The last tale of norah b.., p.1
The Last Tale of Norah Bow, page 1
Contents
Praise for The Last Tale of Norah Bow
The Last Tale of
Norah Bow
Copyright © 2024 Jay White. All rights reserved.
Dedication
Quotes
1
2
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5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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27
Acknowledgements:
Praise for The Last Tale of Norah Bow
“The Last Tale of Norah Bow is a thrilling story—a roller-coaster ride with unforgettable characters and suspenseful life-and-death moments on the wild waves of Lake Erie. Like brave Norah herself, it is full of heart. I loved every page of it.”
– Mary Logue, author of The Streel
“Like Homer’s Odyssey, The Last Tale of Norah Bow is a voyage—ultimately, a voyage home. Through storms and calm, night sailing a great lake in a small boat, Norah is on a quest for answers to dangerous questions. There’s a wonderfully vivid sense of place in this book: Lake Erie, its islands and inlets and its treacherous weather, the seedy dockyards of Prohibition-era Detroit, its whiskey river roaring with deadly opportunity. The Last Tale of Norah Bow is unfailingly eventful (buildings are destroyed, weapons wound and kill, death by drowning threatens more than once), but the story’s real drama lies in Norah’s heart, torn with suspicion, driven by love.”
– Lon Otto, author of A Man in Trouble.
“Norah Bow, the narrator of the novel by her name, is a dream of a character—a storyteller as clear-eyed and canny as the most memorable protagonists in the rich history of the American coming-of-age canon.
Capturing the reader instantly, Norah’s vibrant, precocious voice carries us into the world, and the historical moment, of The Last Tale of Norah Bow, where the tender, heartbreaking, and utterly believable story unfolds on the whiskey river of Detroit. With a setting so vivid it nearly breathes, a storyline propelled by the fearless, hopeful curiosity and wonderment of youth, and a narrator as captivating and compelling as any I’ve read, this novel is already a joy to read; but the language of the book makes it infinitely more than the sum of its parts.
White’s lyrical mastery and exacting eye for what Nabokov called ‘the divine detail’ are evident not just in the glorious sentence-level prose but in their creation of a world and a story that envelops the reader from the first page to the last.”
– Marya Hornbacher, author of Wasted and Center of Winter & Madness
The Last Tale of
Norah Bow
J. P. White
Regal House Publishing
Copyright © 2024 Jay White. All rights reserved.
Published by
Regal House Publishing, LLC
Raleigh, NC 27605
All rights reserved
ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646034604
ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646034611
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023943389
All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.
Cover images and design by © C. B. Royal
Regal House Publishing, LLC
https://regalhousepublishing.com
The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
For Lynn Armstrong
and the many ancestors
who made of Rye Beach
a summer cottage home
Quotes
“Secrecy flows through you, a different kind of blood.”
- Margaret Atwood, from Secrecy
“The future is long gone by and the past will never happen.”
- Kenneth Rexroth, from This Night Only
1
You can reach only so far into the cloud that anyone is and then that cloud travels on without you. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still feel the sway of the porch swing in that leeway between dusk and dark when the failing light is reluctant to lay down its truss. Daddy and I are sitting next to each other, speaking in low tones, careful that Momma is out of earshot. The upward notch of the swing is followed by the backward creak reminding me that Lake Erie is forever heaving itself on Rye Beach, then pulling back, always close and far away. I can hear again Daddy telling me about the one thing he and I shared. He called it our “demon switch.” He said if you weren’t born with this hidden fuse, you couldn’t ever get it, no matter if you walked on your hands or ate steak and eggs every morning. The womb gave you the demon switch. Only the grave could take it back.
“Do I have it? This switch?”
“No question about it,” he said, gripping my shoulders like he wanted me to know the full burden of my strength and brokenness.
“How does this demon go about its work?”
“When everything else breaks down, the demon in you takes charge.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember when that toddler fell into the lagoon and he sank like a stone? You and I were out taking a walk. You couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. I was looking out at the lake when it happened and I didn’t even see the boy. The parents screamed. No one could think, but you didn’t need to.”
“I’ve tried to forget that day,” I said.
“You dove into the water beside the breakwater with the waves pounding the rocks and somehow, Norah Bow, you brought that boy back. The father and mother looked at you like were both an angel and a devil for doing something they couldn’t imagine being done in this life. They thanked you many times, but they walked away from you faster than you could dry yourself off. Remember that?”
“Are you saying the parents of that boy thought I was…?”
“It scared them to be in your presence, even though they wept with joy at the return of their son. They thought you were a wild animal. Not of this world.”
“I’m also saying you’ve known about this demon switch all your life. That you are different from other girls.”
“And you have this demon, Daddy?”
“Top dead center,” he said, drawing the heel of his right hand across his forehead like he was taking aim on a stubborn crease.
“How come I’ve never seen it?”
Daddy didn’t answer me as we rocked on the porch swing watching fireflies gin up holes in the dark. He gave me his answer on another night, when I saw his demon change roles with the man I loved. I guess you could say most of my life has been about talking to my demons and angels, but for decades, I believed only my father was given to such spirited confessions in this land of bones and unbelief. Vigil and verse-reading have shown me otherwise. No matter how pretty we talk or how little we sulk, no one I’ve ever met is unfamiliar with the gates of the netherworld, and few in my wake have refused the help of a warrior angel. Even if you don’t cotton to the Bible, you have to admit there are some lines there so riddled with the wild dark flame they can’t be lit any better. Like this one from Psalm 141, Let the wicked fall into their own nets while I alone escape. That one verse peppers my blood and wings me back to the summer of 1926 when I was fourteen and I went after Daddy who’d been kidnapped by rumrunners on Lake Erie.
Just to be clear, my going after Daddy was not about serving justice or making sure my two brothers had a father or even about trying to assuage Momma’s tears. No, my need to retrieve him was more fierce and elemental like some message staunch-writ on the tablet of my soul. Daddy never took counsel from an angel, never for one day believed in God’s legion, but he did believe in me. For that reason alone, I wasn’t about to quit on him because if I did, it would be like quitting on my own dream of a sailing life. The second reason was more like a sack of pig iron. I believed I was to blame for his being taken at gunpoint.
Because I don’t sleep much anymore, I have the night’s long middle to tell you how my Lake Erie net was cast long ago, or was it yesterday when the light and dark strands fell around me and I could do nothing more than set forth into a quadrant of great unsettling?
My beach hound Bob and I went down to the beach cove to polish off a slab of peach pie when we saw this lap-straked cruiser ghosting in without her red and greens showing. We heard the blub
Bob and I squinted to make the shapes emerge amid a cluster of fireflies peppering the dark. Before we saw faces, we heard voices scratched with smoke and long hours running. Bob wanted to sniff up close, but we talked it over, eyeball to eyeball, and decided to scoot back in the dune grass and let these men flesh out their intentions. We saw three men unloading wooden crates onto the dock, no wider than a pencil. Head-cocked and baffled, Bob and I looked at each other thinking these men were not hauling milk bottles for the Sandusky school district.
“Hard to believe water weighs more than whiskey,” one man said, his voice kinking Bob’s tail.
“Would you shut the hell up,” another man said, his voice cut down to a rasp.
“This hooch is killing my stones,” the first man said.
“Don’t give a damn what’s killing you,” the second man croaked. “You’ll get your money same as the Mexican Export.”
“Who’s buying these shipments?” the second man asked.
“Some local big,” the throaty man said.
“How can one man quaff it all?”
“Far as I know, whiskey never goes bad.”
What Bob didn’t know about the sweaty tang of evil-bearing people was not worth knowing, so I guess what happened next was just a way to spotlight his own instincts. He flashed his yellow teeth at the low-slung moon and peeled over the top of the dune faster than a man-of-war. He ran straight for the three runners bent over their whiskey cases like he needed a jolt himself. I was fast on my feet, but Bob was the uncomplicated wind itself. Before I got off one shout, he’d already jumped toward the third silent man whose face I couldn’t make out. The man with a sandpaper voice pulled out a gun. I figured I had about two seconds to jab into the gunner’s spine and make his shot kick wide.
The third man barked, “Put your goddamn gun away.”
“The dog was aiming for my throat,” the man said, waving his gun in the air like a sparkler.
“It’s my daughter’s dog.”
“What?” the gun-waving man said.
“You heard me,” the third man said.
I grabbed Bob by the collar, dragged him away from Daddy, and tucked him behind my knees. Blood thumped my temples and every hair on my head tingled fire. I couldn’t believe Daddy was with these men. He had even less patience with booze than he did with God so why was he crabbing sideways with these smugglers? Why? That’s all Bob and I wanted to grab.
“What the hell?” the man with the gun said.
Daddy said, “Leave her alone.”
“Spies don’t live long,” the gunman said, then spat.
“I’m no spy,” I said. “Bob and I were sitting over there in the dune eating a piece of pie when you come in and he smelled Daddy out. If I was a spy, do you think I would make it so easy for you to catch me?”
“Don’t get smart with me, missy,” the man said, his eyes sticking me.
“Smart has nothing to do with it. Just saying what happened.”
“Let her be,” Daddy said. “She’ll be no trouble.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked Daddy with as much scold as I could muster while pressing my thumb into Bob’s collar to keep him from gnawing holes in these men.
“I can explain later,” Daddy said, holding his palms up like he wanted to place them square on my shoulders and reason his wrong away.
“You better,” I said, my eyes wet at the corners.
“If she says anything to anybody about seeing us here,” the gunman said to Daddy, “you’re going to end up face down in the drink. Then, I’ll go after her.”
“She won’t talk to anybody. Will you, Norah?”
I took a long look at Daddy hoping he’d show me what to do next, but he fought to hold my gaze. Scanning the beach beyond, Daddy shouted, “Get out of here and don’t come back.” Bent down over my dog, I backed away. Bob was a whimpering handful, miffed with me for cuffing him just for picking Daddy out of the whiskey dark.
That night, I tossed like I was lit up with a three-day fever. Bob was none too happy with my restless legs which kept spilling him off my bed. And I was none too happy that Daddy made no attempt over the next four days to seek me out and explain what he was doing on that dock with rumrunners. The absence of any explanation chewed on me real good.
I dragged myself to our regular Sunday night cottage dinner with enough questions and doubt to fill another Bible. Lots of folks, including Uncle Bill and Aunt Cora, had come over for fried perch, corn on the cob, home fries, tomatoes, cukes, lemonade, and peach pie with vanilla ice cream hand-cranked in an ice bucket. No beer, no whiskey, no wine. Daddy was a teetotaler—or so he boasted—and he wouldn’t allow one thimble of booze in our Rye Beach cottage.
Daddy sold life insurance, which was a funny thing because he never believed in it and he never inked a policy for himself. He said nothing can insure a man against the darkness waiting at either end of the line. I asked him what he meant by that and he said, at birth we come out of darkness and at death we return, and there’s just a patch of light, no thicker than a saltine, flickering between the two. All we ever get here is a chance.
Was the same man who helped me build my own sailboat a whiskey rogue? Whenever I needed money for wood, bolts, screws, halyards, sheets, paint, you name it, Daddy gave me coin. Since I was a happy drain on his wallet, maybe I’m the one who drove him to run booze across Lake Erie, but he wouldn’t even look at me, let alone tell me how he came to be there. My head hurt from trying to unlock the chance my father had come to. More than food, more than sleep, I wanted answers.
What made this hurt hard to bear was a simple fact: Rye Beach was our paradise. It was a sandy splice of land set downwind from the Bass Islands. It came with a fishing pier, a park shaded with red and white oaks, a marshy lagoon perfect for launching toy boats, a penny candy store, and an ice cream stand with the three dependable flavors: chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. Time itself, in 1926, had left long ago, so nothing ever changed except the wind’s direction. Even Prohibition, six years old and counting, didn’t seem to jigger the pulse of our beachy place. Yes, I had heard men and women whispering the allure of liquid escape like they were necessary stops on a rosary bead: tipple, toddy, giggle water, flutter juice, but those whispers seemed harmless. More unsettling were the descriptions of being drunk. I’d find them casually delivered by teachers, storekeepers, and sprinkled in cartoons and sermons. The words always spoke of sudden breakdown: plastered, buckled, clobbered, hammered, shredded, crooked, four to the floor. It was hard for me to imagine the appeal of such chaos and escape and so I never laughed when those descriptions were throttled as punch lines.
Occasionally, a crime story, connected to booze smuggling, would creep into the newspaper, but never on the front page of the Sandusky Register. Men still gabbed more about the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series in 1920, and when they might do it again, than they did about gangsters in Detroit and Chicago.
Others still prattled about the influenza epidemic of 1918 like it was a coming disaster instead of a freak storm already blown through. I nearly died of that flu when I was six, but Daddy wouldn’t let me cross over into the bye and bye. I remember Doc Williams shaking his head, saying Good God Almighty, here today, gone tomorrow. Both my lungs were packed with gunk. My fever jumped to the moon. I saw grackles in a swarm outside my window. Like they were coming for me with a shroud. Daddy told the doc, “God has nothing to do with it.” In my delirium, I didn’t know who I was, but somehow Daddy brought me back to our namesake. The doc left my bedside soon enough. Daddy never did.
Weeks later, when I did manage to find a slouch, I peered again out my window at the world I nearly lost and saw bodies stacked up at the end of our street like cordwood. I tried to stand, and I fell over. I had cracked most of my ribs from all night coughing fits and I had no use of my legs. Daddy didn’t even bother to consult with Doc Williams. Instead, he found every ladder-back chair we had and a pair of curtain rods and he brought them up to my bedroom. Like he was shaping a piano, Daddy set the chairs in two rows, then ran the rod through the open gaps and made me my own set of parallel bars. Every hour for four weeks, he fed me what he called “vital broth” and he made me stagger and thrash my way along those bars until some life returned to my legs. He wouldn’t let me die and then he wouldn’t let my legs fail. Grief was delivered that year in small, untidy bundles set out by the road, but I was not among them.
