The Shore (20 page)

“And did you ever try and talk to me?” she asks, her voice like a needle. I think backward, to the brown-gray days after the funeral, with strange-tasting casseroles and people we hardly knew in and out of our house.

“I figured you needed to be left alone,” I finally say, and she smacks her hand down on the table.

“Exactly!” she shouts, and Charlie's pacifier pops out onto the floor. He looks confused for a second, then starts screaming, but she shouts over him. “You just left me there, in that fucking house with no one sane to talk to, dumped me like a three-legged puppy by the side of the highway. You found your own way to deal with things and left me to take care of myself. Then you had the balls to get pissed at me when you found out just how I was dealing with it. Remember that?” She ducks down to retrieve the pacifier, but he turns his head away from it and bawls louder. She chucks it at the sink, leans back in the chair far enough to reach the refrigerator, and pulls out a nipple-ended bottle of apple juice.

“I figured when you were ready to talk, you'd find me and start talking,” I answer lamely.

“Really? When I hurt myself or got in a fight you didn't wait for me to ask you for help, you just took care of things.” She's still angry, but she's quieting down some. “When Grant was being an ass the last time and I needed a place to live you didn't make me ask you to take care of it, you just bought a house. So how come the one time I really needed you to just step in and be there, you stepped out?”

I rock back in my chair, then get up and dig through the cabinet for a clean mug, fill it with coffee, and slug it down all at once.

“Look, Mo. I'm sorry. You're right, I fix things. I like to fix things. I know how to fix things. But back then, I didn't know how to fix you. It felt like you'd stopped talking to me, 'cause you never had much to say to the rest of them anyway. I thought that if I let you alone you'd just start back up when you felt like it.”

“Guess you were wrong then,” she spits.

“Not quite. You're talking now, aren't you?” She grins a little at this, and settles back in the chair more comfortably, resets the bottle in the baby's mouth so he gets more juice in with his air bubbles.

“You want me to fix things?” I say, and she nods sharp. “OK, I'm here to fix things. Get a divorce. He doesn't have any kind of claim on the house, so no one can touch it for his debts. I took out insurance on it and kept it paid up, so if they burn it down there's no big loss there. Come to Norfolk with me, change your name, stay there till the kid's in school, the divorce goes through, and these guys are off your back, then come back if you want to or go explore the rest of the world if you don't. You got money troubles, I got that. If you want to work, great, we'll get someone in to watch Charlie. If you don't want to work, fine, stay home with him till you do. I'll take care of it. Life looks a bit like shit right now, but it seems to me like Grant just freed you up. You can do just about anything you want to now and he can't say boo about it.”

“Will you come back to the Shore with us?” she asks.

“Now?”

“No, later maybe. When Charlie's older. I don't want him growing up without a man around.”

“Mo, are you just trying to get me to come home?”

“No, it's a legitimate concern.” She sounds hurt. “And besides, can you fault me for wanting you to be close, for not wanting to leave home?”

“The work is in Norfolk. But I'll think about coming back, sometime. It's more important to figure out where to put you right now, anyway.”

We can probably do everything from Norfolk, pack them both into my truck right now, see a lawyer in the morning. It would be safer in the city, with people around.

“So I'm starting over, all over again.” She blows out air hard. “Guess there could be way worse things going on.”

We're quiet for a bit.

“I gave it a shot, you remember, the day I caught you and your boyfriend in Mom's flower bushes. Talking, I mean. About what happened after Mom.”

“Yeah, you did, I guess. I could've made it easier for you. But after that I couldn't talk about it, couldn't tell you about it, really. I was doing shit that you'd never done. Don't think you'd ever really thought about then. For the first time in my life there was stuff you hadn't tried out first and couldn't tell me anything about.”

There isn't much I can say to that, so I start scraping up the toast crumbs on the table in front of me, building them up in ridges and making little ant-sized mazes out of them.

“Benny, have you ever had a girlfriend?” she asks finally.

When she says “girlfriend” I know she means “sex.”

“I mean, I know that you didn't ever when you were home,
but I thought then that it was because you were working too hard, that you'd spent too much time with Mom and me and thought all women were too much crazy to deal with.”

“Women are too much crazy to deal with,” I answer.

“So no then?”

“Yeah. I haven't really met anyone I'd want to sit and chat with.”

“What about just kiss and have a good time with?”

“Mo, you got a point here?”

She shifts around on her chair, hooks her arm around Charlie's middle, stands up, and gets down two squat, heavy glasses. “You did make me talk to you, but when you did it was so all-fired weird that I didn't want to ever do it again. It was like we were speaking two different languages, or like I'd just stopped being human and it was some Martian that was talking to you.” She kicks a stool out from under the table and reaches up to the highest cupboard. “Get out the ice, will you? I can't do it with one hand.”

She sets a half-full bottle of Jim Beam on the table and plunks back down, then laughs a little. “But the look on your face when I told you about sucking off Roddy at the drive-in—”

“You make me throw up, I'm not the one that's going to be cleaning it,” I cut in, and put ice in the glasses. We'd first found a bottle of Dad's Wild Turkey when I was seventeen, and shared sips back and forth on the porch while watching the Fourth of July fireworks over the bay. At some point we'd grown up enough to drink it out of glasses, but I couldn't remember the last time we'd sat down with it together.

“Never understood why that bothered you so much,” she says as she opens the bottle.

“It's disgusting. It's all disgusting. People are disgusting, nothing more than meat and blood sloshing around in a bag of skin, and when they start oozing their fluids all over each other—”

“OK, OK, stop! I'm sorry I said anything,” she cuts me off fast. “You don't have to be graphic, just say you're not into it or something.”

“Like that would make you leave it alone,” I answer.

The whiskey splashing into the glasses looks like iced tea, like our childhood from both ends, and she makes me clink glasses with her before I can have a sip.

1919

W
AKE

J
ackie watched the church float away while sitting on the top of the hill where the Assateague Lighthouse stood, a dull heaviness in the pit of his stomach. Elijah Binney had bought it with the intention of taking it to Chincoteague and turning it into a house, and Jackie had climbed to the base of the lighthouse early that morning and settled in the dust near the shed where the kerosene for the light was kept to watch the entire process of jacking up the building, rolling it down to the water, and settling it on the barge. A small, square, white wooden building with a rough steeple and oversized windows, it wasn't the prettiest church, but it was the only one on Assateague Island. He'd never liked going to church, in fact he was quite happy that he wouldn't have to sit on the hard pew next to his mother not swinging his legs all through the sermon, but it was the principle of the thing. It was their church. They were proud to finally have one. The village had only built it three years before, when their population was still growing, when Assateague was becoming a place you could be proud to come from.

Eighteen months after the church was built, a gentleman farmer called Sam Fields had come from the mainland, looking
to buy growing land. None of the locals would have sold, but the island had been the property of the county, and the county was willing to sell. Apart from the village and the lighthouse, most of the southern part of the island now belonged to him, and the arable part was planted in corn and beans. This wouldn't have mattered as much if the land didn't include Tom's Hook, the long, sandy arm that cradled the quiet bay, the clam and oyster beds, and the best fishing and crabbing. Fields had a strict “No Trespassing” policy, and it was his right to do so, but not being able to cross his land made fishing and trapping difficult, if not impossible, and the harder it became to eke out a living on the island, the more people bought lots on Chincoteague and jacked up and floated their houses across to town.

The church had been used for a single wedding, and no christenings. They'd make do; before the church had been built they'd met in the schoolhouse, or taken skiffs across the channel to Chincoteague.

Below Jackie the square of packed white sand that had so recently been the building's foundation stood out brightly among the roofs and gardens of his village. From Lighthouse Hill he could see it all laid out like a map: the soft curve of the little bay cutting into the land like a bite out of a cookie, the cluster of houses and kitchen gardens, the schoolhouse and the place where the church had been, all ringed by the communal fields where larger crops like oats and corn were planted, the village and the fields surrounded by the dense thickets and forests where the wild ponies—and often their goats and chickens—foraged. They were little houses, handmade of raw wood, one or two rooms with perhaps a single window, front steps leading up to packed-dirt floors. The gardens were riotous, bordered and divided
by swaths of long grass that the sheep and goats never cropped short all at once, and the dusty oyster-shell paths shone out between the fronds, trailing from house to house like string. Neighbors were bent over in their gardens with their hands in the rich, dark earth, and he could pick them out even at that distance. His mother was not there; he had seen her leave earlier that morning, while the church was still being rolled toward the water, walk down to the dock, and row herself across to Chincoteague. She would not be back for hours yet, would not know that he'd spent his morning and a good portion of the afternoon bone idle, but still he felt a tinge of guilt. At eleven he was the man of the family. He ought to have been helping her, working the garden or going after fish and clams down by Tom's Hook, but he didn't have the heart for it, not today.

Every village and hamlet on the Shore had its own steepled building—except Tasley, but that had gambling, vice, and a train depot instead—and several had more than one. There were only twenty-odd families left in Assateague village, not counting the lighthouse keepers, not enough to warrant a church of its own anymore. By the end of the spring term the school had dropped below forty pupils, the number required by the county to receive its own teacher, and in the fall the children who could manage would be skiffing across the channel for school or staying with relatives on Chincoteague. Even with the difficulty he had often had at school, knowing that he would not be one of those children made him feel sick in the stomach, like a pie had gone moldy in the cupboard before he'd even known it was there.

He heard the door of the kerosene hut slam closed behind him, and the crunch of Graeme Quillen's boots on the oyster
shells. The assistant lighthouse keeper came up to stand beside him, his hands deep in his pockets, and they watched the church drifting away for some moments in silence.

“Sad sight, ain't it?” the man asked, and Jackie nodded.

Three families lived in the lighthouse keepers' mansion: the head keeper John Anderton, and the assistants Graeme Quillen and Warren Jones, each of the three with his wife and children. The locals called it a mansion half-seriously: it wasn't much bigger than any of the houses on Chincoteague, and barely held the three families comfortably, but compared to the one- and two-room cottages below it was a palace. The offspring of these unions was impressive, a massing brood of daughters between the age of thirteen and birth, with one or two long-haired, coddled sons somewhere in the mess, whom their sisters treated more as living dolls than siblings. They were part and not part of the village. Paid in cash, they didn't have to keep gardens, pigs, and goats, or worry especially about being shot for trespassing on Sam Fields's land while fishing, or freezing through the winter. Some of the villagers avoided them, for class reasons, but Jackie had long been a playmate of the daughters. He'd caught baby rabbits and birds for them to keep as pets in summertime, wove them baskets out of rushes, and was occasionally dragooned into serving as the pack mule or dragon or other beast for their private pretends. Graeme Quillen was a young, friendly man, and Jackie liked him especially. Anderton was solemn, but kind, and Jones was sour-faced, but none of them chased him off the hill, though other boys often were when caught near the kerosene shed.

As the barge neared the far shore, Quillen pointed out a
small scow moving toward them across the channel, a large man propelling it with strong strokes of his oars.

“Ain't that your uncle Leo?” he asked.

Jackie supposed it was. Leonidas Wallace, his father's only brother, was a massive man, nearly six and a half feet tall and so broad in the shoulders that he went through doorways side-on. He owned one of the general stores on Chincoteague; as a service to Assateague village he would row across weekly to deliver groceries and take orders, but he'd already been that week, and his boat appeared empty.

“No use moping up here, better get down and meet him.” Quillen smacked the seat of his pants and turned back toward the kerosene shed. “It's not as bad as it looks, boy. They can take the church, but they can't take the whole village.”

As he picked his way down the nearly vertical hill to meet his uncle, Jackie considered those words. He suspected that it wasn't so much “can't take the whole village” as “won't take the whole village”—no one would want the cottages, they'd just be left behind when everyone eventually moved to Chincoteague or Accomack Island.

Jackie's father, John Wallace, had drowned in the storm of 1911 while fishing out on the bay; his body never washed up. He had left behind next to nothing: the two-room house with a single window that he had built for his wife Maude, three sheep, a garden, a nine-year-old daughter named Alice, and a two-year-old son. Uncle Leo helped as much as he was permitted, and Maude had briefly considered searching for a second husband, which wouldn't have been easy with two small children. On the rare occasions that a suitor had shown his hopeful face,
there was Alice. Fiercely loyal to her father, she drove off each one with inspiring displays of temper, bad behavior, and cunning. After several years of this Maude gave up. Alice had only gotten more willful, more difficult, as she grew, and when she was sixteen Maude allowed her to move to Chincoteague. She now lived in one of the back rooms of Uncle Leo's store, worked cleaning houses and doing laundry, and seemed to find the arrangement far superior to Assateague village, but Jackie and Maude stayed put. Jackie wanted it to be because of a loyalty to his father, to the home that he had left them, but he couldn't fool himself into thinking that his mother wouldn't have left, if they could afford to: at the end of every year they barely had enough money squirreled away to make it through to the next.

At the bottom of the hill Jackie turned along the oyster-shell path, wove through gardens and around cottages, and trotted across the long stretch of rough grass and sand down to the dock. It was a solid structure, built by the county, and he dangled his feet above the water while waiting for his uncle to finish the crossing. Uncle Leo's shirt stretched and gleamed in the sunlight, like it was painted onto him, and his battered straw hat bobbed in time to his rowing. The water of the channel felt satiny as Jackie dipped his feet to wash off the dust, and he caught the rope his uncle threw and tied it off on one of the posts.

“Your mama around?” Uncle Leo asked as he stepped out of the skiff.

“No, sir, she rowed across just before noon to see Alice and run some errands. Not rightly certain when she'll be getting home,” Jackie answered.

“Alice said she was coming across, I just wanted to be sure.
I was expecting to have to come searching for you—I've got something to say that I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want to be hearing about.”

They walked to the edge of the village in companionable silence; Jackie knew better than to press his uncle to tell before he was ready. It was a warm day, midafternoon, and not much was stirring apart from the goats and the greenhead flies. Jackie poured his uncle a glass of tea and gave him a damp cloth to wipe the sweat from his face before settling on the front step, so as to get the benefit of the breeze. Mal, the oldest of their three sheep, stared fixedly at them from across the fence, their only company except for the chickens which scratched between the rows of their garden; chickens barely counted.

“Awful nice day for a boy to spend doing nothing,” Uncle Leo observed as he sipped the tea.

“Wanted to watch them float the church away. Going egging in the dunes,” Jackie replied, and pulled on one of the long strands of grass that sprang up around the steps to give his fingers something to do.

“Going to skiff across for school come fall?”

“No, sir, don't think so. There's work to be done here…” Jackie began to shred the grass, picking it smaller and smaller, the juice gumming his skin.

“Well, that's a pity. What grade you in now?”

“Should be fifth, but I got held back 'cause I can't spell. Not sure what it would be now, I've forgot so much.”

“No shame in that.” He took a long drink, and glanced up at Lighthouse Hill. “I've got some work I need done, and I'm thinking you're the only boy I trust to do it right and do it well.
Your mama don't like charity, and neither do I, so I'm going to insist on paying you fair for it, but I won't be able to until everything's said and done, and you won't be able to tell her what's going on, hear?”

Jackie nodded. Uncle Leo sat silent for a moment, looking at him, before continuing.

“Well then. I've got a man wants some good apple brandy. Since Virginia went dry a few years back it's all been coming in from Maryland, but with all this Prohibition nonsense it looks like that's going to be mighty short-lived. Chincoteague's stem to stern houses, so there's no place safe and private there to let it work, but I figure if I set up an operation in the woods a few miles north of here, no one will ever find it. Unfortunately, if I up tent pegs and leave myself people are likely to get suspicious.”

“So you need someone to watch it for you?”

He nodded over his glass. “Want to move the equipment across in the next few days. The apples will more or less take care of themselves for the first couple of months; the distilling I need someone to watch pretty closely. It's a tedious job. You'll have to keep after it like you were watching a newborn, but when it's finished I'll pay you fair for it. Probably be enough to get a lot in town and barge your ma across, could go back to school and have your sister living t'home again.”

“I don't think Mama would like it much…”

“Well, it's your choice whether you do it, but I'd ask you not to mention it to her either way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There's a good boy. You take your time thinking, though
I'd be mighty obliged if you'd throw in a hand moving it all—it's a fair pull across and every back's appreciated.”

“Anyone else helping?” Jackie asked.

“The lighthouse keepers are, Anderton and Jones, though the young one's to be kept out of it.” He drained his glass and set it down. “We're going to fix up some of the old cellars, where they used to keep fish oil for the light, and use that to stow things. Makes a snug little hiding place for it to age, before we ship it out.”

“I'll have to think on it some. Mama wouldn't like me doing it if she found out.” Jackie dropped the shreds of grass and plucked another stem. “When do you want to start moving things?”

“As soon as we can. I'd want you to come across tomorrow and fetch a few barrels of apples; you should be able to get away without your ma seeing.”

Jackie put the end of the stem in his mouth and chewed, tasting the deep greenness of it. “How's Alice getting on?” he asked.

His uncle plucked his own stem, changed his mind, and pulled a stubby clay pipe out of his shirt pocket and began to fill it. “To be fair, I couldn't rightly say. She's gotten quiet of late. Keeps to herself.” He took a long draw at the pipe, scowled at it, and drew again. “Think there might be a young man at fault, but if so, that's for your mother to deal with. A bachelor such as myself has no call to be messing in a young girl's affairs.” The flame took, and he blew out a thin gust of smoke. “You'd do well to remember that.”