The Ropewalk

THE ROPEWALK

Copyright © 2011 by John Knauf.

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5273-8 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5272-1 (ebk)
Printed in the United States of America

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Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is the idea of an existence, will also divine a near relationship between it and a sure sense of destiny, and must regard life itself…as directed, irrevocable in every line, and fate-laden.

The only space that remains open to us is visual space, and in it places have been found for the relics of the other senses as properties and effects of things seen in the light…salvation is emancipation from the spell of that light-world and its facts.

Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West

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Chapter 1

The first thing I should explain is how I came to find myself sharing a rather large apartment building with only one other person. Actually, I should correct that to say “a person and a half” because the person in question was a woman who had a young daughter about five or six years of age. So in reality there were three of us residing in the building, of whom only two were capable of what I would consider rational thought. All the other occupants had already left for parts unknown for the upcoming holidays. She lived in the hall below mine, in an apartment approximately in the center of the building.

The building itself was curious in that it was long and narrow and only had the two floors, but sprawled for a considerable distance because it was a renovated rope factory originally built in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Back then they made long ropes for sailing ships in there, and in order to get a continuous braid, the “rope walk” had to go on for however long the ropes themselves had to be. Historically, some of these buildings went on for nearly a quarter mile, but the one I lived in was considerably shorter, being just a little over five hundred feet in length. Rumor mill sources claimed it had originally been much longer.

It had bustled with activity for nearly a century, but eventually steam power began to replace the sails, and its days were numbered. Then it gradually slowed down until finally, down to its last few employees, it closed its doors sometime in the late eighteen hundreds.

After that it sat for decades, remarkably undisturbed by the elements and preserved, so said the local legends, by the sheer quantity of pitch, tallow, tar, and whatever else was used on the ropes back then as a preservative. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, an enterprising development firm bought it and turned it into an apartment building in anticipation of a college being founded somewhere on the adjacent peninsula. Once the college opened, it was reasoned, both students and faculty would need a place to live. It was an insider’s deal, but the sagacity of the political informants who championed it quickly fell into disrepute when the college never materialized. The way I heard it, the entire speculative process boiled down to a visit by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the President of Bowdoin College and hero of Little Round Top in the Civil War, who, over dinner in the nearby town of Bowford, once casually commented on how nice it would be to have a branch of Bowdoin College situated in such a beautiful area. By the time that idle thought reached the speculators, it was a done deal, and it was assumed that Chamberlain’s reputation alone would make it happen. So the old ropewalk was purchased and quickly turned into a rooming house. Then, when Chamberlain showed no signs of expanding the college, funding dried up, the speculators slipped away, and the building was once again left to the elements.

Even the spelling of the town was changed to accommodate the arrival of the college. Originally, it was a French name, which was not surprising since the town was so near the border with Canada. It was spelled “Beaufort” then, and only became “Bowford” after Chamberlain’s visit, the “B-o-w” part intended to mimic the beginning of “Bowdoin” and flatter the future patron. The “fort” became “ford” probably through a simple language ambiguity. When I once pointed out to a local that the “ford” part made no sense since “ford” usually meant a river crossing and there was no river to cross, that person rather indignantly replied, “Well, maybe there was a river here back then,” as if rivers came and went geologically in the span of a few human lifetimes.

One of the consequences of the renovated building never having been used for its intended purpose was the fact that the plumbing, though primitive by today’s standards, remained functional through its idle period. This, coupled with the appearance not of a college but of a boarding school in the nineteen-fifties, saved it from eventual extinction. A new group of speculators bought it, cleaned it up, and sold it to the school as a dormitory. Since it was intended to address the housing needs of a school located rather far from the nearest town, the designers’ original plan included rooms for students and apartments for teachers, a curious anomaly first seen as objectionable but later appreciated by the administration when they came to realize that having teachers living in the same building ensured a staff of hall monitors at no additional charge.

Because the plumbing was of an antiquated design, though, the building had a curious anomaly—the only water service the rooms had was a simple sink and a cold-water spigot. Hot water could be had by filling a small water heater over the sink and heating it electrically, but none of the rooms had bathrooms or toilets. To deal with this, the new developers had converted the old latrine-like water closet on each floor to modern showers and toilet stalls. The arrangement worked fine and even added a certain Victorian panache to the building, but I doubt that anyone could ever have imagined the unexpected role this layout would play in what happened there.

The upper floor, the one I lived on, was dominated by individual rooms, some too small for more than one occupant and others large enough for two beds and the meager amenities called desks and bookshelves. Actual “apartments” of more than one room were to be found mixed in with the rooms on the first floor. Rumor had it that some of the apartments even had bathrooms, but since I had never been in one, I could not substantiate the report. All of these multi-room apartments were occupied by teachers at the school who were married and/or had children of their own. Since I was single, I was shunted off to one of the one-room enclaves on the upper floor. Also, since I was single, I was evidently deemed not worthy of the extra space of a double room and thus ended up in one of the smaller, single-bed rooms, which, “status” considerations aside, didn’t bother me at all.

I had come to the Ropewalk—the building had retained the name of its original function—the year before, 1977, because I was a teacher who had been looking for a job that would take me away from the overdevelopment of southern New England. That euphemistic word “development” had become synonymous with “special interests pandering” for me, and I realized I had to either get away from it or do something desperate. So when I found out about the job opening in northern Maine, I figured, “Well, here’s a place that will escape the ravages of insider corruption for a while. Why don’t I take it?” What worked in my favor was the fact that there were not a lot of people anxious to move to the edge of the earth. I suspected that mine may have been the only résumé they received.

I was a history teacher, one of those dodo birds who were obsessed with knowing the truth behind history’s constantly moving tides. Being single allowed me the latitude to go where I wanted and do what I wanted, but denied me the comfort—which on some level I equated with complacency—of actually bonding with another human being. I had had two marriages, the first failing because we were simply too young and too suffused with the residual efflorescence of the sixties, the second because, despite moving into the seventies, I was not able to shake that sixties glow from my overweaned sense of soul-mate idealism. It was doomed from the start. Her father, an extremely pragmatic and highly successful businessman, had never really liked me, thought I was too impractical.

“Drummond,” he’d once said—he never called me by my first name, Egan—“You’re like the alchemists of the Middle Ages. You’ll spend your entire life looking for some sort of elixir to turn lead into gold while your family slowly starves.” He was probably right. But history, and its sister, archeology, were full of characters much more interesting than anyone I actually knew. The mundane had opened its umbrella of mediocrity over all of us, leveled the playing field of the passions, given us security, and made us all uninteresting.

The reason the building was empty just then was because the Christmas vacation had started, and all the students had returned to their homes and would not be back until after the new year. The teachers had also left to spend the holidays with family or other relatives. The reason I was still in the building was because I wanted to take advantage of the peace and quiet that would prevail when everyone else was gone. I had set personal goals for myself, things I wanted to accomplish—as a history teacher I had decided to enhance my professional reputation by writing a history of the region—but had become negligent because I had allowed myself to be interrupted and sidetracked by my many “acquaintances” among the students. They visited me constantly. This came about because I was the coach for the baseball team. No one else had wanted that sidebar activity, and the program was threatened with shutdown until I, literally, stepped up to the plate. I instantly became the athletic wunderkind. It didn’t even matter how well we played; it only mattered that we played.

I had also started a martial arts club, resurrecting my long-dormant abilities in that arena under the guise of instilling a sense of personal discipline in the students. I had gotten my black belt in Tae Kwon Do about ten years before, the culmination of an interest developed in my adolescence. My instructor, a Korean master, had told me I was “ideally suited” for the fighting arts, both because my six-foot height was not so tall that I had too much body area to cover, and because my long, lean legs—I’d been a runner in college—allowed me to kick to an opponent’s head with no special effort.

He’d also encouraged me to develop what he called “the look.” I had had a thin, black mustache in those earlier years, and this, along with my dark hair, pronounced cheekbones, and deep-set, dark eyes, could, with a carefully practiced sneer, make me look quite threatening, an ability that went a long way toward unnerving an opponent. “To fight is about unbalance opponent,” he’d said in his broken English. “Psych him out,” was what he had been trying to say, and it worked well, both in and out of the practice ring. It sometimes backfired with women, though, so to soften my look, I got rid of the mustache.

Nevertheless, I hadn’t practiced the art in so long that I was seriously rusty and knew that I had become stiff, slow, and badly timed. In spite of this, some of the students took to it like a fish to water, warrior ethic and all. It was good exercise in any case, and I had no illusions about aspiring to be some kind of champion. And it was safe; there were so few people in that part of New England who had ever studied the fighting arts that the chances that I would be challenged were extremely remote. And the mystique of the art itself kept the undecided challengers at bay.

The one thing I was not qualified to coach the students on was relationships, so I stayed away from that subject on the pretense that their adolescent love and lust affairs were too far beneath me to notice. The reality was I had absolutely nothing to tell them about how to make a relationship work. How could I with my track record? In spite of that shortcoming, I seemed to be inordinately popular through no conscious effort of my own. But the upshot was, I never seemed to have a moment’s rest. I would no sooner sit down and begin to work, when the floorboards in the hall would creak and announce the approach of one of my many “friends.” A moment more and there would be a knock on the door. Once interrupted, I knew there was no hope of returning to what I had been doing; my caller would invite himself in and remain sometimes for hours either unloading his problems on my attentive ears, updating the rumor-mill file with the latest suspicions, or simply bending those ears with his talk. I was a good listener and because of that had become a sort of unofficial father confessor, a decidedly one-sided virtue.

Thus conditioned to expect the worst whenever I had an unoccupied moment, I soon abandoned all hope of ever accomplishing anything as long as the building was full of people. I therefore had been looking forward to the approaching holiday with a sense of relief, not because it was Christmas but because I would finally have some time to myself. Once everyone was gone, however, I found to my amazement that the stillness was almost maddening. The vastness of the building only then became apparent, and at one point I had this unsettling feeling that the whole world had either sunk beneath me, or I was the only one who hadn’t gotten the message to move out. I resisted the temptation to do the Robinson Crusoe thing and shout into the empty hall just to hear if my voice would echo. I took the whole first day getting accustomed to what I could only describe as the voluminous silence.

It was during that period that I discovered I was not alone in the building after all. It happened on the second evening while I was preparing my supper. The building had a communal kitchen on the first floor, about halfway down the length of the hall. This kitchen, like the communal bathrooms, was an afterthought added by the developers to cover the possibility that there might be people who wanted to prepare their own meals rather than eat in the school cafeteria. So one of the rooms was turned into a no-frills kitchen. It had a stove, cold-water sink with its electric water heater, refrigerator, cabinets, and two small restaurant-like bench booths. Not exactly a class act but enough to get the job done. I was down there concocting one of my no-frills meals when I was suddenly confronted with Margaret Gillespie, one of the English composition teachers, who also, oddly enough, doubled as a phys ed teacher. Her little daughter, Sonya, was with her.

I was caught completely off guard by her sudden appearance. For some reason, I felt that she, of all the people there, would be one of those most anxious to leave the Ropewalk because of stories I’d heard from my many student visitors about how unhappy she was. She was young, married, and evidently bored to tears by the lack of social life in nearby Bowford. Yet there she was, with Sonya in tow, still in the building when everyone else was gone.

This was an interesting development. Margaret was, by general consensus, a real “looker,” and most of the men at the school, whether they articulated it or not, whether married or single, yearned for some sort of contact with her—a touch, a moment of discourse, a one-night stand, or, in some cases, an outright affair. She had dark brown, shoulder-length hair and, although only of average height, moved with an athletic suppleness that made her seem taller, or at least more commanding, than she actually was. I surmised that this suppleness was a product of her physical education activities, but since I knew nothing about her, I couldn’t be sure.

What I was sure about was that there was something else about her that was so startlingly different that I couldn’t help but notice her. It was her eyes; when I first met her at the school, I’d noticed that her brown eyes had a slightly elliptical aspect to them, oddly out of sync for a Caucasian, that had led me to believe that maybe there was some oriental or possibly South American ancestor somewhere in the family tree. It was none of my business, of course, and whether that was true or not was completely irrelevant in view of how well it all went together. Her projected persona, out of reach but not lost on me, was one of quiet self-assurance built on a subtle sensuality.

All of this resonated on an instinctive level the moment I saw her, of course, causing a reaction that I was sure registered on my face for at least a passing moment. I recovered quickly, though, assumed my usual “social neutrality” attitude, and smiled as she and Sonya stepped into the kitchen.

If Margaret had an arresting aspect to her, it was nothing in comparison to her daughter, but for a completely different reason. Sonya had always seemed strange to me, not because she was in any way unattractive but because she was so different from both of her parents. She had Margaret’s eye shape and color, but her mother’s chestnut-colored hair and her father’s curly, blond locks were not conducive to the straight, black hair that Sonya had and that seemed to grow unusually low on her forehead. That could’ve been just the way it was combed, of course, but when combined with facial features that I could only describe as somehow unsettled, changeable, and amorphous, she had such an aspect of the rare and exotic about her that she actually made me a bit uncomfortable.

Even stranger was her apparent ability to actually use this unsettledness; she would look at me one way, then change her position and expression and seem to be a completely different person. “Rubbery” was the only word that came to mind whenever I saw her features going through their odd metamorphosis. The first time I saw it I was totally transfixed, standing there watching the child become some other child right before my eyes, then reverting back to the original. But even while she was doing that, there was no point when her features seemed to resemble those of her parents, and all I could think of was that some sort of genetic “back-tick” was at work, one of those rare events that cause a child to look more like an earlier ancestor than her actual parents.

What I found most remarkable about this was that Margaret’s features didn’t reveal any of this ability. She was, by all accounts, unselfconsciously attractive—really quite stunning when dressed up for some school event—and her husband, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, but with a slight propensity to put on a little weight, was still able to turn a few female heads. How their offspring inherited this unusual characteristic was, to me, the consummate genetic mystery. But there was no point in denying what was true. I found the child oddly—and, admittedly, maybe reluctantly—“different.” Naturally, I never uttered a word of this to anyone, not even casually. Some things were better left unsaid.

“Margaret,” I said. “You startled me. I thought I was the only one in the building.” I was taking some liberties with my familiar tone. In actual fact, she and I tended to move in different social strata, and although I’d seen her almost every day at the school, I had only ever spoken with her a few times at various faculty functions, and even then only briefly. The truth was, I hardly knew her at all.

Her response surprised me. There wasn’t one. She simply stood there staring at me as if she hadn’t heard me.

“I didn’t realize you could cook,” she finally said.

I took that at face value, which is to say I assumed it was some sort of caulk to plug up the hole in the conversation.

“I wouldn’t exactly call this ‘cooking,’” I said with a smile. “All I’m really doing is satisfying a biological need. ‘Cooking,’ on the other hand….”

“Are you staying here right through Christmas?” she interrupted. Little Sonya looked up at me with her coal-black eyes. Her face was a rubber mask slowly crinkling into a smile.

“Ah, well, I don’t know if I’ll actually be here on Christmas day, but I do plan on being here at least up to the day before Christmas Eve. Would that be Christmas Fore-eve?” I smiled at my own little joke but she didn’t pick up on it.

She seemed tense about something. She smiled, but I noticed, or maybe sensed, that it was a forced smile. Maybe it was because even while smiling her eyebrows remained taut, as if she were shielding her eyes from the glare of the overhead light. But the fluorescent overhead was not harsh; indeed, as the gloom thickened outside, it was obvious that the one light alone was barely enough for a room that size. Like virtually everything else in the building, it was probably one more aspect of its checkered construction legacy.

“Could probably use more light in here,” I said.

She nodded and looked past me through the window to the rapidly falling curtain of darkness outside. “It gets dark early this time of year.”

I nodded.

“There’s a storm coming in,” she went on. “Sleet, hail, snow, high winds. Coming right in off the ocean. I hope we don’t lose power.” She stepped over to the window and peered out. “It’s already started.”

In truth, it had. I could hear the first faint hits of the sleet on the glass. I had been so intent on eating that I hadn’t noticed. Beyond the sound of the sleet, I could hear the pounding of the surf on the rocky coastline, a scant hundred yards away. The Ropewalk was located very near the ocean precisely because back then they were making ropes for sailing ships. It would not have made sense to make the ropes in town, five miles away as the crow flies but three times that by road, and then have to pay some mule teamster to bring them to the harbor.

She hugged herself as if suddenly cold. “So, how long are you staying?”

“At least until the day before Christmas Eve.”

“Oh, yes, right. You just told me that.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders. “Ah, Egan, you realize that you, Sonya, and I are the only people in the building, right?”

“Actually,” I replied, “I thought I was the only person in the building. I didn’t realize that you were still here until now. So I guess I can’t say for certain that there might not be someone else hanging around for a few days. And to be honest,” and here I looked out at the gloom, “this storm might make it difficult for anyone to leave for the next day or two. So if you or anyone else plan to leave, you better do it now.” I realized the moment I said it that it could be mistaken for an antisocial comment on my part, so I added, “Not that I wouldn’t want the company. The emptiness is so huge it may take me a day or two to get used to it.”

Once again, she didn’t react to my comment. Instead, glancing from the window to me and then back to the window, she said, “So you’ll be here for at least the next four days? You wouldn’t, ah, leave early or anything, would you?”

By this time, I had brought my dinner over to one of the booths and sat down to eat. Sonya climbed up on the opposite bench and stared at my plate. “No, I won’t be leaving early. I plan on using this time to catch up on some research and writing that I’ve been trying to do.”

“What are you writing?”

“A history of this region, including, eventually, the building of this establishment,” and here I waved my hand in an arc towards the ceiling to indicate I meant the Ropewalk. “I haven’t gotten too far,” I added.

“You should talk to Sil,” she said. “He grew up here, knows all the stories.”

She was referring to Silio Muraceau, the maintenance man. In fact, I had already considered approaching him for that very reason but as yet had not had the chance. Or, for that matter, summoned up the nerve. Sil was a large-boned, swarthy man with jet-black hair and something of an attitude. While only of average height, he had massive shoulders and arms, and his constant scowl did not invite overtures of friendship. “He doesn’t seem to be very friendly,” I said.

“He’s alright once you get to know him. He’s an Indian, you know. A Native American.”

I nodded. “So I hear. People tell me he knows all the legends going back through the memory of his people.” I hoped I didn’t sound too patronizing. The fact was, I had my doubts about how thick the strain of Indian blood in his veins really was. Someone had told me he was an Algonquin, and someone else had told me, no, he was an Abenaki, the very group attacked and decimated by Rogers’ Rangers in the French and Indian War. I, in my infinite patience, did not bother to inform the speaker that the Abenakis were, in fact, members of the Algonquin group. I had long since accepted that most people did not appreciate historical accuracy the way I did.

“What is his obsession with keeping the grass mowed?” I asked. “I watched him several times during the summer almost frantically attacking the lawn with the mower. It was like he was locked in mortal combat with the weeds and brush. What’s up with that?” It was a feeble effort on my part to add some levity to the conversation.

She smiled briefly and shrugged, glanced out the window again at the gathering storm, then said, “So you’re not aware of anyone else having stayed in the building?”

Something in her tone caused me to stop eating. I studied her expression for a moment and realized there was some meaning—a second question—behind the question. “No. Like I said, as far as I knew I was the only one here. If you don’t mind my asking—why are you and Sonya still here? Where’s Ben?”

Ben was her husband. His full name was actually Benton, not Benjamin, and I knew from my student visitors that it annoyed him whenever he received mail addressed to “Benjamin Gillespie.”

“He had to attend a conference. Can you believe that someone would actually organize and hold a conference right before the Christmas vacation?”

“He couldn’t take the two of you with him?”

“Well, not really. At least he said he couldn’t. He’s coming by to pick us up on Christmas Eve. Then we’ll be heading south to Connecticut. My parents live there. Benton’s, too, for that matter. It’s about an eight hour drive, maybe longer if the weather doesn’t improve by then.” She paused to pull Sonya away from the table. The little girl had reached out for the food on my plate. “Is there any chance that you might stay until Christmas Eve?”

“Sure, that might happen. If I get on a roll with the project, I probably won’t want to stop. The Christmas Fore-eve plan is not carved in stone.” I smiled again at my little joke, and this time a faint flicker of a return smile crossed her lips. “Why do you keep asking if I know if anyone else is in the building?”

She drew Sonya to her. The little girl wrapped her arms around her mother’s leg and stared at me. Margaret stroked the child’s hair for a moment before turning her attention back to me. “Because,” she said in almost a whisper, “someone else is. I can hear his footsteps out in the hall when I’m trying to sleep.”

Read an Excerpt

Monday, February 18, 2013

The Drummond Diaries: The Great Sphinx

Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Drummond Diaries

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Read Chapter 1 of "The Ropewalk"

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Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The New York Book Festival Badge

5 out of 5 stars Outstanding mystery and historical novel