given Promised Land its name, for the place stank to high heaven – a smell so pungent it tarnished the silver coins in the pockets of the workers.
When the plant was in production, the tall smokestacks belching clouds of fetid steam, the residents of Amagansett lived in dread of an easterly breeze. The stench would descend on the village like a curse, clawing at your nose and throat, clogging your pores. Even during the winter months, when the vats lay cold and still, there was no escaping the smell out at Promised Land. Over the years it had permeated the wooden cladding of the factory buildings and the shanties thrown up for the hordes of itinerant laborers, it had seeped into the pale sand, and it seemed to drip from the branches of the pitch pines.
The fish-meal plant sprawled on the edge of Gardiner’s Bay like a rancid dishrag beside a sink, and yet its presence there had safe-guarded the area. For who in their right mind would want to build in the shadow of such a foul-smelling beast? The low dunes behind the curving beach were unencumbered by houses. More importantly, the fragile hinterland of Napeague had been spared the usual depredations of development. Its deerfeed flats, pine copses and dune hills were still laced with freshwater bogs that rang with the sound of peeper frogs in early summer. Cranberry, blueberry and sundews were in abundance, along with curly-grass ferns, staghorn lichens, Hudsonia, tiny orchids and strange edible fungi highly prized by those of Italian and French descent, who’d been known to come to blows during the short picking season.
Napeague meant ‘Water Land’ in the language of the Montauketts, and the area was a living testament to the happy co existence of both elements. The relationship, tentatively forged over the centuries, recalled an era when Napeague had been open water separating the hills of Montauk from the main body of Long Island.
Some disputed this notion, but Conrad was convinced of it. How else to account for the skeletal remains of the whale he had discovered while out roaming one spring morning? The bleached vertebrae, each as big as a water pail, lay part-buried beneath a tangle of bearberry bushes a quarter of a mile inland at a spot where Napeague was half a mile wide. The only explanation was that the creature had been cast up on a shallow bar linking the two land masses, and that over the many years this slender umbilicus had grown inexorably through a process of accretion, sand layered upon sand, scoured from the ocean bluffs of Montauk and deposited by the ocean.
Conrad was an eleven-year-old boy when he first stumbled across the bones, and to his wildly imaginative mind the find was proof that the great Flood as described in the Book of Genesis had indeed occurred. The whale must surely have found itself stranded high and dry when the waters that God sent to punish the wicked finally receded. As far as Conrad was concerned, discovering those bones was the next best thing to finding the Ark itself atop Mount Ararat.
The possessiveness of the young led him to guard his secret closely. He persuaded himself there was no need to share the discovery, not even with his closest friend – Billy Ockham – who would have been with him that day had he not been forced to trim hickory spiles for his father’s pound traps. Instead, Conrad carefully covered the exposed bones with sand, returning home with just the one vertebra, informing his father and stepmother that he’d found it on the ocean beach.
He had rejected the idea of hiding the precious object, partly because he needed his father’s expert confirmation that it had indeed come from a whale, but mainly because his older brother, Antton, would most likely have discovered the bone then destroyed it – ceremoniously, before his tear-filled eyes – for no other reason than that concealment was proof of Conrad’s affection for it.
For years the vertebra lay casually discarded in a corner of the attic bedroom the brothers shared, Conrad feigning indifference to it. However, when he was alone he’d pick it up, turning it in his hands, tracing its soft, porous contours with his fingertips.
Even when his faith abandoned him some years later, the bone lost none of its iconic power. Twenty years on, he still kept it in his bedroom. It was the last thing he registered before fitful sleep descended upon him, and the first thing his eyes searched out when he woke each morning. It had become the touchstone by which he tested his life. Somehow, it seemed to enshrine everything that had happened to him since he first prized it from the packed sand.
When he looked at it he saw himself romping with Billy on Napeague, grubbing for cherrystone clams that they cooked up on a steel plate over a fire-pit on the beach, digging holes and hauling up fresh water in a nail keg to see themselves through the long hot days of summer, or sneaking out at night to watch the Coast Guard cutters chasing the rum runners all over Gardiner’s Bay, tracer bullets and the muzzle flashes from the big three-inch guns lighting up the night sky, better than the Fourth of July. Other times, he saw Billy torn apart by machine-gun fire, clods of flesh flying, on some nameless rock in the Pacific, thousands of miles from home, fighting for a people who had sought, with considerable success, to annihilate him and his kind.
Good times and bad times, the lump of whale bone had absorbed them all like a thirsty sponge. Given the events of recent years, he now wondered if the bone hadn’t begun to favor the bad over the good, somehow attracting ill-luck to itself, and he questioned whether he was to blame for this. Maybe it was a cursed object, blighted from the moment he first removed it from its natural resting place.
He didn’t dismiss such ideas. Like most fishermen he was given to superstitions – no talk of pigs or knives around the boat, no women or preachers aboard, no whistling in a breeze. He even knew a Swedish lobsterman in Sag Harbor who refused to put to sea in the company of a Finn, but that had as much to do with ancient rivalries between the two nations as it did arcane beliefs. Men for whom death was a daily and very real possibility were inclined to respect the precautionary wisdoms, however curious, of those who’d gone before them. It was the reason Conrad still cherished the caul that had masked his blunt, newborn face.
The patch of diaphanous skin, moist and clear when he was first dragged into the world, now lay dry and crinkled like a piece of old parchment in the shallow wooden pine box made specially by his father to house it. Prized as a potent charm against drowning, deep-sea whalemen used to pay big money for a baby’s caul to carry with them on their perilous voyages, though most found themselves rounding the Horn with little more than a scrap of cow’s after-birth in their pockets, sold them by some unscrupulous type wise to the lucrative trade.
That Conrad should have been born with a caul was as good a portent as any fisherman could wish for his son. It meant that the child was somehow touched, that the gods looked favorably upon him, that this was one boy who would never get to share the company of Davy Jones. Whether there was any truth in this, who could say? All Conrad knew was that he was still alive while others had been taken by the sea.
A sharp pain in his hand brought Conrad to his senses. He flicked the cigarette butt away and turned towards the oyster house, aware again of the noisy debate taking place inside.
It was some years since the beds off the north shore had yielded oysters of sufficient number or size worthy of the New York market, and little remained in the cavernous hall to indicate the building’s original function. The long benches for cleaning and packing the oysters had been stripped out – bought by old Mabbett for a song when he had expanded his fish-packing business – and the community of Amagansett men who followed the sea now referred to the rickety building as Oyster Hall. It was where they collected to while away the slow, fragmented winter months in idle chat. When the weather was too severe for even the most reckless among them to put to sea, the place would be packed with bodies. Right now there were fifty or so men gathered inside, but not one of them turned as Conrad entered.
Some were on their feet, gesticulating wildly, disturbing the pall of pipe and cigarette smoke hanging below the rafters. Others hurled insults at each other. The meeting had degenerated into a free-for-all.
‘Shut it off!’ bellowed Rollo’s father, Ned Kemp. He was seated behind
