Jake Barnes's Boat Yard

Jake Barnes's Boat Yard sits on the lake shore between New Essex and Harper, at the end of a road that turns off Route 18, directly next door to the Harper Boat Club. The club building itself could more accurately be called a shack, and its boat basin was small and crowded; the boat yard beside it was a cluttered, informal enterprise. Jake Barnes, a fat, sleepy man who had inherited the business when his father died, sold boats, gas, oil, gear, fishing tackle, and cold beer. He was a good but indolent craftsman, with rickety ways on which he could haul anything up to forty feet out of the water. He had a good touch with marine engines and outboards and, when pressed, could do major hull repairs. His yard was an incredible clutter of timbers, corroding hardware, empty oil cans, hulls too far gone for repair, rotting lines, and sagging roofs over his covered storage area.

The Bowdens' Retreat from the Stuffy Club

The boat yard became part of the Bowden family's life after Sam and Carol Bowden decided to give up the expensive club they had first joined. That club was too far from Harper, and too many of its members were excessively stuffy. When it came time to pay dues for the second year, Sam and Carol talked it over and were each pleased and surprised to find how willingly the other person would give up the club. They joined the Harper Boat Club instead, ten miles closer, and the Sweet Sioux took kindly to the change. Here she looked almost modern; after the opera, the washer-woman had returned to the neighborhood saloon and was content. The marine engine no longer conked out, and Sam and Carol had a lot more fun at club affairs because the group was younger. Most members of the Harper Boat Club were ardent do-it-yourself addicts, which seemed to please Jake. He charged a nominal fee for hauling the boats out, and he seemed happiest when he could stand in a dirty tee shirt and soiled duck pants drinking his own beer and watching the clientele work on their boats. The children of the members of the neighboring club adored Jake, who told them all kinds of monstrous lies of his adventures.

The Confrontation with Max Cady

The boat yard was the setting for the first direct encounter between Sam Bowden and Max Cady after Cady's release. Sam parked the station wagon in the rear of Jake's boat yard and checked off the things they had brought: sandpaper, calking material and calking compound, antifouling marine hull paint, deck paint, and varnish. Jake, with a can of beer in his large dirty hand, ambled over to meet them as they came around the side of the main shed. While Sam's daughter Nancy worked on the boat, Sam went over to put a sandwich and thermos on the sawhorse. As he was unbuttoning his shirt, he had his back to Nancy. He stopped, motionless, his fingertips touching the third button. Max Cady sat on a low pile of timbers twenty feet away. He had a can of beer and a cigar. He wore a yellow knit sports shirt and a pair of sharply creased slacks in a shade of cheap electric blue. He was smiling at Sam. Sam walked over to him, and it seemed to take a long time to walk twenty feet. Cady's smile didn't change. Sam asked, keeping his voice low, what Cady was doing there.

The Yard as a Stage for Cady's Menace

The boat yard, a place of ordinary family recreation and honest manual labor, became the stage on which Cady demonstrated his method of psychological warfare. In this setting, Cady revealed the details of his harassment of his former wife Mary, whom he had looked up when he got back to Charleston. He described how she damn near dropped dead when she recognized him, how he had to bust open the screen door to get to talk to her, how she ran and got a fireplace tool and tried to hit him over the head with it, and how he took it away from her and bent it double and threw it in the fireplace. He told Sam he drove her to Huntington, about fifty miles away, and made her write him a love note full of dirty words, dated and asking him to take her away for a while. He stayed with her about three days in a hotel in Huntington. When Sam asked why Cady was telling him this, Cady replied that he wanted Sam to get the picture, and he framed his threat in terms of their relative positions: "we started pretty near even. Now you're a wife and three kids ahead of me." When Sam said, "And you want us to be even again," Cady answered, "I didn't say that." The boat yard, with its timbers and clutter, thus became the place where Cady's campaign of intimidation first made itself felt directly on Sam, in the presence of his daughter and within sight of the family's ordinary weekend routine.

The Yard's Place in the Larger Conflict

The boat yard also connects to the broader investigation of Cady's character. It was through the informal network of the boat yard's world that the Bowdens' ally Sievers, the private investigator, gathered intelligence on Cady. Sievers told Sam that, just out of curiosity, he had Apex in Wheeling run a check on Cady as a courtesy between branch offices. The report revealed that the Cadys were old stock, hill people from around Eskdale, with four brothers, two older than Maxwell and one younger. Max Cady had no record prior to the Army sentence, but he wasn't any angel; he got in the Army after he cut a man badly with a broken bottle in a fuss over a woman, and the court gave him the choice of enlisting or going to prison. The old man was a moonshiner with a violent temper who died of a stroke three years ago, and the boys' mother, married when she was fifteen to a man nearly thirty, was feebleminded her whole life. The oldest brother was shot to death eight years ago in a running gun battle with federal agents, and the next oldest was killed in a prison riot in Georgia while serving a life sentence for felony murder. Sievers concluded that Cady was one of the wild ones who don't think the way people do, with no comprehension of right and wrong, whose only thought is whether or not they'll be caught. The boat yard, where Sam and his family came to sand and paint their boat, was thus the place where the full weight of Cady's violent lineage and psychopathy was brought home to Sam, transforming a site of leisure into a vantage point from which the threat against the Bowden family could be measured.