The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  “I’m not . . . You don’t know . . . My father was a mailman! I’m not using you!”

  “You brought it up,” he said, eyes flashing. Then he closed them, clenched his fists, and took a deep breath. “Ada’s my great-aunt; did you know that?”

  “Well, the town’s great-aunt.”

  “No,” he said. “Carrie’s and mine. My grandmother’s cousin. Her mother—Emmy Carver—fell in love with the Congregational minister; he knocked her up.”

  “But . . . the boat. They heard the oar. . . .”

  “Oh, Christ, that old story. Pastor Stewart was a very well-educated man. I mean, the guy was used to lying at quite some length every Sunday at eight and eleven. He was the most trusted man in town, and he knew how to make up a good story. He sent Emmy away to work for his brother in Virginia . . . then this baby arrived by ship. His wife must have guessed it—or maybe not. People don’t guess very well about things they don’t want to know. Anyway, she and the pastor raised Ada as their own, and the town saw a saint instead of a sinner. Emmy was broken, of course. She came back a drunk, and spent all those years under the minister’s care.”

  “Ada doesn’t know this?”

  “I’ve seen things cross her face . . . but I’m not sure. Certainly no one’s back is straighter than Ada’s. She’s her father’s daughter—a Yankee all the way.”

  “A bibleface.”

  “What? I never heard that one.” He smiled, and Charlotte remembered that he loved her. She had so much to give him, things he would love.

  “I suppose it’s just another word for a puritan,” she said. “A person who’s uncomfortable being happy, who believes it’s a moral duty to suffer. Except Ada’s very thoughtful, so I guess it doesn’t fit.”

  “She’s no friend to the Stead family. I suppose we embarrass her. She went to Mount Holyoke, you know. It was pretty unusual for a woman back then.”

  “So,” Charlotte said, teasing, “another Stead who got over the bridge and came back with a college degree.”

  “She’d never admit to being a Stead,” he said, laughing. “Not that I really blame her.”

  “Speaking of going over the bridge, what if we did?”

  “Oh, no, no . . .” he said. “Oh, no.”

  “To sell oysters, I mean.”

  “I sell at the market in Chatham. Or the aquaculture consortium . . .”

  “Wholesale.”

  “Yeah, wholesale.”

  “That’s what I mean. I think we should take them to the restaurants. No middleman.”

  “Nah . . .”

  “Why not try it? Why not just try?”

  “Because . . .”

  “Because the last time you took a step out beyond what was expected, you stumbled. But it won’t happen this time; you’ve faced it down. It’s the bravest thing a man can do, if you ask me.”

  A wondering tenderness lit his face. “I guess we could try,” he said.

  31

  OVER THE BRIDGE

  They set off for Boston on the morning of May’s lowest tide. The oysters had been back in the water, south of Try Point now, for three weeks. They would grow slower and taste saltier because there was no spring to mix freshwater into the tide down there; but these had been nearly grown when Darryl set them back out, so they were fat and fresh and sweet. Henry had agreed to get Fiona dressed and off to school, and though he referred to the adventure as a wild-goose chase, he had an admiring gleam in his eye. His wife, who had so often stood still like a supplicant, hoping for his approval, his praise, his love—was becoming her own independent creature. She surprised him; she unnerved him. Even the way she moved had changed.

  That morning, as soon as she heard the trees fill with the sharp whistles and cries, the tick-ticks and hoots and quibbles of the million morning birds, Charlotte pushed the covers back and left the bed in one swift motion, so as not to disturb her husband’s sleep, and went silently down the dark hallway to wash, her feet loving the cool floor.

  Darryl had the red canoe up on the rails of the truck and they drove up Point Road to the highway, crossing Oyster Creek and turning off through a grove of locust trees onto a grassy trail just wide enough for one car, then onto the beach. There was not the slightest breeze; the tide was receding without a ripple so it reflected exactly the pale rose and silver tints of the changing sky. A kingfisher was poised on a dead branch overhead, scanning. One plash: He dived, and came up with a fish clamped in his bill. The stillness felt sacred; Darryl and Charlotte kept silent. He poured coffee out of his thermos and she drank it down. They pulled the canoe behind them across the mud, then floated it out to the claim.

  Charlotte went down the row, opening the pins, with Darryl behind her lifting bags of oysters into the canoe. By the time the sun was up it was nearly full. Darryl slid the closure off one bag, reached in, and took out a big oyster, holding it up to the eastern light. There was a frill of new shell, paper-thin, around the edge. “They’re growing,” he said. “They’re off to a good start.”

  By eight they were out behind his place, not a bit shy as long as they kept working. The new leaves were just unfolding, pale green and deep red like flocks of butterflies all through the woods. Darryl put the power-wash nozzle on the hose and hit the oysters with it until most of the silt and muck was washed off, then began to chisel them apart, prying the small ones carefully off the shells of the larger ones and dropping them into bags to be returned to the water at the next tide. He sang as he worked:Feet up on the dashboard,

  end of another long day.

  Drinking a beer in the church parking lot,

  Waitin’ for Gramma to get out of AA.

  “Gracious, where does that come from?” Charlotte asked.

  “Carrie,” he said. “She was waiting to pick my mother up at the senior meeting; it gets out at six.”

  “I love it!”

  “Yeah, there’s only that one verse, but I do find myself singing it.”

  Charlotte sang too, scrubbing the oysters with a wire brush one by one.

  “They’re not goin’ in a museum, you know,” Darryl told her, but she liked to rub her thumb over each shell and feel how clean it was. In the end he took one bushel and scrubbed it himself in less time than she needed for a dozen. Charlotte hadn’t been able to find a rental truck, so Darryl had lined his truck bed with a tarp and in Orleans they went around back of the rink and took pails full of ice shavings off the pile emptied from the Zamboni, packing it over the oysters, tying another tarp over the whole thing. Up-cape, cherry trees bloomed on the roadside, veiled by wisps of fog. At Charlotte’s feet there were tools in case of car trouble—one of the truck’s front springs was already broken, which magnified every bump they hit, adding to the general effervescence of the day. They were on an adventure together, the sun, by now, was blazing, and a tugboat was passing under the bridge as they crossed over.

  “My heart’s beating like we’re running away,” Charlotte said, laughing, but the minute it came out of her mouth she was sorry. “Not that we are running away, or anything like it,” she said quickly.

  “No.” He watched the road. Everyone passed them; he didn’t dare push the truck past fifty miles an hour. Charlotte had the feeling that if she said, “Turn off on 495 and go north,” he would, and drive until nightfall, and they’d check in at whatever motel was nearest and have all they wanted of each other finally, and the next day wake up to a truck of oysters rotting in the sun.

  “In fact,” he said, “there’s something I need to tell you. I . . . well, do you remember Nikki?”

  “Nikki Miles? Whose brother got hurt in the war?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. You met her at the Wharf Grill with me last fall.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, we’re . . . you know . . . going out. He’s younger, her brother; I knew him when he was little, so I’ve been going over to visit. I put in some handrails for him; he’s not very steady on his feet right now. She’s all alone with him; h
e has his veteran’s benefits and nothing much else, and he has a grant out near Egg Island. She’s been trying to manage it herself but it’s pretty tough.”

  “That’s nice,” Charlotte said, frozen, stunned. This dream they’d created and kept aloft like a soap bubble between them—it was so fragile they’d barely dared touch it. And now he just popped it, without a thought? “That’s very nice of you.”

  “Nice for me,” he said.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Charlotte . . .”

  “Don’t say anything. You don’t need to, really. . . .”

  “I know,” he said quietly. “You’ve always understood.”

  She nodded. “I thought . . . I thought we’d get the oyster business thriving, and you’d get your general contractor’s license, and I could write for the Oracle, and together we’d . . .”

  “Wreck each other’s lives,” he finished.

  “Or save them,” she said.

  “What about Fiona?” Darryl asked. “What would you have told her?” Past tense, aha. But past tense meant there was nothing to lose; they could talk.

  “Honestly, Fiona started it! You watched her the way I did; when she did something funny or surprising, you noticed. You smiled over her little head at me. While Henry was reading the goddamned Well Wrought Urn.”

  “But he’s her father.”

  “I’m not saying we ought to get married today,” Charlotte said. “I’m not saying . . . anything . . . except, we like each other; I’d have liked it if we could have gotten to know each other.” How reasonable this sounded, as if finally she had spoken a truth.

  “Get to know each other!” he said. “I feel like I’ve swallowed a hook and every time you move it rips my guts.”

  They suffered one of those moments of knowing, and, turning to each other, nearly forgot everything else. The truck swerved; Darryl pulled it back too hard and it veered into the other lane, within inches of an Audi whose driver honked in outrage and made such a point of glaring that he nearly rear-ended the car in front of him.

  “Do you know how many cars I wrecked, in the old days?” Darryl said, when the rush of fear had subsided and they could think again. “Six. Two of them were stolen. Once, I thought I saw some evil force coming at me, and I swerved off the road and went over an embankment onto a school playground. As it happened, it was a Sunday. Otherwise . . . you can imagine. Of the guys I was with in the halfway house, two died of AIDS, one OD’d, three are using again, and then there was Dev. His wife left; he couldn’t bear it. One bad moment and you lose all you’ve gained, and more. I can’t take another chance; I can’t.”

  “Here, left lane, Route 93. So, what happened to Nikki’s brother?” she asked. “What’s his name? And how is he?”

  “His name’s Bart. His transport hit a land mine. . . . He was thrown from the vehicle, as they say. He’s okay, he can walk, and sometimes he makes perfect sense. . . . His short-term memory is shot, though, and he has these hallucinations. . . . He can see light and dark; sometimes he can make out shapes. . . . They say physical therapy can help clear his vision somehow, but we’ll see. It’s hard on her. Her friends have been taking shifts with him, and there’s the VNA nurse once a week, but it takes its toll. She’s smoking too much and she’s lost so much weight her wet suit’s fallin’ off her.”

  “Not good,” Charlotte said. They were bumping along the South-east Expressway while SUVs, eighteen-wheelers, even school buses zipped around them. Their first stops were in the South End—newly chic, with lots of little restaurants. Charlotte had been poring over menus all week, figuring out which places were pleased to be offering cheese from local farms and fish from the Gloucester pier. Full of excitement, imagining they were starting a business together, reminding herself it was no such thing.

  “He’s a big guy,” Darryl said, “and when he loses his balance . . . it’s tough.”

  “It’s lucky you’re there,” Charlotte said blankly. “Here, Melnea Cass Boulevard, that’s our turn.”

  The first place said they got all their oysters from Oregon. “Now, that’s ridiculous,” Charlotte said as they walked back to the truck, double-parked at a fire hydrant. It would have taken a speedy meter maid to catch them, though—their visit had been half a minute long. At the second place they had to park on the sidewalk, and the cook, who spoke no English, shooed them away on the assumption they were beggars. The third place felt just right: It was called the Sea Grill; there was a parking spot open right in front, and an awning over the sidewalk, as if it were Paris. Boston was farther into spring than Wellfleet; the maple leaves on the new little tree planted in front were fully open. Two young women sipped cappuccino at an outdoor table. In Wellfleet you could spend the morning watching a rabbit choose which blades of grass to nibble. Charlotte had forgotten the cheerful energy of cities: all the different people heading briskly toward their different aspirations. If you didn’t keep your eye on your goal you’d be lost.

  “Oysters, farm-fresh from Wellfleet,” she said to the owner, who was lodged at a table in the dark back of the restaurant, poking at a calculator. “It’s kind of the ultimate in local food.” The man looked up; Charlotte discerned, amid the hair raging from his open shirt, the glint of a gold chain. She swallowed. “They take three years from seed to the final product, and every minute they’re tended by hand.”

  “You sound like a telemarketer,” the owner said.

  “Well, it’s something I’m proud of,” she said, defensive. “Would you like to try one?”

  “I’m getting a great deal on oysters,” the owner said. “Up from Florida, they grow faster there; they’re priced day-to-day.”

  “But . . .” She had exhausted the man’s patience.

  “I’m in business to make money,” he said. “That’s what we’re all here for.”

  And they had a parking ticket. “What the hell?” Apparently there was no parking on alternate Thursdays, and this was an alternate Thursday . . . last Thursday would have been okay.

  “It’s been worth it,” Darryl said, pulling back into the traffic. “We shouldn’t see it as a failure. We’ve learned a lot—if nothing else, we’re discovering that wholesale isn’t such a bad deal.”

  “You mean you’re going home, after three places?”

  “Charlotte . . .”

  “No. Darryl, you put in twelve-hour days, between the building and the oysters, all the time. You don’t just try three times and give up.”

  “That’s different. We’re on a wild-goose chase here; he just explained it.”

  Charlotte remembered how Henry had called it a wild-goose chase, wry and tender, acknowledging that all life is a brave quest in a wrong direction. No one had chased his own personal wild goose more fiercely than Henry. Charlotte’s throat tightened; she looked hard out the window.

  “Yeah, he sure told us what big fools we are. I hate being told something I already know. We can’t stop at three; we’ll regret it forever. We’ve got something wonderful to sell here; we only have to find one person who recognizes that. I’ve got nine more places on the list. If none of them works out, we can give up and go home. Okay?”

  North Wind wasn’t on the list. It was halfway through its transformation from corner bar and sandwich joint to bistro, and Charlotte and Darryl were walking past, carrying the cooler of oysters between them, when Charlotte put her face to the window and saw the big wooden booths around the sides and the menu on a chalkboard—meaning it could change according to what was fresh that day. When they asked to speak to the manager, the waitress sent them around back and they found themselves in a tiny, dark kitchen where a man was sautéing mussels over a leaping flame.

  “Mr. McConnell?”

  “One second,” he said, holding up a finger, sliding the mussels into a bowl. “Now, what’s this? Wellfleet oysters?”

  He was the first person to say he’d try one. Darryl opened one for him, then another.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at
all.”

  “Fresh this morning,” Darryl said, so simply, as a point of fact, with none of a salesman’s bravado, that Charlotte saw trust begin to grow between the men.

  “And how many . . . ?” McConnell asked.

  “About a hundred in the cooler here. I’ve got eight bushels back in the truck.”

  “Let me talk to my partner.” He looked over at an older man who was garnishing a tray of chocolate mousse on the other side of the room. “Why don’t you wait in the barroom. Pretty quiet in there this time of day. Have whatever you like.”

  The bar was old Boston, old Irish, old, tenement South End. Henry would have loved it. Like all good bars it was a manly home, a place where men drank and talked together, feeling truly close to one another in some absolutely solitary way.

  Darryl’s hands shook; he looked as if he were whistling through a graveyard.

  “Long time since I’ve been in a bar,” he said.

  “It’s nice here,” Charlotte said. “It’s fine. Look at the jukebox. Look at all this old stuff. . . . God, was there really a time before Fiona?”

  “A time before September eleventh. . . .”

  “Where were you on 9/11?” she asked.

  “Just moved back here. It was a good dry day; we were shingling. By the next day everyone else was flying an American flag on the back of his truck, and I was afraid they were going to lynch me when I said I didn’t think we should go to war. What about you?”

  “Nursing Fiona . . . at that exact moment. Then it was so loud . . . and then it was so quiet.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You lived in New York.”

  “I kept thinking the Trade Center would fall like a tree, and the fire would spread like in an earthquake, so I wrapped Fiona up and I just started walking away. People were running, but I had this sense that I had to walk, because I had the baby. . . . I kept my head down, like a horse in blinders. . . . I wasn’t even thinking really, just following instinct—Guard the baby, guard the baby.”