The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “The perfect clarity of a winter day,” Henry said in a distant voice. His father would have stood there and said that. And someday Fiona would say it, and hear the echo of her father’s words.

  The furnace huffed and wheezed. Charlotte drove down to Orleans to buy a pot roast so she could keep the oven on all afternoon, then tucked Fiona in beside her on the couch, reading Little House on the Prairie aloud. She’d felt stiff in the shoulders when she woke up, and by now every muscle ached. When she stretched her legs out she seemed to feel her knee bones rubbing against each other, and when she got up to take some Advil her back went into a spasm and she had to call Henry for help.

  “What happened?” He held her around the waist as she let herself down, carefully, to lie flat on the floor.

  “Oh, I was too eager to help with the oysters yesterday. I had to heave those bags like I’d been doing it all my life; I didn’t want to look like a weakling.” Henry laughed in sympathy.

  “Are you warm enough?”

  “No, it’s freezing down here.” Fiona jumped up and ran off wild-eyed, as if she’d been waiting years for this chance, returning with a blanket and her teddy bear, which she tucked in beside Charlotte, with a kiss for both. Bunbury circled her, sniffing, then jumped up and took her spot on the couch.

  “Do you want a pillow?” Henry asked.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “A sandwich?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “A hot water bottle? Tuck it under the small of your back; it would probably do the trick.”

  He stood over her worrying, his head crooked, his hair sticking out on both sides, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose.

  “Yes,” she said, “a hot water bottle would be nice.”

  He went off with the light step of a man who knows just what to do, and Fiona lifted a corner of the blanket and nestled at her mother’s side. Henry should have married an invalid. Emotions unnerved him, storms that blew out of the dark, wrought havoc on his orderly life, and disappeared. The physical you could see and understand. What a thrill he’d gotten from her placenta, the huge bloody jellyfish that slid out of Charlotte in Fiona’s wake. “Look at that!” he’d said, with a cook’s gusto. “What nourishment!”

  He was back in a minute with the hot water bottle, and when she felt better he helped her onto the couch again, brought her a glass of wine, started setting the table. Charlotte went back to reading aloud. As the light faded Darryl’s truck came along down the driveway, and stayed a long time at the water’s edge. It felt like a cosmic test: If she turned her head to look at him she’d be vaporized instantly.

  “ ‘ “ Would a panther carry off a little girl, Pa?” Laura asked. “Yes,” said Pa, “and kill her and eat her too.” ’ ” Fiona snuggled in tighter. Henry was whisking the salad dressing, after checking with Charlotte to be sure he had the right proportions. The truck turned and came back up the drive. Darryl would see the two heads bent in the lamp-light; he would see a family that must be protected from harm. His taillights disappeared around the corner of Narville’s fence.

  “There’s the question,” Henry said at dinner, “of what Joyce would have written next, if he’d lived. People have speculated, of course—there are all kinds of answers. How could a man follow Finnegan’s Wake?”

  “Poor James Joyce,” Charlotte said without thinking.

  “What?”

  “Dubliners . . .” she said. “He was writing about life, and people, and the feeling in a room, and . . . and then by Finnegan’s Wake he’d lost the humanity; he was only arcane.”

  “Preposterous,” said Henry, who was probably the last living being who could get away with using that word.

  “It’s like he had to keep proving how smart he was,” she persisted, though she wanted to give in, “and his heart—his talent—kind of atrophied. . . .”

  Henry laughed, incredulous. Did she really dare to question James Joyce? She who was an absolute nobody?

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It’s just the way I feel.”

  This was deft—Henry had ceded the province of feeling to her. He started talking about modernism and postmodernism and how the Holocaust had smashed everything up and a broken literature might be the only way to respond and . . . Charlotte remembered Darryl’s face, his eyes lowered, the way he had turned his head so his mouth just touched her fingers, as if that were as much as he dared.

  Through the night she could hear the sharp cracks and dull blows as the bay froze, each successive wave pushing up under the crust of ice, lifting it over the last bit frozen. By morning it was a solid, jagged expanse and all she could hear was the wind.

  18

  QUAINT

  “So, I’m up in New Hampshire and I see they’re giving frost,” Bud Rivette said, standing by the coffee counter at SixMart. “I gotta finish the job up there, and I’m thinking—‘I got Danny’s Ritalin; I can drive through the night and make the morning tide.’ I lined up Carlos and Paul and Flyer; they met me there at five. . . .” Bud was small and stocky, probably Henry’s age, his eyes hugely magnified by his thick glasses. Danny, his ten-year-old son, was one of a number of kids in town who owed their existence to the Mermaid. Danny’s mom, a tired, all-forgiving woman and the best cashier at Stop & Shop, was just grateful to have a child and asked nothing of Bud—in fact, she shared what she had, Danny’s Ritalin, with him. “And the whole thing was frozen all the way to Try Point. I’ve never seen it happen that fast.”

  “You won’t be needing Ritalin to keep you awake the rest of the winter,” Carrie said, grim. The other men at the coffee counter, Matty Soule and Jake Becker, laughed and agreed. Carrie counted out Bud’s change with hands rough and strong as a man’s. Oystering, mothering, forty hours at SixMart supplemented by as many as she could get at the fish market shucking oysters and clams, and in summer she did changeovers at the Lemon Pie Cottages, cleaning them all every Saturday between checkout in the morning and check-in in the afternoon. Now she was going up to see Tim in the House of Corrections every visiting day. Charlotte doubted she could survive a week of Carrie’s life. But she would need to, if . . .

  She reminded herself not to be a fool. Their kiss, all she had felt in it . . . so many people would brush that off, let it blow away with the fog. She had always been too susceptible to feelings, hers and everyone else’s. She’d see something in a man’s eyes and respond to it, only to have him deny it as loudly as if he’d been accused of a crime. Maybe she was prone to hallucination; maybe she recognized things before others were conscious of them. It hardly mattered—if Darryl didn’t feel the way she did, then she’d rather never see him again. It wasn’t hard to avoid someone in Wellfleet, and she had come to the SixMart now because she knew it was after his coffee break time.

  Bud sighed. “I’ll be in suspense till March,” he said. “I don’t get it. They were giving frost, not six inches of solid ice.” He sounded comfortable, though, buckled in for his ride through life, ready for this next bump. He worked when the tide was low, slept when it was high, drank through the winter months, got by. Matty and Jake had oyster grants, and sterile rooms to wash and sort their harvest, and refrigerator trucks to take the oysters to market . . . modern, likely profitable operations. And of course Matty had Soule Propane and Jake his lobster operation, and Jake was a painter too—small, close views of the tide bottom that seemed to get every inch exact: the sparkle of the water among the brown and gray stones, the dull red seaweed, the vein of rust running through the wet sand. Standing in front of one of those paintings, you’d feel that every square foot of the world had a sacred beauty.

  “How’s Tim?” Bud asked Carrie.

  “How d’ya think?” she said. “No one asks how I am, with three kids at home and two jobs and the claim and the truck a total loss and—”

  “Bite my head off, why don’t ya?”

  “He’ll be out in February; then you can ask him yourself.”

  “Hi, Carrie,” Charlot
te said, setting the milk on the counter. Carrie looked as if the quart of milk must have spoken.

  “A dollar ninety-nine,” she told it. She might have fallen on hard times, but she had not gotten so low she had to acknowledge a washashore like Charlotte Tradescome.

  Ada came in, chipper in her red wool coat, smiling, her cheeks glowing from the cold, talking to herself in her bright, curious voice. “. . . but I suppose that’s the way things always are. I was too young to know, then, and of course later I was too old to care. . . .”

  “Hello, Ada,” Charlotte and Carrie said at once.

  “Hello, ladies.” Ada sounded kind, concerned, as if she guessed both were suffering, because people generally were. “We’re having a real winter, aren’t we? Like we used to . . .”

  “Is this unusual now?” Charlotte asked.

  “I don’t remember when the bay froze so hard so early.”

  “The year the Mary Belle went down,” Carrie said to Ada, keeping her glance averted from Charlotte, as if to say it was none of her business. Did Carrie realize that Ada had joined the lawsuit, signed the petition to get the sea farmers out of Mackerel Bay? If so, she didn’t care. Ada had been born here. Charlotte was the interloper and she had better keep that in mind.

  “That’s right,” Ada said, nodding. “Doesn’t seem long ago.”

  “Icing,” Carrie said, nodding toward a yellowed clipping framed on the back wall.

  “What’s that?” Charlotte asked. Carrie frowned, as if this were an impertinent question.

  “My father used to say the ocean was the real cemetery here,” Ada said. “Only the women are buried in the churchyard; the men were all lost at sea . . . and the women lost on land . . .” she continued, to herself, counting out exact change from her coin purse. “Thank you, dear.” With the Boston Globe and the Wellfleet Oracle folded under her arm, she set back off toward home, picking her way across the icy parking area, looking up and down Route 6, then crossing it with her firm, measured step as if it were still the lazy tourist trail it had been in the fifties, not a highway traveled by all manner of trucks and cranes and whatever heavy equipment was necessary to construct the dream houses (second . . . no, third houses) of the very rich. Charlotte took a deep breath and dashed after her, like a good reporter, getting across just before a cement truck barreled over the top of the hill.

  “Miss Town?”

  Ada looked surprised, and not particularly pleased, but she was, of course, polite. Charlotte looked into her eyes like a burglar at a jewelry store window—what was in there, how best to snatch it? What had gone wrong with Henry that he’d been left in such a bleak state? Wasn’t there some way to save the oyster farms? Ada’s posture warned her against direct questions—she was like the ladies on Marlboro Street who’d had them in for a glass of Dubonnet after Henry’s father died. The first thing Charlotte did wrong that day was to mention his death; the ladies had ignored this as they would if she had belched. She tried compliments, saying what a lovely home they had, asking about the tapestries that covered the walls, but a stern look passed between them: Why was she prying? A mention of the weather elicited a quiet protest—damp was common in harbor towns. Giving up, she had said, “What crisp saltines,” and saw them relax. They talked on for half an hour without saying a thing, and at the end of it they seemed to feel young Henry had married well.

  “What is ‘icing’?” she asked Ada.

  “Oh, the spray off the waves freezes on the rigging in the winter. It happens on the windward side, so the boat lists—the Mary Belle rolled onto its side and sank. When I was young, it wasn’t so bad; the boats would just come straight in on a bad day. With the new fishing rules, they only have so many days, and they can’t afford to lose one. So they take more chances. . . .” She shook her head, walking along, disappearing into her own thoughts. “How long has it been since anyone had a new boat?” she asked herself. “These draggers, they’re thirty or forty years old. . . .”

  “So they’re in mortal danger when they fish at sea, so they turn to farming, but the city people move in and try to pull the flats out from under them—because they don’t like the way they look,” Charlotte said.

  “Change is the nature of a seagoing place.” Ada sighed. “Everyone leaves their mark here.”

  “The Narvilles lived in their house for about two minutes before they dreamed up this lawsuit.” Ada turned up her driveway, and Charlotte went with her—it was a sand path, hardened with oyster shell, that ran through a thicket of chokecherry and then turned to curve alongside the marsh. The tide was out; the winding channel was empty except for a trickle, coated with smooth ice at the sides.

  “Someone else would have done this if Jeb Narville hadn’t,” Ada said. “It was bound to happen.”

  “So you don’t mind that Carrie and the others are likely to lose their farms?”

  Ada stopped walking. “How long have you lived here now?” she asked.

  “We moved in last April, so, almost nine months,” Charlotte said, with the pride she’d heard in other people’s voices, people who could say “almost six years” or “almost a decade” or “almost a lifetime.”

  “Not much longer than Jeb Narville.”

  “No, but . . . I’m speaking for people who’ve lived here all their lives,” Charlotte protested.

  “My dear,” Ada said, “they don’t want you to speak for them. They don’t want you here at all.” They were standing on Ada’s front step, and Charlotte shuddered, letting herself feel the cold now that the house stood between them and the wind. It was a half cape, covered in cedar shingles like everything out here—cedar was the only thing that would stand the salt. The wooden storm door was freshly painted dark red, the windows looked newly washed, the garden was covered with a thick layer of salt hay for the winter. Inside it would be low and dark—those old places always were—but if you’d begun life in a dory on a rough sea, a neat, small life in a house like this might be just the thing.

  “Nice of you to walk me home, dear,” Ada said.

  “Not at all,” Charlotte said, not budging. “What do you mean, they don’t want me here?”

  “Oh,” Ada said, starting to open the door and then letting go of the latch, not wanting to invite Charlotte in. “It’s a dead culture and it’s left them all ashamed,” she said in a distant voice.

  “What?”

  “Oh! Nothing, dear, I get lost in my thoughts.”

  Charlotte recalled a time when she had brightly asked an old man with a thick accent what it had been like to flee Berlin during the city’s last free hours. She’d seen in his eyes, for a half second, what it had been like, and what it was like to have a silly, apparently pitiless girl ask him to recount it as a piece of cocktail conversation. “Miss Town, I don’t mean to be rude. I just . . . I feel bad. It seems like it’s my fault that all this is happening.”

  Ada shook her head. “No, no . . . something will always be going wrong for Carrie; that’s the way it is with the Steads . . . generation after generation—their lives move from one accident to the next. . . .” Her voice drifted; it seemed she was thinking aloud.

  “What do you mean, a dead culture?” Charlotte asked very quietly, so as not to wake Ada out of her thoughts.

  “Fishing, fishing . . . Zeke Stead, the grandfather, he was a good man. Rough—but you had to be rough. Out to Georges Bank every day, no matter what—pride was measured in pounds of cod back then—a full net. It still would be, still is . . . but the fish aren’t there, and the men don’t quite understand that. They come back with a quarter of what their fathers got; all they feel is small.”

  Charlotte thought of Henry, trying to live up to what he expected of himself, demanded of himself. His mind was supposed to become invincible, to make up for his body’s fragility. An impossible goal, but he despised himself for failing to reach it.

  “Amos Stead—Darryl’s father—came by to see me,” Ada said. “When he was shipping out for Vietnam . . . He was radiant;
he was going to be a hero. When he got back, I don’t know. He was drinking, he got into fights, he took chances. . . . I’ll never forget those men’s faces the day he fell into the net. Marlene just said, ‘I knew he’d die some fool way.’ ”

  This was pretty much what Henry had predicted in Dread and the Common Man.

  “But Darryl . . . Ada, Darryl still has a whole spirit; he’s working up from a pit, and he’ll lose everything if Jeb Narville wins.”

  “None of those Steads was worth a cent, except Zeke,” Ada said. “My father was over there taking care of them, more than he was at the church. . . . She died of drink; she left them alone.”

  “Over where? Who died of drink?”

  “Oh, Emmy . . .” Ada said, shaking her head, looking around as if she’d just woken from a trance. “Another Stead. Years and years ago now. She lived in this house, left it to my father—to repay him for his years of care. Now I must take leave of you, my dear.”

  Charlotte turned to go, turned back. “Darryl’s worth a cent,” she said.

  Ada’s glance was sharp. “He’s a handsome man,” she allowed.

  “He’s more than that, way more,” Charlotte said. “Have you ever seen him work?” She wanted to make a speech to Ada, to say that Darryl had looked at his life of wrong and failure straight on, with a courage such as few people could muster. The light, understanding, thoughtfulness that shone from his face—these qualities were hard-earned. Ada didn’t seem interested to hear.

  “It’s not just Steads and Cloutiers who’ll lose their livelihood. . . . It’s Buzz, and the Soules, and the Bethels. . . .”

  “The Bethels are down at Indian Neck. No one’s claiming that land,” Ada said. “Tim Cloutier doesn’t care about anyone but himself, believe me. He’s a renegade. We’ll be lucky to be rid of him.”

  “Someone will claim the Indian Neck flats. Some couple from New York will buy Westie Small’s house for a million dollars, and . . .”