John Casey - Spartina

By the seaward corner of the house there was a tanker truck with the Salviatti Company emblem on it. Dick was puzzled for a minute, then saw the hose. They’d been spraying a truckful of fresh water down the lawn to get the salt off. They could have used that water on the potato field behind the Matunuck beach, maybe saved a crop instead of a lawn. It was their money, they could do what they pleased. It was their house now. But they should still be grateful to Uncle Arthur.

Dick started back up the point. In front of the Van der Hoevels’ cottage he saw Parker’s VW station wagon. Dick parked alongside and started down the path. From Spartina he’d seen that the porch had been knocked into the creek, but the main part of the cottage was standing, although the doors and windows had popped. Dick was about to shout to Parker when he heard voices. The low sun was in his eyes. He took a step forward into the shadow of the house. His foot crunched on a piece of glass. He looked down at it, and then up when he heard a woman moaning. He saw Marie’s head appear in profile in the side of the bay window. There was no glass in it, though the network of lozenge mullions was half intact, sagging outward.

Dick thought she was crying over her house. Her head moved backward and disappeared. Her arms and hands reappeared. She picked up the long cushion of the window seat, shook it, flipped it over, and ran one hand over it. Her head reappeared, her cheek drowned in her loose hair. Her hands slid along the cushion and braced against the windowsill. Her shoulders were moving as though she was sobbing. She lowered her forehead onto the cushion.

Dick began to back away. He hadn’t thought she’d have cared so much about the cottage. But maybe they were wiped out. Uninsured …

Her head and shoulders were suddenly covered. It was so abrupt Dick jumped sideways. She made another noise. It took him a moment to realize she was laughing. What was covering her head was her long skirt, flipped up.

Dick’s right ribs hurt from having jerked so suddenly. He tucked his elbow over them and kept crabbing away, off the path now, in between the ornamental bushes.

Well, that’s another way to take it, he thought, when your house is coming down around your ears. Now he was into the raspberry bushes. He ripped his pants leg free from a tendril. He looked back, ashamed but prickled and heated up in spite of himself. Schuyler’s head came forward, his chin on her back. It wasn’t Schuyler. It was Parker.

Jesus, Parker. Of course. It was Parker’s car. You son of a bitch, Parker. You’ll do anything.

Dick turned away, tucked his chin down. He clambered over a skinny uprooted pine. He got his hand gummy pushing away a branch. He was surprised at how churned he felt, how nasty he felt himself. He was angry that he was stuck with seeing it. Angry at the sharp sticky impression he carried away. Angry that he looked back once more.

They were just rearranging themselves. Dick backed away. They got up lengthwise on the window seat, face to face, their feet toward him. He almost laughed when he saw they both had their sneakers on. Two pairs of sneakers. All four sneakers allemande left, and do-si-do. Bow to your partner.

Dick got back to the road and climbed into his truck. He hesitated to start it. He heard Marie’s voice, a faint high note. He turned the key.

He said out loud, “Goddamn,” but he carried away the sight of her hair on her cheek, her hands sliding on the window seat. She’d turned the goddamn cushion while it was going on! Against the sound of the motor running and the wheels crunching, he imagined noises from her thin-lipped mouth, blown open like the fancy windows of the cottage.

“You son of a bitch, Parker,” he said, but he couldn’t shake it, he was talking to himself. “Go back to sea, get out of this.”

H e was about to go by the turn to his house. He thought, They’ll ask what I saw.

He parked the truck at the head of the driveway. So far so good. The boys had done a good job with the front windows, boarded them up good but left some room to breathe. The chimney was toppled. The silt line was above the windowsills. It could be worse.

When he got to the back he took one look and sagged. He looked again and sat down on the end of the driveway. He picked up a handful of gravel and let it trickle out.

It was his own goddamn fault. It wasn’t the boys’ fault, he hadn’t told them. He hadn’t thought of it, no reason for them to have thought of it.

There was a piece of Spartina ’s old cradle sticking through the wall, half inside the house. Through the hole around it, he saw a flap of black paper, broken studs. The broken clapboard had been plucked away. Must have happened early — a lot of wind had worked it over.

Another piece of cradle had cracked into the southeast corner post. It wasn’t as obvious as the hole in the wall, but the post was probably broke. He didn’t get up to go look.

He couldn’t have put the shed and cradle in a worse place if he’d meant to. Due southeast. Might as well have aimed a cannon at the house.

He made a right angle of his thumb and forefinger and held it up toward the corner of the house. No question about it, the roof was off line, the corner was sagging.

He sat there. The longer he sat, the better it got. The house was insured, the bank holding the mortgage had seen to that. The boat hadn’t been, so if something had to get hurt, this was the place.

The boat was okay, May and the boys were okay, he was okay. He owed something to the storm. He might as well pay here.

The kitchen door was gone, the screen door too. There was a last bit of light coming from the sky shining on the wet slime on the kitchen floor.

His butt was getting cold. He was tired. He’d only been up a couple of hours and he was ready to climb back in bed.

May would take it hard. First thing she would take in — well, maybe second thing after the hole in the wall — would be what was all over her nice kitchen floor.

He got up to go look at his wharf. He’d better go look now, May wouldn’t take it right if he wandered off to see it tomorrow.

The wharf was fine. He couldn’t believe it. It had mud, weeds, and sticks all over it, but all four posts were solid. Why shouldn’t it be, dummy? It let the water through, nothing to push against. The flat part was flat, nothing sticking up, the water just flowed flat across the top.

Of course that was what got Spartina through too. There wasn’t anything solid sticking up on her but the wheelhouse. And what there was of her to push against was curved — her hull was as curved as a pumpkin seed. He thought, We did okay, Uncle Arthur and me.

He stood on the wharf and looked across Pierce Creek. A few big trees were down, and the smaller stuff was stripped. He could see clear across his bit of land, across Sawtooth Creek, and onto the salt marsh, rustling and silver in the last light.

He began to cry in gratitude. He stopped and washed his face in the creek. He laughed at himself. He said, “I could have had lots more swept away. I could have been swept away along with them fornicating ants in tennis shoes.”

He started for the truck. He’d tell May it wasn’t so bad, could be worse. Get her to have a drink with him. Get her tipsy on a drink or two. Get in his lawful bed.