A Matter of Mercy Page 7

  Tears came to Caroline’s eyes. Again. “This is so pretty. So nice of you. Where did you get…?”

  “I brought extra. Take a bite.”

  “Thanks,” Caroline whispered. She wanted a shower and a long, dreamless sleep in a cool room and to wake with her mother well and giving unsolicited advice, all of which she would cheerfully take for the rest of her life. She took a small bite and put the sandwich back down. “Last night was bad.” The jeans and gray sweatshirt she wore were the same ones she’d had on for the past two or three days. She’d lost track. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything else clean; a respite worker had done the laundry. It was just easier to pick up the same thing off the floor and put it on, no need to think. She really had to stop doing that, no matter how tired she was when she got up, as tired as when she’d laid down.

  “Can you listen to me for a minute?”

  With her free hand, Caroline pressed against the ridge between her eyes.

  “I know it doesn’t feel this way, but this time can be a gift.”

  “Oh, definitely.” Caroline was faintly ashamed of her sarcasm in the face of Elsie’s kindness, yet not enough to retract it. “Have you been through this?”

  Elsie didn’t appear to notice, or at least not to take offense. Instead she stroked Caroline’s shoulder with her left hand, and with her right, she reached across the table and took Caroline’s other hand, which lay inert next to the sandwich missing its small half-moon bite.

  “Yes. With my mother. And with many patients. I’m not trying to force something on you. Some people can do it, some can’t.”

  “Do what?”

  Elsie paused. “Well, not fight it so much. Not run from it. Be with her in it, if you know what I mean. This is a time you can share. You can help her complete her life.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Again Elsie overlooked the sarcastic edge in her voice. “I mean that if you can give her the chance to say ‘I forgive you, forgive me, I love you, thank you and goodbye,’ and you can say those very same things to her—more or less—for most patients and most families, it gives a great deal of peace.”

  Elsie held Caroline’s eyes as she spoke. For a few seconds, some curtain was raised and Caroline glimpsed what Elsie was talking about. But either she was too tired to hold the vision or the window fogged over and the clarity was gone. She stopped meeting Elsie’s gaze, dropping her head and pressing her fingers against the bony part of her brow again, where some punk rock band seemed to be warming up.

  “Headache?” Elsie said.

  “Always.”

  “Okay. You eat. I’ll get you a couple of Tylenol. We’ll finish our lunch and—maybe you’d like to get in a shower before I leave?”

  “Hmm. Starting to get a bit ripe, am I? No wonder my dating life is slow.”

  “I didn’t mean that. No, not at all. You said earlier that you wanted to shower and I.…”

  Kindness, not humor, was Elsie’s forte. “Elsie, I was just kidding. Yes, I’d really like to shower and wash my hair. And thank you for lunch. It’s delicious. Really.” Actually, it helped to have to yank herself back abruptly like that. She’d been skirting the abyss.What Else had been talking about was too big, as if while Caroline was lost, chartless in an ocean fog, she was expected to navigate the mystery of her mother’s life and death. Too big, too much. Now she was speaking to the nurse’s back, as Elsie was over at the kitchen sink where a large bottle of extra-strength Tylenol was on the windowsill. Elsie came back and put two capsules into Caroline’s hand.

  Caroline took them, drinking from the cup. “Ooh. That tea is so good.”

  “We have a whole pot of it,” Elsie said with a smile. “Can you taste the cinnamon? There’s a stick of it in the pot. Not too much, I hope.” She sat down again. “Goodness, your neighbors are having a time of it with that lawsuit, aren’t they?”

  “Lawsuit?” Caroline asked. Good, sweet Elsie, talking about anything but death and dying now.

  Elsie pointed vaguely upward, out the side of the kitchen to the east, toward the bluffs. “The people up there suing the oystermen.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, well, it’s been on the front page of The Times, and living right here, I thought you’d know. One of the people up on the bluffs is suing some of the oystermen because he says he owns the flats.”

  “I haven’t looked at the paper. I stopped delivery last month—I was picking it up and dropping it into the trash, and it was just a waste.” As she spoke, Caroline’s mind skipped ahead: Rid. Was he involved? “I don’t see how anybody up there can sue, though. I mean the town gives those grants. It’s town property.” Wasn’t that what Rid had explained to her?

  “I don’t know the details. Something about how the town doesn’t really own it. It’s quite a mess, anyway. It’ll put those oystermen out of business if they lose. And if it spreads to other upland landowners, it doesn’t just wipe out the fishing families, it wipes out a town.”

  That night, Caroline watched the local news on television but there was no mention of it. She called and had delivery of The Cape Cod Times resumed, but there was nothing about a lawsuit. Not for nearly a week. She thought about whether to call Rid, whether to walk down and ask him. She didn’t though. Something else took center stage: she awakened nauseated, ate lightly and promptly threw up. That made her pay attention to the missed period she’d attributed to stress and to the tender breasts she’d attributed to the missed period.

  * * * *

  The damn lawsuit was consuming him. He had nothing to compare it to except maybe a hurricane warning: something you knew was coming, saw the sky darkening, frantically tried to defend against but realized could take everything you’d worked for. It was all they talked about on the flats, even those who weren’t being sued. It was eclipsing this weekend’s Oysterfest, something they all had fun with the middle of every October. Barb would probably win the oyster shucking contest again—he could’ve beaten her last year if he’d concentrated more—but now he wasn’t even going to enter. Too far behind on orders, having wasted time standing in the shallows with Tomas, looking up at the Pissario house. There was no sign of activity up there, which was, in itself, infuriating. He had to hold himself back around Mario to avoid inciting the hothead to some retaliation that could boomerang back on them all.

  “I’d like to know exactly how we can be such a terrible problem for Mr. High and Mighty,” Mario would rant bitterly, squinting up to where the sun glinted off the Pissario house like an ice sculpture. “Ain’t nobody there. Four friggin’ decks overlooking his friggin’ view that we working scumbags mess up but there ain’t nobody ever on one of ’em. Too busy out hiring lawyers, I guess. Now, if them plate glass windows of his was to get shot out mysteriously some night, I’m thinking he’d have a problem worth his time. I don’t see what choice we got. It’s not like we got help from our friends.” The others named in the suit had, one by one, opted out of a joint defense. They were trying to work out a settlement, they said. So far the upland owners above their grants were sleeping giants, and all they needed was to cross Pissario’s beach. Obviously, they thought Mario, Rid and Tomas had zero possibility of winning against Pissario and wanted to avoid going down with them.

  Rid stopped picking oysters out of a cage then, even though the tide was moving in and he didn’t have enough for his restaurant order yet. He stood up between Mario and shore for the third or fourth time that afternoon. “Man, you gotta back off. We’ve gotta go with Tomas, with the lawyer stuff. That’s the way to fight this.”

  Privately, though, he felt the same rage, the same urge to strike back. Visceral prison memories—the slide and clang of an auto lock steel door, the smothering closeness of the cement walls and ceiling—kept him in check.

  When the tide came after dark or was small—meaning it didn’t drop below the mean low-tide mark because the moon was waning or new—Rid, Tomas and Mario met ea
rly to drink at The Reading Oyster Restaurant, across from the town pier and the shellfish warden’s office. “The Oyster” was where they always went, where everyone went, but now they sat apart, not at the bar with the others, but at one of the high tables along the wall. When the others came in, it was later, and earlier when they left. Everyone spoke to them. They were slapped on the back, cheered on, given sympathy, outrage, and thumbs up variously. But then they veered off, as if discreetly trying not to catch a communicable disease.

  The main topic for Tomas was raising money. “I don’t think you two are adequately aware of how far this may go. The retainer is just the beginning.” Tomas had gone into his children’s college fund for his share. So far, his wife was with him, but the children came first for her. Tomas didn’t think Marie would be willing to follow him into a hole. “If we don’t fight it, obviously we lose everything. But we may lose everything anyway, because it may take all we’ve got and more. That’s why we’ve got to decide now exactly how far we’re willing to take this.” Tomas spoke in his patient, cultured voice, usually looking at Mario.

  For Rid, the issue was trying to keep Tomas from giving up on a joint defense because Mario was such a wildcard. Mario had more money than he did, and he was hoping that Mario would advance some of his share until he could come up with it. There was a question in his mind—probably in Tomas’ mind too—about the source of Mario’s money. They all had side jobs; they had to. Tomas and Marie ran a bait shop with Marie’s brother in Eastham. Some cut and sold firewood, or jumped on a scallop or shrimp boat out of New Bedford for a week or ten days, which would bring in a quick couple of thousand extra in the winter. Rid had done both, depending on the year.

  It wasn’t impossible that Mario ran some drugs. He reminded Rid of himself ten years ago, which ran up a red flag or two. But there wasn’t room to worry about that. For one, he and Tomas needed the money, for all of Tomas’ talk about going it alone. And Rid had more than enough to worry about. He should have been home repairing cages. He hadn’t fixed all the damage from the hurricane tail swipe last month, and winter was coming on. There was no way he should have been sitting on a bar stool.

  It was mid-October. The summer tourists were long gone, and it was the local fishers and year-rounder business people in the restaurant. The fishermen were in the bar; the tide had been at five-fifteen and had run them into darkness. Most had come in for a drink right off their grants. On the other side, the restaurant served a couple celebrating an anniversary, a lone man in a suit, a smattering of nondescript others. The bar, as usual on weeknights, was the heartbeat of The Reading Oyster, which was the heartbeat of the town, especially in the off-season.

  The restaurant was named for the dark and dusty bookstore at its rear, crammed with ancient paperbacks and magazines and rare books, some suspended over string along the beamed ceiling, many stacked precariously along the narrow aisles. Old, yellowing movie posters were tacked to any wall space not covered with shelves from which old, random books tumbled, here and there an astonishing treasure surrounded by garage-quality junk. The family that owned the restaurant kept the bookstore in operation a few hours a day, not that there were many customers, because it was the collection of their ancient patriarch, who sat guard at the antiquated cash register by the door. Maybe it also kept him out of the restaurant, where he’d be in their way.

  Even the bar was slow tonight. Or it was slow now, at seven thirty, because most everyone had come, had their after-tide beer and gone on home to work on their nets or cages or, in the unlikely event that they were caught up with those, to struggle with the paper work. Cash out and cash in was always best. It all used to be under the table, but things were changing, regulations being enacted, inspection procedures becoming more and more rigorous, put in place faster than some of them could keep up. Federal HACCP—Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point—regulation, with its boatload of rules controlled every single clam and oyster if you wanted to deal wholesale, and the damn rules so complicated the government made you pay to take their class.

  Rid, Tomas and Mario were still on their stools. They weren’t drunk, nor were they entirely sober, except for Tomas who never showed beer anyway, even after five or six. Tonight he’d had only three. All of them ordered sandwiches, Rid and Mario mainly so they could keep drinking, and Tomas to keep them all sober enough to stay on track.

  “Look,” Tomas said. “It’s money now or money later. If we lose our grants we’re out our income and everything we’ve invested. Or even short term—remember, he could get a restraining order. We’re got to stop pissing and moaning and focus. That’s the point. Or we fold now.” The last was rhetorical. They all reiterated regularly that they weren’t giving up their lives and livelihood, but Tomas still brought it up as an option.

  Mario banged his fist on the table. “Why us? Why not the others?” His face was red, a bit bleary in the semi-darkness of the bar, but Rid recognized it as Mario’s pent-up anger as much as the beer.

  Tomas sighed.

  As much to intervene as because he thought it was actually workable, Rid said, “Maybe we could ask all the others to help us out. With the money. You know, make a case that they’re all in danger, too. ’Cause if Pissario wins, then the upland owners above them, hell, they’re all likely to just say, hey, that’s my land you’re on, I want you off, or I want sixty percent of everything you pick off my land. Whatever. I mean, isn’t Pissario setting precedent? They could all be laying back, letting Pissario absorb the cost of the first suit, and if he wins, then they pounce.”

  “Yeah,” Mario said, “that’s what I’m getting at,” although, of course, he hadn’t been. His cap was on forward tonight, with the bill bent up and back.

  Tomas closed his eyes a moment and rubbed his chin. “That’s good. That’s good. We should be able to make that argument,” and Rid was as pleased with himself as he’d been since the one A he’d gotten in high school. Over behind the bar, glassware clinked as Billy hung them in the overhead rack, pretending he wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. Usually the bartender wasn’t too bad about spreading gossip, but doubtless this topic was too hot to resist. Probably Billy had leaned so far over the bar he’d caught his earring in a barstool. Rid wished he’d paid more attention to making sure they weren’t overheard. Mario, especially, barked like a damn seal when he got going. The last thing they needed was for it to get around that they were going to ask for money before they had a chance to do it themselves.

  “We’ve never organized,” Tomas sighed again and shrugged one shoulder under the strap of his overalls. It was a strangely delicate movement for his hefty frame, and out of character, too. “Too independent a bunch, and I suppose if any of us had wanted to work with anyone else we wouldn’t be working the flats in the first place. But okay. We’ve got to start somewhere. So we see if we can get everyone to contribute something. Everyone with a grant on Indian Neck. Maybe we should go beyond Indian Neck. Hell, maybe Mayo Beach area? All the aquaculturists in Wellfleet, even. This law affects the economy of the region, after all.”

  “Okay, how we gonna do this? We just each of us talk to who we know best, and—” Mario shoved his cap back further on his head and plunged in.

  Tomas interrupted. “Slow down. Let’s be organized about how we approach this. Different arguments will appeal to different people. Let me think about this and let’s assign each of us to talk to certain people. This is akin to forming a union.” He made eye contact with Mario. “Listen to me. Do not say a word to anyone. We don’t want a half-baked plan leaking out, and we sure as hell don’t want it getting to the upland owners, who might decide to get together and help Pissario. The tide’s at six forty-nine tomorrow night—we’ll only be able to use the front side of it. How about we meet here about seven-fifteen, maybe a little earlier? All right?” He was already shoving his seat back from the high table, putting his arm in the sleeve of his windbreaker, but as he did he again looked at Mario hard.

  “Sure,” Ri
d answered with a head gesture to Mario, pulling him into agreement with Tomas’ proposal.

  “Yeah, I guess,” from Mario.

  A half-hour later, Rid had hardly unloaded the truck and gotten into the house when the phone rang. He answered it on the run, switching on lights as he passed them.

  “You and I have to handle this ourselves,” Tomas’ voice came through the receiver. “Mario isn’t the person to be talking to people about this. He doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  “I thought that’s what you might be thinking.” Rid slumped into his recliner, wishing he’d had time to get a beer out of the refrigerator before he’d answered the phone. Lizzie curled into a circle on her bed next to him, their television watching posts. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Manage him or distract him. We can’t have him making threats or inciting people, and we can’t have him—”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t care about Mario but I’m not going to let him take us down.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Okay. I’ll figure out a list tonight dividing who I’ll talk to and who you cover.”

  Chapter 7

  A mackerel sky was just brightening over the steely morning tide when Rid bumped his truck off the access road. Most of his grant was exposed already, but he’d had to wait until it was light enough to work. He was glad only two other trucks, Barb’s and Clint’s, were out on the flats. He hadn’t figured out just how to handle Mario yet, and he needed to get his digging done while he thought things though. His cages, rake and buckets rattled in the truck bed while Lizzie rode shotgun, her head out the passenger side window, sniffing the wind, ears flapping like flags. Rid took a long swallow of the coffee he’d picked up at the Cumberland Farms store on Route Six and made a face. It was old. Usually he made a thermos at home, but this morning he’d been hurried and distracted. Already this damn lawsuit was affecting everything, sucking up what he loved. Like right now, a morning tide was usually when he reveled in his life—the sun coming up soft on the water, the birds coming to work, too—and him there, outside, free, grateful. Grateful because he was free, he guessed. Now, here he was instead all worked up and worried, trying to figure out how to deal with frigging crazy Mario, who shouldn’t be his problem.