The Salt House

by Cynthia Huntington

  TWENTY

  Staying In

  Morning. The storm has passed and left behind a steady rain that promises to pour down on us for days. The wind bangs the shack like a wooden gong and glass rattles in the window frames. There is no going out: it’s given that we will stay inside, listening to the rain beat the walls, occasional thunder growling up. The temperature has fallen thirty degrees and streams of water shove under the door; we put down newspapers, then towels, until everything is soaked and the smell of wet newsprint clings in our nostrils. We wear all our clothes, sweatshirts and jeans and sweaters, in layers mismatched and lumpy. There’s no dry firewood; the gas stove boils water for tea. No fire, tea and crackers, and wearing all our clothes.

  Afternoon. We rested and read all morning, tired after a sleepless night. I tried to get out a little bit during a seeming lull, but the rain soaked me through, and when I came back it was hard to get warm again, with tea and blankets and my last dry socks. The windows press fog and mist and we are cut off, adrift in the grey, beating rain.

  We take up a lot of room, suddenly large as we move around the shack. I feel dangerously shut in, blinded by the closed door and rain-soaked windows. To go from the table to the cupboard I must displace Bert, who is sitting on a camp chair beside the cold stove. To make a third cup of tea, Bert has to get past me at the table; if he wants to sit there too I have to get up and pull out the bench, and move books and papers, cups and spoons out of his way. We maintain an elaborate courtesy. I think of old hut dwellers who would live like this whole winters. The smell of smoke and stale bodies, wet socks, and the fear of going mad. I fall asleep in self-defense, a stale, unrestful sleep, visited by dreams of giants.

  For lunch I make a pot of soup, using the last of the potatoes and onions, some sausage and dry milk. When the wind turns we get an occasional patch of radio. A station somewhere in Maine is playing all the songs of 1958 from two o’clock to three-thirty. “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier,” leads off. I count the hours until supper. If we were in town today, we would go to the movies or sit in a bar with friends…

  Second morning. Last night it was hard to sleep because we hadn’t moved all day. I lay in my bunk and heard the rain beat only inches over my head, its mental chatter like the details of many lives dropping singly and together. Outside, each creature crouched in its shelter: the owl, the hawk, the tidy, plush bodies of mouse and mole. Nothing was hunting or hunted; every beast and fowl and creeping thing was gathered into its place. What were the terns doing? The adults leave the nest to ride out the storm on the waves, but how were the chicks surviving? Could they last a second night in this heavy rain, with nothing to protect them—or had the storm tide already washed them out? Lying there I imagined scenes of desolation. Shipwrecked sailors wandering the dark, how long a man might search for shelter here. Bert began snoring then in fitful bursts, as irritating a sound as you could possibly imagine, and louder than the rain.

  We woke to find the door still leaking. This was not amusing. The boards are soaked through now, and along the back wall a thin stream of water courses downward, winding past the window-frame and across the floor where it drips out through cracks in the boards. The wind shudders and pushes, body of wind, big shoulder heaved at the walls. We can see nothing from the windows; the shack is cold as a tomb, wreathed in cloud. Shut inside, we glare at each other over tea. I sit in bed with my journal and find I have no thoughts. Words advance across the page in merciless progression; sentence follows sentence, idea flows out of observation, words putting out more words and none of it means anything to me today. The pages feel thick and soft in my hands. We lie on the beds and read, or dial the radio across the numbers of distant cities. Voices scratch out of the metal box like a needle pulled across grooves.

  Afternoon. My book this week is peopled with characters suffering from bad marriages and too much gin—it seemed witty enough on a bright, noisy day when I borrowed it from a friend in town. We eat an endless bowl of soup, dipping out of the pot that never diminishes. We start to hate the soup. I make another pot of tea; the crackers are stale and damp. This matters more than either of us could have imagined. The rain persists. Bert says he’ll take a walk anyway; I say he might as well swim in a whirlpool. He comes back quickly and spreads wet sheets of clothing over chairs and I only just mention having told him so. We play scrabble. We play gin rummy, peeling the cards up from the soft, fibrous wood. Bert’s raincoat hangs on a chair like a dejected visitor, melting into a pool on the floor. We move our chairs to the furthest corners and plan separate vacations. The wind makes the most godawful noises. Arias and death-cries, keening and barking, terrible scrapings and thunder of something falling over. It shakes the walls to get our attention but when I listen it still doesn’t make sense.

  “Do you realize that when Picasso was my age he had already invented and discarded Cubism?” Bert says, looking up from his sketchbook.

  “Picasso was a shit,” I tell him.

  “Maybe you have to be a shit to get anywhere. Be selfish, just live in the work. Let somebody else clean up.” He pauses. “I don’t know if it’s healthy for an artist to be in a relationship.”

  I ignore this last. “Well, when Keats was my age he was already dead.”

  “Why do you always have to make it be about you?”

  Time grinds to a stunning halt after this exchange; we’re quiet and glum, padding about in our socks and long underwear, feeling snappish. Why do I live with this hulking, hairy, stale-smelling, large and surly creature? We turn on the news and get a weak signal, then static: the batteries are failing. We’re cut off from the world: does no one think of us, or care to ask how we survive? Boredom relives boredom, running mental films of random action, exhausting with its she said and then that happened, how it all comes to nothing. Stand in the middle of the room and listen: the afternoon seems tranquilized, spent of passion, gently breathing. Then a quick blast throws a truckload of sand at the walls and the shack staggers, sways, and rights itself.

  Night. This night comes early, black night in which everything disappears. Then wind, thunder again—it’s hard to believe no one’s angry. What does the air hit to make it stop so suddenly? A light sways violently offshore, then light opens into light; the waters sheen electric pale. The shack trembles like an animal that smells fire. Tucked up in blankets, not really warm, I fall asleep feeling sorry for all of us.

  Shadows pile up at the door. Ghosts of lost creatures, sailors, ancestors, all I have tried to put away from me here, cry out, demanding comfort. Go away. Get on, you storm voices, you mysteries, leave me alone, you damned lost endless multitudes, and the hell with you. Where you come from there are more of you, endless you’s, the centrifugal force of your woes pulling me toward you, and I will not go. I do not want to go with you because I know you are dead. A shadow stands on the doorstep, rain pasting his clothes to his body, his hair slapped to his forehead, a streaming wraith wrung out in the sea’s agitation, with the deadlight shining in his eyes. His silence is a demand; he says nothing. If I bring you into my bed to warm you you still are dead and I am cold from holding you. No—you nothings, you dead voices, you windborne sorrows, no to you.

  In my dream a lamb roast is turning on a spit; tents billow in gaudy colors across a desert camp. I dream the elders are gathering, caravans arriving by day and night, and the lamb turns on the spit, its skin splitting, black char of fat and the head revolves over and around, righted and spun downward, staring from burnt eye-sockets. Meat, hot and running with fat, savory with herbs, the smell of the animal growing stronger in the fire.

  In the dark a skunk comes knocking, treading up the path, wet fur effusing skunk stink. I wake and taste it in the back of my throat, through my sinuses, inside my lungs. He bangs once at the trash can and pads off. I wait, listening. The rain has stopped. I listen some more, then get up and open the door.

  The quietest night, weighted with damp, lies on the world. A faint glow of moonligh
t burnishes the clouds, and night sleeps. It is right to say the storm has lifted; I can feel the air spring back under it, the grasses uncoiling. There is the blink off and on, around and back, of Highland Light, not visible for days.

  The stairs hang down like a bridge between lives; a soft radiance is on the sand. Grasses bend seed plumes toward the flowing dunes, their lapped curves standing still a moment in their constant retreat. Offshore, boats circle their anchors, afloat on the consciousness of water, and the moonlight wakes a struggle of roses gripped down in sand. Their blossoms clenched tight, roots pulling hard to earth, they bury themselves holding on. Behind me, the shack is dark as a shell; the whisper of surf breaking on the beach below is like the jet stream around a disappearing space craft. The shack rises up behind me. Sheer and hollow, wingless, it rises as the ground flows out beneath it. I am standing here on the night earth on my two white legs, on moving ground, out here awake in the moonlight, not dreaming, alive in the dark before naming.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Fishers

  In first light the earth wears its eternal body: each shape of brush and leaf is fixed and still, the shoreline joined to the water at every turn. Light filters out of the sky, soft and grainy, touching every grass and woody twig, the undersides of leaves, with the exact form of their separate being. The air is cool and damp. The only motion is the slow drift of clouds off to the southwest. From the doorstep I hear one bird call, a single note rising up from the valley. The screen door creaks, its damp complaint of steel against swollen wood, and the rusted spring tugs inward with a sleepy sound. Behind me the room floats in shadow. Bert turns and sighs, exhaling stale breaths of sleep; I hesitate, then quickly pull on shorts and a t-shirt, and walk out into the dense, salt-laden air.

  Wet grasses touch my legs as I climb the hill. The roses are furled, pouting on their stems, their soft, dark emerald leaves crumpled around them. A cloud of midges swims in the air, doing their atom dance, electrons defining an empty center. Bred out of thin air, they hover in the currents of my breath and my blood’s rich tropical climate; I wave my arm and a vortex of glittering motes swirls after, drawn in the wake of body heat. At the crest of the hill the foredune falls away toward the beach in a slope of long grasses, softly bent, no light or motion in them yet. Ammophilia: “sand lover.” The grass is dotted with little purple flowers of beach pea, and seaside goldenrod, still green and nubby on the stems. The grass, too, is a flower, stalk on stalk of minutest blossoms, seed-sparks clustered at the head.

  Dawn unfolds gradually: first a decomposition of the dark and then a slow reassertion of forms. Day does not break, but unfurls in a steady gesture, opening from within. Clouds on the horizon fume and swell, and now the sun floats up out of the sea, shoots its red rays sideways, and disappears into a bank of clouds. The gulls wheel toward it, crying as if the sun had never been seen before, and all along the foredune the grasses toss and shake the wet from their heads. The world shivers in a membrane of light, cold and tender. A shell blue sky opens above the horizon, holding a piece of moon as thin as skin.

  My appearance at the top of the path seems to have wakened the terns over to the east, who rise up and circle over their nests, flashing white wings and pointy tails, and screeking out dire warnings. Bright chips of white, their black caps making sharp accents, they flash and cry at the waves and the gulls and at each other.

  The wet sand sticks to my feet in clumps, coarse grains giving way in great deep prints. Each grain holds its separate cushion of moisture, each a distinct planet pushed apart by the water’s pressure. An outgoing tide has swept the beach clean, lifting sticks and bottles and shells, and dry, snarled mats of seaweed in its flood. The sand is smooth and untracked, with objects simply laid across its surface, as if placed there by extraterrestrials. A red buoy, a mayonnaise jar, bits of shipwood and fishnet, all lie as if on display. Down at the waterline, pieces of jellyfish dot the sand; pink, purple, lavender, they quiver with a touch, all protoplasm and water. Fish eggs and dead legs of crab. There’s a goose, a flock of anxious sanderlings, and a big black crow picking his way among the rubble like a pharaoh. The body of a great black-backed gull lies up on the berm, his beak stuck straight into the sand bank, looking as if he had just fallen over in mid-step. One clear eye gazes up at the sky and his wings are flung outward slightly, as if to check a fall. A piping plover darts past, sprinting in and out of the tracks, pecking at wrack and seaweed, disappearing against the sand, then popping back into view. Sparrow-sized, the color of dry sand, he looks wonderfully neat and serious. He passes the dead gull without pausing, truly unaware of the presence of death. He runs past me and stops to squat as if on a nest, peeps sweetly in a worried tone, then leaves it and runs again, and squats; he’s leading me away from his brood, he thinks. It’s worth the effort, good for a try; it’s what he knows how to do.

  A lot of the rubbish on the beach this morning has washed off fishing boats. I spot a gobstick lying clean up on the sand—a wooden bat about eighteen inches long the fishermen use to clobber the big fish they heave up on board. It’s heavy, weighted at one end, with a worn leather thong for a handle. I pick it up and swing it at my side as I stride along, liking the feel of its weight, the way it fits my hand. Smooth, well-balanced, meant to swing through the air and come down hard, it has the satisfying feel of something made and useful, a patina of old use smoothing its grain. To club them—a kindness, I suppose. These items of industry are strangely cheering, these lines and nets tangled and looped with seaweed, these painted buoys, even this murder weapon of a bat—they have a reason to be here, a serious intent in the scheme of things. They seem as natural as fish-heads, or the jingle shells sucked out by moon snails, that chatter back and forth at the tide line.

  A truck festooned with fishing poles, buckets dancing off the back, rounds the bend from Race Point and rolls toward me, bouncing in the ruts. It passes beneath the berm, hugging the firm sand at the tide line, heading home at dawn. I turn my head to wave and the driver raises one hand carefully from the wheel. A little blond-haired boy lies sleeping across his chest.

  They would have come out some time after midnight to get the best of the night fishing, and to be here for that hour just before dawn when the fish feed best. When I rolled over, hearing Bert’s slow, heavy breathing, as the tide reached its fullest point, hesitated, and fell back, when I sat up, sensing the darkness breaking up, they were already out. Before dawn and through the morning’s run, while the water simmered steel grey and churned with life, I was just stirring, turning over in my bed, and they stood in the waves and cast and pulled back, the man and the boy beside him.

  It’s getting to be a good time for stripers; every night we see lights of jeeps parked down at the shoreline, and dark figures casting into the shadows. Bluefish have been running since June. Now that the terns and plovers have hatched out, parts of the beach are opened to traffic; there’s a lumbering parade of jeeps and pickups down from Snail Road most every day.

  The fishermen are the most constant visitors here. They come on grey days and at odd hours, following an almanac of tide, currents, and rumor rather than the weather reports dispensed by the Chamber of Commerce. They come at dusk and stand peering into the surf, while the tide presses in and out ahead of them. They stand for hours at the water’s edge, casting, sticking their rods into the sand to wait for a strike, then reeling in to cast again. Even at a distance it is clear what they are after, how they stand up before the whole Atlantic in readiness, in attendance on ordinary wonders, keeping strange hours, and faith in the plain, possible miracle of fish. Their darkening forms grow heavy as night falls, as they stand half in the water in hip boots, there where the world falls off. These are “ordinary men out of the ordinary,” someone once said, released from the narrow, nagging world into a wide and mysterious landscape. In the morning their wheel ruts bruise the sand and their bootprints swell like the tracks of an enormous vanished race.

  They want something, and this makes
them peaceful. They want fish and know their chances, so they wait.

  You stay still and listen, alert for a tug of line or any disturbance in the water, but meanwhile there are the stars, and the sand cooling, and the weird cries the seagulls make just before dawn. You stand watching lights moving slowly offshore, under the great moving lights of the Big Dipper, rotated clockwise around the axis of the north star. Your life is with you and not with you then—you stand in the time of hours, of things like tides, and phases of the moon, but also somehow inside or next to the endlessness of these, knowing in your cells that what the tide perpetually measures is nothing, and you pull in the fish and the sea is still not empty and you are satisfied with it or not, with the water washing over your feet. The fish is alive, you see it for a minute, then it dies and becomes food. This wanting is endless, a kind of elemental greed that keeps replenishing itself like any hunger, taking the world in constantly through its single need.

  More distant, and strangely heroic, are those ones who sail out after the fish, whose lives are spent at sea, dragging offshore or fishing the dangerous ledges of Georges Bank. I see them beyond our window, heading out to sea where they crank up heavy nets in the cold, the water streaming through the mesh that strains with the bodies of fish. They go out by necessity, putting the same question to the sea over and over. Each time, the answer the sea gives is inarguable. I have seen them returning to the town pier in the purple November twilight, off-loading fish with meat-red hands and wool hats pulled low on their foreheads. I see them in the mornings from my window, headed east, and sometimes at night floating out past the bars with a single light hung up on their masts. “Viaha com Deus,” the Portuguese captains say, “Go with God,” as they cast off. Little Natalia, Gale Winds, Liberty Belle, Jimmy Boy, Little Infant, Carla B., Second Effort: the names painted along the bows reach for luck or adventure, or celebrate family, wives, partners. There are Silver Mink, Plymouth Belle, Alwa, North Star, Pauly B. The names are for remembering. I think of the Captain Bill, which went down my first winter here, drowning all hands. How many others before, all wrecked, broken up, their crews lost? Sea full of fish: the sea will feed you, swallow your bones. Still the Charlotte G., Ancora Praia, Pat Sea, Chico and Jess, go out from the pier with full crews. In the nets the bones are hauled in, the dead and the living picked from the moving current, and the decks are piled with silver, glistening bodies, the smell of blood and salt in them, cold, shimmering wet-eyed, bright-scaled, firm-fleshed fishes thumping the decks.