A Matter of Mercy (7 page)

The horseshoe beach, reserved by the town for swimming, didn’t have grants in front of it. Rid briefly wondered if that would actually be a selling point. When he saw CiCi’s house, that’s what he thought first, would she sell it after her mother died, and to whom, for what? How could the tidal flats be private property? That made no sense. There was obviously a mistake in all this, one that would be straightened out in time. His mind wouldn’t hold an unbroken thought, only pieces. Still, when he saw her house, he did think of her. And when he thought of her, he was ashamed.

He’d felt it before, with other women. They try to be dignified, let a man leave when he needs to leave. Wants to leave. Whatever. Something like desperation starts to leak in right at the end, though, as if a good watertight seal just springs a tiny leak. And any leak can sink a boat. Just give it time to work, work, work. Anyway, he’d heard her, though he pretended not to. The business about the accident-child being deformed. Like that made some difference. The reason he hadn’t turned around was simple and direct. He had to get to his dog and his grant. He couldn’t let himself be finagled into staying, not today, not after a blow had done whatever to his nets and his stock. There was another reason, too, though. He didn’t have any idea what difference it was supposed to make, what she expected or hoped for in reaction, that she’d have sailed that out like a lasso to snag him. He didn’t know what to say or how to help. If he had, maybe he’d have turned around and said, “Why don’t you come on with me today after all?”

* * * * 

“Apparently, you’re not fishermen. You’re farmers. Sea farmers.
Big
difference,” the attorney said.

Of course, it would be Tomas—burly-looking in his overalls, untamed gray mane, weather-beaten face and hands—who spoke for them in his refined, educated voice and vocabulary. Among them, he was the scientist, the one who read, who studied environmental conditions and growing techniques. Just now he was working with the new Australian lines, hanging nursery bags from lines suspended in deeper water to increase their exposure to nutrients. The only one of them who began to know as much as Tomas was Barb, only she wasn’t being sued.

Tomas cleared his throat. “We’re acquaculturists, actually, but it would properly be considered a form of commercial fishing, sir. My research says that fishing is exempted under the Colonial ordinance of 1641. Isn’t that correct?”

The three of them had agreed. They would pay for a joint defense. Tomas would speak for them with this Barnstable lawyer who’d agreed to take their case. Now Rid and Mario glanced at each other, tacitly congratulating each other on their wisdom. Tomas had book smarts. What they knew was that they had been raised always to stay below the high water mark when driving to and from their grants as a legal bow to the rights of the private beach owners. Once in the shallows, actually on the tidal flats, they were on their own grants. Neither of them understood—nor particularly wanted to—how something that had functioned so simply and so well for so long was suddenly the focus of litigation. Tomas, on the other hand, would make it his business to understand and fix it.

The attorney sighed. “Yeah. It’s correct. And there’s a loophole the size of your harbor in it. See, the Colonial ordinance of 1641 was designed to encourage commerce—to get settlers to build wharves and the like. To do this, the lawmakers extended waterfront land ownership all the way out to mean low water—which, as you three well know, is a huge distance—what? five football fields?—rather than just to mean high water like practically every other coastal state in the country. And yes, you’re right, they
did
provide that commercial fishing and navigation could go on in the water above the land—hell, even swimming, if you can believe that, as long as the swimmer’s feet don’t touch bottom, for God’s sake.”

“So, there’s our defense,” Tomas said. “And the town’s.”

“Except…,” said the attorney. He leaned back in his swivel chair. It wasn’t a fancy office, but decent enough. Framed diplomas. Boston University. A wooden desk, not too scratched up. A second floor office, an abandoned reception desk just now. David Lorenz, Esquire himself: balding, wearing an open-necked Oxford shirt, khakis, steel-rimmed glasses. A habit of twirling the end of his mustache. Bitten fingernails.

“…Except that your pea-brained state Supreme Judicial Court of 1993 affirmed a definition of aquaculture as farming. Not fishing. Therefore the grants are not a protected use. Therefore Pissario’s claim that you are on private property may well be valid. The town may not have the right to issue these grants at all.”

“What position is the town taking?” Tomas still sounded measured and matter-of-fact, which was the only thing preventing Rid from grabbing the lawyer’s throat and demanding to know what the hell he was going to
do
about this. He didn’t dare even look at Mario now. The guy had been in the Marines; at least that’s what his tattoo claimed, but Rid figured him to have been tossed out of boot camp for sniffing Agent Orange or for putting his drill sergeant in a headlock. Mario was a good-hearted, hotheaded moron. Rid would rather have been sued with anybody else on the flats.

“I couldn’t tell you. The town attorney seems rather befuddled. As does the shellfish warden. I realize that there’s … er … expense involved for you, but my best advice is not to rely on the town to resolve this for you.”

Mario erupted onto his feet, his hand onto the lawyer’s desk.
“That’s my grant, my father put my name on it, and I’ll fucking kill the bas—”

David Lorenz drew back. In the same motion in which the attorney moved, Tomas was on his feet, his bulk equal to Mario’s but easily five or six inches taller. Still, the fluid grace of a fish. He slid himself between Mario and the desk, a hand on Mario’s shoulder, Mario then abruptly back in his chair. Rid sensed, rather than saw the force the hand had applied. That was the thing with Tomas. You never actually saw the force he applied to anything. “Hey, man,” Tomas said very quietly, speaking eye to eye to Mario. “Mr. Lorenz is our friend. Keep that straight, or we can split up and defend ourselves separately.
Right?
”

Mario’s eyes were coal fires, but he mumbled, “Right.” He looked out the window where the sky was the pure periwinkle of the Cape in September. It helped. The bay would have helped more.

The attorney’s shoulders and eyebrows—which could use a trim—dropped back into place.

“Look,” he said, resuming. “There
is
some good news. Remember that Pissario is also suing the sea farmers—”

“That’s aquaculturists,” Tomas corrected quietly. His hands rested on thighs that looked exposed without waders over them. His voice was strong, even though it was always low and calm.

Lorenz blinked and went on again. “Right, excuse me, aquaculturists, he’s suing the other acquaculturists who drive over his beach to get to their grants. Now if I have this right, there are four whose grants are between the access road and Pissario’s who don’t drive over his beach so they’re not included in the suit.” He ran a hand from his forehead back, as if there were hair falling down but there wasn’t.

Tomas nodded. “That would be Barb, Clint, Tweed, and Karl.”

Rid directed the question to Mario and Tomas. “Have they heard anything from the people above them? Any complaints, I mean.”

Tomas answered. “Barb just says she’s always gotten along with them. You know, she sees them out walking, she gives ’em a couple dozen oysters and chats awhile. Nothing different since Pissario filed, but maybe they don’t know about it yet. I doubt it though. People love Barb, and rightly so.”

“It’s a subdivision up on the bluffs, of course,” Lorenz said. “Sometimes neighborhoods like that will band together if a leader like Pissario emerges. Don’t be surprised. But that won’t affect you.”

“Yeah.” It was Mario, bitter. “Our asses have already been sued. What else they gonna do? Shoot us at dawn?”

Tomas shot Mario a look. It was enough to shut him up, but he twisted the baseball cap in his hand until Rid wanted to grab it away. He was nervous enough with Mario’s fidgeting, restraining himself from speaking to avoid Tomas’s reprimand as well as the embarrassment of sounding like Mario. The truth was that his head was about to detonate; he couldn’t trust himself not to explode in his own death threats.

“Look, could we stick to the point here? I have other appointments.” Lorenz straightened his calendar after leaning over, ostensibly to consult it. “The
point
is that while there are four aquaculturists not included in the suit for whatever reason, there are six or seven others also sued because they drive across Pissario’s beach to get to their grant areas, although their actual grants are in front of other upland owners’ properties. The
point
is that perhaps you could draw some or all of them in to fight this together—pool your resources, as it were.”

“Six or seven others?” Rid couldn’t contain himself, although he had enough control, unlike Mario, to stay seated, refrain from shouting and not cuss. His mother would have been proud. “How’d he figure that? There are twelve or thirteen grants down past Pissario’s toward Blackfish Creek.”

“I have no idea how he decided whom to sue. That’s a mystery. Maybe they had too many letters and numbers on their license plates for him to copy down or something. I really have no idea. It seems pretty random.”

“I know Bogsie and Smitty are in it, I saw ’em yesterday,” Rid inserted. “As far as I know, they haven’t done anything like get a lawyer yet.”

“We can get that information easily enough. You three are his primary targets though, I’m afraid, since you’re engaged in illegally farming his land.” The attorney put up two fingers of each hand to bracket
engaged in illegally farming his land
in imaginary quotation marks. “Do you need time to think about this?”

Rid couldn’t contain himself. “As opposed to just committing suicide here in your office?” He’d worn his newest jeans, the unfaded dress ones, a clean plain white T-shirt and deck shoes. The outfit was his equivalent of a tuxedo. He felt ridiculous and furious that Pissario—or anyone else—should bring him to his knees this way when nothing else had. Before Tomas could humiliate him, he forced himself to look at the lawyer directly and say, “I apologize. That was uncalled for.”

David Lorenz shook his head. “Look, it’s all right. You’ve got every right to be upset. You’ve just got to realize that I’m on your side here, and what we’ve got to do is research, strategize and present a hell of a case. You men are going to have to put emotions away for us to do that or we’ll waste a lot of time. It’s time you’re paying for.
Presuming
, I mean, that you decide to fight this. You
can
walk away, you know. Go do something else.”

Rid sensed that Mario was about to blow. He put his hand up and out to the side where Mario sat, a warning. “That’s not an option,” Rid said.

From behind his desk, David Lorenz glanced warily at Mario. “I assume you feel the same way?”

Tomas slid his own voice into the available space. “Yes, sir, he does. We all do.”

“Well, then, we’ll proceed. I’ll need a ten thousand dollar retainer to get started. Our first step is to prevent an injunction that would stop you from working your grants while this thing makes its way through the courts. It could take years. I hope you’re prepared for that.”

Rid had never gone there in his mind, considered maybe they could be shut down, stopped from working at all. Each of them had thousands of dollars lying in the shallows of the harbor. All their nursery stock, all their maturing and ready-to-harvest shellfish. All their trays, their nets, their cages. His stomach roiled. His peripheral vision picked up Mario twisting his cap.

Tomas wiped one side of his face with his gnarly hand, a narrow gold wedding band part of the flesh. “Yeah. Okay. We’ll need to get that together for you.”

Rid allowed himself to look at Mario on the way to looking over at Tomas. Mario’s eyes glittered unnaturally and for a moment Rid thought a dangerous rage was about to erupt. It was that hard to imagine tears.

Chapter 6

In the weeks that followed, Caroline carried around the hope Rid would call like a sand dollar in a zippered pocket. Not that he’d asked for her number, but it was in the book. It wasn’t like he didn’t know her mother’s name, even if he thought she might be using a married name, which she wasn’t. She’d resumed her own Marcum name before the divorce was final. Not that he’d asked about that, either.

She watched him surreptitiously through the big windows near Eleanor’s bed as he came and went from his grant at low tides. Surreptitiously not because he could see her from that distance, but because Eleanor watched her as sharply as Caroline wished she could watch Rid, so she could not. And it wasn’t actually Rid she watched anyway, but more his truck. She had to actually see the truck arrive to be able to track his movement out to his grant. Otherwise, the figures looked too much alike from a quarter mile, and, lacking any discernible border, one patch of sandy bay bottom littered with oyster cages looked exactly like the next.

He didn’t call. The first few days were hardest, but then Eleanor was worse—sicker, weaker, more pain—and Caroline stiffened herself by stuffing hurt and sadness in a bag of anger. So
I’m lonely and scared here
became a muttered
Fuck you
,
Rid
when she walked down onto the beach at mid- or high tide. If Elsie or a respite care giver were there for Eleanor at low tide, she went into town or over to Newcomb Hollow beach on the ocean side and walked until she was so tired she worried about making it back to the car. Not thinking about him, not rebuking herself, was fairly simple at home because her attention was so much on her mother. But when she was out of the house, however briefly, there was no neutral or restful place for her mind.

* * * * 

October. Some days the offshore wind unsheathed its blade, but others were butter-soft, shining. The first two weeks offered a late Indian summer with beach grass gilt and silver shining in the Cape’s crystal light, waving under a topaz sky. Whitecaps. A symphony of gulls swelling overhead. Bluefish running. One warm Friday afternoon, Caroline opened all the windows in the living room and raised the head of the hospital bed, trying to bring the day to her mother, bring her mother to the day.

Elsie had bathed Eleanor in the morning, a process Caroline intermittently forced herself to watch and couldn’t bear. Afterward, the sublingual morphine finally won and Eleanor was asleep, but it had taken much too long. Now Caroline and Elsie were in the yellow kitchen. The light beyond the window was an insult to what was happening indoors, a day Eleanor would have called an ode to joy. Instead she was oblivious to it, only able to focus on an argument with pain, and the recognition broke Caroline’s heart. Even visits from Eleanor’s friends had become difficult, the effort leaching her, leaving her worn and pale. Caroline had started putting visitors off when she could get away with it, trying not to give offense, sometimes accepting a homemade soup or pudding on the porch and saying that Eleanor was sleeping when she wasn’t. Otherwise they lingered, like a nice cake going stale from too much air, and her mother’s face looked like a snow sky when they left. Sometimes, though, when it was Eleanor’s best friends, like Noelle or Sharon, Karen or Carol, it was Caroline who couldn’t bear their presence, how they took what Eleanor had to give when it was Caroline who needed it most.

“Your mother should have the drip now,” Elsie said, as she organized a late lunch for the two of them. She was making tea, practiced and efficient in her motions. Her sable hair was cut in a child’s straight bob, hardly a bit of gray in it though she looked to be in her late fifties. She definitely wasn’t the sort to color it, Caroline was sure; she didn’t wear a speck of makeup and her clothes were utilitarian, without a discernible style.

Caroline slumped against the refrigerator, her face in her hands.

“If you can be ready, you’ll help her be ready.” Caroline felt Elsie touch her shoulder and she lowered her hands from her face, which felt sticky. There was pressure over her eyes.

“I’m not. How can I pretend to be?”

“Don’t pretend. Can you start to accept it?”

Caroline felt a flush of anger. “Easy to say.”

“I don’t mean it to sound that way. Is there something that would help?” Elsie leaned toward Caroline, her brown eyes intent and direct.

“When my father died, I felt cheated—you know? He died at his desk at work. He’d stayed late, the secretary had gone home. Mom finally went to the office to look for him when he didn’t answer the phone. A massive heart attack and we didn’t even know there was anything wrong with his heart. A little overweight, a little high blood pressure, no big deal. No goodbyes. No nothing. But in comparison to this? In retrospect, it seems a mercy.”

Elsie crossed to Caroline, took one of her hands and led her to the kitchen table. She pulled out a chair and sat Caroline down, as if she were a child. The table was set, a turkey sandwich and a cup of tea at Caroline’s place. The tea, in one of Eleanor’s mother’s bone china cups, had a translucent round of lemon studded with cloves split on the rim like a slice of sun. The sandwich, too, was on the good china and had a pink cloth napkin folded next to it. A bowl of mixed fresh fruit was a little to the left. Once Caroline was seated, Elsie sat down with the corner of the table between them, the breath of her own tea rising next to Caroline’s.

Tears came to Caroline’s eyes. Again. “This is so pretty. So nice of you. Where did you get…?”

“I brought extra. Take a bite.”

“Thanks,” Caroline whispered. She wanted a shower and a long, dreamless sleep in a cool room and to wake with her mother well and giving unsolicited advice, all of which she would cheerfully take for the rest of her life. She took a small bite and put the sandwich back down. “Last night was bad.” The jeans and gray sweatshirt she wore were the same ones she’d had on for the past two or three days. She’d lost track. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything else clean; a respite worker had done the laundry. It was just easier to pick up the same thing off the floor and put it on, no need to think. She really had to stop doing that, no matter how tired she was when she got up, as tired as when she’d laid down.

“Can you listen to me for a minute?”

With her free hand, Caroline pressed against the ridge between her eyes.

“I know it doesn’t feel this way, but this time can be a gift.”

“Oh, definitely.” Caroline was faintly ashamed of her sarcasm in the face of Elsie’s kindness, yet not enough to retract it. “Have you been through this?”

Elsie didn’t appear to notice, or at least not to take offense. Instead she stroked Caroline’s shoulder with her left hand, and with her right, she reached across the table and took Caroline’s other hand, which lay inert next to the sandwich missing its small half-moon bite.

“Yes. With my mother. And with many patients. I’m not trying to force something on you. Some people can do it, some can’t.”

“Do what?”

Elsie paused. “Well, not fight it so much. Not run from it. Be with her in it, if you know what I mean. This is a time you can share. You can help her complete her life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Again Elsie overlooked the sarcastic edge in her voice. “I mean that if you can give her the chance to say
‘I forgive you, forgive me, I love you, thank you and goodbye,’
and you can say those very same things to her—more or less—for most patients and most families, it gives a great deal of peace.”

Elsie held Caroline’s eyes as she spoke. For a few seconds, some curtain was raised and Caroline glimpsed what Elsie was talking about. But either she was too tired to hold the vision or the window fogged over and the clarity was gone. She stopped meeting Elsie’s gaze, dropping her head and pressing her fingers against the bony part of her brow again, where some punk rock band seemed to be warming up.

“Headache?” Elsie said.

“Always.”

“Okay. You eat. I’ll get you a couple of Tylenol. We’ll finish our lunch and—maybe you’d like to get in a shower before I leave?”

“Hmm. Starting to get a bit ripe, am I? No wonder my dating life is slow.”

“I didn’t mean that. No, not at all. You said earlier that you wanted to shower and I.…”

Kindness, not humor, was Elsie’s forte. “Elsie, I was just kidding. Yes, I’d really like to shower and wash my hair. And thank you for lunch. It’s delicious. Really.” Actually, it helped to have to yank herself back abruptly like that. She’d been skirting the abyss.What Else had been talking about was too big, as if while Caroline was lost, chartless in an ocean fog, she was expected to navigate the mystery of her mother’s life and death. Too big, too much. Now she was speaking to the nurse’s back, as Elsie was over at the kitchen sink where a large bottle of extra-strength Tylenol was on the windowsill. Elsie came back and put two capsules into Caroline’s hand.

Caroline took them, drinking from the cup. “Ooh. That tea is so good.”

“We have a whole pot of it,” Elsie said with a smile. “Can you taste the cinnamon? There’s a stick of it in the pot. Not too much, I hope.” She sat down again. “Goodness, your neighbors are having a time of it with that lawsuit, aren’t they?”

“Lawsuit?” Caroline asked. Good, sweet Elsie, talking about anything but death and dying now.

Elsie pointed vaguely upward, out the side of the kitchen to the east, toward the bluffs. “The people up there suing the oystermen.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, well, it’s been on the front page of
The Times
, and living right here, I thought you’d know. One of the people up on the bluffs is suing some of the oystermen because he says he owns the flats.”

“I haven’t looked at the paper. I stopped delivery last month—I was picking it up and dropping it into the trash, and it was just a waste.” As she spoke, Caroline’s mind skipped ahead: Rid. Was he involved? “I don’t see how anybody up there can sue, though. I mean the town gives those grants. It’s town property.” Wasn’t that what Rid had explained to her?

“I don’t know the details. Something about how the town doesn’t really own it. It’s quite a mess, anyway. It’ll put those oystermen out of business if they lose. And if it spreads to other upland landowners, it doesn’t just wipe out the fishing families, it wipes out a town.”

That night, Caroline watched the local news on television but there was no mention of it. She called and had delivery of
The Cape Cod Times
resumed, but there was nothing about a lawsuit. Not for nearly a week. She thought about whether to call Rid, whether to walk down and ask him. She didn’t though. Something else took center stage: she awakened nauseated, ate lightly and promptly threw up. That made her pay attention to the missed period she’d attributed to stress and to the tender breasts she’d attributed to the missed period.

* * * * 

The damn lawsuit was consuming him. He had nothing to compare it to except maybe a hurricane warning: something you knew was coming, saw the sky darkening, frantically tried to defend against but realized could take everything you’d worked for. It was all they talked about on the flats, even those who weren’t being sued. It was eclipsing this weekend’s Oysterfest, something they all had fun with the middle of every October. Barb would probably win the oyster shucking contest again—he could’ve beaten her last year if he’d concentrated more—but now he wasn’t even going to enter. Too far behind on orders, having wasted time standing in the shallows with Tomas, looking up at the Pissario house. There was no sign of activity up there, which was, in itself, infuriating. He had to hold himself back around Mario to avoid inciting the hothead to some retaliation that could boomerang back on them all.

“I’d like to know exactly how we can be such a terrible problem for Mr. High and Mighty,” Mario would rant bitterly, squinting up to where the sun glinted off the Pissario house like an ice sculpture. “Ain’t nobody there. Four friggin’ decks overlooking his friggin’ view that we working scumbags mess up but there ain’t nobody ever on one of ’em. Too busy out hiring lawyers, I guess. Now, if them plate glass windows of his was to get shot out mysteriously some night, I’m thinking he’d have a problem worth his time. I don’t see what choice we got. It’s not like we got
help
from our
friends
.” The others named in the suit had, one by one, opted out of a joint defense. They were trying to work out a settlement, they said. So far the upland owners above their grants were sleeping giants, and all they needed was to cross Pissario’s beach. Obviously, they thought Mario, Rid and Tomas had zero possibility of winning against Pissario and wanted to avoid going down with them.

Rid stopped picking oysters out of a cage then, even though the tide was moving in and he didn’t have enough for his restaurant order yet. He stood up between Mario and shore for the third or fourth time that afternoon. “Man, you gotta back off. We’ve gotta go with Tomas, with the lawyer stuff. That’s the way to fight this.”

Privately, though, he felt the same rage, the same urge to strike back. Visceral prison memories—the slide and clang of an auto lock steel door, the smothering closeness of the cement walls and ceiling—kept him in check.

When the tide came after dark or was small—meaning it didn’t drop below the mean low-tide mark because the moon was waning or new—Rid, Tomas and Mario met early to drink at The Reading Oyster Restaurant, across from the town pier and the shellfish warden’s office. “The Oyster” was where they always went, where everyone went, but now they sat apart, not at the bar with the others, but at one of the high tables along the wall. When the others came in, it was later, and earlier when they left. Everyone spoke to them. They were slapped on the back, cheered on, given sympathy, outrage, and thumbs up variously. But then they veered off, as if discreetly trying not to catch a communicable disease.