The Salt House

by Cynthia Huntington

  In June you can feel the full shock it must have been to see the first flower wither. Everything is growth, budding, opening into light. It seems this must be the way of the world, a blossoming with no cost, the magical light thrusting through the plants, shifting the ground, beginning over and over.

  Everywhere I look I see the rebirth of roses, new grasses waking in clusters of yellow, wind-shredded spears, the berry hugged in the root of the blossom. Last year all the roses died, and their petals blew across the sand. But this spring the world fills with roses again, and little moist leaves folded tight against the stems. At the base of every rose are a thousand roses, buried in the rosehip, the seedpod. So that if all the roses were gone but one, only one rose remaining, we would still have roses. And so for goldenrod, cranberry, huckleberry and pine, all flowers in a single flower, eternal repetitions of life appearing in succession, even as the petals fly to the ground.

  The track curves around and sinks deep in sand, a green corridor shaded by miniature oaks and pine. Just over the hill is the densest cluster of shacks at Peaked Hill: Boris Margo’s, Harry Kemp’s, Grace Bessay’s, the Hunzingers’. A footpath winding through high grass, and a pump half hidden in bushes, are all I can see from here. Off to the right the low roof of Jim Bowen’s decrepit shack folds itself into an encroaching dune.

  Further on, the old Coast Guard boathouse lies collapsing beside the road. It was abandoned here half a century ago when the Coast Guard moved its operations into town. Open at both ends, the boathouse lies swamped in goldenrod, the sun streaming in through gaping holes in its shingles. A sand dune is building up inside against the far wall, shouldering its way between the boards, and the hard sand in front glitters with chips of glass from parties that ended thirty years ago, when the boathouse was still standing. Now, with its floorboards heaved up in splinters, its walls buckled in, it looks like a single step could bring it down.

  Resting atop its own rubble, buried in leaves and vines, and leaned on by a moving sand dune, the boathouse lies three hundred yards from the beach, in a quiet of stopped wind. Nearby sits the concrete foundation of the old Life Saving Station, built here after the two stations before it slid into the waves. A strange hush hangs over the place. Even the incessant voice of the waves is stopped in this narrow valley. The little, blue-black tree swallows have it now: their soft twittering cries run before them as they dart among the shadows, over broken boards and ivy. A brown snake slides quietly up the listing wall and slips under the leaves.

  I always feel a chill as I approach this spot, haunted by birds and deerflies. How tenuous our hold here seems, even in this green valley shining in sunlight, even on such a bright spring morning. I look at the boathouse covered in vines, its interior filling up with sand, and I feel my life slipping away under me, the sand blowing over, covering everything I know. It buries living plants, erases each familiar shape of hill and coastline. Sand fills in the hollows of our houses and then leaves cover the sand. Mice scramble under the floorboards, and sparrows play along the roof. The sand blows and moves and makes a new world, tunneled by ants. What persists? A spoon, a splinter of glass, a toy soldier risen up from the wreckage. A blue-green marble reflecting the sky. We live on top of other lives, pulling water up from old wells, moving on as the sea takes the land away, but we can never know for sure where our place is in the succession. A house of boards declining inch by inch into the earth, sunlight dappled through a broken roof, the bright eyes of swallows in the leaves. And the brown snake, sliding quietly up the leaning wall: egg robber, destroyer of nests—his place is here too. I would have followed him if I could, into that dim and dusty place, back into the lost garden, closed to me. Instead I turn aside and begin to climb the hill. There’s a pump half-hidden in the brush, I know where, with a tin cup hanging from the handle by a string, and a path leading up to a shack. Nobody lives there now, but there are birdhouses nailed up on posts around the doorstep, with swallows swooping and crying all around. Roses grow by the doorstep, and from that doorstep you can see for a very long way.

  ELEVEN

  Jacob’s Ladder

  One day last summer I found a man sleeping in the dunes. It was late morning and I was out for blueberries, climbing the side of a dune to get to a meadow on the other side. Halfway up the slope the path began to curve inward, and I followed it until it became overgrown with poison ivy. Hesitating, I looked around, then chose a steeper, winding route, avoiding the laces of the vines, and finally came out on to a little clearing of dune grass and bearberry, its sandy floor studded by dark scat of rabbits.

  Sunlight splashed the bright leaves of the ivy. Sprays of meadowsweet rose up below, wavering on their long stems, and the little yellow blossoms of the poverty grass winked among the low green. Moving forward, I saw there below me at the bottom of the dune a form stretched flat, not moving. For a terrible moment I thought he was dead. But the man, the stranger, was sleeping, tucked up in a sleeping bag, curled on his side. He had rolled himself up close to the edge of a dune, on a bare patch of sand ringed by trees and a thicket of scrub oak, hidden from view of anyone passing, except from this exact, unlikely spot. I pulled back quickly, then crept up to look again. He lay in deep sleep, his chest and shoulders half out of the army blanket. He was wearing a black t-shirt and looked like a giant slug or a larva in its chrysalis. Only in sleep he was already the butterfly, orange and black winged.

  I stood there without breathing, afraid to turn. Partly it was my normal fear of meeting a stranger in the open, any woman’s fear of the hobo, the man among the brush. There is a danger in the woods, in isolated places; thinking of it spoils everything, but it’s there just the same. At the same time there was something uncanny in the man’s presence. He had an air of integrity, a self-possession in the midst of utmost vulnerability. He was not, at this moment, his usual self, but a traveler outside time and space. Watching his chest rise and fall, I felt I was trespassing on some deep privacy. His face was clear of any expression except for rapt attention, as if he were dreaming hard, studying the dark for clues. His black hair stood up from his forehead like a brush, giving him a surprised look. I leaned over, wondering, trying to read his expression like a code, but the vision was closed to me, belonging to another world.

  He might have been some hiker or traveler out of money for a room, or perhaps just someone who wanted to spend a night out here. Camping in the dunes is not allowed—he knew enough to choose a place hidden from the jeep paths, out of rangers’ eyesight. This sleeping in the dunes was an old town tradition before the Park Service came. A fight in a bar or an argument at home sent many men out here to sleep off their liquor or their rage. It was a great free place, a place of open space and mental scope, against the backside of the small, all-seeing town where everyone knew your life. This sleeper might have been a townsman, or a runaway, but then he might as well have been a god, surprised among the morning’s bright leaves.

  He blew out a sharp breath and turned over abruptly and I startled and froze, but he did not waken. We might have frightened each other thoroughly then, but instead he turned and snuffled down into deeper sleep. I backed slowly down the path, barely breathing until I was some distance from where he lay. I left the sleeper sleeping, a free man with no life, and gave up my idea of blueberries for that day. Meanwhile, my traveler lay in his body and watched the galaxies turn.

  Jacob lay out under the stars and dreamed a ladder to heaven, with angels going up and down, and God promised him the land where he lay and he called the place the gate of heaven. In the dream we are gods, graciously descended into the world. But we wake and the stairway has vanished, the connection is broken. Still, we erect a heap of stones to remember the place where we met ourselves ascending and descending.

  In the shack, I dream the shack, reconstructing it board by board. I dream the real, igniting cells that blossom over and over in my mind, saying: “rose, snake, rabbit.” You nose around the fenceposts, sniff the air and leave prints in th
e sand. You nibble a leaf. You put your head under your wing and blink toward sleep. You close white petals at twilight, feel the spears of your leaves furled against the wind, holding in warmth and moisture. You are sand, many-faceted, your molecules arranged in crystal firmaments, surrounding eons of empty space. You are empty space, ready to ignite with a word. You see a snail cross the sand and hesitate. An angel sleeps in the garden, guarding the portal. A man in a black t-shirt, rolled up in a blanket, walks among stars.

  The stranger sleeps at the foot of the dune and space stands back around him. He cannot see himself or me; I feel his breath a hundred yards off, and after I turn and walk away, I watch him with my mind.

  TWELVE

  A Visit to Zena’s

  We’re reading in our bunks after lunch when a voice sings out “Hello!” and footsteps bang up the stairs. It’s Annie, our neighbor from town, peering in through the screen, her blonde braids glinting in the sun. We call come in and she does, bringing three cold beers—magnificent green bottles sweating beads of chill. No, she doesn’t want one; we put them away for later.

  Annie looks appraisingly around the shack, the way people do who have stayed here before, alert and suspicious of possible changes. She lived in Euphoria one summer when her daughter Phoebe was a baby. (I’ve always meant to ask what she did for diapers out here, but I suppose Phoebe just went without.) She’s come to invite us over to the Bowen shack for wine and cake after supper. It’s Phoebe’s seventh birthday, and they’re spending the night, along with Gabriella and her daughter Lulu.

  If anyone could merit the label “dune rat,” it would be Annie. She has been coming here since she was a teenager and has stayed in just about every shack on the back shore, including a lot of time in Thalassa. Several years ago, though, she and Hazel had a falling out—Annie says it was over a beach party that got the attention of the park rangers—and since then she’s stayed in Frenchie’s shack and at Bowen’s, but never in either of Hazel’s shacks. We suspect, too, that Annie’s ways were a little too relaxed for Hazel’s liking.

  Jim Bowen’s shack doesn’t really belong to Jim Bowen, but he’s the latest caretaker. It belongs to Vic Peters’s sister, Zena, but she doesn’t use it anymore. It’s a peculiar structure, built low and far back in the dunes, sunken among pines, and is used by a fairly casual assortment of people, most of whom at least profess to know Jim Bowen. It’s the crash pad of the dunes, never locked, seldom repaired, and it seems to be gently declining back into the earth from whence it came.

  We agreed to come over after supper and then we all talked a bit. Annie didn’t have much news. A steady sort of person, she lacks the kind of appetite for gossip which would attract the finer particles of rumor and supposition which circulate in this town. Still, she’d know if someone had died or gotten divorced, or if there was a major fire, so it was worth checking in to be sure.

  She couldn’t stay. Gabriella had packed a lunch and was meeting her on the beach with the children. We wandered out onto the deck without quite saying goodbye, our talk trailing off. The afternoon was warm and clear, the big dome of sky settling over the last line of dunes to the west, and along the clean horizon of the ocean. A song sparrow flitted busily in the bayberry just below us, and then the cock pheasant crowed from the high grasses, his voice seeming to scrape the air. He’s been around this past week at all hours; he preens and stamps his feet, then lets loose a strangled love cry, hoping to attract a female. So far he’s had no luck that we can tell.

  Annie disappeared down the path by the pump as we watched. In the distance, we could see someone over at Boris Margo’s shack, walking back and forth around the door and windows. The shack has been boarded up since last July; we wondered whether Boris’s nephew had come at last. The figure seemed to be moving deliberately; he was carrying something—tools? lumber?—it was hard to tell at such a distance. He stopped to examine the window frame and the shingles around the door. We wondered whether it was a trespasser trying to get inside, and then Bert spotted a blue truck pulled up the track, along the inland road that only locals use, and so it was all right.

  The pheasant crowed again, and strutted into the open. He threw back his head and began marching up and down on the hard sand, his chest thrust forward, swinging his long, pointed tail around with each turn. His wings glinted in the sun; his brilliant green head and red eye patch vibrated with color; he was magnificent, princely, master of all before him, and then he beat his wings, lifted his head, and let out that unfortunate cry. A cackle, a gargle, a screech. All space stood back, embarrassed.

  Eight o’clock, Bowen’s, the sky still blue with light. A fire on the ground outside the shack had gone out, leaving a ring of charred wood and blackened sand surrounded by corn husks, sticks for roasting things, the remains of dinner. Phoebe and Lulu were out in front on the trampled sand, both of them sun-browned and dirty and in a dissident mood. They presented a contrast: Phoebe at seven, tall and blonde, all legs and arms, and three-year-old Lulu squat and brown, with dark hair cut short like a boy’s, goldbead earrings, black eyes of a warrior. A day of sun and sea air had honed their dispositions to a defiant edge. As we approached, Phoebe was rhythmically pounding a stick on the hard sand, chanting, “I want … another corn … I want … another corn,” which was evidently not forthcoming, though judging from the remains strewn about they had gone through a dozen ears already. “I want … another corn.” Lulu stood watching her, deeply fascinated, her black eyes fixed on Phoebe’s every move. Phoebe might have been doing this a long time because the refrain had lost whatever urgency it might have had and seemed to be fluctuating between complaint and some sort of tribal chant. If she had begun in anger, her temper had subsided and she now seemed to be in the process of hypnotizing herself, and Lulu, with the repetition.

  Lulu did not acknowledge our approach by so much as a breath or a spark of movement, but Phoebe hooded her eyes and turned partially aside to ignore our greeting. The two of them there, in front of the blackened fire in the evening light, seemed to inhabit a separate world, sealed off from us by a thin barrier of will. I could feel the combination of tiredness, petulance, and boredom driving the girls, the scary pull of their wildness, and so I let it be and went by quietly. Another minute and we’d all be leading some sort of sacrifice.

  You enter Bowen’s shack by ducking through a small anteroom, just an enclosed doorway without windows, like entering a cave. A hand-lettered sign on the door reads: “This door is not locked, so please don’t break it down.” Inside, the shack is square and low, with windows reaching down to the ground. (Actually, the sand has piled up to the windows.) The place has a sort of hippie squalor and coziness—a worn rug on the floor, one window with no glass in it, shaded by an Indian print curtain, a sagging double bed in the corner, and in the center of the room, a big table ringed with half a dozen mismatched chairs in various states of disrepair. If Euphoria’s interior has the elegant simplicity of a boat, Bowen’s is a sixties dorm room.

  Annie and Gabriella had finished cleaning up the supper things, and had already started in on the wine. Gabriella was speaking excitedly in her heavy Paris accent, making vehement gestures in the air as she exclaimed over some affront. She noticed us, and without pausing waved, “Come in,” and kept talking.

  Chairs were shoved and switched around, to find the ones least likely to break under us, and soon we were seated at the table, sipping wine. It seemed Gabriella was infuriated over a run-in that afternoon with the Hunzingers, who have a shack down past Thalassa on the inner side of the dune. They had stormed out of their shack to chase the children off the dune ridge, yelling incoherently about their “property”—Roy Hunzinger shouting and waving his fist in the air as he chased the women and girls away while Mrs. Hunzinger stood behind him, stolid and unyielding, holding the second line of defense. Gabriella was indignant: “They think they own the whole place?” she demanded, slapping her hand against the table.

  “The Grouches,” Annie said
wryly, applying the children’s term for them. “Oscar and Grungetta.”

  That sort of incident is nothing new. For years everyone here has kept a wary distance from the Hunzingers, whose tempers are notorious. They are the mean old couple in every neighborhood: the man who yells about his lawn, the old woman who calls the police about street noise at ten p.m. See them peering out through curtains, bristling with suspicion, always on guard against some unspecified threat. People who don’t like kids or dogs, who view every approach as an intrusion. What are they doing here, we wonder, and concede bewilderment. Nobody has ever seen them walk beyond their own fence, much less glimpsed them on the beach. They’ve made a compound of their place, a half acre of bare sand ringed with barbed wire, and flood lights aimed at the perimeter. Their cabin has two rooms, a porch, and is painted a forbidding, military shade of green. A generator runs the lights and powers an electric pump, a water heater, and a television. Every Friday during the summer they drive over the big dune in their old white pickup, staring ahead with fixed gazes, gun it uphill and down, straight through the barbed wire gate, then for all anybody can tell, they sit in front of the television all weekend and drink. On Monday they return to New Hampshire.

  “Why can’t they drink in New Hampshire?” Gabriella wanted to know.