A Matter of Mercy Read online

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  That night, awake in the bed that had been hers through a childhood in the same whitewashed pine room, the same white curtains at the window overlooking the perennial garden—the annuals were in a Jacob’s garden (her grandfather’s old dory) on the driveway side and the vegetables had always been planted by the kitchen door, just not this year—she thought how perversely things had turned out. There was Rid, who left high school with nothing and managed to lose even more, ending up in love with his life at what? Must be thirty-eight anyway, since she’d just turned forty. His father a third, maybe fourth, generation Portuguese fisherman turned oyster farmer, his mother a fallen-from-grace local girl who’d had to get married, if Eleanor had her ancient gossip straight. Their house was three or four miles inland, cheaper property even when waterfront prices weren’t only for people with money falling out of their pockets. Rid’s father had scratched his way up, but hadn’t made a go of it until after Rid was gone and oysters went yuppie in the eighties. Back when it mattered, the road into Rid’s future had looked unpaved, potholed, and dead-end. Exactly the sort of guy she’d been subtly steered around.

  Being native Wellfleet was a mixed bag. It was a fishing village, pure and simple, which meant life on the tidal flats, or maybe picking up work on shrimp and scallop boats, or running your own deep sea operation, going after, say, tuna. The taproots of the year-rounders, the locals, were long and deep. You knew who you were, and so did everyone else. People inherited houses that had been built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—some floated over on barges from Billingsgate Island, once a community across the bay before the sea claimed it entirely back in the nineteen twenties. Now it was no more than a shoal just off Great Island. Little cottages like Susan Atwood’s, who was born back in 1804, were still graced—or ghosted—with the voices of the people who lived there first. “The sea is my cemetery,” Susan was known to have said; every male in her family, seamen all, had been lost to it. In Wellfleet, history was close as your pillow at night and your mirror in the morning.

  In towns like Wellfleet, when there’s one thing everyone does, people start thinking it’s the only thing anyone can do. Respect and disdain rub uneasy elbows and become indistinguishable as they join, and local becomes a term of derision and deference at once. Caroline’s mother had managed what only a skillful few had done before her. Eleanor was a local who’d kept the deference and lost the derision by becoming part of the wider world while never forsaking home. Caroline’s father, Bill, was the Cape Cod rep for a Connecticut marine insurance company who’d married Eleanor right after he graduated from Boston College. Eleanor had been in art school then, on her way to becoming a potter whose work sold briskly in a glutted market. When she inherited her parent’s house on the Wellfleet bay shore, Eleanor wanted to go back for good.

  “It’s the Cape, Bill, my home.”

  Of course, she wasn’t coming back to work the flats or bag groceries at Lema’s Market. She was returning as an up-and-coming artist to the Wellfleet village where Main Street was already becoming an arts mecca, especially in high summer when gallery doors are propped open for the tourists with their Gucci sunglasses and platinum credit cards.

  Bill transferred to his company’s Cape Cod branch, and they built Eleanor a separate studio behind the house, her design, with a skylight, a good wheel, kiln, and plenty of shelves. She taught part-time at the Castle Hill Art School in Truro and tried to keep up with orders for her work. Caroline, an only child, had the gift of their expectations, attention and income.

  She’d had every chance. Although CiCi was from an old native family which established her in the community, she hadn’t had the pall of it over her head like Cape fog. Her parents weren’t involved with fishing, and Eleanor smartly affected expectations for her daughter by quietly working the schools, where the life stories of the locals were often written at the same time the pregnancies were announced: early marriages and menial support jobs for the girls, the flats or the sea for the boys. Although Caroline hadn’t been raised a snob, to her mother’s mind, perhaps she turned out a bit of one. Or got a dram too much of her father’s washashore blood. Either way, by the time she graduated from Provincetown Regional High School, and left for college, CiCi could have been anything, done anything. And she did. She’d had everything until she didn’t anymore, until here she was, back home with nothing.

  Chapter 5

  Rid turned the key in the ignition as he slammed shut the truck door. The engine churned but caught quickly enough and with the same smooth mesh of motion, he had the truck in reverse, his head swiveled and his foot weighing the accelerator. The weather was unsettled after the storm, dank, the morning’s onshore wind shifty. As he backed up from the protected place he and CiCi had left the truck, between the access road and the beach, he saw that the others were out on their grants, checking and resetting nets and trays and that the outermost part of his grant was already partly submerged. “Shit,” he yelled as he banged the steering wheel with the heel of his right hand. He thought of heading out on his grant now, leaving Lizzie another couple of hours. But since she was with him pretty much all the time, and would have been last night if he hadn’t tried to spare her the incoming blow, something she was afraid of, he was already guilt-pocked at having left her at all.

  Now he’d done worse, left her to shiver it out alone under his bed, unfed and in the dark with no one there to let her relieve herself. No, he had to make a quick run to go get her first. As he shifted into drive, he saw Barb stand and give him a hands-up puzzled gesture, and he knew she wasn’t the only one who’d ask him where he’d been. Missing a tide wasn’t something any of them usually did; too much to do, and the work on the grant itself could only be done about two hours at a time once a day (except in the blessed months of extra daylight when there are double tides), the hour before and after dead low. Other than that, everything was under water.

  That’s what made the whole fuss with the upland owners so dumb. Beyond dumb. They were just spoiled rich people fussing about how the sea farmers’ trucks and paraphernalia spoiled their view even though all of it, every single bit was under water except for two hours around low tide. For God’s sake, he and his friends made their living on these grants—grants the town had given them, grants they were able to put their children’s names on, to pass down the right to work and carry on the traditional way of living on which Wellfleet was built. Not only that, the town’s economy was based on what they did. That’s how shortsighted and selfish the complaints were.

  He shook his head remembering CiCi’s tone as she asked him why anyone would want to work a grant. She’d sounded like she was interrogating a garbage collector. What he’d wanted to say about it was, for one, it’s mine. If she was out there with him at, say, a morning tide, he’d sweep his arm out expansively to show her, this is my office. There’s the view out my window, my ceiling. This is the air I breathe. Can you hear the bay water lapping around my feet, and those crazy herring gulls feeding? That’s my elevator music. Other people pay a fortune to get this for a week. It’s mine every day. He was well beyond the point where he could imagine another life. Nor did he want to. It probably was a blood thing, he guessed, although shoot, CiCi was native Cape, too. Going to the tides must be a blood-type thing, like A negative or some sort that needs an exact match.

  That’s, of course, why you couldn’t talk to the upland owners. They’d never get it; washashores never did. They were clueless that the bay itself was a living, working being, that the oysters from it were the best in the world because of the particular mix of fresh water from the creeks and rivers emptying into the salt harbor, the sweet clean cool of the place, and that the rhythms of putting in and taking out were fascinating and beautiful. They could glory in them from their fancy decks, if they had a shell’s worth of sense. In fact, instead of driving to Aesop’s Tables in town and ordering from the raw bar, they could climb down the fancy stairways they built from their manicure
d yards to their blasted private beach, walk over, make friends, and he’d have pulled twice as many oysters and given them freely, with a smile and handshake. Where the hell did they think those oysters had come from anyway? He was the one who had the contract with Aesop’s and what he sold the restaurant for sixty-five cents each, the restaurant laughed and sold for double that. Sometimes triple, he’d seen that, too.

  At least he’d been able to pull the nursery trays out, thanks to CiCi securing the nets for him. What seed he’d gotten was premium, nearly the size of plantable field clams, which would cost thirty-six dollars a thousand, but he’d only paid the eighteen dollars that matchheads cost. Losing even some of it in a nor’easter would have been—well, he just couldn’t, that was all.

  As he got a couple of miles inland, closer to Route 6 where his house was just barely on the harbor side of that bisecting road, the protection of the pitch pines and the oaks lessened the force of the wind on his truck and gave him hope that Lizzie might be asleep. No such luck. As his front tires started to crunch the driveway gravel, she was already giving him what-for.

  “All right, all right, I’m sorry girl, I’m coming,” he called, leaving the truck door open in his fumbling haste for his house key.

  The Lab shot out and into a squat in the weedy grass. “Whew,” Rid whistled. “I know, I know. Wow, that’s a lot. You really had to go bad. I’m really sorry, girl.”

  As soon as she was upright again, the dog did an ecstatic dance around him, leaping to take tongue swipes at his face. Rid squatted and let her kiss and nuzzle him, his arms around her in a hug that shortly resulted in his being knocked onto his rear. “Okay, okay,” he laughed. “I’m happy to see you, too. D’ja think you I was gonna let you starve? Ya wanna eat?”

  At the word, the dog backed up and barked.

  “C’mon, girl, we gotta hurry, we’re losing the tide,” he said, striding to the kitchen where he scooped dry dog food into a metal bowl, and slamming the house door behind him, carried it to the truck, Lizzie barking and jumping in famished eagerness alongside all the way. Once in the front seat, she snarfed the food as he jammed the truck in reverse and raced back to the tide.

  * * * *

  He’d lost way too much time. Some of his nets were already under so much water that if they were fouled, he really couldn’t do anything about it now. “Crap,” he muttered, throwing the truck into park fairly near the high-water mark, seeing that Barb and Tweed and Woody were already throwing some equipment into the backs of theirs in preparation to move them in some. On a moon tide like this one, so much of the grant was exposed that it was worth it to move the truck two or three times, farther out and then back in some on the flats rather than leave it in the shallows and have to trudge back and forth. It was their most valuable work time of the month, not that tomorrow’s tide wouldn’t be good, too, but last night had been the full moon, so from now on it wouldn’t be quite as good, and now he’d missed it when there might be repairs needed, on top of the digging and picking he’d planned to get done to fill the weekend orders down in Chatham.

  Lizzie bounded out of the truck and immediately—he could have predicted it, having given her no time in the yard—did her business on the beach. Rid winced, hoping the owner whose precious sand Lizzie was polluting wasn’t doing an eagle-eye patrol behind some enormous expanse of window. He’d not thought to bring a plastic bag to pick it up with; maybe someone had one lying around his truck. Rid was always careful—all of them were—about antagonizing the upland owners. Sometimes when he was early and waiting for the tide to drop enough so he could work, he’d play ball with Lizzie in the shallows, always scrupulous to keep her off the beach, and while he worked, he kept her in the truck. He reminded himself: don’t forget to clean that up as he pulled his waders on and hooked one of the shoulder straps.

  “Where the hell you been?” It was Mario, shouting from in front of the big rock that handily marked the border of his grant. He looked at his watch in an exaggerated motion. He’d already thrown his bull rake in the truck, which meant he’d dug the quahogs he needed to fill immediate orders. Behind him, the wind whipped the surface of the bay into frothy whitecaps. The mottled sky kept moving.

  Rid wasn’t going to take the time to answer. “Got held up,” he shouted back, and slung the first two nursery trays he’d pulled from the water last night over his shoulder to carry out and reset. “Much damage last night?” he yelled as he slogged out.

  “Some. Not too bad,” Mario called, from closer. Mario didn’t believe in pulling stock before storms or even burying his oysters in a pit for winter. Most of the time he got away with it, but when he didn’t, he lied about it. He was crossing to Rid’s grant, zigging to avoid oyster cages and skirting the edges of Rid’s netted-over raceways. “Hey, d’ja talk to Tomas since the second tide yesterday?”

  “Nope.” Rid kept moving, to be clear: man, I’ve got to get this done. It wasn’t that they didn’t visit out there. For sure they did, but they all had times when they let each other know not today. Actually, he was surprised Mario was sparing five minutes himself if he’d had any digging to do along with checking the whole grant for storm damage. “You done?”

  “Not yet. Listen, we got trouble. Something about a lawsuit, trying to take away our grants.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah. Tomas got an appointment with a lawyer for tomorrow.”

  “What the hell’re you talking about?” This was one of Mario’s stupid games, and one Rid did not have time for today.

  Mario paused and eyed him. “Didn’t ya get your mail yesterday?”

  “No, guess I didn’t pick it up.” He’d been at CiCi’s, of course, not that it was Mario’s business.

  “Buddy, you’re being sued.”

  “Me? For what?”

  “We’re being sued, us three with grants in front of Pissario’s place. Don’t you know? We’re on private property.” Typical Mario, acting tough and amused by disaster, water sloshing at his boots now, one hand shielding his eyes although there wasn’t a hint of sun and he had on a backward baseball cap anyway. If he actually had to deal with it, Mario would blow like Hurricane Bob.

  “What the hell? The town gave us these grants, we’re perfectly legal. We stay off their damn beach.” Rid felt himself flushing, hated it.

  “Except when your date decides to take a shit up there,” Mario said, using his chin to gesture at Lizzie where she sat in Rid’s driver’s seat watching them.

  “Goddammit, Mario,” Rid said.

  Mario laughed, then having received the message, sobered enough to mollify Rid. “They’re claiming that the town don’t have the right to give us the grants because they own all the way out to mean low water, not mean high water. Well, it’s not a they, actually, it’s Pissario, suing us for being on ‘his’ property.” When he said “his,” Mario put quotation marks around it with fingers in the air, and underscored it with sarcasm. “And in case that ain’t enough, the prince is also suing the town for leasing his land out to you and me and Tomas. We just happen to be the lucky bastards whose grants are the ones the prick claims he owns. Anyway, your paperwork, you’ll be pleased to hear, is in your mailbox. Ain’t that just a kick in the pants?”

  Rid struggled to wrap his mind around what Mario was saying. “That would….”

  “Yeah. Shut us down.”

  “But he can’t—”

  “Hell no. He ain’t gonna get away with this.”

  “What does Wardy say?”

  “Hell, Wardy works for the town, he’ll do what they tell him to do. It ain’t like he’s got guts of his own now, is it? I don’t guess they told him nuttin yet because I ain’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

  Rid looked down at the tide climbing his ankles. “Christ, man, I’ve got to check my nets and get these trays back in. I can’t think about this now.”

  “Whatever.” Mario gave a half wave, half shrug and turned back toward his own grant. Mario was like that, offended if y
ou didn’t join his jocularity or gossip. Rid would have to talk to Tomas and the shellfish warden, although he had to admit that Mario was right about one thing: if they had to rely on Wardy for help, they all might as well stick their heads between their legs and kiss their asses goodbye.

  “Your nets fouled bad?” Rid called to the back of Mario’s head.

  “Yeah.”

  “Real bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rid sighed. All the grants on the flats anywhere near Blackfish Creek got a lot of shifting sand in every big blow that had to be cleared from the raceway nets within a day or the quahogs planted underneath would suffocate. Oysters, too—if they were buried and couldn’t filter the water for nutrients, they’d die. Even too much weed on the nets would steal oxygen from the water and slow their growth. Rid was always looking for ways to get to market sooner, not later; they all were. The longer until his animals reached legal size, the more likely he was to lose them to predators, pollution and disease. And in the meantime, well, that was his money lying there, his investment account underwater, and as likely to drown as not.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t until Rid left the grant, frustrated, the last to go, waiting until the wheels of his truck were sinking in the advancing water and there was no part of his grant he could work, that CiCi crossed his mind again. He’d not have thought about her then—his mind was mired in the mess of his nets and worrying the whole expanse of this lawsuit business—except that he saw her house over across the little horseshoe-shaped beach as his truck bumped up onto the access road. The houses near CiCi’s had been there forever and belonged, for the most part, to natives. But as the property up on the bluffs over the bay had all been snatched up, there was increasing opportunity (the real estate agents’ favorite word) to sell the old places down at sea level, the ones without the spectacular views. Already, a couple had been demolished to make way for the glass castles. One was only a couple of houses from CiCi’s traditional Cape, a huge angular structure with jutting decks and skylights, ridiculously out of place to Rid’s eye. He’d said as much to Tomas, who’d replied that the owner didn’t care how it looked now: he’d just had the foresight to build there while he could still get the land, and get it more cheaply than up on the bluffs. Soon enough all the sea-level houses would be sold and demolished, the natives moved, and the house in question would be ideally placed. Like most natives, Rid looked on the newcomers and their mansions with a mixture of derision, anger and secret envy.