The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Come up,” Orson said. “From the balcony you can see whales frolicking.” This seemed unlikely, as they were three blocks inland, but Charlotte went up the narrow staircase and found that by leaning out to the left she could see, over the rooftops, a wedge of sea. Suddenly a great cloud of mist puffed up in the middle of this view.

  “Oh!”

  “Did you see a spout? They’ve been having a marvelous time this morning. Here, what do you think?”

  “Perfect,” Charlotte said, as she could not say she thought he was a dead ringer for Stuart Little. The opera cloak was folded around a few sheets of tissue paper, its gold silk lining exposed.

  “A bit dramatic for our purposes. I’ll put it on later in the day.”

  Charlotte stopped to admire some black-and-white photographs that had looked botanical from a distance, mushrooms probably, but turned out to be penises of different sorts, in varying states of tumescence.

  Orson made a ruminative sound, as if he’d had a second thought, an abashed moment. “My favorites,” he said. “Though it’s wrong to choose favorites, isn’t it—when every variant has its allure. To the registry!”

  If Orson looked like a white mouse, Charlotte felt like one. She stood trembling at the entrance to this great hall whose floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with immense and nearly identical leather-bound volumes. Women ticked in and out on their heels, discovering facts, taking notes, calculating percentages. It seemed that in spite of the spiral notebook pressed to Charlotte’s heart, they must see right through her and guess she was on a lover’s errand, intent on peering into private matters out of motives most impure. Orson must have felt this way too, because his step was more than usually buoyant, and he looked around with bright, avid eyes.

  “I . . . I need to look up a deed?” Charlotte asked of the pigeonylooking woman at the desk.

  “Do you have the book and page number?” Her tone suggested that people who did not know their book and page number ranked with cockroaches and must be dutifully squished.

  Charlotte blushed and shook her head. Henry’s skepticism had been right; she was no more “good at research” than she was at flying. But no—she was timid, anxious to please, and having come from people who stayed carefully within the bounds of their postal route, she was easily convinced she’d done wrong. But it was that same distance from the world that made her so ravenous to know more. She’d been crazy to decipher the world, see how everything fit together. She’d wanted to lift up the roof of every one of those pretty places on Main Street, to see how their inhabitants lived, so she could do the same. And like everyone who was afraid to ask directions, she’d become exceedingly adept at reading maps.

  “Then you’ll have to look it up by address.” The woman sighed.

  “It doesn’t have an address,” Charlotte admitted. Her idea was about to be proven wrong; she would be revealed for the idiot that she was. . . . Henry had tried to save her but she had pushed ahead heedless. . . . “It . . . it’s underwater most of the time.”

  The clerk gazed across at her, deadpan: “Do you know where it is, then?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “Then you’ll have to start with the maps. Over there.”

  She had so expected disappointment that she almost didn’t know what to do with success. She went where the woman had pointed, knelt at the map drawers, and slid the book on Wellfleet out of its place. It was four feet wide and two feet high, like something in a dream, and opening it she felt small as a child. Here was Tradescome Point, seductive even in this dry portrait, its ragged southern edge torn by the glaciers, the soft northern sweep shaped by the sea. Here was the boat meadow—the grasslands that blazed green out of the creek in summer—and Point Road, with Oyster Creek cartway in parentheses, Fox Hollow, Mackerel Bay, Route 6 running just across one corner, and Try Point jutting at the bottom. The map was marked in a simple grid, each square having a number, which corresponded to one of the books on the shelves.

  “In the eighteenth century,” Orson explained, pulling down book number one ninety-four, going to page forty-three, “ownership was ‘purely by use’—if you farmed it, it belonged to you. Ah, but here we are.” He’d found a deed of sorts, dated 1824, covering Try Point, Mackerel Point, and Fox Hollow, all land, islands, meadow ground, and sedge flats.

  “Sedge grows below the tide line,” he told her, “so the tide flats, or a portion of the tide flats, were owned by . . . Nathaniel Bellwood, it says, at the time. So, did he sell the whole property to Luther Travis, or . . . ?”

  They found nothing until the record of Luther Travis’s sale to Isaiah Tradescome, in 1902. The registry had burned to the ground in 1900. “Their version of a computer crash,” Orson said. “They had to reconstruct everything, bit by bit.”

  “So, what do we do?” Charlotte asked.

  “Well, at the time, the probate court was in a different building. So the wills may tell the story.”

  He went up to the desk, threw his shoulders back, and became another man. “Can you direct me to the department of probate, my good woman? I need the records for Luther Travis, of Wellfleet, died . . . 1930 or so.” His voice was magisterial; it brooked no dissent—the woman who had sniffed at Charlotte became a marvel of helpful efficiency, leading them down the hall to the probate department herself.

  “Naturally, given my interest in opera, I felt I should have some vocal training,” Orson said sotto voce to Charlotte. “And you will imagine my pleasure at discovering a true baritone—nothing to fill a concert hall, of course, but a room such as this . . .” He smiled. The clerk returned with three thick volumes, for which he thanked her most eloquently.

  “Here,” he said, “Travis . . . 1893 . . .”

  Luther had inherited his father’s “homestead” and his woodlots. Wood being the heating fuel of the time, these were his most valuable assets, though there was also a cranberry bog, a couple of useless lots on the desolate back-shore bluffs facing east over the Atlantic (ten dollars apiece; anyone who tried to live there would go mad with the isolation and incessant wind), two horses and a buggy, a skiff, and half interest in an oyster cellar. Also, he owned a spring, whose water he had bottled for sale.

  That spring became Oyster Creek, a trickle that opened into the wide marsh full of serpentine channels, then onto the flats in the narrow bay. As the tide withdrew, it pulled the freshwater out with it through the oyster beds; as it rose, surging through the marsh, it bathed the oysters in minerals and salts. It was accidental, and perfect, and Luther had owned it all.

  Charlotte looked back at Isaiah’s deed—by the waters of Mackerel Bay, extending eastward to a stake and stone marking the common beach, and westward to Sedgewick’s Gutter.

  “Isn’t it clear, then?” Charlotte asked. “By the waters, beside the waters. Not under them.”

  “That’s not the way the courts interpreted the phrase in the Truro case.”

  “But . . .”

  “Let’s look a little further,” Orson said.

  “Why?”

  “Because Luther did have title to that land. He owned Bushel Point, as it was called then, and Try Point, and the spring, and the marsh, and the bay. He owned it, and he could sell it. So, did he sell it to Isaiah Tradescome? Or someone else?”

  “Wouldn’t someone know that? Wouldn’t it be part of the case?”

  “Skip wouldn’t want to know it, wouldn’t want anyone to know it. And the oystermen, as you’ve said, don’t have a lawyer. The judge saw whatever Skip showed him and that’s all.”

  Charlotte was sitting at a Formica counter beside the window, the book open in front of her and her finger on the phrase by the waters. Orson stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. It had begun to snow, a quiet, delicate spring snow that seemed to cover the ground with lace. It was the height of satisfaction to be safe here in this big, sturdy building, beside the radiator, looking back into the world of Luther Travis, piecing together from these old documents how his actions a
hundred years ago were dictating theirs now.

  “So, we begin,” Orson said. “Or should we lunch? The establishment across the street has an extraordinarily well-stocked bar.”

  They lunched. Orson had two Manhattans, because the restaurant was paneled with oak and had a brass bar rail, and he felt Manhattans fit best with such surroundings. Charlotte had a steak sandwich. Somehow a list of brandies and liqueurs materialized, but Charlotte was able to slip her credit card to the waiter while Orson was still studying.

  He looked up with a distant smile and said, “Courvoisier,” as if from a dream.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She was just finished signing. “But we don’t want to peak too soon. We have an exciting afternoon ahead, and we have to be fresh for Tennessee Williams.”

  “Peak too soon?” he asked, woeful, but she doubted he was any match for a woman who could disengage a lollipop from Fiona’s sticky little hands.

  “I think I’ll just visit the men’s room for a moment,” Orson said. “Why don’t you go get started? I’ll be over in just a bit.”

  So she returned alone to the probate court, to turn the pages and follow the fortunes of the Travis family of South Wellfleet, peeling up the layers of history one by one. Besides Tradescome Point, Luther had sold several pieces of land for resort hotels. The Sea Witch, the fantasia of turrets and gables set on the site of the old tryworks at the end of Try Point, had been the largest. Much of the Sea Witch had been built on piers and so was carried out to sea with the ice floes one year. Otherwise the only transactions recorded were sales of two cottages on the north side of Try Point to his sons, for one dollar apiece—wedding gifts, maybe—and the little wedge of land between the marsh and the King’s Highway, which had become Route 6 later on. That must be Ada Town’s house—it had been bought by someone named Carver. Luther died on V-E Day, leaving them the rest of the property, and as the war ended and prosperity returned, they became masters of subdivision. The back shore, with its wide, cold views, was not so frightening now—those ten-dollar scrub lots were split up and sold off, and Charlotte knew them as Sunrise Terrace and Beach Plum Lane, cul-de-sacs where knots of kids waited for the school bus in the mornings. Here was Fox Hollow, sold to the asparagus farmer; later, Patti Page would sing “Old Cape Cod” and the era of middle-class tourism began. Housewives who loved being housewives would have hung their laundry on the pulley lines between the cottages; they’d have worn those dresses printed with morning glories or fat cherries or lemon slices, dresses that just shouted the joy of being home with your family, growing your own little garden, stitching up the rickrack curtains. . . .

  Charlotte had the most vivid picture, suddenly, of a little white cottage with blue shutters. There was a white kitten climbing one of the shutters, not a real one, but a porcelain sculpture, and her mother lifted her so she could touch it. . . . That’s right, they had come to Cape Cod when she was very little . . . they had spent a week there in the summer. She might have been four? This one image was all that was left—and a sense of absolute happiness and the excitement of discovery, such as Fiona had now.

  Henry would have just finished college that year. . . . They might even have crossed paths, the child and the young man. And Darryl . . . his father would have been just out of the army. Here was the deed to their little house on Shankpainter Road, and here the probate, when his wife inherited it. The mortgages, liens, discharges, as she tried to make her own way and failed, selling the house in 1985 for what did not look like very much. By then Darryl was a lost boy. As Charlotte had been a lost girl, rolling up joints at night and stashing them in the stone wall, to smoke while she waited for the school bus in the morning. Those bleak, stony fields, the sense that she was growing into a world she didn’t understand, with no one to guide her. If only there had been one other person, a hand to touch, someone to say, Let’s try it together, step by step; we’ll keep each other brave.

  She looked up; the room was hot and stale; the snow melted flake by flake as it touched the ground. She’d gotten off her subject, of course. She was searching for Darryl; she might look for him everywhere, every day, for the rest of her life. Orson returned, at something of an angle, and began to follow the story backward—to Luther’s father, the ship’s captain who had bought Try Point in the mid-eighteen hundreds, and further, to Nathaniel Bellwood, who seemed to have used it to pay off a debt. Orson’s glasses lay beside his elbow on the counter and he looked up blearily, rubbing his eyes.

  “Never study the history of a watery place,” he said. “Men dig, they build, they engineer, but the sea overrules it all. Come here; let me show you. . . .”

  The map on the wall was from 1884, and it showed, at the entry to Wellfleet Harbor, an island Charlotte had never seen.

  “That’s Billingsgate,” Orson said. “You’ve heard of it? Billingsgate Light? It was due west of Tradescome Point; it acted as a wave break. Once it was gone, that water started to erode your beach. The landscape keeps changing; it always will.”

  “Is that why people are putting up seawalls?”

  “Are people putting up seawalls?”

  “That’s what Darryl said. The Narvilles have a big one—Fiona used to catch crabs off it before they put up the camera.”

  Orson put on his glasses. “You say the Narvilles have a seawall?”

  “Yes.”

  “A real seawall, with waves breaking?”

  “At high tide.”

  “Good to know,” Orson said, pressing his palm flat on the copy of Luther Travis’s will. “Luther inherited it from his father. He sold the land to Isaiah Tradescome, the piece for the Sea Witch, then here. . . .”

  He lifted the heavy book with Luther’s will so it sat open between them, and Charlotte read aloud.

  “ ‘The eastern half of the Try Point property and one back-shore woodlot to Simon. The western part of Try Point and another woodlot to William.’ And there’s a rough sketch here that shows the piece he left to each one. It follows the outlines of the shore on both points. It doesn’t show the tidal land at all.”

  “No,” Orson said, with sudden understanding. “Because Luther forgot about the tidelands. The bay would have been much deeper when Luther inherited it. Deep and still, protected by Billingsgate Island. As Billingsgate broke down, Mackerel Bay silted up. It became too shallow for a proper mooring, and besides, by then boating was a hobby, not a necessity anymore. The bay was of no use to anyone, except as a view. So Luther forgot it, and when he drew the map, he left it out.”

  “He forgot it? How . . . ?”

  “Look at this,” Orson said. “Look at all he had—the stocks and bonds, the oyster cellar, the horses, a letter from Napoleon Bonaparte—I’d like to get a look at that!—paintings acquired in Shanghai and Brindisi. . . . What did he care about the mudflats of Mackerel Bay? And so . . . here it’s explained: ‘All that remains of my holdings, as may be fit for the use of man, I leave to Reverend Oliver Stewart of the First Congregational Church, in gratitude for his immense and selfless services rendered to the town of Wellfleet, and to my family in particular.’ ”

  “So the tide flats belong to someone named Oliver Stewart?”

  “They did forty years ago. Pastor Stewart was Ada Town’s father . . . adoptive father, I mean.”

  Pastor Stewart’s will was in another book, from a later time, and Charlotte was surprised to find that typescript looked just as old-fashioned by now as the scrolled handwriting of the earlier generations. More moving, in fact, because it reminded her of Henry.

  Pastor Stewart had sold off most of his land before he died, and his will divided all of his considerable investments equally among his natural children.

  Orson kept reading aloud: “ ‘All that remains, including the parcel of land at the head of Mackerel Cove, known as the Red House and described in book six eleven, page three seventy-three of the Barnstable County registry of deeds, I leave to the foundling Ada Town.’”

  “Mackerel Bay belongs
to Ada Town?”

  “He never sold it to anyone else, nor does he mention it in his bequests, and he left everything that was left over to Ada. He probably wasn’t even aware he owned it.”

  “Orson! Then all we have to do is convince Ada to let them keep working the flats, and Darryl will be okay!”

  Orson looked at her with great tenderness. “Is that what we’ve been doing?” he asked. “I wasn’t sure.”

  Charlotte nodded involuntarily, looked quickly away.

  “My dear,” Orson said gently, formally touching her hand as he made his suggestion. “Would not one night of carnal ecstasy be a more appropriate remedy for this dilemma?”

  “I’m not sure one would do. . . .”

  He nodded, in sympathy, and gave his own version of a prayer. “May we live forever to watch life unfold. And meanwhile, a drink.”

  “A drink!” Charlotte echoed. “To Darryl Stead, and all men and women who work daily for small gains!”

  “And the beautiful shoulders they earn thereby!” Orson said, linking his arm in hers.

  “You’ve got nice shoulders yourself, Orson,” Charlotte said. “Especially after today.”

  29

  ALL THAT REMAINS

  “Oh, he didn’t leave me anything but the house and the furniture, that sort of thing,” Ada said. “I mean, he and his wife raised me along with their own children. I could hardly have asked for more.” They were in her parlor, in the little red house looking out over the boat meadow. Ada sat in a straight-backed chair beside a secretary desk whose pigeonholes were crammed with old papers, Charlotte on the edge of a very hard velvet settee. This house, like Henry’s, seemed arranged to thwart comfort, and Charlotte thought of the Narvilles’ state-of-the-art hot tub—times had changed; they would change again.