John Casey - Spartina

“What are you going to do about your baby?”

“Look. Elsie was planning on having a baby all along. She’s getting Mary Scanlon to move in with her, in that new house with her, and the two of them were going to adopt a baby. They found out it was too complicated. So when this came up, they figured they’d take this one. They’re going to say it’s adopted. When Elsie comes back from Massachusetts, that’s what they’re going to say.”

May was silent. For an instant Dick thought this time he’d been the one that got in two moves. Then he saw he was worse off.

May said, “So Elsie didn’t make a mistake.”

Dick fumbled a minute before he said, “It was a mistake, and then they figured they’d go ahead and take advantage of it.”

“ ‘They,’ ” May said. “I’m too tired to go on listening to you. I’ve never heard you so shifty. You sound like Parker. I can’t pay attention to it. You go back out on your boat and think about this — what are you going to do about your baby?”

D ick woke up when he heard Eddie’s truck leave. He heard May in the kitchen. He got up and stood behind the bedroom door listening. The boys weren’t there, must have left for school. He was sore from lying on the floor, so he got sidetracked by the thick quilt covering the bed. He wrapped himself in one of his blankets and curled up on top of the quilt. He hadn’t been in bed so late in months. He hadn’t been so tired in months. Not since after the hurricane blew itself out and he slept away a day on Spartina. He’d never taken a nap ashore in his life. Except the time he drowsed off in Elsie’s bed one of those afternoons. That recollection snapped him awake. What struck him as odd was that the sensations were so alike — waking up in Elsie’s bed, with that same feeling of two pressures — alarm and satisfaction. It took him a minute to identify that, although he was in trouble, he was satisfied by what May had said, by how she was taking it.

May woke him up to tell him Tran and Tony had both called to ask when they were going out. She made him breakfast while he tuned in the weather. No better. He called Tran and Tony.

He spent the morning fixing some pots in Eddie’s cellar. May called him for lunch but otherwise didn’t talk to him. She didn’t seem mad. Just slow and far away.

The wind backed into the northeast and blew hard for three days. It turned cold.

May said he could get back in the bed to sleep.

For three days they were alone, in and around the house all day, from breakfast to when the boys got home from school. May talked to him some about other matters. She also felt free to make comments about Elsie’s having a baby. Dick understood he wasn’t to answer back, just pay attention and give whatever facts May might ask for.

He didn’t dare say out loud he admired the way May was acting. She was taking her own time. She was hard, but she wasn’t asking anything for herself. He could see it weighed on her steadily and she was carrying it. He went about his business.

Eddie had brought back a wood sailboat from one of the wrecked boathouses he was rebuilding. It was on a cradle in one of the sheds. Dick set to work on it during the day. At night he went down to the cellar for an hour or so to mend a few more pots.

May came down and said he could go to the Neptune if he wanted. He knew what she meant — his working extra hours didn’t count that much one way or the other.

D ick went down to the harbor to check Spartina. As he walked past the Co-op the radio operator called out to him. She had a message for him from Woods Hole. He couldn’t think of anyone he knew there. Even when he read the message he wasn’t sure it was for him. From Neptune Documentary Film Co. Woods Hole, Massachusetts To: Capt. R. Pierce, master of Spartina , Galilee, RI … Tune in Channel Two Boston, 2000 hrs, 18 Jan.

He got off on the wrong track for a second … thought of channel 2 on the CB. Then he figured a TV channel. Schuyler’s movie? Why didn’t he put his name? Then he figured it was Elsie. That was why there was no name, why it was phoned to the Co-op, why she’d put that it was from Woods Hole. Dick couldn’t recall the real name of Schuyler’s film company — Elsie’d told him each of Schuyler’s films had its own company — but maybe she put Neptune because she meant him to watch it at the Neptune.…

It was still blowing a little on the 18th. He went to the Neptune. Neither the Celtics nor the Bruins were playing. He bought a beer and asked the bartender to tune in Channel 2. A couple of guys Dick knew said they wanted to watch a cop show. He bought them each a beer and said if it turned out this wasn’t a movie about around here, they could switch back.

The teaser was an aerial shot of the harbor of refuge and Galilee. The guys called to a couple of their buddies.

At first Dick didn’t recognize Schuyler’s voice narrating. It was a slow, serious baritone, none of Schuyler’s usual prance. What he was saying was more like Schuyler, little jabs and twists:

“Rhode Island — poor cousin to Massachusetts” … “Most densely populated state after New Jersey” … “Lowest educational level of any state outside the Deep South” … “Highest percentage of people whose first language is not English” …

Dick thought of what Mary Scanlon used to say—“Rhode Island is not a high — expectation state.”

There was an aerial shot of palaces in Newport—“… glittering remnant of the robber barons, but the greater part of Rhode Island is as desperately poor as West Virginia.

“According to a Ph.D. thesis on state governments, Rhode Island came in second only to Louisiana for the title of most corrupt state legislature.

“If Rhode Island were a country, it would be part of the Third World. The largest employer is the military. Tourism is the major moneymaker, although most Rhode Islanders benefit from it only in service positions. The bulk of choice real estate is in the form of second homes or resorts run by absentee corporations.

“There is a seafaring tradition, and there is — still — a fishing fleet. By comparison to the high-tech factory ships of Russia, East or West Germany, Japan, or the tuna clippers of our own West Coast, the boats and methods are quaint. But it is still possible — barely possible — to wrest a living from the sea.”

One of the guys said, “Who the fuck this fag think he is?”

During the introductory narration, the shots kept alternating between luxury and what was meant to be seen as squalor. A fancy restaurant. Then, at the phrase “lowest educational level of any state outside the Deep South,” there was a shot of the crab pickers at Joxer Goode’s plant. Dick knew that some of those guys were hired out to Joxer from the state school for the retarded. Dick had always thought Joxer was doing the crazies a favor while he got some real cheap labor. In the pictures Schuyler shot, the camera lingered on the retarded men and women in a half-light that made them look like driven slaves. The soundtrack left out the Muzak Joxer piped in that the poor guys sort of bobbed to, so their movements all looked like some necessary part of a hellish assembly line. Then there was a shot of a mansion from the ocean walk at Newport, with a pack of guard dogs snarling behind the ironwork fence. Then a shot which Dick recognized as his own backyard, and the outside of his patchwork boat shed. Then the Wedding Cake. At the phrase “wrest a living from the sea,” a long shot of Dick tonging quahogs.