John Casey - Spartina

He wondered if he’d get a second boat. There seemed to be another boat.… He’d always wondered how Captain Texeira could own two boats, could stand the strain of worrying about the boat under his feet and the second one over the horizon. Maybe Captain Texeira wasn’t a worrier. Or had enough trust in his nephew to set him free as skipper of the Lydia P.

Dick looked at Elsie under the lamp. It hadn’t dawned on him till now that he’d have to trust her. No matter whether they managed to stay in touch, she’d be pretty much on her own with the child. Not easy for her, she was sometimes oddly young for thirty-three; no, thirty-four now. He got a sense of her as older, everything older and all right. But it wasn’t going to be easy for him either. He’d got that right in the first place, when he’d stooped in the bushes and heard, felt alarm and anger and then a terrible forlornness. Feeling forlorn would keep on, but it wasn’t so terrible, eased somehow.

He’d guessed back then in the bushes the kid would be a girl, and he seemed to know now that was right. His second boat, his daughter, were there in the future, not visible to him but bumped into by some blind sense, like coming up Pierce Creek on May’s baking day — if the air was still, or he was to windward, he didn’t have to get there and taste it to know.

His sense of the future, of other time, left him on a little shift of wind.

What was with him now was just himself, scoured. And time once again ticking.

Elsie shifted and worked her bare feet under the ham of his leg. He got up and fixed the fire, looked for something to put over her.

There wasn’t much to the house, he didn’t need to turn on a light to find the bedroom. One bed, a folded afghan at the foot. His fingers felt the holes, the lay of the yarn, the tighter twist along the scalloped edges. He came back into the light — only the color of it was a surprise.

Elsie opened her eyes when he covered her. She said, “Oh, good … What time do you have to be at your boat?”

It seemed a very hard question. Before he got around to it, Elsie nodded off.

After a bit he thought, I don’t have to get there any special time. I’m the captain.

He felt the return of figuring logically as if he was putting on clothes after being naked.

He didn’t want Tran and Tony to start worrying. But he could use a little sleep. He went back to the bedroom and got hold of another blanket. There was enough room for him to stretch out on the sofa, his head at the other end from Elsie’s. He took his boots off, thought he’d better wash his feet.

While he was sitting on the edge of the tub, Elsie came into the bathroom, hiked up her jumper, and sat down on the toilet. The noise woke her up completely. “God, I sound like a cow pissing.”

When she was done, she pulled herself up on his shoulder. “One thing I won’t miss is peeing five times a night.”

She stayed while he dried his feet. They arranged themselves on the sofa, their feet and shins overlapping.

“There are things I miss,” Elsie said. “Being in my own house. The salt marsh, the sea. And I miss Miss Perry. I even miss work.”

“They’re all right there,” Dick said.

Elsie turned out the light.

Dick didn’t go to sleep. Sometime in the last months, sometime in there between the time his boat had been in doubt and now, he’d changed, been breached as wide as the cut from the sea to the salt pond, and been washed of the worst of his bitterness. Curled up now in his own skin again, he had no way of seeing whether it was the storm or one of his own crazinesses that had breached him, or whether it was a goodness of his or of someone else that had kept him rooted soundly while his bitterness went out on the ebb.

It was odd — no question but that the worst bitterness was gone, though he couldn’t say when or how. He fiddled with answers: maybe it was just plain getting his head above water, just being able to relax about putting bread on the table. It seemed more than that, though — he could have just had a job, and May and him could’ve put bread on the table.

Maybe it was May having a right to bitterness and choosing another kind of feeling. Not that she didn’t get angry, but her anger was solvable, approachable; he could find his way back to her. She had put up with a lot, with no more vengeance than speaking her mind, telling him things he could do to make it right. She’d let him back in bed without too much fuss. It had been a good winter since then, he’d been fond of May lately in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time. Another thing he hadn’t put into a thought till now: when it came to regular homecoming, regular get-your-ticket-at-the-station, all-aboard, down-the-line, Kingston-next, next-stop, Kingston, on-time, and home-for-a-hot-supper, May had Elsie beat hollow. Even with her hair cut short and dyed. Now her hair was short, taking out her hairpins was what he missed — picking them one by one, letting his hand full of pins brush by her mouth so he could feel her breath getting short and quick, taking out the last couple of pins real slow, letting the ends scratch along her scalp a little the way she liked, fluffing out her hair, then combing it out straight with his spread fingers, starting at her forehead and going back to her neck, his little fingers getting in behind the tops of her ears, she liked that part a lot too, so well that it was often about then that she’d get her embarrassed half-smile on her face and switch the light off.

It was a funny damn thing to think of. He saw the funny side of how he’d just been carried away, grabbing a hold of Elsie when she was so pregnant she was tipping over.

He was like a green kid when he was around Elsie. This time it was her good sense that had kept things in order. And that was a funny thing too, Elsie having good sense, at least when it came to sex. She’d changed some too. Still quick and tart, but sweeter. Easier and sweeter and more connected …

And so he came onto his own change again, not just that his worst bitterness had drained, but his feeling of his distinctness. He’d spent a lot of time trying to make himself distinct by doing distinct things. His life on land was boats he’d built, bigger and bigger, until he built a boat that was big enough. That’s how he would have put it. Or he might have put it that his life was distinct things: father’s death, marriage, house, Charlie, Tom.

Even the skill that got him onto boats when he was young was his seeing what was distinct before most people could — he could make out the edge of a swordfish fin while the fish was still submerged way off, indistinct in the roll and glimmer of the sea. He saw himself black against the sun, going out to the bow pulpit. Ease on up, on up over that fishy shape. He could see his shadow out in front of the shadow of the bow, a stiff cutout dancing on the bronze water. He saw himself held cocked just before his arm moved down, became one shadow with his body. The fish was away, stuck deep and fast, took the line out, took the silver keg — a bright eye that saw that fish clear down a taut line into its toggled wound.

Dick’s arm twitched. Elsie stirred, rolled her belly sideways against his clean feet. Dick lay still.

And there was fixing a position on the surface of the sea. There was sounding out the bottom of the sea — the shelf, the canyons, right down to the ledges and cracks where hard little lobster scuttled around. The pots settled and gave off their rot day and night. Lobster crawled their way in, dreaming that fishy perfume, not dreaming how hard and fast they’d be. The water came in and out, but the distinct lobster was stuck in the distinct pot.

This time it was a blotched red buoy that kept an eye on these comings and goings, down the warp into the dark. More lines — a wand atop the buoy, a radar reflector atop the wand, a six-pointed, twelve-faced crystal that made a nice blip on the screen; no matter what course you came in on, it blinked right back at you, brought you straight in. He’d been measuring everything in hard lines. He’d measured himself in hard lines. Where would he be, what would he be, without hard lines?