I turned the skiff away from home, heading in the other direction, out to the Salt House.
It was named after a rocky spit of land on the easternmost point of Alden, connected to the mainland by a long wooden bridge. Great Salt Bay stretched out in front of the house, and Olde Salt River snaked past it, visible only from the bathroom window.
The dirt road leading to the front door was marked by a wooden sign that read only SALT after time and weather erased the remainder of the words.
Pop said the sign had always been that way. From the first day he’d moved there, when he was just a boy.
When I was little, I’d imagined his family had moved to Alden for the beauty of it, for the water.
But Pop had a different story.
His father, Seamus, married with three kids by the time he was twenty-five, hated the water. He couldn’t swim and hadn’t held a fishing rod in his life. But his wife, Lydia, inherited the house from someone on her side of the family, and since Lydia was pregnant again, and not at all happy about bringing another baby into their already cramped duplex in South Philly, they sold whatever they couldn’t fit in their station wagon and drove straight through the ten-hour ride to the house on Great Salt Point.
Pop would tell the story of that drive over and over through the years. Some details would change; the places they stopped to eat or the things they took with them, but his memory of seeing the house for the first time never faltered. The way he’d make his eyes open as wide as he could, let his jaw hang open like it had a loose hinge. It was paradise, he’d say, effin’ paradise, with a whistle through his teeth.
It was a poorly constructed barn made into a ramshackle farmhouse by Lydia’s self-proclaimed carpenter uncle. Rooms added to rooms with no logic; a hallway, long and narrow that ended at a wall, as if the uncle decided at the last minute that he’d grown tired of all that work and the room was no longer necessary. The walls were empty inside, not a speck of insulation. Cedar closets in the bedrooms, almost as large as the rooms themselves. Guy had those moths tapped down, Pop would say, shaking his head, no matter if the people inside were frozen solid.
But that morning when Pop pulled up in front of the house, the sun was shining on a slope of grass that wandered down to the dark blue water. For a city boy who’d never seen the ocean, it was paradise.
To please Pop even more, the house came with a boat, just a dinghy, but it had a motor and wasn’t in bad shape. Seamus wanted to sell it, and Lydia didn’t care much for it either. She was a young mother of three with one on the way. She had little use for a boat unless it was bringing food to the table or helping her with the mounds of laundry. But Pop wanted that boat, and he knew getting through to his mother was his only hope of keeping it.
He made it his mission. When he wasn’t pestering her, he was working: painting the buoys that had sat unused on the boat for years: a bright green ringed with blue, the same color as the family coat of arms his mother hung next to the cross in the kitchen. He took out library books on lobstering and taught himself how to restring the old wooden traps that were piled in a heap against the back of the house. And he kept at his mother. And at her, and at her, and at her. After three months, she relented with one condition. He wasn’t to go out on the boat unless his father went with him.
Pop would chuckle when he got to this part of the story. His mild-mannered father had whipped around to his wife when he heard this bit of news and said, “Have you gone feckin’ nuts, now, Lydia?”
But Lydia had gone nuts, she told them both. Absolutely out of her mind from that boy on her all the time about that damn boat. She had her hands full enough with the other kids, and besides, a lobster or two a week, maybe some fish here and there, wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.
So two mornings a week at the crack of dawn, Seamus and Pop motored out and set two traps, all that Pop managed to salvage from the old heap. The boat had fared better than the gear, and the blue dinghy, with its tinny buzzing motor, became my grandfather’s home away from home.
Seamus clung to the sides of the boat, white-knuckled and pale, for the near dozen trips they took. Finally he put his foot down and told Lydia that his son was more than capable of going out alone, and for the love of Pete, what was he going to do if something happened anyway? Pop would always act out this part of the story, mimicking his father. “It’s not that I can’t swim, honey,” he’d say, a wild look in his eye. “I sink, Lydia. Sink.”
By the time I was born, Pop had built up steadily from those two traps to more than five hundred. When he died, Hope and I had inherited the house, and even though Pop had put in a woodstove and done some updates, it was still rustic living, and with the girls so young, we’d only used it as a summerhouse every year.
Now it was another ten minutes before the house was in front of me, set back from the water. The lawn overgrown, a layer of green mold covering the back stairs, as thick as two-day stubble.
Hope had been the one to suggest renovating the house, moving into it for good. Can you imagine, baby, she’d said, waking up to this? What a gift.
We’d jumped in with both feet finally. Never in my life did I think I’d have two mortgages. But it was only supposed to be for a few months while we did renovations. We had a crew come in, and Boon was usually good for a day’s work as long as I had a cooler full of cold beer.
We’d planned to move in at the end of summer last year and have the girls settled before school started.
Then she died. We hadn’t been to the house as a family since. I knew Hope hadn’t been back at all.
But I couldn’t stay away. Sometimes I drove over and mowed the lawn. Checked the house to make sure there were no problems. I didn’t feel the same way Hope did. She was afraid to go back. Afraid of all the memories piling up on her. I felt the opposite. But the more I pushed at her, the more she shut down.
Hope had suggested we sell it. She’d said it once. And once only. I stayed silent. Because if I spoke, the words would have been that we wouldn’t come back from selling it. Our marriage. We wouldn’t make it back. Not just from her forcing me to do it. But from her giving up on it. Giving up on us.
Looking at the house now, with the water shimmering in front of it, and the yellow clapboards so bright, it seemed hopeless. I had no idea how to get Hope to change her mind. How to make her feel how she did once about the house. What a gift.
?6
Jess
I crossed the street on my bike and headed to the wide paved road that divided the town like a lazy river.