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?
He tried to sit up, almost called out to Elsie.
What would he be without the hard things he was right about? If his bitterness had drained, what would he be, how disabled? He didn’t want to be like Eddie. It was hard to say about a friend as good as Eddie, but he didn’t want to be that soft-shelled. In a way Elsie was right to say class rage — he’d been made by enemies. It was natural. How else did nature work? He’d used some of his tricks to show up the piss-to-windward sailors, wasn’t much maybe, but it marked his territory. And Spartina. What had he ever got by letting up?
An answer came from a funny direction. He thought of Mary Scanlon talking about her father. Fresh from his funeral, she told his jokes, even told his dumb jokes. He was a man Dick might have put down as just another gabby mick. And here he himself was remembering her remembering her father’s remembering. Little Tommy Scanlon whizzing down the hill at the noonday whistle, poking his cold face around the barrel on his sled, carrying the lunch pails to the mill, where his father was foreman of the dye works, where little Tommy Scanlon saw him jump over the dye vat …
Mary Scanlon sifted her old man like flour through her fingers.
Dick thought he’d be lucky to get as fine a sifting from his own kids. Include the one still in Elsie, now pressed against his feet. No building a boat, no hard craft of his would keep him from their judgments.
But that wasn’t the only reason he thought of Mary and her father, to worry about how he’d be remembered. Not just for that. It seemed to be to get him to relax about something he’d always known — that they all flowed into each other. All of them set about the salt marsh in the little towns and the houses on the hills — they all got mixed in, they stayed themselves. Permeable, yielding to each other, how could they stay themselves? The notion was as dizzying as the notion that time moved through them, that they moved through time. They changed and changed and stayed the same.
They were here, they were gone, they were somewhere in time.
But if there was no time that mattered but the time that was inside them, then they’d be nowhere.
He’d been scared by that thought before, shuddered it away before. Now it stuck him, as if it was angered by what he’d thought before, angered by his airy-fairy kindly-light notions of time as wave, in motion through a sea that was always there. Of all of them as waves in a life that was always there. But what if you go into the dark — you go in, you don’t come out?
Old geezers sitting around the Neptune near to closing time on a quiet night — he’d heard them say, “Best thing I ever did was have kids.” It had always sounded feeble to him. Now it seemed completely empty.
They were all down there trying to wire the shackle. Each one of them alone, clinging to the stem of a mushroom anchor with one breath inside. One breath. It didn’t matter if you got the shackle wired or not. There was no up. When your breath was done, no up.
You could let go or hold on, no difference. No up. No brightness getting brighter. You got dumber and dumber in the dark.
He was caught tighter and tighter in this thought, motionless but shot by thought to the end of his breath.
At last he was released. He felt how tight he’d got. His body was twisted hard as rope. He let his shoulders go loose, and he must have moved his feet, because Elsie pushed them away in her sleep.
He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t calm, but he wasn’t scared anymore. He let his feet slide off the sofa onto the floor, got up, and put a log at the back of the coals. It was still dark at the window.
He no longer thought he’d brought that despair on himself by thinking big. Now it occurred to him he hadn’t been scared enough when the wave came through the window into Spartina’s wheelhouse. He hadn’t been scared enough, he hadn’t been thankful enough. All right, he could see that.
But he was goddamned if he was going to go on being scared, not for one black wave of thought that might be true, might not be. He had other thoughts; they might be true too. One picture of himself turning into minerals in the dark wasn’t necessarily all there was to it.
He took up what he’d been thinking when he’d left off. He started off warily. He thought of the other people around the salt ponds, the salt marsh, up in the houses in the hills. Take Elsie for one. Now, there was someone as unlike him, as unlikely to be connected to him, as he could imagine. By comparison, Miss Perry’s connection to him and his family made sense. And yet it turned out he didn’t just know about Elsie, he felt her feelings way beyond what she told him, beyond their rushes at each other. He could trace other people in her. She talked about how she was scared of becoming like Miss Perry, as if Miss Perry’s spinsterhood could overtake her like a flood of sterilizing salt up into the fields above the marsh. But Elsie stuck to her, took in the good Miss Perry as much as she could, kept out the salt.
Elsie had her pricks of jealousy against her sister, against her sister’s beauty, against all the cultivation it took to tend the blossoms of her sister’s life. Elsie stuck to her too, imitated her, was working on her own blossoming in a beach-rose way, a wilder imitation of her sister’s flowering.
And then there was Mary Scanlon, now at home in Elsie’s house. Dick remembered how he’d laughed at the idea of the two of them under one roof — he’d said they’d take the paint off anyone who dared to come in. There was Mary making the place a nest while Elsie was in exile. Elsie complained about Mary’s getting sentimental and holy, but Dick knew she was grateful for every twig and piece of down Mary moved into the nest.