The Salt House

by Cynthia Huntington

  “Listen to this,” he calls up to me. “A man in Barnstable was arrested for hitting his girlfriend over the head with a twelve-inch statue of a cat. They’re charging him with ‘assault and battery with a deadly weapon.’ But this woman in Hyannis hit her husband with a frying pan and they only called it ‘a dangerous weapon.’ Does that sound right to you?”

  I let my breath escape with a subtle, hissing sound. “Yes,” I say, “Yes. A frying pan sounds just right,” and a new silence begins to vibrate from below.

  These days Bert is off across the dunes before the mosquitoes and deerflies wake up. He carries strange equipment: a roll of reed, and sticks picked up along the beach, a knife, a camera, string, and a sketchpad. In his baseball cap, long pants and soft-soled shoes, reeking of musk and Deet, he’s down in the bog this spring on his hands and knees, building a single, six-and-a-half-foot structure made of reed and driftwood branches that will preside among the cranberries and pines until fall.

  When he drags himself back up the hill at midday, tired and very hungry, dripping sweat and bog water, he is preoccupied, full of himself, and wants to be waited on, to plunk himself down on the bunk and wearily accept food, sympathy, and back rubs. He enters grumbling, making guttural noises, and rearranging large pieces of furniture. Woe to the wife who doesn’t look up from her notebook.

  “I just need to finish this passage,” I say, wadding up another wasted sheet of paper and aiming it toward the box on the floor.

  “Why can’t you go on and come back to it later?” he wants to know.

  “Because I can’t.” The unsolved puzzle of a phrase leaves me paralyzed with frustration. I turn my back and let him know he has Interrupted Me.

  Meanwhile, over the course of the morning, I have claimed all the space inside the shack, spreading papers across the table, half-read articles marked and propped on the bunk. Where is a guy supposed to stretch out anyway? He groans suggestively, sweeping the bottom bunk clear and pouring himself across it. It’s Adam’s curse, I tell him without sympathy: you live by the sweat of your face.

  What’s for lunch?

  Thorns and thistles, bitter herbs.

  So the quarrel begins, scripted in the ancient marriage code of never saying exactly what you mean. A wrong word, a quick heat followed by a coldness. This quarrel began because Bert moved some papers from the table and disturbed a very provisional order that was the holograph of a half-realized thought. He piled the papers up, as he thought, carefully, but in a manner which I interpreted as imperialistic. Talk quickly moves to weightier matters, concerning whether one of us has any consideration whatsoever for the other. I feel aggrieved and misunderstood. He works all morning without interruption, but expects me to drop everything when he walks in the door. He wants attention and care. He wants Donna Reed and he got Bertha Rochester.

  For an alternate diversion I might point out my efforts during his absence: I hauled the water, swept the floor, made up the beds … the list is pathetically short for eliciting sympathy, whoever did the work. It’s hopeless, I think, as our argument unfolds. On a beautiful day, on a far and sandy shore, in the sweet wilderness together under a vast and arcing sky our voices rise and batter space. He asks when I am going to calm down and I tell him when hell freezes over.

  There follows a silence during which I pretend to be working. Then Bert gets up, carefully, polite with antagonism. He says, “I’m just going to make some sausage and eggs, if that’s all right with you.”

  He’s looking straight at me. I can see his frustration and his anger, and I also see his love for me, which at the moment I probably do not deserve, and which he isn’t dying to show me, but there it is. The way desire takes hold of us and lifts us and breaks us open so life can have its way. He picks up the knife and starts hacking at a roll of hard sausage.

  “Be careful with that,” I tell him.

  “No,” he says, smiling into my eyes, and my heart squeezes shut and skips a beat.

  Our seclusion and the physical intimacies of the shack make us jittery as we settle in, too aware of one another, exaggerating the effect of every word or gesture. Perceptions sharpen: I feel seen at every turn, caught up in invisible strands of awareness.

  The law of gravity states that bodies of similar mass will attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the distance between them. The closer the bodies, the greater the force. We warp space, deforming it; we fall toward one another like sleepers in a water bed. Impelled toward one another constantly, we live in imminent danger of collapse unless we pull apart by will, walk out in separate directions, bury our heads in books, or turn aside, asserting the independence of our separate selves. We create a balance between us, not by standing carefully in one spot, but by jostling, going too far and then retreating, until we know each other’s ground entire.

  For weeks I do not see my face. Euphoria has no mirrors except for the small steel plate Bert uses for shaving. Slowly the masks drop and our faces relax. Living side by side, we become again our unguarded selves, discovering the natural distance between one mind and another. We draw inward, not keeping all our emotions on the surface. Then, gradually the force of the speechless world around us begins to declare itself; its silence absorbs our excess and emotional static. In this calm the world speaks softly and draws us back; its quiet seeps through our skin and penetrates and we leave ourselves a little and expand to meet it.

  The goldfinch is back on the weathervane, singing his heart out. He looks so bright and hopeful; what on earth is he thinking? “It’s not too late,” I want to tell him. “Look around you, see what’s happening. Why do you want to get into it? Why not just skip it this year and have a peaceful life? It’s summer, man, the seeds are ripening, life is sweet, why complicate everything?” But he wants it, there’s no reasoning with him, so much bigger than he is that he doesn’t know what to do with it. And pretty soon she’ll come along and think it’s all a great idea too.

  Look at him there, the little hero, his head thrown back and his chest puffed with air. All imagination and vanity—you could say he’s wasting his time—they’ll be at each other’s throats by August—but how can you, when he looks so pleased with himself, so bent on pulling all of life into him, on swallowing it whole, a world that’s too big for him? We’re too small; life pulls us and is breathed into us. It comes in a rush, this expanse of world claiming us. It breaks us, opens, and we rush toward it, against judgment and reason, and are swept and carried on its flow.

  SEVEN

  Mouse in House

  Last night we could not sleep for hours, curiously restless, unable to settle into the dark folds of sheets and quilts. The dark, which came late, seemed to swallow us whole. I lay in the upper bunk, feeling the night with its unseen energies and the spaces within its silence, as I lay there like a radioactive element giving off consciousness in ticking half-lives. Bert grunted and thumped his pillow. An insect beat its wings against the screen, some sound that small, and the surf softly splashed below on the beach. Everything was in order, going about its business, night and day creatures in their places: the only thing out of order was us. Then there came a whisk and a scratching sound, like sand blown against wood, but more deliberate. It stopped, and started again, seeming loud. A mouse was scratching at the plug of tin foil we’d stuffed through the hole in the floor behind the bedpost, chewing, clawing, and nudging it upward. It stopped, started, stopped again. A silence, then something scurried across the floor and ran straight up the wall.

  Bert, by virtue of having claimed the bottom bunk, is in charge of investigating all nighttime disturbances and so he got up, grabbed the flashlight, and lurched around in the dark, shining the light wildly in the corners and up the walls.

  By the twitching yellow beam, the inside of the shack appeared in total disarray. It seemed impossible to make sense of space in that jabbing, irregular light. Suddenly objects would leap forward—odd, insane-appearing things—a lethal-looking can opener nailed to t
he wall, jaws open, gears unlocked—the thrust of a roof beam angled upward and swallowed into the dissolving dark. A brown boot lay on its side, split open like a gored animal. Bert stumbled and swore as a moth batted his ear and careened off, startling him so he hit his shin on the bench with a sickening thud. There was an ugly moment in which the bench stood in danger of reprisals, but the mouse ran across his foot at that minute, terrified, and the atmosphere softened. Bert caught him in the light and he froze and stared up at him. Tiny, no bigger than a thumb, but quivering with defiance—at the sight of him the war was over. Bert switched off the light and we heard the mouse scurry off in the welcome darkness. “You’re outta here, pal,” Bert laughed, then unbent and limped to the door, shooing the huge moth ahead of him with a grand sweeping motion. “You too. Everybody clear out.” He stepped across the threshold, and stood there for a long moment.

  “Cynthia, come here,” he called quietly across the dark. I snaked down from the bed, found my footing and padded over to the door. The waves were turning over, shaping the edges of the land. Highland Light stroked the flanks of the dunes with its white beam. We stood together on the doorstep as a fleet of clouds moved out overhead, grandly opening the sky, and suddenly there were all the stars. The Big Dipper hung upside down, spilling into the northeast, with its two bright stars pointing to Polaris. The great dragon, Draco, high above the northern horizon, sprawled down into the western sky; in its tail is Thuban, the old North Star, by whose light the Egyptians aligned the pyramids. Far down at the southern horizon sat the Queen, Cassiopeia. For years now we have seen these stars above Euphoria, so clear and brilliant, each one familiar in its place, and the Milky Way opening overhead, with its shining dust trailing off, and still we can never believe it. An expanse, a universe with space enough in which to think or be anything.

  We stood on the high deck facing into the dark as the wind blew us backward, westward, where night had gone. An offshore wind was rising, and the deep, even pulsing of the waves beat up below on shore. The earth lay all dark and shadowless before us, darkness flooding the cool, still ground, black grasses standing motionless above black sand, alive in earth’s night, and down below the water stretched itself out, gazing up at the sea of stars.

  A meteor streaked down the sky, and as we leaned toward one another, I wished quickly for what I always wish: to be given another summer after this one, to be able to come here all our lives, to keep making this our home. In that quick flare I caught my breath, seeing it all race by, speed of light, our summer, our lives, and beyond that single spark only dark endless space. Looking into the sky’s wide black expanse with its cold fire of stars, I come gratefully back to what is ours, this cloud-wrapped, spinning earth, these boards just holding back the wind. I wished for this very home, no more or less, but Bert’s wish must have been more immediate, because he put his arms out and pulled me closer to him, urging me back inside, deep into the furthest corner of the shack and into his bed under the top bunk. There was just enough room there to sit up, all arms and legs in the little bunk, the headboard and footboard closing up the ends, one side pressed to the wall, the sheets mussed and warm, with grains of sand in their creases. Wrapped in long johns against the chill night, we unbandaged ourselves, goose-fleshed in the new air, cold, then warm, moisture glazing our skin. For once then, gravity was not a problem; with no distance between us, we agreed to the pull, to being drawn so close until our boundaries must have been indistinguishable, twining arms and legs, touching everywhere, without a single worry about identity. Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.

  Whether the mouse left in peace or died on the spot from fear I don’t know, but the night was quiet after that. The wind came up some hours later and I got up and pulled down extra blankets from the shelf. I spread one over Bert and he stretched gratefully in sleep and I hoisted myself back up into my own bunk. I slept until the sun rose in the window, hitting me in the eye, and then turned over to sleep again, hearing, faintly, the morning cries of the birds.

  EIGHT

  The Garden

  I am sitting on the steps with my feet in the sand and I am trying to wake up. It’s a brilliant morning: the sun just skims the hill, turning the grass tips all silver and blinking in the light. Down in the meadow, a squad of redwings cries and scatters upward, rattling the branches of the bayberry. Coffee breathes a thin vapor at the mug’s rim; it curls and rises past my hands like a signal sent up in smoke.

  The coffee is necessary. I wake these mornings in a daze, stupid, and barely able to recognize the world. Surfacing from the cold, deep currents of dream, where all things flow downward and melt into one story, I rise to meet the bright fact of daylight. Morning kills the dream, dissolving its images with light, chasing the shades of night back to their dark, unchanging underworld.

  I dreamed I was taking an examination on the nature of time. I needed an answer I could write on the back of a maple leaf; the tree should have an answer hung from every leaf … Now I sit here, pulling at dream images, tugging them into the light, but they won’t come. Deep-rooted, formless under the sun, they shred and tear apart like rotten seaweed. Already these memories are a story read long ago, dim as legend. Moments ago they were the air I breathed. I stand up, wipe my hands on my jeans, and start down the hill for water.

  The pump groans and gushes, spurting water from the spigot and across the iron lip. Water splashes out, heavy and shining, overflowing one bucket, then another, spilling onto the sand. A snake was here to drink before dawn, drawing S-shapes in the sand with his whole body. I fill four plastic jugs and set them in the bushes where the sun will heat them for our baths this afternoon. Then I refill the big basin we leave for priming and trudge uphill, the weight of water pulling my arms to earth. Bert is shoveling sand up around the exposed beams in back of the shack, in a futile campaign against the prevailing winds. He comes over to take the buckets from my hands, hoisting each one overhead on to the deck, and then turns back to his digging.

  All summer we take turns scooping bites out of the backside of the dune, packing sand around the pilings as the hill moves off to the south. We buy time with our efforts, keeping a foothold as the dune slides out from under us. Each shovelful unearths layers of summers people have lived here, scrap from the constant building and rebuilding of the shack over forty years. We’ve turned up spoons and hinges, hundreds of rusty nails, a small green plastic soldier; these sift down to a certain substratum and surface again whenever the sand is moved, rising like bones into the light. Broken crockery, the spindles of a chair back tossed into the woodpile under the steps, glass, pennies, rusty twists of wire—the detritus of other lives floats just below the surface. This digging could go on forever and never stop uncovering objects; bones of ships lie buried in these dunes, their sails soft as parchment, spilled cargoes of rum, and dust of sailors. Our digging scatters particles of sand that shift and slide over one another, then shift back again. Ceaselessly, we shove the sand back as the dune slides out from under us. Ceaselessly, the wind undoes our work.

  I climb the stairs and go inside, set the water buckets under the sink and cover them with tin plates, then take up the broom from behind the door. Our morning chores consist of sweeping, making up beds, sweeping, hauling water, washing up, and sweeping. The wind pushes infinitesimal specks through the cracks all night, piling up ridges of finest dust at every opening. Grains of sand are carried in our clothes, stuck to our skin. There’s sand in the bed-covers, sand in the grooves of the driftwood table, sand filtering down from the unfinished ceiling. I sweep beneath the stove, under the table, and scoot the sand across the doorstep. I figure I move a quart of sand a day, a volunteer in the war against entropy.

  Sweeping the old, soft boards, brushing pale sand across sungold wood, light flashes up through a crack in the floorboards, and for a moment I remember dreaming. Flowers on a bare, rotted limb, a huge bird gulping down a frog … The light beyond these four walls opens into a wide and endless space; the image
flees into the dazzling fullness beyond, and then the whisper of broom straw shushes thought. I pull the bedsheets tight, smoothing out creases to obliterate the landscape created in a night. The red covers tuck tight into the wooden bedframes, and fat white pillows loll against the headboards as if nothing had ever happened here.

  The screen door bangs shut. Reaching up to pin damp towels on the line, I feel a quick breeze whip them out of my arms. The towels thrup, tugging at the cord as wind fills them; the line strains and then goes slack. In a wash of color, the dream stains the air. Blue smoke rising, an odor of onions along a dim hallway. These are not images of the mind. They seem not to belong to me at all, but to be effigies of another, wilder, world, one I can barely recognize, though it seems to know me well.

  A blue house shining from a hundred windows. I walked up the stairs and through the door, knowing my way though I had never been there before, though in fact this house does not exist. I walked into a room and met my father at the stove frying peacock’s eggs—I did not say to him, oh, you are dead, because it was a dream.

  A girl with no legs was being lowered by ropes into a pond beside a country road. She bobbed high in the water like a cork, smiling and waving, and after a while they fished her out with a hook.

  Why not believe it? I saw these things, smelled food cooking, felt the warm mist bead up on my skin. Behind closed eyes my brain filled with light, and images that made my eyes jerk back and forth, chasing phantoms. Lying still, I felt myself running down city streets; I climbed long staircases that opened into fields of wildflowers.