Dead Letters: What the Sound Keeps

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

A reader named Katharine wrote to ask me two things. The first was whether I would go and see a fishing captain named Ellery Thompson, out of Stonington, Connecticut, a draggerman who paints. The second was whether I am a vampire. I will take them in order, and I will do a better job with the first, because the first has an answer.

I went up to Stonington to find the captain, and found instead that Joseph Mitchell had beaten me to him by years.

This is the recurring shape of my working life and I have stopped being surprised by it, but it stung more than usual here, because Mitchell had not merely gotten there first. He had done the thing correctly and forever. His profile of Ellery Thompson had run in The New Yorker and been set between hard covers, and it was, as everything of Mitchell's is, so quietly and completely right that a second man arriving with a notebook feels like a fool showing up to a house already furnished. Mitchell had called him a sad-eyed, easygoing Connecticut Yankee, and had laid down the whole of him, the three hundred years his people had fished those same waters, the boat, the paintings, the trumpet he played, the Yale men who took him out to teach them the bottom of the Sound. There was nothing left on the shelf for me. The man had been caught, cleaned, and mounted by a better hand.

I went to see him anyway. You do, when you have come that far.

The Eleanor was his dragger, Kat (may I call you that?), as you said, and Thompson took me out on her, which I have since understood he did with anyone who asked and a good many who didn't, because he liked the company and he liked the water and he had reached the age where the two were about the only things he still liked without reservation. He was a big, slow, courteous man with rheumatism in him and paint under his nails, and he talked the whole day, freely, the way Mitchell said he did, and I filled a notebook I already knew I would never use, because you cannot publish the furniture out of another man's house.

What I had not been ready for was the dragging itself.

A dragger works by dropping a net to the floor of the Sound and hauling it along the bottom, and what comes up is not only fish. The bottom of Long Island Sound is a great cold drawer that everything eventually falls into, and Thompson's net brought up a portion of it every time the winch turned. There were the fish, yes, flounder and the rest, the reason for the trip. But there was also the other haul, the one he did not sell, the one that had been going into that net for forty years: bottles, a shoe, the arm of a chair, chain gone to lace with rust, a china cup with no chip in it whatever, a service revolver, and once, he told me, so calmly that it took me a moment, a live six-hundred-pound bomb that the Air Force had dropped in the Sound for practice and forgotten, which he had cut loose and let go back down rather than bring to the market with the flounder.

He knew the bottom the way I know a card catalog. He could tell you what you would find at a given depth off a given point, what had gone down there and roughly when, which wrecks were giving up what. When the china cup came up whole in the net he took it out and turned it over in his hand and looked at it as though it had done something faintly embarrassing. Nothing stays lost that doesn't want to, he said, and set it on the rail, and I wrote the line down in the notebook I had told myself I would never open, and was wrong about, because Joseph Mitchell never stood in that stern and watched that unchipped cup turn in that man's hand, and I did.

He had spent his life reading a floor no one else could see and hauling the past up off it into the light, unchanged, dripping, the cup as whole as the day it sank. And in his off hours he painted the surface of the same water, the boats and the weather, because the surface was the part you were allowed to keep.

I understood, standing in the stern while the winch groaned, that I had met the only other man in my long acquaintance who did exactly what I do. He went down after the drowned and lost and brought them back up where people could look at them. He used a net; I use a notebook; Mitchell had used a better notebook than either of us. The three of us, the fisherman and the two writers, were all in the same low trade of retrieval, and the Sound did not care which of us it was, and gave up its cup to the one who happened to have his net down.

Thompson gave up fishing not long after, and died an old man ashore, and the draggers are mostly gone now, and the three hundred years are over. Mitchell's pages are still exactly right. Mine went into a drawer of their own, and now, all these years later, here they are.

Now, Katherine, to your second question.

You noticed that the men and women I have sat with go back further than one lifetime should reach, and you offered vampire as the only theory that fit, and you said you would not tell anyone. That is kind of you, and I would be obliged if you'd hold to it. I am not going to answer you, and I want to be honest about why. It is not coyness. It is that I have spent this whole dispatch describing a cold place that takes things down and keeps them and gives them back after forty years without a mark on them, the cup as good as new, and I find I have no wish to say out loud whether I came up out of a drawer like that myself. Some questions are better left on the bottom, where the light doesn't reach them and they keep.

I never got the quote. Ask Mitchell. He got it in 1947.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.