I led him to a little tide pool basin separated from the dark ocean by just a foot or two of jagged stone.
“They collect here at high tide. Even in fall and winter you can come across nice ones if you’re lucky.”
We scanned the pool, its rocky bottom covered with shifting sand. Tiny, black fiddler crabs scuttled in dark corners. A hermit crab climbed among the mussels.
“There!” I said, as the current shifted the sand and revealed something white, pink, and sharp. “Grab it!”
Sam leaned forward and gave a yank. “It’s heavy! I can hardly budge it!”
“Give it a big tug. A real hard pull.”
He did, grunting, and the huge whelk sucked out of the sand.
“Hey! Hey, look at that!” he cried, beaming at the beautiful shell. It was a full foot long, its spiral perfect, the inside a smooth, polished pink.
He handed it to me. “You keep it. You saw it first.”
“You grabbed it, it’s yours.”
“Thanks. That’s really nice.” He looked it over again. A big, goofy grin spread across his face. “It’s the best one I ever got.”
Then his watch beeped. “Oh, shoot. Dinner. I gotta get back.” His face fell. “I don’t want to, but I’ll get in trouble if I don’t. Mom’s been real stressed through all this mess. Can’t say as I blame her.” He clambered down the rocks and back onto the sandy beach.
I felt real bad. I’d just made a new friend and now he had to go home.
“How long you staying at the cove?” I called out. He was already walking away.
Sam turned. “A week. Maybe a little longer. ‘Til after Thanksgiving, at least. We just got in today. Hey,” he took a few steps back, “you wanna meet again tomorrow? Same place?”
“Early in the morning or in the evening as the sun begins to set. That’s when I come down.”
“I’ll be there.”
My heart swelled.
* * *
The next week was terrific. We met every day, usually in the morning and evening, and spent the time walking, skipping stones in the surf (trying to make them go through as many wave crests as possible), and poking around in the hills.
And collecting shells.
I asked Sam about where he lived and he said far inland, in Arizona, and that he didn’t really like his school. And I told him all about my family and the town we used to live in before we moved here full-time. But he never invited me to meet his parents, and I never invited him to meet mine. We were both shy, and besides, for Sam our time was a chance to escape all the family problems and sadness he had to deal with.
The cove was a place where we both felt comfortable and easy. And we found some great shells, too! Over a few days we gathered up a couple dozen good cowries, some beautiful, purple-streaked scallops, and even a conch the size of my fist. Sam found some shark’s teeth, which really thrilled him, and I snagged a handful of ray egg pods, which I took home to dry.
At one point during those long days, Sam turned to me and said, “I think fighting is the dumbest thing ever. People say and do things they regret and can’t ever take back. Take my Uncle Brock. He used to be nice. But he wants some paintings that belonged to my grandfather because he wants to sell them. Mom and Uncle Alex want to keep them in the family. Uncle Brock said they were selfish and always ganged up on him, and then Dad said something, then Mom, then Uncle Alex, and all back and forth until they were screaming and stamping and threatening, and now they’re not talking anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever see Uncle Brock again.”
Sam had never told anyone that, except me. He trusted me. That meant so much, even though I’d only known him a little while. And I understood how he felt.
* * *
The storm struck just two days before Sam had to leave. I should have been glad, but this one hit at a bad time. Sam and I were still out on the beach, skipping stones. The clouds got dark, but we just thought twilight was falling. Then, finally, Sam looked around and whistled. “We better get inside.”
“Oh, we’ll be fine,” I replied.
And then the storm hit.
It was a real bruiser: a cold, hard shower with black, pressing clouds. The whole cove was covered in gloom and shifting light from blue, scattered lightning. Strong, gray waves lashed the shore. A bitter, spray-flecked wind drove us toward the water, but we fought our way back.
Sam shivered, raising his voice to be heard over the thunder. “Is your place close?”
No, I thought. Don’t tell. Not yet.
“You go ahead home, Sam!” I yelled back. “I’ll meet you tomorrow. I’ll be fine!”
“No, I live too far away!” The rain had plastered his hair against his head and his chattering lips were pale. “Is your house nearby?”
I thought a moment. I was shy about my home. But I knew Sam trusted me. The things he’d told me all said so.
“Fine,” I said after a long pause. “Follow me! We’ll ride it out and you can head home later.”
I led him along the beach, farther than I’d gone before with him, then up a thin path into the hills that ringed it. The rain was really hammering down now. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled across the sky.
“Almost there!” I called back to Sam.
We reached the cave: a small, black hole in the side of the hill—all by itself, hard to find, invisible from the shore.
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
I shook my head and pulled him in after me.
It was very dark inside, but the falling day and the lightning provided some light. I shook out my hair and Sam ran a hand through his.
“Where are we, Mattie?” he asked, still breathing hard, water dripping off his nose. “This is a cave.”
“It’s OK,” I said softly. “Come on.”
I led him farther in. He followed slowly, hesitantly, and soon I heard his shoes crunch.
“Careful!”
“What is it?” he asked. “I can’t see.”
“Why, it’s my shell collection, dummy! You’re stepping on it!”
He stopped walking. I could barely see his face. “What is this place? Why are we here?”
“It’s my home,” I said. And before he could speak, I stepped forward and lit a candle. “Here, now you can see all my shells!”
I looked around the long, low space and smiled. It was cold but dry, and for ten feet back into the cave the floor was covered with shells. My shells. My whole collection. Every kind you could imagine. All shapes and sizes. Most of them perfect. They lay two feet deep in some places, piled almost to the ceiling in others.
“Your… your collection is here? Home? Mattie, I don’t understand. I—”
He stopped.
“What’s that smell?” he demanded in a hollow voice.
I winced. “Nothing. I mean… Sam, we’re all here, you see. I would have told you before you left, but the storm kind of rushed things. Still, you trusted me. I know I can trust you, too.”
“Mattie…” Sam’s face was very pale. “In the corner, way back there… what is that?”
I followed his gaze. In the shifting candlelight, in the flashes of lightning, I could make out two dark shapes I knew very well.
“Give me the candle.” Sam yanked it from my hand.
“Wait, Sam, I just—” I tried to hold him back but couldn’t.
He thrashed through my shells, not bothering to be careful, until he stood over the slumped forms. He stared at them for a long, long time.
“Sam?” I said softly. “They’re my parents, Sam. Or used to be. I was so worried what you’d think, I couldn’t tell you…”
Suddenly, almost casually, he turned and threw up. He breathed hard, fast, and wiped his mouth. He stumbled away from the half-rotted bodies and moaned.
/>
“It was my father, Sam,” I told him quietly. “He had a bad time. He’d lost his job. One night he and Mom got to fighting. You know how it is. Anyway, he wasn’t thinking straight. He took us up here, and that’s when I saw the gun. He shot her, Sam. Then he shot himself.”
“No,” he wheezed, eyes wide. He stepped back from me slowly, like a sleepwalker, and tripped over something else.
Sam fell.
Don’t look down, I thought.
He did.
“Dad shot me, too. Right after Mom.”
And then Sam bolted upright, screaming and screaming, his face a white mask of shock. He stumbled past me, crunching shells as he passed. He sobbed, pulled in a harsh breath, screamed again, and ran.
“No!” I said, starting to cry. “Come back! That’s not me, Sam! Not any more! It’s just a shell! Just an empty shell!”
But he was already gone, his shrieks lost in the howl of the wind, and once again I was alone with my collection.
Wood Smoke
“My grandfather tilled this farm,” Benjamin Collins told Blake Riggs, his grandson. “It ain’t proper and it ain’t right.”
“You should buy one of those townhouses they want to build on it. You could, with the amount they’re offering.” Blake was 26, ambitious, with a master’s degree in business management from Penn State. He lived in Pittsburgh, fifty miles away.
Collins looked at him with bemused impatience.
“Offering? Demanding, you mean. And to share all this with a hundred townies, talking into earphones like crazy people, power-walking, with manicured lawns and little, red foreign cars and rat-terrier dogs? No. I won’t do it. Can’t do it.”
“Have to, Grandpa.”
Collins sighed. “Come outside, kid.”
With a hidden smirk, Blake followed him through the kitchen to the back porch. The view of the property was almost complete from this vantage—fallow ground, long untilled, and a great expanse of woodland. Maples, oaks, birches, and spruce pines sighed in a mid-summer breeze.
“See, Grandpa?” said Blake. “What do you need all this for, anyway? It hasn’t been an active, productive farm in twenty-five years, and even then it didn’t bring in much money.”
“Money,” Collins echoed.
“Right. And besides, look at all those trees! You’re the proud owner of a half-assed scrub forest. To sell is the best option. But, hey, it isn’t even an option now, is it? Not the way the town council raised your taxes.”
“When I was a boy,” Collins said quietly, not looking at his grandson, “my daddy used to thin the forest. Lots of trees die in a year, and of course saplings start to grow in the fields. Every autumn, close to Halloween, he and my uncles and my older brothers and me would cut them down and stack them all in great piles and set them on fire. Always around apple-harvest time. The smell…” He closed his eyes. “You know the smell of wood smoke, Blake?”
“I guess,” Blake replied absently. “I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing like it. If you did, you’d not forget. My daddy, he used to smoke cherry tobacco from his corncob pipe while he worked. Always did when he was outside, and farmers are always outside. And on those days when they lit the fires and Mother made hot apple cider and baked pumpkin pies, and all the neighbors came over, I remember sitting here on the back porch, smelling his tobacco and the wood smoke mixing together, and it felt like everything would always be all right and nothing would ever change.”
“That’s sweet, Grandpa, but things do change.”
The faraway look in Collins’ eyes faded. “Anyway, I’ll sell, but they’re letting me keep the old house; that’s the condition if I stop fighting. Isn’t that nice? A stand-up thing to do. Change… yeah, things change. Some things. So it goes.” He passed a hand across his brow, wiping off a sheen of perspiration. “And I’m getting tired, so I think I’ll head upstairs and let you head home. Thanks for coming out and visiting your old ancestor.”
He led Blake to the front door.
* * *
An hour later and three blocks away, the steamed windows of Maggie’s Eat n’ Smile Diner hid the two men in the front booth from the view of anyone walking down Main Street.
“Does he know?”
Blake snorted. “How can he? Anyway, he’s keeping the house, so we’ll have to work around that, but I don’t think he’ll be any more trouble. Not like before, when he went up against the council with that damned petition. He’ll sell. He told me. He can’t afford the tax increase. That’s got him.”
Max Nelson, President of the Still Creek Town Council, beamed. “That works out for all of us, then.”
“He got quite a piece of change from the deal. I’d rather inherit that when the time comes than a useless bit of wilderness.”
“Well, hell, kid, you’re overlooking the best part!”
“What? That my company’s doing the developing?”
They both laughed.
“Here’s to a mean, ornery son-of-a-bitch.”
“Which one? Him or me?”
Glasses clinked. Steaming dinners arrived.
* * *
“I haven’t seen you for upwards of a year.” Collins, a little older, a little slower, appraised his grandson with shrewd but tired eyes.
“Sorry, Grandpa. I’ve been snowed under, that’s all. Lots of work.”
“I figured. Busy man. Plenty to keep up with out there in the city. Thanks for coming.”
Blake nodded. “It was nice you invited me. How’s the view from the back porch now?”
“Come see.”
They stepped through the kitchen door into the crisp autumn air that filtered through the screens.
“There’s your view,” Collins murmured dryly.
The old fields and forest were gone, cut down, bulldozed over. All that remained was a muddy, flat expanse from which the wooden shells of four-dozen townhouses rose like matchstick models in perfect rows.
“Wow, they’re really making progress!” Blake exclaimed, absently rubbing his hands together. “Amazing.”
“Yes, ain’t it though?”
“See? Everything changes, Grandpa. Just like I said. Everything changes, and it isn’t so bad.”
His grandfather clapped him on the back. “Well, you might be right, kiddo. But I gotta be honest. One thing doesn’t change. Not ever.”
“Hmm? What?”
“I’m still a mean, ornery son-of-a-bitch. Always will be.”
Blake blinked, then laughed nervously. “Well, I kind of like you anyway.”
“Why thank you, kiddo.” Collins gave him another good-natured pat and pulled a corncob pipe from his back pocket. He sighed, packing it carefully with tobacco from a bag he produced from his shirt.
“I didn’t know you smoked, Grandpa.”
“This is the very first time since I was a young man. Bought the pipe and tobacco down at Stockton’s just this morning.”
“What’s the occasion?”
Collins patted his pockets. “Where’d I leave my matches? Oh, here we go.” He pulled a box from another pocket, struck a wooden match with his thumbnail, lit the pipe, and inhaled deeply.
The smell of burning cherries filled the air.
“That takes me back,” he said through clenched teeth. “Smells are powerful when it comes to bringing back memories. You have any special smells that bring back memories, kiddo?”
Blake shook his head. “Nope. Can’t say that I do, Grandpa.”
“That’s a hell of a shame. You know,” Collins added abruptly, “Mrs. Gerts down the street is an old friend.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep. I’ve known Myra Gerts for fifty years if a day. Small town, you know. And she tells the best damn stori
es. She hears things, you see, from here and there around town. Especially when she takes her supper at Maggie’s Diner.”
“Oh?” Blake looked distracted. He was squinting hard toward the distant townhouse frames.
“Oh, yeah. And one of those stories—one of her favorites, in fact—is about an uppity young man from Pittsburgh who talks too loud and…Hey, but you look distracted, Blake. Why? It’s a nice autumn day. Falling leaves, cherry tobacco…there’s just one thing missing.”
Blake blinked, took a step forward, stopped, eyes fixed on a spot in the distance. “Is that… is that smoke?”
“Hmmm?”
“Smoke. It… it is! Oh God! It’s… they’re all—”
“Well, would you look at that!” Collins opened the screen door and stepped out onto his back walk. Blake followed, mouth opening and closing like a shocked fish in cold air.
In the distance, flames licked higher as pine boards burned.
“Grandpa! Grandpa, call the fire de—”
The old man smiled. “That’s what was missing, kiddo. Damn, but that’s what it was.”
“What? What?”
“That other smell,” Collins said, removing the pipe from his mouth. “You can’t have one without the other. It just wouldn’t do.”
“Other smell?” Blake had turned a deathly shade of pale.
“Wood smoke,” Collins said, breathing deeply. “Don’t you just love it? When I smell that and cherry tobacco mingling in the cool autumn air, it’s like everything will always be all right and nothing will ever change. Oh, but I guess I told you that before. Here now, breathe deep. You’ll never forget this day.”
Blake ran around the house and into the street, screaming for help.
Collins shook his head, clamping the pipe between his teeth again. Cold, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. One of them found and shook the box of matches.
Half empty, it sounded like a rattlesnake.
The Return
On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home Page 3