Spartina (49 page)

Now none of that was wishes anymore. In the little hollow of that shock he wondered what he would want next. He didn’t know, but for a long second he got a sense of what it might be. Whatever it was was invisible but real—maybe a wish to be part of something bigger, as though the shell of his boat, of his family, or even of Miss Perry’s arrangements was getting tight enough for him to molt.

For a moment he felt whatever it was was as huge as the horizon, always there but you never get there. Then he thought it was a little thing, the spark in a herring’s tiny brain that made it splatter upstream with a shoal of other herrings, a little dot that drove its body in a long line.

The size of it flicked from big to little and then vanished. Maybe he had it all wrong, it wasn’t a straight-line wish he needed, no new course ruled in on a chart.

What he thought next was how quick it would all go. No matter what he set out after, his life wasn’t more than a puff, a cat’s paw just shivering the water. You only saw it whole if you were a ways off; you only felt it if you were inside it.

That was one way to look at it all—from outside it was quick. But, sitting here, breathing slow, and, for all the rush of these pictures, barely thinking, he felt completely still in time.

Time slowed up. Then, without moving, time slipped both ways at once. Part of it came from Elsie sleeping: there she was a sixteen-year-old girl, her quick-bird hands curled up, a little girl still younger, his father was still alive, he himself was young, he could feel how little he knew, his mother was alive, she was sleeping, everyone was there.

The future was nearby—for a moment he thought he was there too, or maybe he’d been there and back. He felt that future the way he felt the past still. All at once.

He snorted at himself. This was what old folks thought when their eyesight went and they sat at home remembering, thinking they remembered.

Then, from years ago, he remembered standing watch on a Coast Guard vessel. Near the end of light on a short, cold day in the North Atlantic. Checking out icebergs north of the shipping lanes. Dick saw one, sang out, and looked down to find the officer of the deck. Okay, one mistake—keep your eye on the ball. When the officer looked it was gone. Dick looked and it was gone. The officer asked the radar man, who said there was nothing on the screen. An hour or so later, they picked up a blip on the radar, turned out to be one huge iceberg. The officer and Dick were baffled. The skipper said it could happen like that—you sometimes could see things beyond the horizon. The Eskimos knew about it. Arctic and Antarctic explorers. Called “superior mirage” or “looming.” The old man couldn’t explain it, just that it had to do with layers of air of different temperatures. He said to Dick, “Tell me, Pierce, did you notice if your iceberg looked like it was upside down?”

“No, sir.” When he tried to remember, he couldn’t picture it.

Now, here in the cottage in Woods Hole, he saw it. Piled up like a thunderhead, an anvil of opal. It had been upside down.

Dick’s watch officer said, “Something you didn’t know about, huh, Pierce?”

“You and me both, sir.”

The old man said, “That’ll do, Pierce.”

He liked the old man. The old man had tried to get him to stop being a wise-ass. He’d been a wise-ass. Now at last he let go of being a wise-ass. Of layers and layers. Wise-ass was just one. He let go of being himself.

He was still again, without thought, on watch, just seeing the way things would work out: him staying at home, putting out to sea, the familiar waters from Galilee to Georges Bank, from Georges Bank to Galilee. The house was there on Pierce Creek, there was the salt creek, the salt marsh, the salt pond. He wasn’t going anywhere. So how would things happen? He’d stay in his life no matter how often or how far he put out to sea. The future was that a lot of things would move on away from him—was that it? Charlie and Tom would move on away; it didn’t mean they’d leave, it was that what they wanted and what they’d get done would move on away, link up with things he’d have less and less to do with.

He guessed he’d always known neither Charlie nor Tom would work on his boat. It didn’t bother him, it had been a good part of his wish while he was building
Spartina.
It’d helped. You don’t get everything. He’d tell them it was all right, so long as they understood he’d have liked to have them along.

He wondered if he’d get a second boat. There seemed to be another boat.… He’d always wondered how Captain Texeira could own two boats, could stand the strain of worrying about the boat under his feet and the second one over the horizon. Maybe Captain Texeira wasn’t a worrier. Or had enough trust in his nephew to set him free as skipper of the
Lydia P.

Dick looked at Elsie under the lamp. It hadn’t dawned on him till now that he’d have to trust her. No matter whether they managed to stay in touch, she’d be pretty much on her own with the child. Not easy for her, she was sometimes oddly young for thirty-three; no, thirty-four now. He got a sense of her as older, everything older and all right. But it wasn’t going to be easy for him either. He’d got that right in the first place, when he’d stooped in the bushes and heard, felt alarm and anger and then a terrible forlornness. Feeling forlorn would keep on, but it wasn’t so terrible, eased somehow.

He’d guessed back then in the bushes the kid would be a girl,
and he seemed to know now that was right. His second boat, his daughter, were there in the future, not visible to him but bumped into by some blind sense, like coming up Pierce Creek on May’s baking day—if the air was still, or he was to windward, he didn’t have to get there and taste it to know.

His sense of the future, of other time, left him on a little shift of wind.

What was with him now was just himself, scoured. And time once again ticking.

Elsie shifted and worked her bare feet under the ham of his leg. He got up and fixed the fire, looked for something to put over her.

There wasn’t much to the house, he didn’t need to turn on a light to find the bedroom. One bed, a folded afghan at the foot. His fingers felt the holes, the lay of the yarn, the tighter twist along the scalloped edges. He came back into the light—only the color of it was a surprise.

Elsie opened her eyes when he covered her. She said, “Oh, good … What time do you have to be at your boat?”

It seemed a very hard question. Before he got around to it, Elsie nodded off.

After a bit he thought, I don’t
have
to get there any special time. I’m the captain.

He felt the return of figuring logically as if he was putting on clothes after being naked.

He didn’t want Tran and Tony to start worrying. But he could use a little sleep. He went back to the bedroom and got hold of another blanket. There was enough room for him to stretch out on the sofa, his head at the other end from Elsie’s. He took his boots off, thought he’d better wash his feet.

While he was sitting on the edge of the tub, Elsie came into the bathroom, hiked up her jumper, and sat down on the toilet. The noise woke her up completely. “God, I sound like a cow pissing.”

When she was done, she pulled herself up on his shoulder. “One thing I won’t miss is peeing five times a night.”

She stayed while he dried his feet. They arranged themselves on the sofa, their feet and shins overlapping.

“There are things I miss,” Elsie said. “Being in my own house. The salt marsh, the sea. And I miss Miss Perry. I even miss work.”

“They’re all right there,” Dick said.

Elsie turned out the light.

Dick didn’t go to sleep. Sometime in the last months, sometime in there between the time his boat had been in doubt and now, he’d changed, been breached as wide as the cut from the sea to the salt pond, and been washed of the worst of his bitterness. Curled up now in his own skin again, he had no way of seeing whether it was the storm or one of his own crazinesses that had breached him, or whether it was a goodness of his or of someone else that had kept him rooted soundly while his bitterness went out on the ebb.

It was odd—no question but that the worst bitterness was gone, though he couldn’t say when or how. He fiddled with answers: maybe it was just plain getting his head above water, just being able to relax about putting bread on the table. It seemed more than that, though—he could have just had a job, and May and him could’ve put bread on the table.

Maybe it was May having a right to bitterness and choosing another kind of feeling. Not that she didn’t get angry, but her anger was solvable, approachable; he could find his way back to her. She had put up with a lot, with no more vengeance than speaking her mind, telling him things he could do to make it right. She’d let him back in bed without too much fuss. It had been a good winter since then, he’d been fond of May lately in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time. Another thing he hadn’t put into a thought till now: when it came to regular homecoming, regular
get-your-ticket-at-the-station, all-aboard, down-the-line, Kingston-next, next-stop, Kingston, on-time, and home-for-a-hot-supper, May had Elsie beat hollow. Even with her hair cut short and dyed. Now her hair was short, taking out her hairpins was what he missed—picking them one by one, letting his hand full of pins brush by her mouth so he could feel her breath getting short and quick, taking out the last couple of pins real slow, letting the ends scratch along her scalp a little the way she liked, fluffing out her hair, then combing it out straight with his spread fingers, starting at her forehead and going back to her neck, his little fingers getting in behind the tops of her ears, she liked that part a lot too, so well that it was often about then that she’d get her embarrassed half-smile on her face and switch the light off.

It was a funny damn thing to think of. He saw the funny side of how he’d just been carried away, grabbing a hold of Elsie when she was so pregnant she was tipping over.

He was like a green kid when he was around Elsie. This time it was her good sense that had kept things in order. And that was a funny thing too, Elsie having good sense, at least when it came to sex. She’d changed some too. Still quick and tart, but sweeter. Easier and sweeter and more connected …

And so he came onto his own change again, not just that his worst bitterness had drained, but his feeling of his distinctness. He’d spent a lot of time trying to make himself distinct by doing distinct things. His life on land was boats he’d built, bigger and bigger, until he built a boat that was big enough. That’s how he would have put it. Or he might have put it that his life was distinct things: father’s death, marriage, house, Charlie, Tom.

Even the skill that got him onto boats when he was young was his seeing what was distinct before most people could—he could make out the edge of a swordfish fin while the fish was still submerged way off, indistinct in the roll and glimmer of the sea.
He saw himself black against the sun, going out to the bow pulpit. Ease on up, on up over that fishy shape. He could see his shadow out in front of the shadow of the bow, a stiff cutout dancing on the bronze water. He saw himself held cocked just before his arm moved down, became one shadow with his body. The fish was away, stuck deep and fast, took the line out, took the silver keg—a bright eye that saw that fish clear down a taut line into its toggled wound.

Dick’s arm twitched. Elsie stirred, rolled her belly sideways against his clean feet. Dick lay still.

And there was fixing a position on the surface of the sea. There was sounding out the bottom of the sea—the shelf, the canyons, right down to the ledges and cracks where hard little lobster scuttled around. The pots settled and gave off their rot day and night. Lobster crawled their way in, dreaming that fishy perfume, not dreaming how hard and fast they’d be. The water came in and out, but the distinct lobster was stuck in the distinct pot.

This time it was a blotched red buoy that kept an eye on these comings and goings, down the warp into the dark. More lines—a wand atop the buoy, a radar reflector atop the wand, a six-pointed, twelve-faced crystal that made a nice blip on the screen; no matter what course you came in on, it blinked right back at you, brought you straight in. He’d been measuring everything in hard lines. He’d measured himself in hard lines. Where would he be, what would he be, without hard lines?

He tried to sit up, almost called out to Elsie.

What would he be without the hard things he was right about? If his bitterness had drained, what would he be, how disabled? He didn’t want to be like Eddie. It was hard to say about a friend as good as Eddie, but he didn’t want to be that soft-shelled. In a way Elsie was right to say class rage—he’d been made by enemies. It was natural. How else did nature work? He’d used some of his tricks to show up the piss-to-windward sailors, wasn’t much maybe,
but it marked his territory. And
Spartina.
What had he ever got by letting up?

An answer came from a funny direction. He thought of Mary Scanlon talking about her father. Fresh from his funeral, she told his jokes, even told his dumb jokes. He was a man Dick might have put down as just another gabby mick. And here he himself was remembering her remembering her father’s remembering. Little Tommy Scanlon whizzing down the hill at the noonday whistle, poking his cold face around the barrel on his sled, carrying the lunch pails to the mill, where his father was foreman of the dye works, where little Tommy Scanlon saw him jump over the dye vat …

Mary Scanlon sifted her old man like flour through her fingers.

Dick thought he’d be lucky to get as fine a sifting from his own kids. Include the one still in Elsie, now pressed against his feet. No building a boat, no hard craft of his would keep him from their judgments.

But that wasn’t the only reason he thought of Mary and her father, to worry about how he’d be remembered. Not just for that. It seemed to be to get him to relax about something he’d always known—that they all flowed into each other. All of them set about the salt marsh in the little towns and the houses on the hills—they all got mixed in, they stayed themselves. Permeable, yielding to each other, how could they stay themselves? The notion was as dizzying as the notion that time moved through them, that they moved through time. They changed and changed and stayed the same.