by Barry Rachin
The restaurant smelled of fried clams, coleslaw and fresh-ground coffee. They found a booth near the door and the waitress, a dark-skinned woman with a braid of hair that hung down to the small of her wide back, took their order and hurried off.
“How we mistreated the Indians is a black mark on American history.” Grace said. “Trail of Tears, Little Big Horn, the Seminoles in Florida - all a part of our shameful past.” But only fifteen minutes later, Grace leaned forward and whispered, “Angie, didn’t you order a cheeseburger with fries?”
“Sure did.”
“That fellow with the cowboy hat came in ten minutes after us and he’s being served a cheeseburger with fries.”
“With my tossed salad and blue cheese dressing,” Angie rested her chin on the edge of the table and blew out her cheeks in protest. “This stinks!”
The waitress came out of the kitchen with a spaghetti dinner, which she place in front of a man seated at the counter. The pudgy waitress freshened his coffee then began a leisurely conversation. “That fellow,” Angie was furious now, “came in no more than five minutes ago. How do you figure it?”
“Trail of Tears, Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Seminoles in Florida,” her mother replied. “It doesn’t appear they’ve forgiven past indignities.”
Grace’s blood was beginning to percolate. An inconvenience was one thing. What if they had no intention to serve white people? She could complain, draw attention to the fact that half a dozen customers who arrived after they did were already eating and maybe—hocus pocus—the food would suddenly appear. Or maybe, out of shear vindictiveness, the cook would push their order back by another half hour. Grace wished she had a kerosene-soaked rag ball to kick toward the front of the restaurant.
The food arrived. Arranging the plates on the table, the round-faced waitress smiled. It wasn’t so much a nasty smile as one of bland indifference. Cheeseburgers and fries. The fries were burnt and greasy; the burgers undercooked.
“Well, we’re off to a good start,” Angie muttered.
******
Back on the road they picked up route 151 heading east and entered the outskirts of Mashpee. The sun was almost down. “Bastards!” Angie spit the word out, an explosion of hatefulness. “Stinking Indians!”
Grace wasn’t quite sure how she felt. Were the Indians to fault or was it just the same old same old? Another drop in the never ending pitter-patter of life’s disappointments. Too many shitty experiences like the Mashpee diner cobbled together with a never ending mishmash of false starts and shattered dreams could wreck your faith in humanity. In recent months, she felt her purpose in life frittering away and that frightened her. “Those Indians made us cool our heels and the food was crap.” Grace spoke without rancor. “Lesson learned. Next time we visit Mashpee we don’t break bread with the Redman.”
Finally they reached the causeway that connected the island where the cabin was situated. “What the heck is that?” Angie pointed to a large bushy object perched on top of a telephone pole. The pole was forty feet tall and tilted at a queer angle. A short, chirping whistle filtered down to the marshy wetlands.
“Osprey nest.” Grace replied. With their white breast and belly, Ospreys were one of the largest birds of prey in North America. The wingspan alone could reach well over five feet. “Osprey feed almost exclusively on fish,” Grace explained. “The birds are protected under the endangered species act. And with good reason.”
A large bird suddenly appeared, soaring in from the bay and landed on top of the rickety structure. “They look like they can fend for themselves,” Angie replied.
Grace shook her head. The species had gone into a steady decline since the early 1950’s due to pesticide poisoning. But after the ban on DDT, the massive birds bounced back. They built their nests frequently on manmade structures like telephone poles, duck blinds and even channel markers.
Grace eased passed the pole on the thin slip of roadway and found the cabin a short distance nestled between a row of holly and slender birch trees. What little light was left quickly bled out of the sky and the New England night arrived serene and darkly beautiful. From the upstairs bedroom they looked out over a calm bay. Too far away to be seen, the island of Martha’s Vineyard rose out of the Atlantic waters due south. Nantucket, the former whaling center, sat only a handful of mile off to the east.
The women quickly arranged the linen, washed up and got ready for bed. Angie shuffled into the bedroom barefoot. She kissed her mother’s cheek. “I didn’t mean what I said about the Indians.”
Grace sighed and pulled her daughter close, rubbing the nape of her neck. “The strangest thing happened to me today.” She pulled Angie down on the side of the bed next to her and told her about Carl, Pushkin and the amboyna burl box.
When she finished, Angie asked, “What else do you know about the guy?”
“Nothing.”
“A regular mystery man.”
Grace blinked. That was the same thing the receptionist, Pam, had said. “For the time being, yes.”
She squeezed her mother’s hand. “I’m tired. Goodnight.”
When she was gone, Grace thought, “A thousand questions in search of a thousand and one answers.” It was an old Arabic saying she had read somewhere, possibly in graduate school - the implication being that a person, no matter how sincere and earnest, can search a lifetime and still come up short. Grace listened to her daughter’s steady breathing. Deep, serene and unencumbered. The sleep of a youth with little to no excess emotional baggage. As tired as she was from the drive south, Grace hovered on the edge of sleep but could not slip across the threshold. Some bit of unfinished business?
Wait. She did know something else about the enigmatic Carl Solomon. But it was really only more of the same, one more bit of ephemeral nothingness. A thousand-and-one questions in search of a thousand-and-two illusive answers.
A little more than a year ago, the teachers at Brandenburg were negotiating a new contract with the school committee, and the meetings were going poorly. In December just before the holidays, a number of staff refused to attend a parent-teacher conference. The act of defiance, which was written up in the local press, backfired and was interpreted as a slap in the community's face. Many parents who previously were sympathetic toward the teachers, felt betrayed. Between the staff who attended the conference and those who stayed away, a rift developed; best friends were no longer on talking terms, and an ugly mood settled over the school unlike anything Grace could remember.
She saw little of Carl during this time. He seldom ate his lunch in the staff dining room and was either working snow removal or doing repairs in some other wing of the building. One afternoon when the children had been sent home on early release, the janitor's helper came quietly into her classroom. He walked with the weight of his body far back on his heels - the strong, earthy gait of a man used to doing heavy, physical labor. His expression was flat, opaque. "Floor needs washing. Did you want me to come back?"
Grace looked up from the pile of papers she was correcting. His face was framed in the habitual scowl, but the tone of voice was unmistakably neutral and polite. Almost but not quite friendly. "No. That won't be necessary. I'll be out of your way before you get to the front of the room.
Stacking the chairs and desks to one side, he left the room and returned with a mop and pail of water. His eyes shrouded over, turned dull and inward as he leaned into his work. Rinsing the water after each pass, he swabbed the floor down with smooth, muscular strokes, paying special attention to the baseboards and space under the heating vents. When half the floor was washed, he dragged the dirty liquid out of the room and returned with a bucket of clean water. Moving all the furniture to the other side, he repeated the process.
"You're getting a new floor," he said leaning on the mop handle at the far end of the room. The entire length of floor between them was still quite wet. For the second time, Grace put her pencil down and looked up. The classroom floor was covered in li
noleum tile, except for a smaller section toward the rear of the room that was solid oak. The wood was originally installed as a purely decorative feature - decorative and utterly impractical. Over the years, the finish had been eaten away and the damaged boards reduced to an eyesore.
"This oak," he said tapping the floor with the head of the mop, "may look a mess, but it’s in reasonably good shape. This weekend I'll be sanding away the stains and dirt to the bare wood. Come Monday morning, you'll have a brand new floor." Carl rubbed his chin meditatively. "We're using a water-based sealer that dries real fast and leaves very little odor."
He lugged the filthy water back out into the hallway and disappeared. In the morning the children would be back with their dirty feet and untidy habits. Once more the scuff marks, bits of scrap paper torn haphazardly from spiral binders and other bits of educational debris would litter the floor - the disorder and chaos of half-formed minds.
On Monday as Carl had promised, the classroom floor near the coat racks in the back of the room had a bright new look. All the scrapes, gouges and discolorations were gone. The oak had lightened to the color of golden wheat. There was an odor from the high gloss finish but it was slight and inoffensive. Even the blackened stain - India ink - near the water cooler was mysteriously erased, the wood fiber sanded flush then finally bleached back to its original color before the final, satiny film was applied.
Later in the day when the children were gone, Grace sat for the longest time staring at the new floor and wondering at the hidden allegory: the dirt and dust swept clean; the blemishes and discolorations undone; the multi-textured grain of each, thin board stripped, restored, made whole again.
A new floor. A new life.
******
The clock on the bedside table registered two a.m.. Grace’s brain was shutting down. Like a ship coming untethered from a dockside mooring, her body was drifting off to sleep. Her last conscious recollection was an image of Carl's deadpan face and cryptic, oddly visceral body language which kept floating back to her with obsessive force. Then with equal insistence, another image presented itself: that of Ed Gray, the neurasthenic Chairman of the English Department. Grace imagined him dressed in blue coveralls and steel-toed work boots laboriously swinging a mop back and forth across the classroom floor. With his wire-rimmed bifocals perched on the tip of his nose and the tattered copy of Pushkin's short stories protruding from his back pocket, the middle-aged academic flailed away with the string mop, splattering water in every direction.
Where this bizarre imagery came from or what it meant, she hadn't a clue. For sure, Ed Gray was an odd duck, but he wasn't a bad person. He certainly wasn't malicious like some people.
Like Stewart.
Stewart could be hateful and cruel. When they married, he seemed so full of enthusiasm and spunk. Misdirected enthusiasm. Self-serving, opportunistic spunk. A thousand-and-two questions in search of a thousand-and-three answers.
******
In the morning they watched the harbormaster cruise up the channel from the breakwater. During the summer he would be checking permits for anyone digging clams, but this late in the season it was just a routine patrol. Locals waded out waist deep with a wire clam rake, which they scraped along the sandy bottom. When they hit a hard object, they scooped it up. Mussels, smallish clams, succulent quahogs, even spiny starfish were all fair game.
They drove back across the narrow slip of land that connected the island to the mainland. Wild lilies, yellow with speckled mouths and lavender-fringed blossoms fading toward porcelain centers, rimmed the inland grasses. High up in the telephone pole, the osprey was feeding her young. Grace pulled off the road onto the stiff marsh grass so they could get a better view. “Osprey eggs seldom hatch at the same time," Grace said. "There could be a lapse of five days between the first born and the last chicks.
The women craned their heads far back but all they could see was the huge basket-shaped nest fashioned from twigs and branches. “The older chick dominates the younger ones. If hunting is good, there’s no problem among the chicks. But if food is scarce, the older ones won’t share even to the point of starvation.”
They ate breakfast at a bagel shop near the rotary then drove out to South Cape Beach. The beach was empty except for an older couple searching for sea glass and an occasional surf caster. The bluefish had been running since late September and sea bass were also plentiful.
The twosome headed off down the wintry beach. A flock of grayish-brown whimbrels bobbed easily on the calm water. Near a hillock in the distance, stiff plume grass and salt spray roses bloomed close by a marshy wetland where phragmites grass rose four feet out of the water on elegant, plumed stems. Angie meandered near the shallow surf, dodging stranded horseshoe crabs and rubbery stalks of seaweed. A pale jellyfish floated by, sucked in toward shore then thrust back to sea by the whimsical currents. They skirted a cove and, on the far end, found a middle-aged man laying out the frame of a smallish kite on a terrycloth beach towel. Thirty feet away a team of three men was flying similar bat-shaped kites in precision drill.
"Those are synchronized flying kites," Grace said. With a hand shielding her eyes from the bright sun, she stared up into the sky. “Very expensive.”
Angie followed the trio of kites as they pirouetted in a perfect figure-eight then hovered motionless for a fraction of a second before darting off in another combination of twists and turns “Next month there's an oceanfront festival off Newport. Kite clubs from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey will be competing. My parents and I use to go every year.” The festival featured teams from all over New England. The more sophisticated models were constructed of lightweight, space-age metals and colorful fabrics. Four-member groups took turns running through a series of choreographed maneuvers, with the team leader calling out directions seconds in advance of each, new routine.
"Too bad!" Angie said, gesturing with her eyes. The end kite on the far left suddenly veered off in the wrong direction from the other three. "He missed the call." Angie had never seen anything quite like it. The kites dived and soared in perfect - or, as in the previous, botched effort, near perfect - unison, covering a span of a hundred feet out toward the ocean.
"See how they adjust the height and direction,” Grace said, “by moving their hands."
Her daughter had been too busy enjoying the acrobatics to notice how the men handled the strings. But now she could see, as the kites tacked in a new direction, the three sets of hands moving in and out, up and down, accordingly.
"Kites are easy,” Grace thought on the walk back. Angie was skipping about in the tumbling surf. “Something goes wrong with the routine,... you adjust the line or check the metal kite frame. With human nature it's not so simple.”
Grace glanced over her shoulder at her daughter bringing up the rear. Angie looked up and smiled - a quirky, darkly beautiful expression that pulled all her malleable features at cross-purposes. “There was a letter from the court,” Angie said.
Up ahead a tall man in his thirties was surfcasting with a metal lure that sailed far out over the breaking surf in a looping arc. “I asked the judge for a few extra dollars, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Angie put her hands inside the pouch on her windbreaker. “Why didn’t you just ask dad directly?” Grace had asked him on several occasions. More like begged. “He doesn’t get it, does he?” Angie said, anticipating her mother’s thoughts.
“No, I guess not.”
Monkey syndrome. That’s what Grace called Stewart’s affliction. Baby monkeys developed at the same rate as humans up to a point. Then the primates hit an intellectual brick wall and stopped learning. Stewart might have been an ace at the Toyota dealership, but as a parent his potential petered out shortly after his daughter was born. Now, strangely enough, Angie had come into her own and outstripped her father in subtle, undemonstrative ways that Stewart would never comprehend.
They hung back to the left of the surfcaster, watching him heave the monofil
ament line out over the water. “Any luck?” Grace asked.
“Not today.” He kept jerking at the rod with a spastic pumping action to simulate an injured minnow on the end of the line. “Fish aren’t cooperating.” He gestured with his head so they could pass safely.
“Dad’s got this new girl friend,” Angie said.
“What happened to Gloria?” Angie shrugged. “What’s the new one like?”
Angie flicked her hair back over a shoulder. The sun caught the blond highlights in the dusky, chestnut colored strands. She didn’t answer right away. “She’s nice enough.”
Another unwitting victim. When an Osprey caught a fish, it always carried the prey back to the nest tail down so its flight was unencumbered. Grace imagined Stewart carrying his romantic quarry back to the domestic nest in a similar fashion, but kept the thought to herself. A soft breeze was blowing now diagonally across the beach. They could smell the pebbly seaweed drying in the damp sand. Up ahead, another fisherman was threading a sea worm onto a barbed hook. The worm was blood red and slimy, its tiny legs and pincers writhing in agony. In a pail next to the fishing gear was a half dozen flounder, flat and smooth.
“I’m going to take a vow of silence,” Grace spoke in a confidential tone. “Show up to school on Monday morning with a chalkboard on a string.”
“And how exactly are you going teach eighth-grade English?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
A chalkboard and a string. Grace was talking nonsense, but behind the silly blather hid a darker reality. The brown-skinned holy man could parade around with a goofy chalkboard dangling from his scrawny neck. But maybe he was a colossal faker - that’s faker, not ‘fakir’, as in religious mendicant - and who would know the difference? He never spoke a solitary word just smiled incessantly. Enlightened soul or simpleton? Besides levitation, mind travel to distant cosmic galaxies and sleeping on a bed on rusty nails, did the mystic possess any practical skills? Could he teacher eighth graders how to conjugate a verb? Make an amboyna burl box? Grace was tired of all the phony baloney. The verisimilitude. The appearance of truth. The sham. Maybe the bearded yogi in the geriatric diaper was on to something. Or just maybe he was laughing at humanity behind his silvery beard.
