-bye to that tranquil place (maintained in part by foundation funds) which presently my remains shall say hello to. I will not join the family, Dad, in Plot #1. If I cannot manage to recycle my body to the crabs and fishes on which it has so long and gratefully fed, it will go into this venerable, quiet ground, so near their haunts that I heard the minnows plashing from my grave.
I had dreamed again that night. Through the day — an easy glide on prevailing southerlies out of the Little, and into the Great, Choptank, my river — I mused upon those dreams. They had been local geographical teasers, inspired no doubt by Point No Point. That name figured in them, as did Ragged Point, Cooks Point, Todds Point, which-all I left to starboard during the day: my subconscious is as unsubtle as our Author. There now lay home, so close I could scan the property with binoculars; but I had two bases more to touch, and planned anyhow to end my cruise and the week in Cambridge, with a stop at the office, before coming full circle to Todds Point. The mild breeze died in midriver, at slack tide, just off the Choptank Light. I lowered sail, kicked the engine on, and chugged up the wealthy Tred Avon past Oxford to my parking place: snug and unspoiled Martin Cove, not named on Chart 551.
After shower and dinner, finishing a soft Bordeaux under a fine full moon, I turned last night’s name-list into a list of questions. For what reason could Castine and Drew be friends, who were by way of being rival contenders for Harrison’s money, if not that they were in political collusion to swindle Jane, perhaps Jeannine as well? Did not Drew’s position vis-à-vis “the media”—i.e., co-opting the co-opters — account for his easy new detente with A. B. Cook, perhaps even with me, and his expressed wish, however apparently sincere, for reconciliation with his sister? Disagreeable speculation! But unto death I am a lawyer. How account, though, for Cook’s affability, which seemed to me to go substantially beyond his former and famous mercuriality? Could there be anything to Joseph Morgan’s old supposition, that behind that flag-waving poetaster was a closet radical? How useful it might have been for this old trial lawyer to watch him and Castine together! Could Drew be planning to turn the Fort McHenry film scene into a terrorist demolition stunt? Or could Cook, say (or Castine, for possibly different reasons), be setting Drew up for such a stunt in order to thwart and arrest him? Perhaps Cook, rather than Castine, was an Intelligence Type!
Et cetera, vertiginously, till near midnight, while my last full moon (the Sturgeon) whitened, crossed Martin Cove, and penumbrally eclipsed. Herons squawked. My conjectures bored me; I was spinning them out, I began to suspect (just as I’ve spun out this last letter to you), in the way Dante tells us that Florentine assassins, placed headfirst into holes in the ground and condemned to live burial, spun out their last confessions to the bending priest — inventing, to delay their end, even more sins than they’d committed. My concern was real — for Jane, for Drew, for Jeannine, for (for that matter) the Star-Spangled Banner and suchlike national symbols — but it was limited. What’s more, at that hour in that private place where a certain old friend and I had watched many a moon sail westwards, I missed her awfully. I was in fact fairly seized by horny, lonely boredom, to the point where (at age 69, Dad!) I fished out my penis to masturbate — but ended by pissing over the taffrail instead, and turning in. Good night, Polly.
They might all, of course, be conning me. An elaborate conspiracy among Jane, Drew, and Jeannine, assisted by Cook and Castine, to eliminate me (i.e., the T.F.) from the Mack sweepstakes. Why not? With secondary plots against one another once I’m out of the running. I considered this possibility through the Thursday — another dull scorcher, with fitful breezes that made sailing a slow but busy business. My last anchorage, in Trappe Creek (La Trappe on the chart, but no Eastern Shoreman ever called it that), was a mere eleven miles down the Tred Avon and up the Choptank. To kill time I reviewed and adieu’d the other elegant Tred Avon creeks — Peachblossom, Maxmore, Goldsborough, Plaindealing — and tied up at Oxford for lunch and supplies before tacking out into my river for the afternoon and running into Trappe Creek for the evening. By when I found it hard to care who was conning whom.
Trappe Creek, Dad, is the favorite of my favorites on the Chesapeake. (Did you ever see it, I wonder? You never spoke of what you loved.) The placid essence of the Eastern Shore: low but marshless banks, a fringe of trees with working farms behind, houses few but fine, clean sand beaches here and there, and two perfect anchorages: the large unnamed cove to port behind the entrance point, sheltered from the seas but open enough for air on muggy nights; and, a mile farther up, also to port, magic Sawmill Cove: high-banked, entirely wooded, houseless, snug, primeval. There I went, never mind the humidity, to close another circle on my Last Night Out: it is where I spent my first youthful night aboard a boat (someone else’s), sleepless with excitement at the contiguity of the world’s salt waters, yearning to go on, on, to Portugal, to Fiji! I shall not ever see those places; have long since (i.e., since 1937) put by such yearnings. But Sawmill Cove is still a place to make one miss the world.
Ordinarily. This night too it did its part — bluefish thrashed after minnows in the shallows, great blue herons stalked and clattered, ospreys wheeled, raccoons scrounged along the low-tide flats, crows and whippoorwills did their things, turtles conned and glided in the moonlight, there was not one human sound — but I could not do mine. Good-bye, good-byes! On, not to Portugal, but to the end! I began this letter, to say good-bye to you; put it by after an hour’s sweaty scribbling. Too much to tell; too much of consequence not yet tellable. To bed, then, to get on with it, on with it.
In the early hours my sleep was broken by a shocking noise: from somewhere alongshore, very nearby, as feral a snarling as I’ve ever heard, and the frantic squeals of victims. A fox or farm dog it must have been, savaging a brood of young something-or-others. For endless minutes it went on, blood-chilling. Insatiable predator! Prey that shrieked and splashed but for some reason could not escape, their number diminishing one by pathetic one! I rushed on deck with the 7x50’s, shouted out into the pitch-darkness (the moon had set), but could see and do nothing. The last little victim screamed and died. Baby herons? Frogs? Their killer’s roaring lowered to an even growl, one final terrible snarling coup de grâce, then almost a purr. There was a rustling up into the woods, followed by awful silence. Long moments later a crow croaked; a cicada answered; a fish jumped; the night wood business resumed.
I stood trembling in my sweat. Nature bloody in fang and claw! Under me, over me, ’round about me, everything killing everything! I had dined that evening on crabs boiled alive and picked from their exoskeletons; as I ate I’d heard the day’s news: Judge Boyle denies Kennedy request to cross-examine Kopechne inquest witnesses; last of first 25,000 U.S. troops withdrawn from Viet Nam; U.S.S.R. acknowledges danger of war with China. And Drew would become a terrorist, only accidentally killing others. And you, sir, killed yourself, the only lesson you ever taught me. Horrific nature; horrific world: out, out!
Come misty morning I rowed ’round Sawmill Cove and found nothing. Trappe Creek and all its contents were dewy, fresh, innocent, almost unbearably sweet. Oh, end it! I felt heart-haggard as the Ancient Mariner; looked as zombieish as on the morn of June 22 last. End it. A northwesterly sprang up in time for me to leave cove and creek silently, under sail, as I’d hoped. No good-bye; just out, out. In the river I passed without emotion Red Nun 20. By midmorning Osborn Jones was in his Cambridge slip, fit with reasonable maintenance to sail to the end of the century; but I left him without a qualm, almost sorry I had yet to sail back to Todds Point, so done was I with what had been for 30 years my chiefest pleasure — and with having done.