The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  At five a.m. Fiona awoke, like a little general, ready to march into the day. If only she dared leave the safe island of her bed—but no, so she called for her mother until Charlotte stumbled down the hall in the bleak light.

  “Yes, darlin’, here’s your mom.” Your deeply resentful mom. Never once had Fiona called for Henry, who wouldn’t anyway know a child’s cry from a gull’s. When Fiona was tiny Charlotte had assigned him the two a.m. feeding—he was usually still at his desk at that hour—but after a few nights in the crook of his bony arm, sucking on her bottle while he read The Economist, Fiona had given up and started sleeping through the night.

  The little arms cinched around Charlotte’s neck; the damp forehead rested on her shoulder. “Oh, Mama,” Fiona said, “there’s no place like you.”

  So then it was worth everything. It was a new moon; the trucks were parked on the flats with their headlights shining over the grants so the men could work. The best, lowest tides came at the new moon, just before dawn.

  “Maybe you’ll have an oyster farm when you grow up,” Charlotte said. “You seem to like the hours.” Fiona cuddled in deeper, rubbing her soft little earlobe between thumb and forefinger, “whispering my ear,” as she called it, while Charlotte brewed coffee, heated milk for cocoa. The house smelled of old summers, shells and seaweed and sun-bleached bones, a boy’s rank treasures. It was as if the ghost of Henry as a child still lived here, slamming the screen door, racing down the lawn to the bay. A boy all alone, without siblings or cousins or even aunts and uncles—just the parents, those models of rectitude, his grandfather the ancient mariner, and Great-aunt Vestina on the wall.

  Once Vestina’s frame broke, the paint began to flake off the canvas and the mean face turned pathetic. Charlotte put her in the attic with the other things they couldn’t bear to throw away. Up there, where the wiring ran between porcelain knobs, and a thick spiderweb was spun in the corner of the one small window, history felt less romantic and more cruel. There were two steamer trunks full of old papers—ships’ logs, mostly, cargo all neatly detailed: wheat, lard and whalebone, tallow, boots, and staves. Or maybe slaves. The paper was brittle and sooty—it had been through a fire. Fires on shipboard, like smallpox and gangrene and all manner of other terrors, had been common back then, and you could smell this somehow when one of those trunks was opened. Henry had wanted to sell them, with everything else, to an antique dealer up-cape; Charlotte wanted to go through them, try to find something out. Or so she said. In fact she was afraid of the spiders and the old wiring and the papers that told the story of the dangers people faced, the dark, cold lives they had lived then. The antique dealer, a short and wide woman who was named Grace, though Charlotte thought Avarice would have been just as pretty and more apt, insisted it was foolish to keep the trunks, that they would draw in buyers who would drive up all the prices, but Charlotte couldn’t let them go. Instead, anxious to please this woman she’d never met before and would never see again, she gave up the crystalline gouaches on the living room wall.

  “Out with it, all of it,” Henry had said, shuddering. He’d have given up the painting of the Kingfisher, but this Charlotte had the courage to hold on to. “Your great-grandfather built it. Your grandfather sailed it. Surely it has some sentimental value?” she asked. The most ordinary things—a scorched glass pie dish, the sight of a horse standing in a field—would trip her into grief suddenly. Her mother had been such a soft, defenseless creature, and Charlotte couldn’t help picturing her wandering alone out there in the empty space between the stars, with no one to protect her. When Charlotte buttered a piece of toast for Fiona in the morning, she felt as if it might keep her mother from feeling so lonely. She knew it was silly, but she did. “I’m not a sentimentalist,” Henry said, irritated, dying to get back downstairs to his reading. “Keep the painting if you like; it’s no business of mine.”

  She did, and bought a big pillowy sofa to replace the stiff velvet one. She set it to face the window. Snuggled into it in the morning, with Fiona on her lap, she felt safer than she ever had before.

  The sky grew pale, blurred with fog, but the terns sparkled in the midst of it, their wings catching flashes of sun. The tide was ebbing; the first trucks turned down toward the flats. They’d see to the oysters and be at work on land by nine o’clock—Darryl and some of the others were building the Narville house, which rose with mighty pretension on the other side of the fence. Charlotte tried to ignore it, which wasn’t easy, given its lighthouse-shaped tower, and the delivery-by-crane of a stainless-steel hot tub said to have been made to Andrea Narville’s measure, with the jets placed just so—at a cost of twenty thousand dollars. Every day the Narvilles dreamed up some new flourish—the latest a fishpond stocked with exotic Asian breeds: koi, comets, shubunkins, and a meditation platform shaped like a lily pad in the center: Andrea was very serious about her yoga.

  Darryl and Charlotte had laughed over this in the hardware store the day before. He was ordering more shingles; she was renting a tank of wallpaper remover. The living room wallpaper, a print of brown and purple feathers, was waterstained in the corners from some leak long ago, peeling off as the wall crumbled away behind it.

  “It’s fine,” Henry said. “I’ve barely noticed it. What can’t be cured must be endured, as Mother used to say.”

  “But it can be cured.”

  “If you say so,” he said, retreating to his study. Charlotte had marched off to rent the equipment, just to show him a thing or two. She felt ridiculous, lugging the heavy tank of paper remover up the front steps. What did she know about real estate development, or home renovation, or anything? Henry at least had the sense to stay safe behind his book.

  But it was easy! You sprayed, you waited; then you pulled the sheet of wallpaper away, using the scraper to unstick the stubborn bits. It didn’t smell bad, it didn’t leak, it didn’t burn. It was easy and Charlotte was competent. She imagined herself on one of those home-improvement shows, demonstrating the right technique, spraying until each sheet of wallpaper was thoroughly wet, waiting, using the scraper to unstick the stubborn bits as she pulled it away. By dinner she’d nearly finished. She stood in the doorway admiring her work, dirty and tired and as satisfied as if she’d just painted a master-piece. The room seemed bigger, and the bay seemed closer somehow. She had poured herself a glass of wine and toasted her reflection in the china cupboard.

  Now, in the morning sunlight, she saw something was peculiar. The paper had come off but the surface beneath was porous and chalky—it looked as if it would absorb paint like a sponge. She scratched her fingernail across it, making a deep mark.

  “What . . . ?” She tugged at the edge of one of the scraps of wallpaper that was left. . . . It had bonded completely with the paper covering of the drywall beneath—she hadn’t been stripping wallpaper; she’d been pulling the walls apart.

  “Henry!” But he was still asleep.

  “Oh, Fiona,” she said. “What have I done?”

  “It’s okay, Mama,” Fiona said, kissing her forehead just as Charlotte would have done if she herself had been upset.

  Darryl’s truck turned down the driveway toward the flats. She rushed out to the porch, pulling her bathrobe around her, waving an SOS.

  “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know. I was stripping the wallpaper, and it’s like I’ve turned the house to mush.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know; it seems like the wallboard is all crumbling. I got it too wet, or . . . I don’t know.” She could hardly bear to look at it; it was like the time she’d cut one of Fiona’s little toenails too short and it started to bleed.

  “The tide,” he said, anxious, looking out at the water and back to her face. “Well, I’ll come take a quick look.”

  He took off his rubber boots on the porch and came in in his socks, to pick at the edge of the last bit of paper. “No sizing,” he said. “They cut corners on the job; they pasted the wallpaper straight t
o the drywall. Or . . . this stuff is old . . . maybe drywall was such a new thing they didn’t know they had to size it. God, what a mess.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Looks like you made a big effort here,” he said, consoling.

  “Yeah, it’s hard work, ruining a place like this.”

  “I think you can coat it with mud . . . you know, like plaster. I’m not sure, but you could try.”

  Charlotte sat back on the arm of the couch. “I was so proud of it,” she said, as lightly as she could. Truly, the mistake seemed a sign of how wrong she’d been to think she could manage this house, this new life.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing that happens with an old house. Believe me, I’ve done enough renovations to know it’s always one step forward and two back.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Let’s see . . . get some lightweight joint compound, a plasterer’s trowel. . . . Do you have a belt sander?”

  This made Charlotte laugh.

  “I can help you,” he said, and meant it, but his shoulders sank slightly, from the new little weight.

  “No, you’ve got the oysters, and the monstrosity. . . .” She nodded toward the Narville house, and he laughed.

  “That’s a good name for it, and they’re lookin’ for a name. They’ve got someone making a family crest to put up on the turret, and it has a ribbon running along the top that’s supposed to have the name of the place painted on it. . . . He wants to call it Bootstraps, but she wants Navasana; I guess it means boat in Sanskrit. So I’ve got to wait until they decide before I can do siding on the turret.”

  “See, you’ve got enough to worry about.”

  The stairs creaked and Henry appeared, looking like an owl that had fallen out of its nest.

  “What’s this?”

  “I kind of . . . poached the walls . . .” Charlotte said.

  Henry giggled and Charlotte gave him a crooked smile. He just assumed everything would go wrong; it would never occur to him to blame her.

  “How about a trade?” Darryl asked. “It’s tuna season; I’m short on help. You help me on the flats and I’ll get you started on the drywall.”

  “Really? But I don’t know what to do. . . .”

  “I’ll tell you. Here, put on some clothes and hop in the truck. I’ve got about thirty bags in the back and you can help me set ’em out while the tide’s low. . . .”

  “Can I bring Fiona?” It was wrong to ask, but she was greedy for experiences for Fiona; she had to snatch every one that passed.

  “Okay, but we gotta get down there.”

  They were dressed in two minutes and Darryl was throwing the old soda bottles and oily rags out the back window into the truck bed to make room for them. Fiona snuggled between them, her little hand tight in Charlotte’s, her eyes wide, ready for adventure as they bumped down the driveway and turned onto the beach across the wet sand. The wide view made the distances seem shorter than they were; Charlotte hadn’t guessed they would need to drive so far. The individual grants, each one a small farm, were laid out on a rough grid, maybe a thousand square feet apiece, marked by buoys at the corners, and Darryl’s claim was at the farthest reach, what seemed like the middle of the bay.

  “You don’t get a lot of time when you’re out this deep,” he said. “I’ve gotta get in and out faster than some of the others. But the animals are underwater longer here, more time to grow.” He got out and went to retrieve a bag of oysters that had broken loose from the rack, and Fiona jumped out behind him, running across the flats, frightening the gulls into flight as she splashed through the little streams of tide.

  “Blustery,” Charlotte said to herself, happy.

  “What?” Darryl asked.

  “Oh, nothing . . . We sort of use that word to mean . . . fresh and exciting, or something.”

  “It means windy, right?”

  “I think so. . . .” An awkwardness came over them. Charlotte’s hands hung useless there at the end of her arms. What did one do out here? How?

  He walked down between the racks, shaking the bags, considering. Most of the oysters were in bags of plastic-coated mesh, pinned to the rebar racks that stood maybe a foot off the ground. Others hung in wire baskets from long rails of PVC pipe anchored in the wet sand.

  “The baskets swing back and forth with the waves,” he told her. “The oysters grow faster when you’ve got more water passing through them, and the pipe breaks the surf if it gets rough. I don’t know why Tim and the others don’t try this. I’m hoping to do ’em all in the baskets by next year.” He picked a silver-dollar-size oyster, the green-brown color of the sea bottom, out of one basket and set it in Fiona’s palm. “Feel how heavy that is?” Fiona nodded gravely, thrilled to be included, determined to act grown-up.

  “These are real Westsiders, nice deep cup; these are going to sell. Now, see over here?”

  He pointed and Charlotte saw a square of mud covered with netting. “Here, step on it. . . .”

  She did—it felt like cobblestones, and Fiona, after a first gentle step, began jumping up and down. “Is it paved?”

  “No, those are clams. They dig themselves down into the sand and they just grow. You don’t even have to take them out in the winter.”

  “You have to take the oysters out in the winter?”

  He laughed. “You’ll see, but yes, we take them all out and put them, you know, in a basement or a root cellar. Otherwise they freeze into the ice and when it breaks up in March they go right out to sea with it. The clams can stay, though—they’re deep in the mud; they’re not going anywhere. . . .”

  “I had no idea. . . .”

  He smiled. “I grew up here; my father was a fisherman, and I barely knew anything about aquaculture until I came back.”

  “You went somewhere?” This question burst out embarrassingly. She was ravenous to know the answer, for some reason. “I mean, I guess . . . it’s so beautiful here, it must have been hard to leave.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But there’re more chances out there, more possibilities. At some point you gotta go over the bridge.” He sounded more resigned than pleased, picking up a shell and tossing it into a pile of refuse at the side of the claim. “You’ve gotta keep it neat out here, or it gets away from you,” he said. “I mean, look at this . . . what a wreck.” Now that Charlotte looked at it, the claim beside his did seem haphazard and unkempt, bags heaped on algae-covered bags, oysters growing like limpets over every surface. “It’s Bud’s; he’s trying to do too much. . . . Everyone’s flat out, working carpentry and oystering and tuna season and whatever else.”

  He glanced up at the Narville house, which looked, if possible, more imposing from this side.

  “Anyway, we gotta get to work here. . . .” He got a pair of rubber-coated gloves out of the truck. “Wear these; the oysters have sharp edges.” Opening the tailgate, he lifted a bag of oysters into Charlotte’s arms. It weighed more than Fiona. “What you need to do is carry these over to that rack; do you see?” She nodded. “Set them side by side, all the way along; then we’ll pin them. Then we’ll take in the bags on the far rack and I’ll cull them tonight.”

  “What’s cull?”

  “You know, go through ’em. Chisel ’em apart so they have room to grow. Pry the seed oysters off the big ones, chip away at the edges so they fatten up all around, wash ’em, sort out the ones that are ready to sell, put the others back to grow—you know.

  “Can you carry the pins for us?” Darryl asked Fiona, who was standing there like a little soldier. “That’s an important job.” She nodded solemnly, and took the rusted box of pins as if it contained a medal of honor.

  Charlotte’s arms would ache the next day, but like Fiona, she was grateful to be trusted with the work. And determined not to seem like a weakling, a city girl.

  “What does it mean, tuna season?” she asked.

  “You’ve heard of tuna. Like . . . the fish? Did you think they picked it off trees in littl
e cans?”

  Even Fiona laughed.

  “No, but I didn’t know it interfered with oyster farming . . . though it’s also true I didn’t know oysters came from farms. . . .”

  He looked happy, setting off on his explanation.

  “Do you know what you make for a tuna? Up to ten thousand dollars a fish. Three months’ pay in an afternoon. And the season is ten days long, so everybody takes off after them. Tim got three last year; that’s how he bought the truck.” The truck, the instrument and emblem of his menace, gleaming black with high wheels and tinted windows and the I’M A LOCAL bumper sticker that meant, I’m above the law.

  “It’s three months’ pay in an afternoon,” Darryl repeated, almost to himself.

  “But you don’t go?”

  His eyes flicked away and she knew she’d tripped a wire somewhere. “I don’t have a boat,” he said. “It’s . . . Fishing’s a good job for a gambler. You follow your instincts, and maybe you strike it rich, maybe you come up empty, maybe . . .”

  He looked out to the mouth of the bay: a perfect watercolor with two yellow kayaks crossing. “My father was pulling in a purse seine, out on Georges Bank. He lost his footing and slipped into the net. They cut the line but it was too late. There was nothing anyone could have done.”

  He spoke the last sentence by rote; he’d heard it over and over, of course. What else could anyone have said to the men who’d had to come back with the story?

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen. It was summer, not a cloud . . . like today. . . .”

  The tide was creeping up, licking around the edge of a shoal until it disappeared. The water had a soft sheen now that the fog had burned off, and they watched the reflection as a gull flew in great slow flaps just above the surface.