by Jeffrey Lent
Mid-September one weekday morning with the hardwood leaves up near the peaks already changing he walked into the office of the Sinclair and found centered on his desk blotter a penny postcard with a lighthouse scene, beachgrass on dunes, the sea with a smudge of breakers. On the back her scrawled handwriting without break or punctuation: If you want to come see me Id like that. Below she’d penned a box with an address in it. He dropped the postcard back on the desk and went to the office door and locked it. Took up the card and studied it again. His hands quivering. Tore the card in two and then those halves in two again and on until it was bits that he let fall from his fingers into the empty wastebasket under the desk. He took up his cap from the desktop and turned for the door without a clear plan but to leave, get outside, drive somewhere. Then turned back and knelt on the floor and took out the bits and pieced them together and still kneeling copied the address onto a sheet of hotel stationery. Folded that and put it in his inside jacket pocket. Took up the bits of postcard and carried them out through the bar to where a fire burned in the hearth and scattered them onto the flames, ignoring the handful of guests seated there. Went down the main hall and out the front doors and walked around the building to where his motorcar was parked, going the long way rather than back through the bowels of the building, avoiding anyone he knew. Anybody that worked for him would know about that postcard. If you want to come see me. He couldn’t trust his hands, not on her or anyone else. If she’d turned the corner in front of him he couldn’t have said what he’d do to her.
What he’d imagined, when he allowed it or when he couldn’t help it, was her showing up unannounced and unexpected. Maybe walking into the Sinclair one night off the late train. Or even come whistling down the track to the house some morning, scuffing her feet in the sand, that cheap valise banging against her side, her hair down over her face, her eyes glinting onto him, her mouth set firm against the smile wanting freedom there. But that If you want to come see me Id like that was a rock lobbed hard out of the sky, from behind a tree he’d already passed, from a hand unseen. Striking the back of his head.
He cranked the Ford and drove out along the main street without plan or intention but found himself turning off beyond Mount Agassiz to circle the long rough backroad around the broad shoulder of mountain that escarped the land between Bethlehem and Franconia, passing the small farms and then into the long stretch of woodlands until coming again to the small meadow where the night back in the summer when she hadn’t left yet but he’d known she was going to, he’d come drinking and fallen asleep. That looked out onto Mount Lafayette. Now with a thin cap of snow on the stone-rubble summit. The snow beautiful in the heat of the early fall day. He parked in the meadow, now grown up, not be to mown again until the next summer. Browse for overwintering deer. He didn’t get out of the car. Left it running.
It seemed a short time he was there although he felt the sun pass over him and watched as from a distance the small shadows pass from right to left. At one point he beat his hands upon the steering wheel, the fists popping up and right back down but it was only after a time doing this that he felt the pain slip up his arms into his back and from there his neck into his head, where it resounded. The bitch of nerve. What she gave him. Someplace where he must step. He knew it when he saw the postcard on the desk. How many ways may a man despise himself. Most all, he guessed. Maybe even—and here he’d quit beating the wheel and held his wounded hands in fists to his mouth—ways never guessed at. Ways not known until presented. The return address. What the fuck was she doing in Massachusetts? He gave credit—she knew how to write a postcard.
When he finally put the Ford into gear and drove a wide circle around the meadow back onto the road to return the way he’d traveled he saw the snow was gone off the mountain. Couldn’t have been much of a snow. It was afternoon. He guessed he’d run out of gas before he got back to town. He thought the walk might do him good.
What he remembered of his mother was hearing his father come into the kitchen and running in from the front parlor to see his father standing by the stove holding his mother in his arms, her head lolled down and turned back, her face swollen, the bruised purple-black of a blackberry. Then his father seeing him and his voice booming, fractured and frightened at once, yelling at Jamie, Get out of here, get out of here. And Jamie just standing, staring without words at the face of his mother. Then he did not remember what happened. If he fled. If one of his sisters came in and took him out. Or something else altogether. He did not remember. And he could not call up her face any other way. There were tingling fragments of memory: where she was a presence, a smell, a view of some piece of clothing in motion. He remembered her holding him but could not recall her hands. He could remember her reading stories to him but not the sound of her voice. When he dreamed of her she was monstrous, frightening, most often angry at him for something he had done or not done but even when he woke from those dreams it was not as if he had seen her, the way he felt when waking from dreams of Joey but more as if he’d been in another country, some other place that never was. But once out of the dream there was no lingering sense of the real. Except the feeling that she was not happy with him. Only that remained.
He rode the slow night train to Portland. He watched himself in the windowglass. Another man would have cast her off, crumpled the postcard and discarded it and excused her from himself as a few good years with some fun there, in his youth, and gone on ahead and perhaps have found another woman or not but have lived with himself in some measure of totality. Have held a line of pride and self. Even have held out so long and then with the postcard cursed her for the impudence of it and let her go. But he felt he knew her. And that card was no impudence, implied nothing beyond what he could do if he wanted. And he was on the train. With a through ticket and twenty-five dollars in his trouser pocket and his wallet pinned inside his jacket with twelve hundred dollars cash money. Because he knew he needed it but didn’t yet know why. In Portland rode an express through to Boston and did not believe he slept—his brain too boiled for sleep—but long patches of time swept away as he gazed into himself again in the windowglass and at some point the land began to spread around the train in a ghost of dawn as he came into Boston.
At the station he began to understand why he’d brought so much money with him. He held a misunderstood conversation with an old man behind the ticket grate. Finally ended up with a local ticket to Plymouth and a two-bit map of Cape Cod. His eyes burned and his body was stiff and he felt off-tilt, precarious, and could not afford appearing what he was, a countryman lost and not knowing how things worked, even something as simple as transportation. He did not want to put himself in another’s hands. It was as simple as that. He would not ask directions. He felt he should be able to go anywhere and know what to do and how to do it. People fled left and right and back and forth around him and he felt little more than a huge bruised knuckle they must walk around. He knew this was himself and not them but he could not change it. And would not give in to it. Whatever he found where he was going he was determined not to wash up there like something haphazard and helpless.
And so he got off the train in Plymouth raw and confident and walked three blocks and unpinned the wallet from his jacket pocket to count out eight hundred dollars for a new Ford ready to drive away and thought if it turned out to be an extravagance then the entire trip would be so. The man he bought the motorcar from had a livery and forge and was reserved and delighted with the paper money. And so Jamie felt easy asking again, this much closer, about Truro.
“Truro,” the man repeated, just correcting pronunciation. “Well, now, you’re driving up to there you’ll need to let some air from the tires. Them roads all turn to sand.”
“For cash money,” Jamie said, “I guess the tank’s full.”
“It’ll be full, you pull to the front.”
“A sandy road, that’s hard to travel.”
“You let them tires slop down some, they’ll be fine.”
“Thing is,” Jamie said, “I got to be there by noon.”
The man nodded understanding. He said, “You pull around to gas it, I’ll deflate em down just right. You’ll be good then.”
Jamie glanced off at the sky. “It’s a pretty day, idn’t it?”
It took until the middle of the afternoon to make Truro. The last hour and a half on boggy sand roads that was not like driving in mud or snow but more like dreams of running with heavy limbs, the car wallowing steadily forward. It was not bad driving once he got used to the idea that the conditions would remain constant but it was slow. The air was warm over him and heavy with the reek of the ocean and the salt ponds and the bay. The lower cape was a discernible landscape of small villages and farms but once the road turned north onto the long narrow neck of land he felt the disorientation of the unfamiliar. And he was fatigued. The houses were low-slung with long roofs and he imagined winter storm winds passing over them as if they were not there. He passed a man mowing with a scythe in a meadow that Jamie would not have taken to be fodder of any kind, a tall rough spare grass. From time to time on one side or the other the slight sand hills fell away or opened up between for glimpses of water—little more than a pale gray smudge out to the distance where he could not tell where the sea ended and the hazed sky began. He felt peculiar, out of place. Not without excitement. People looked at him as he passed. There was little other traffic and only one other automobile, coming south. He passed a cart drawn by oxen, an old man walking slow as the cart carrying a long goad. The cart heaped with nets, rust red buoys like bullets. He hadn’t seen oxen since Randolph.
Truro was a scatter of houses. Picket fences with sand blown through like the teeth of a comb. Some scabby late-season roses. From the postcard he half expected a lighthouse but didn’t see one. There was a single mercantile flying a flag and a post office shingle hung under the eaves. He parked before it and went in. It was dark after the light of day. A woman with gray hair drawn back tight and wearing a cable-knit sweater sat behind the counter and she did not greet him when he entered but watched him. One end of the counter had a couple dozen pigeon holes for mail and there was a brass-fitted slot for letters. He prowled the short aisles. He took up a tin of sardines and a handful of crackers and a package of Sen-Sen to clear his breath and laid them on the counter and then asked what he had to.
“I’m looking for a place called High Tide. A house I guess.”
Her eyes rested on him. She wet her lips and said, “That would be the Sloane cottage.”
He nodded. “I guess that would be right.”
She waited then, not as if she mistrusted his intentions or doubted he should know of the place and not even as if she were making some judgment otherwise. She just made him wait. Then told him where to go and what to look for. And he thanked her and gathered up his foodstuffs and went out the door. That moment he would have beaten Sloane the sportsman to a savage death with the crank off the front of his preposterous new car if he had appeared.
He drove to where she’d told him and parked when the sand began to bog around the tires. He sat in the car and ate the food. He wished he’d bought something to drink. He got out of the car and scrubbed the fish-oil from his hands with sand. Brushed the front of his vest free of cracker crumbs. Opened the Sen-Sen and chewed one. Ran his hand through his hair, thick with the salt air. His face seemed to have a layer over it. He lighted a cigarette with the match cupped against the wind and then went forward, walking up through the sand toward the gap in the dunes before him. Seagrass hanging from the dune tops either side of him. Then was up on top.
It was nothing like the postcard. The beach was broad to the water and stretched either side of him to nothing. The ocean was a miracle—such mass that he immediately saw it and allowed it but could not comprehend what he saw. The breakers three or four long lines of upturned white never stopping and never the same as if a tangible upthrust fist from what made them. The air and wind now over him as if to hold him in place.
He went down to the packed sand of high tide and walked the way he’d been told and watched up the dunes to the occasional house for one to meet the description but mostly he watched the water. The waves exhausted ran up in flanges like the small shorebirds that raced ahead of the water. The sun poured over him, diffuse and not immediate like in the mountains but as if from a great distance. There was no one else on the beach. Out in the water, what he decided was a short distance, was a boat working, short and stub-nosed. Far out he saw a bigger boat. Against the horizon. A ship he realized. It was warm, more like midsummer than mid-September. Then he turned back to look at the dunes and saw the house described to him.
She was up on the screened porch seated crosslegged on a daybed and even with the warmth of the day the air moving on the shaded porch was cool and so she sat with a quilt wrapped loose around her, down off her shoulders but over her lap. Her hair was gathered behind her, heavy and coarse with salt. There was a hogshead cistern on a trestle behind the house to gather rainwater off the eaves but otherwise no fresh water and she swam daily in the ocean but barring this left herself be. The hair that escaped the binding ribbon and sprang out in coils around her face was of a different density than she’d ever known and she liked it. There was no one to see her anyway. When she walked to the mercantile in Truro on off days the old woman there took no notice of her, and whatever she might think was not Joey’s concern.
She saw him when he was still far up the beach. Too far at first to be more than a figure she nonetheless knew was him. And only when she saw him did she allow herself to know how much she’d counted on his coming, as if the days spent walking the beach or sitting in the dunes or here on the porch or her solitary evening swims had consisted of something else, had been that time spent thinking things through that she had claimed to need. And now him walking so slow down the beach toward her, she knew this was what she’d been waiting for even before mailing the postcard. And for a moment wished he’d not come so soon. To sustain somewhat longer those days now behind her of walking and sitting and waiting. To continue those evening swims in the dusk when the land and sea and sky merged and she would swim out in the water still warm with summer. A woman alone at the edge of the world. And Jamie now coming. And whatever he came with and whatever he went away with, even if she were left here still, that other time before he came was ended.
Watching him now peering up at the house she knew she had wronged him. She felt ready for whatever that meant. She could take nothing away from what had happened and would promise little but honesty. It was a slim straw and she tried not to attach overmuch importance to the simple fact of his being there. And within all of this she felt calm. Whatever happened it would be worth it to feel this way.
He went up through the trodden declivity in the dunes and could see now the dim figure of her within the porch. His stomach roiled and he had another Sen-Sen and wondered if the sardines had been bad. It was improbable his being here and yet he could not imagine not being here. The sun was low over his left shoulder and the front of the house was lighted and he walked up to it feeling he’d made a grave error coming directly here, that he should have come down and stopped the night somewhere first. He felt rough-limbed and awkward, as if he lacked the language spoken here. He went up the two steps and opened the screen door and stepped in. Joey looking at him wide-eyed. At first he was not sure it was her—this was not only her absolute presence but the fragility of himself before her.
And then thought she looked frightened and he grinned at her. And said, “It’s nothing like I pictured Rhode Island to be.”
“No,” she agreed. “I didn’t end up where I thought I would.”
He nodded. “That took less time than I’d thought.” And knew this to be cruel but could not help himself. He went on. “It’s not bad though. Pretty. Be cold come winter I’d guess. This place’s not built for winter, seems to me. And lonely too. But maybe he comes up here weekends to see you.”
“You
have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Start off that way. With what you think you know.”
“It wasn’t me that ran off.”
“I didn’t run off.”
He tossed up his head. “You didn’t? What do you call it then, what you did?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I went off a little bit. Something.”
He nodded. “Sure. And you’re better now. And want to come home.”
“I don’t know what I want. You acting this way is helping me sort things out.”
“Me? It wasn’t me sent that postcard.”
She was quiet a moment. He was swaying. Then he realized she was not going to say it, not point out his presence; that she was trying to stop all this. After a pause she entreated. “Jamie.”
He looked away from her. Through the door into the house he saw a plain pine table with a brass hurricane lamp on it and behind that a rough-mortared fireplace of round seastone with a stack of driftwood for burning to one side of it. He looked back at her. “You have anything to drink? I bought some lunch but didn’t get anything to drink. I’m about dried out.”
She stood, stepping off the daybed and out of the quilt at once. She was wearing a white dress tight across her breasts and to her waist where it opened then in loose folds to her ankles. A little short for daytime, he thought but this was the beach. And there wasn’t anybody else there. Right then, he reminded himself. She said, “There’s some bottles of beer but no ice. The ice wagon only comes along the beach summers. And I didn’t have a way to carry any out here. You’re overdressed to be walking on the beach anyway.” And turned then without touching him and entered the house and glanced back at him and he followed her.
“What I’d like is a drink of water. And I didn’t know I’d be hiking on a beach when I got dressed to come down here.” He said this to her back, the sprigs of hair showing at her nape beneath the bundled mass of the rest of it. He wanted to put his nose there. He wouldn’t reach for her, the familiar stranger.