The Salt House

by Cynthia Huntington

  Was it the bird’s call that pulled me back? Two notes, bright and sharp—at the last minute I asked myself: “What bird is that?” and hauled myself back into awareness.

  If I had stood up then my legs would have wobbled and shook. The woods were closed again, leaving no place to remind me where I was woven in so delicately, momentarily. Light slanted between the trees, glinted on a stick not quite dry, and pebbles and particles and stone-colored lichens all sat clear in their own right. From oak to pine, across the plum thicket and roses, a blackbird flew straight across the sky, crying.

  When I stood up at last I found a large red tick clinging to the cuff of my sock, holding on with a vast and stupid hunger. Its grip was so tight and passionate that I could not detach it. Sensing blood, body heat, it clutched its flat, round body to the weave of a sock, burrowed down as far as need would carry it toward the reunion of flesh; if it had to eat through a world of sock meat it would, to cross that frontier, full of yearning.

  I flicked it with my finger, then knocked at it with a stick, and scraped the side of the stick across the threads, but it wouldn’t budge. “That’s a sock, dummy!” I explained. It only knew how to hold on; it could not reconsider. This smallest speck, this universal parasite wanted to be my brother, to share with me every germ of its former lives. Eight legs, eight filaments adhered, held on with blood lust. Drink me slowly, small and powerful, full of disease, stupefied with blind desire. Drink me up, oh Rocky Mountain Fever, Lyme Disease, Plague, Typhus: the blood-sucker’s offerings. Resigned, then, to its friendship, I took off my sock, rolled it in my hand, and set off walking stiffly toward the marshy meadow behind the shack. Everywhere I stepped, ants were marching with me, small specific lives, faintest perceptions of order: this earth is so strange, what do we ever know? A dun-colored butterfly came to light on my shoulder but changed her aim at the last second. The sun came out in a hazy sky, and it began to turn hot. Midges swarmed and quivered, banging into my forehead, swimming in my breath. I walked from shade to light, out of light into shadow, uphill and down, and up again.

  In the distance the line of sand was pink, the roofline of Euphoria etched on the hill beyond. A pleasant, rank odor hung over the marsh, and flies bumped slowly against the grassheads. As I came over the rise, there below me, four deer were feeding. One looked up and turned her head to look at me, taking me in with wide wet eyes. Nostrils flared forward, large round eyes on the sides of her head, eyes of the hunted. She gazed long, with mild and tranquil interest, took a single step away, then stopped and turned back again to her grazing.

  SEVENTEEN

  Dog Days

  Footprints circle the shack, not ours. Mouse, rabbit, toad, the prints read. We lay sleeping; we knew nothing. Maybe a change in the wind made us turn over, the scratch of sand tossed up against the shingles. Warm shapes moved near us in the dark; they crept along the roof and under the floor, and slipped away on padded paws. Past midnight a skunk nosed the garbage pail, fearless, trailing must, his thick, swampy odor caught in our throats. We coughed, turned over, dreaming skunk.

  It’s hot, the sun is high up in the sky, already baking the dunes. We woke late this morning, heavy and stale after a night of sticky heat. Bert grumbles through breakfast: it requires three matches, a sound curse, and the banging of a pot lid to light the stove. The chair in its usual place offends him, the bread is stale, there is no milk for tea. I try not to take it personally: Bert’s moods are like the weather, dramatic but fleeting. “Emoting,” he calls it. He sits down and stares out the window, with faraway, unseeing eyes.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask.

  He grins over at me. “Nothing much. Murder, arson, ruin … The usual.”

  “Oh good,” I tell him, letting out a breath. “I thought it was me.”

  We’re living under the Dog Star. Sirius, lodged in the nose of Canis Major, is closest to the sun now, bringing heat and pestilence. The brightest fixed star in the sky, he lights our discontent. These dog days find us simmering in heat; flies whine at the screens, and at evening the eerie buzz of mosquitoes haunts the air as they levitate on currents, finding their way to us over miles of grass and dunes. In the black night, in our beds, we’re prisoners to a single thought, a whine at our ears drilling sleep as one mosquito grazes the dark.

  A pair of tree swallows is flying back and forth from their nest, feeding their insatiable chicks. They make little murmuring noises as they pass over the deck, seemingly bothered by my presence. These days they work frantically from dawn to night to satisfy ungrateful hungers. A head fills the round hole of the bird box; as a parent nears, the head becomes all mouth opening, turned inside out. How they cry, these giant hungry babies. The chicks are almost big enough to leave the nest, but these days nothing moves. Everything stalls, waits, delays completion. Down on the beach a pair of terns is guarding a clutch of eggs that will not hatch. All the other nests have chicks, but this nest sits and spoils; the parents wait, unable to count time.

  A white sheen rises over the water; the sun hangs low, broadcasting shimmering heat rays across the surface. The beach is heaped with seaweed: fucus, codium, sargassum, kelp, sea lettuce, all rotting in the heat. There’s a rank smell and no wind. Sandfleas rise up murmuring in the dead weeds, and as the day wears on the greenheads appear, vicious and single-minded, honing in on all defenseless flesh.

  Last week the Park Service closed the beach from Race Point to High Head—the tern and plover chicks have hatched—and the fishermen are mad. They announced a protest for yesterday: some of the RV clubs planned to meet at Race Point Beach and line up their vehicles along the border of the prohibited area. A show of force: I wonder if the plovers were intimidated. Ill will simmers everywhere. Now the terns begin screaming down on the beach; then the swallows return and fly at me, crying and circling over my head—as if I had anything to do with their troubles.

  My discomfort grows. My hair lies limp against my neck. A kiss is damp and sticky. The refrigerator has quit working three times since yesterday. By the time we get it running again the meat has started to spoil.

  Why do the animals hide, why do bugs bite, why do I have a body that sweats and bleeds and itches and lies about sighing? Insects,” according to Saint Augustine, “remind us of the inconvenience of the mortal state.” Is it my fault for wanting the world to be what I want it to be? I can’t seem to accept that this place doesn’t need me, that I’m neither welcome nor unwelcome. And also, I think too much.

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” I finally ask Bert, trying to sound casual.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Something fundamentally wrong, deep down, that makes it impossible for me to fit in, to adjust to things.”

  “Oh yeah,” he says, looking thoughtful. “Yeah. You’re a nut.”

  As summer wears on, I’m more and more aware of my inability to be a part of this landscape which I love. I feel caught between two worlds, standing on the border of one, gazing longingly into the other. My curiosity betrays me, spying on the birds and animals.

  Just watch and here he comes, hopping out from under a rose bush into a clear circle of sand, this most anxious heir of all creation. The rabbit sits back on his big feet, chewing the grass tips one after another, bending down the stalks, tasting only the tenderest parts and moving on. Gangly, young, unevenly put together, his ears hang askew, pointing extravagantly in opposite directions. Big ears, big feet, he’s all attachments to a compact little body. On his own this morning, he’s a baby gourmet, weighing the succulence of grass tip and blade, seed head and blossom, giddy with choice. Even so, he won’t forget himself entirely. The rabbit’s eye is bright and unmoving. He looks straight ahead, in profile like an Egyptian relief, trying to catch sounds with the hot, sensitive skin of his ears, ready to run at any movement, but not wanting to, wanting only to stay and graze upon this intoxicating bounty of summer green. He is all youth in his dilemma, his fresh hunger and candid look around at every dang
er. Rabbit-like, exactly. New actor in an old role, how well he plays “rabbit,” how he masters himself in it already.

  Now he sees me, and seems to freeze and make himself small without moving. He waits, performing whatever passes for deciding in his morsel of a brain, then nibbles, stops, then takes another bite.

  Yesterday, while moving some old boards, I uncovered a colony of ants under a stack of two-by-fours behind the shack. They went into a great commotion getting out from under my shadow. The dowager queen, shiny as black glass, was hurriedly shoved down a hole by her military escort. Nurse ants nudged eggs and larvae ahead of them; little flesh-pink pods tumbled over one another as the workers scrambled back and forth dismantling top secret installations. I stared a while at the unroofed architecture of highways and cathedrals and watched the city go up in a panic.

  Ants we see everywhere, more ants than rabbits. Ants are in the sand and in the rock: minute, willful beings burrowing under fence posts and kitchen counters. They trail across the path, swarm over flat stones, crawl along flowers and up weed stalks, erupting out of bare dirt. Ant hills, ant columns, solitary ants scurrying back to the nest, bearing their remarkable burdens, and never minding the world. They eat grease and sugar, blossoms, dead beetles, and motor oil alike. What the planet gives they take, what they encounter they do not question, and whatever happens with the rest of creation remains a matter of the dimmest interest. Their fate hangs on the disposition of ant, on one particular community of saints, all females, abiding here in the desert.

  Were they aware of me looking at them? In spite of all the ruckus, I don’t think so. It’s more likely the upheaval was caused by the sudden light, or change of air temperature, than by any awareness of my presence. Most of the time they go on, underfoot and around us, talking their private talk, mumbling invocations, acknowledging no other world. The rabbit knows more of me, though this makes him wary, and as a result, I probably know him less.

  The rabbit hops off down the hill, going about his business, and I wonder, for the hundredth time this week, what mine is here. It is possible to live here every day, for weeks and into months, and see, essentially, nothing. You can study signs, tracks, clues, and still never be able to say what you’ve missed. You can live in the world, even in a place as bare and bright and close to the bone as this one, and never see the world. There are white-tailed deer in the marshes, foxes glimpsed by the side of the trail, who disappear, nose first, into the bushes. Beach mice scurry under grass cover, in direct relation with grass and with the marsh hawk circling above: invisible vectors connect them, force lines of desire and shared DNA. They squeeze through holes in the boards on summer nights to steal our crumbs and chew up bits of cotton scarves or socks for nests, yet our relation is casual, based on accidents of proximity and economics: we have goods between us, not substance, as in the equation of grass, mouse, harrier. To be a mouse is to fear the shadow of the hawk and to thrive on the new grass, to grow tender and fat to feed the winged shadow made of mouse and grass. We inhabit this common ground with varying degrees of curiosity or unease. The mouse is a spoiler and a quiet thief, stealing tastes of bread and cotton in unwitting intimacy by night. To the hawk, I’m a minor annoyance, set in the middle of her flight path, while every tern detests the very shape of my shadow. The ant discounts me completely, due to her utter lack of imagination; the rabbit eats, watches, and bewares. The comb-foot spider who hangs her frowzy web from the porch rail, secured to the underside of the third step of the shack Euphoria, conveniently near the reeking trash can, does not know where she is, or care particularly. And though I walk across her wooden firmament every morning and make her whole universe shake, in that universe I do not, in fact, exist.

  EIGHTEEN

  Talking in the Dark

  All night the flame whiffs and whooshes under the hood of the little propane refrigerator, its motor struggling in the heat to make cold. In the dark the pilot light glows yellow. Striking a match, I turn the stove dial, and gas rushes toward the flame. Bert wakes to ask sleepily if I’m all right, do I need him. Blue flame leaps in cabin darkness, a floorboard creaks, a teacup scratches across the table top. Impossible to move silently.

  It is some unnamed, unchristian hour past midnight. I’m sick with fever, chills, and a deep, dull pain in my gut. For hours I’ve been heating endless kettles, drinking tea and refilling the hot water bottle, trying to send warmth into the cold empty spaces between my cells. Some hours ago I routed Bert out of the lower bunk and sent him up top to sleep. Now, bed to window, window to door, and back again, I mark the hours until morning.

  The dark in the room is a physical presence, filling every corner, heavy as water. Space begins at my face, and presses back at my outstretched hand; outside, the planet turns, stars hiss and flare, and small animals snuff beneath the grasses. I walk to the door and lean against the screen: dark as it is on this hill, over the water is darkest night. Fog-shrouded, two or three miles out, some boats are riding at anchor, the lights on their masts flickering through the vapor. Highland Light sweeps a faint beam against the hill, then turns away. Sweat glazes my face and shoulders and a shiver slides up my legs.

  I lean there, moony in the dark. The screen feels soft and grainy, its mesh stretching under my hand. The little hook and eye digs into my arm and I move aside slightly. A very small contraption—a bent hook, no bigger than a nail, and a little hole to pass it through. Warm air flows freely through the wires. Frenchie said the dead take walks together on these moonless nights, strolling with lighted candles across the crests of the dunes. Why do they need candles if they are dead, I asked. She frowned at that. I don’t need ghosts to scare me. My worst dreams are the simplest, inner visions I have no defense against here in the dark.

  Yesterday, while Bert was out working in the dunes, a man came to the door carrying a long stick and a gallon of Gallo red. He leaned on the screen and looked in at me: “Hi.” I looked up and he was there; I had not heard him coming. I was lying on the bed in a t-shirt and shorts, my papers spread all around. I could see this little hook and eye fastening the screen—so flimsy I could rip it with my hands. His smile stayed too long; he stood with the light behind him, between me and the outside, my back against the wall.

  He was drunk, and, as it turned out, meant no harm. I didn’t know that. I asked what he wanted and got up to walk to the door, assuming an authority I could never back up. He let me pass. It was better outside somehow, not to feel trapped. He sat on the step and drank from the bottle. Nothing happened. He left after a while, after his being there had almost begun to seem normal, more an annoyance than a terror, though I knew it could turn in an instant. He got bored and staggered down to the beach, leaving the empty jug on the step. I could see him weaving in and out of sight below, walking up and down, drunk, and crazy from too much sun, shaking his stick at the hills like some Moses.

  Now I stand at the door, staring into the dark while my mind chews up old worries, endless chatter. How long until morning? First the dark will thin a little, and shadows will rise up from the black ground. Then pink streaks will appear in the sky. From the corner of the east window, between two angles of wood and glass, the sun will rise up out of the water. Gulls will cry out rudely. I throw the blanket from my shoulders as a sweat sheen washes my skin; the muscles of my neck and shoulders tighten. Dark fills up the world.

  Tonight I wish for a fluorescent-lit motel: gleaming white porcelain, hot and cold water flowing at a touch, switching channels on the buzzing cable. Late-night TV, a refuge in the nowhere world of sickness and insomnia, to take me out of myself.

  Instead I am thoroughly here, feeling my body flush and chill, the greasy feel of my skin, the thick blood pushing through my veins, feeling the several deaths that live in my body wriggle up like spiders, smelling it. That burning when you pee means infection in the urinary tract. Infections like this start quickly, race up the body through filaments, every system connected. Before sulfa, penicillin, how many died of a str
ange germ at the orifice, a blocked duct, fever and chills?

  The fever enlarges me; vague, swollen, my skin heats the air. Who can say where I end and the night begins? I’m hot, burning, a languid coal; the pain in my abdomen and lower back is deep, a root going into the ground, a stake driven through the flesh, down through mattress, chair, floorboards, and into the center of the earth. I’m grateful at least for the foresight that goaded me to hoard Bactrim, after a horrible night two years ago when I woke up sicker than this, and had to hike into town in a rainstorm the next morning. Waiting in the doctor’s office, wringing wet, sick and sleepless and sour smelling, the fever spiking up, I felt like a refugee presenting myself at a mission hospital. Then to trudge to the pharmacy and back out again. Laid me up for a week. After that I managed to convince my doctor I could be trusted with a single course of sulfa.

  With sulfa you drink lots of water or burn up inside. Drink water and piss in the dark. This is what it comes to, on a dark, close night, squatting over a decommissioned lobster pot beside the door, squeezing out dark, spare drops of burning urine. Any illusions I may have cherished about myself disappear from this pose. I look out into the sky and see nothing, and feel myself a voyager in space, this earth a satellite, a spaceship carrying me out of time. It makes me think of Laika, that sad little dog the Russians sent up, who circled the earth and died, poison in her food when the oxygen ran out.