The House on Oyster Creek Page 7

  “I don’t disagree,” he said. “I’ve got oysters out there, and everything you do here affects them. The seawalls change the tidal flow; it’s bad for my herd, for everyone’s. But it’s gonna happen one way or another, and I need the work.”

  “Your ‘herd’?”

  “Of oysters . . .”

  “Do they stampede at all?”

  He smiled—this wasn’t the first time he’d heard that joke. “They’re pretty sedate.”

  “Phew. Glad to hear it. We sold them this land,” she admitted suddenly. His apology at SixMart had been contagious somehow; she wanted to return it.

  “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do,” he said, rushing to exonerate her. The smallest act of generosity, of awareness. It felt as good as the spring air. “Believe me, if I owned this place . . .”

  He stopped. No stepping into that morass. He lived back in the Driftwood Cabins like half the rest of the town. If you hadn’t already owned a place before the buying frenzy in the mid- nineties, you were out of luck now. And there was no such thing as a year-round rental, not when a landlord could make more by the week in tourist season than by the month the rest of the year. Wellfleet was owned by wealthy city people . . . people like Charlotte. Locals—fishermen, carpenters, cooks, waiters, chambermaids—lived on the leftovers. And were proud of it. You had to be proud; otherwise you’d have to be ashamed. Some flicker of this showed on Darryl’s face and Charlotte rushed in:

  “In some ways you’re more of an owner than I am,” she said. “You work here every day.” This attitude, like so many things, she had learned from Henry.

  An involuntary smile spread over his face. “I do know it, very well.”

  “Maybe you’ll show us the oysters—your herd?—sometime?” Charlotte said.

  “My pleasure.”

  Fiona was sitting bolt upright on Charlotte’s hip, watching as if she’d like to take notes. “Maybe you’d like a ride on the bulldozer?” Darryl asked.

  She stiffened. “No!”

  “Okay, I promise. No bulldozer rides. But I’ve got to take one myself now, get this done. The tide’s going out and my herd needs me.” He grabbed his water bottle from the cab and drank it down. Charlotte had rarely felt so physically aware of a man—in the city they all had the same muscles, created by the same gym equipment, but Darryl’s had been made by work. His joints were huge; she could see the tendons glide over the bones—she had a guilty wish to see an X- ray of his shoulder. Still, he moved so quickly, he was back in the driver’s seat before she could say a word.

  Wait a sec, she mouthed to him over Fiona’s head, and he nodded, waiting to start the bulldozer until they were back safely in the house. Fiona ran to the window to watch him drive away.

  “Mom, we made a new friend!” she said.

  “In New York, you’d have to get used to a new building that blocked off your whole view. A seawall, really it’s rocks where there used to be grass,” Charlotte said. She’d been addressing Henry, but he was buried in the Times, so she found herself talking to Fiona, who listened greedily, if without understanding. “It feels kind of suburban, that’s what’s sad, when what I love here is how wild it is. And the way the high tide slaps against it—it sounds so . . . contained. But we still have waves right out front, so we can’t really complain.”

  A gleaming black pickup drove into the driveway, one she recognized from the nightly procession to the flats, though she didn’t know the men who jumped out. She went to the door, figuring they were about to knock, but no, they had shovels—they were uprooting the lilacs.

  “Wait, wait! Sir! Excuse me?” Charlotte ran out to them, but neither looked up. They were working energetically, angrily even, as if they knew they were making trouble and were glad to do it.

  “Excuse me,” she said again, sounding imperious by now, but at least that made them stop. The older one was wearing an eye patch, something she had never before seen in real life.

  “What?” He took instant offense.

  “Why are you digging up my lilacs?”

  “Putting a fence here.”

  “What? Who? Are you working for the Narvilles?”

  “Yup,” he said, insolent—as if to say, And there’s nothing you can do about it.

  “Well, I don’t believe these bushes belong to the Narvilles.”

  “He hired me to take ’em out.”

  “I think there’s a misunderstanding,” she said. “Not sure, but I guess we’d better slow down a minute and see what’s what exactly.”

  The landscaper sliced his spade into the ground. “I’m hired to do this today,” he said.

  “Do I have to call the police?”

  The guy shrugged and continued his work, daring her.

  Charlotte called Skip Godwin, who said she could call the surveyor, but from what he understood the property line ran about three feet east of their driveway. Straddled by the lilacs.

  “I didn’t think,” Charlotte said to Henry. “I didn’t imagine. . . . Why would anyone take out a whole stand of lilacs, right in full bloom?”

  “Didn’t think,” Henry echoed, giving her a significant look over the top of his glasses. His madcow-birdflu-globalwarming-Bush-administration look: Things go wrong, they always do, and if they had stayed in New York, they, and the lilacs, would have been kept from such harm.

  “I guess it’s better not to fight it?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  She went back out. “You were right,” she said, as graciously as she could manage. “I’m just wondering, do you have any plans for those bushes? Because I could probably replant them.” Not that she had ever planted anything larger than a pot of basil.

  “Using ’em on another job,” he said, pleased to disappoint her. “Part of the deal.”

  The next day he came back and sank posts, and soon there was a white board fence, six feet tall, topped at intervals with carriage lamps. Charlotte stayed in the house, noticing from the window that his bumper sticker read, DON’T HASSLE ME, I’M A LOCAL.

  “To put up a fence before you build the house, what do you suppose that means?” she asked Henry.

  “Nothing very deep,” Henry said.

  “I don’t think the Narvilles realize what they’re doing,” Charlotte said. “They’ve barely ever been here. I’m afraid they’re not going to like it when they see how . . . out of place . . . it all looks.”

  “They don’t care how it looks to you,” he said. “It’s their fence.”

  “It’s cutting off the whole east side of the view.”

  “Look west.”

  “Well, I’m going to call them. Just . . . to get to know them a little.”

  She dialed in a righteous fury, and got Mrs. Narville—Andrea, or On-dray-uh.

  “Oh, you’re our neighbors up there,” Andrea said, without enthusiasm. “Are you there right now?” she asked.

  “Um, yes.”

  “Wow, how early do you usually go?”

  “I . . . I guess I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  “It’s kind of empty out there now, isn’t it? Do you always go out before Memorial Day?”

  “We just . . . live here,” Charlotte said.

  “Oh, wow.” Andrea’s voice was slow and husky, with a Southern accent but almost no inflection, so that a sentence like, “Oh, wow,” took on a satirical cast. “Aren’t you lucky. You don’t go crazy in the winters?”

  “Well, we haven’t been through a winter yet.” Charlotte laughed. “I guess we’ll see.”

  “There’s something I’d been wondering,” Andrea said. “Where do you get your hair done? I mean, where are the high-end salons there, the salon-spa-type places? Is there a good one in Wellfleet, or do you have to go out of town?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I’ll try to find out for you.”

  “Thanks, honey, that’s really good of you.”

  “Listen, Andrea, the reason I called is, they just put up your fence here, and . . . I’m no
t sure it’s really what you want.”

  “Why, what’s the matter? It’s supposed to be the same as the one we have here at home.”

  “Well, maybe that’s the thing. It’s very wild out here and the fence feels more . . . like something that belongs somewhere else. It’s so high, it’s like . . . well, it felt as if everything was wide-open and natural out here, and now the seawall, and the fence, and . . .”

  “You know, honey, Jeb deals with all those things. Honestly I don’t even know what he ordered for fencing. Why don’t you call back later, okay?”

  She did, and got the machine, and when Jeb finally answered, the next evening, she realized her mistake.

  “Good fences make good neighbors!” Jeb said. “Robert Frost, right?”

  “He quoted that to debunk it,” she said in a small voice.

  “I’m not really a literary type,” he answered, “but I’d guess you’d need to ask Mr. Frost to get the lowdown on that.”

  “It’s six feet tall,” Charlotte said. “Six-foot-one is a spite fence.”

  “A spite fence? I’ve never heard that term. I’d call it a privacy fence.”

  “But . . . there’s nobody out here. It’s private with or without a fence.” Charlotte had taken down the kitchen curtains, intending to replace them, until she realized they were unnecessary. No one could look in the windows unless they were on a boat in the bay. “And they dug up those lilac bushes; they were eight feet high at least.”

  “Flowers. Another of my weak points, I’m afraid. Did you mind the lilacs, since they were so much taller?”

  “Well, no . . .”

  “And the fence is on my side of the property line?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sure you know more about poetry and lilacs than I do, Mrs. Tradescome, but I feel pretty comfortable on the topic of real estate, and as far as my understanding goes, what I do with my property is my own business. Is there something I’m missing?”

  “No.” The tide was ebbing. The first of the oyster trucks jounced over the path toward the water, which was crosshatched with neon pinks and oranges, reflecting the sky.

  “End of conversation, then, eh?” he said, genial. “Unless you’d like to get back on with Andrea.”

  “No thanks, just give her my best.”

  “I certainly will.”

  The fence blocked their view of the road from the driveway, but who ever came down this road, except the occasional curious tourist, and the oystermen at low tide? Then Charlotte took Fiona for an after-dinner ice-cream cone and turned onto Point Road into the path of an oncoming truck. She braked hard, he braked hard, and they stopped sideways, inches apart. Fiona was in the back, in the car seat, and Charlotte saw her in the rearview mirror; her dark eyes were wide and watchful, but not frightened, not as long as she was with her mom.

  The driver of the truck—eye-patch guy—leaped out and came toward Charlotte as if to pull her out of her seat through the window.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing . . . ?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. He’d been on the wrong side of the road, but this was no time to argue the fine points. “I’m so sorry.”

  He clenched his fists. His arms were immense, and tattooed over every inch with an aquarium’s worth of sea creatures, each drawn with such precision they could have illustrated a textbook. This is the kind of thing you notice, Charlotte thought, when you’re about to be strangled . She watched for a long second as he wavered between reining in his anger and just killing her.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. Because he was, which meant he had no excuse to hurt her. He looked down at her with a loathing that seemed to grow until he decided finally that she was not worthy of a beating. Another truck was coming along behind him, and he went back to his, spitting: “Look both ways,” over his shoulder.

  “Mom, was that a pirate?”

  Charlotte laughed, though she was trembling all over. “He’d have made a good pirate, wouldn’t he?” she said, as lightly as she could.

  The next truck was Darryl’s patchwork one, with ladder rails made of two-by-fours. He turned down the driveway beside her and rolled his window down.

  “Was that Tim?”

  “Is that his name? I thought he was going to kill me.” The trembling seized her now that she wasn’t alone.

  Darryl reached out to her, then pulled his hand instinctively back.

  “Tim is . . . he’s had his troubles.”

  “Were any of them murders?”

  “No.” He laughed. “He’s a good guy, really. You should see his claim—his oyster claim, you know—no one else is so scrupulous about it. He had a couple of animals with QPX—that’s a parasite—last year, and he dug the whole thing out, every last ounce of sand, all the seed clams, trucked it all out of here—way beyond any requirements; it was painful to see it. He’s driven, he’s a perfectionist, he’s got an anger problem, but really, he means well. . . .”

  “Convinced yourself yet?”

  He smiled and sighed. “He’s my brother- in-law,” he admitted. “I’ve gotta keep on his good side.”

  “What’s with the eye patch?”

  “Oh.” Darryl winced. “Fishhook.”

  “In the eye?” Charlotte squinted hers shut, for fear he’d say that fishhooks sometimes blew into people’s eyes on Cape Cod.

  “It was back when he was scalloping,” Darryl said. “Drink four days and fish three, you know.”

  She did not know, but nodded.

  “So, you’re okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said, brushing it off. It surprised her to hear such honest concern in a man’s voice.

  7

  TUNA SEASON

  She was coming to know the place a little; the summer began and she learned to live according to the local rhythms, doing her errands in the early morning before the tourists were awake, or at noon on a hot day when they were all at the beach. Summer rain constituted an emergency: Vacationers trying to escape their motel units would hop in their cars to creep, bumper-to-bumper, north toward Provincetown or south to Orleans. Charlotte had learned to stay home. She knew the tides by smell—the rich brine and sulfur stench of the ebb, the fresh, sharp scent of a high-tide plankton bloom that gave a deep sense of well-being, as if the most primitive, waterborne part of her recognized it as plenty.

  And the people: oystermen, artists, Trotskyites still reeling from the breakup of the Soviet Union, ecologists who revered the hognose snake and the spadefoot toad. The extended Mulligan clan, who’d met one another at Woodstock, recognized their natural affinity, and moved to Wellfleet to start a commune. That hadn’t worked, but they’d married into one configuration and then another, the kids living back and forth between parents’ and stepparents’ houses until they were as homogeneous as a family, and each of them with his or her trade—plumbing, landscaping, sweeping the chimney. They weren’t all Mulligans, but that was the name that stuck, and if you had termites or your well went dry people would say, “Isn’t there a Mulligan for that?” Beyond the Mulligans, there were lobster divers, chambermaids, and, in the summer, professors and editors who found the lobster divers and chambermaids irresistibly attractive. There were Freudian analysts, Jungian analysts, and a stray Kleinian analyst who was furious at both groups. There was Sklew Margison, who had a Nobel Prize in physics, for discovering something no one could explain. And Reggie the glass eater, who was said once to have swallowed a shot glass right along with the bourbon in it, and shown no ill effects. Reggie got around on a bicycle, calling out, “Telegram!” as he passed. Those in the know replied with a cheerful: “Rhode Island Red!”

  And Ada Town, the old woman who walked to the end of the point every morning regardless of the weather, dressed in a neat skirt and blouse and always with lively interest in her face. She’d been found on the church steps as an infant, rowed in from a passing ship, people said. Someone had seen a light on the water, heard the quiet splash of an oar. This scene,
like so much of the town’s history, remained vivid in every imagination—the streets were still narrow, angling up from the harbor to the town center, where the Congregational Church stood at the highest point, its steeple stark against the sky. If you stood on the steps there, you could see exactly how a dory might have been pulled ashore for the minute it would take to run up the hill and set a baby safely at the church door. It was said she was found in a life preserver ring; it was said that some ship’s captain had a child with a woman in another port, that he promised to keep the baby secret, but safe, to see it was raised with kindness. “A child not of one man and one woman, but of every man and woman in Wellfleet, our responsibility and our joy,” the minister had said, christening her with the name of Town. Ada had been Henry’s babysitter in the summers, when his father brought the family out to Wellfleet, “rattling around alone” in Boston during the week, arriving in the Buick on Friday evenings to take great, satisfied lungfuls of air on the front porch as if he were breathing in virtue itself.

  This was how Charlotte pieced Henry’s father together, from the scraps in Henry’s memory, and the few photographs: the one they’d kept in his room at the nursing home and one of him with his pipe, looking the way some men did back then, truly, quietly confident of his place in the world. In the family portrait he looked only forbidding, and Henry’s mother was blond, tailored, and in her face a stony misery that might be mistaken for haughtiness. Or maybe she’d been haughty. Whatever, Henry, who might have been four or five, stood between them, so intent on the model ship he was holding that he didn’t seem aware of his parents’ presence. “That was my nature,” he said, when Charlotte asked him. “They were the most upright, honorable people, and they had to put up with me. It wasn’t easy for them. It’s not their fault I’m the way I am.”

  Singing Fiona her lullaby in the evening, looking out to see the tide pushing in through the spartina, until only the green tops showed, Charlotte felt that one part of this was true: that every child is born with something of his or her own, beyond DNA. Fiona’s fierce little spirit, her purposeful goodness, seemed set solidly in her from the day she was born. Her cheeks flushed as she slept, as if that same ambition was still working. Falling asleep herself, Charlotte heard the tide, gentle at first, then, on a windy night, rushing and swirling up the serpentine paths of the river, straight into her dreams.