Spartina

John Casey

SPARTINA

John Casey was born in 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa.
Spartina
won the National Book Award in 1989. His latest book is
The Half-life of Happiness.
He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia.

The Half-life of Happiness

Spartina

Testimony and Demeanor

An American Romance

D
ick Pierce swung the bait barrel off his wharf into his work skiff. He cast off and began to scull down Pierce Creek. He built his skiffs with an oarlock socket on the transom. He had to tell most buyers what it was for. In fact sculling was a necessity for him—this far up the creek it was too narrow to row and, except at high water, too shallow to put the outboard down.

The tide was still dumping and he let her drift a bit. A spider’s strand broke against his forehead. A light mist came off the water but dissolved as soon as it got above the black banks. Dick loved the salt marsh. Under the spartina there was black earth richer than any farmland, but useless to farmers on account of the salt. Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water. Smart grass. If he ever got his big boat built he might just call her
Spartina
, though he ought to call her after his wife.

He always started off these fair early-summer days in a mood as calm and bright as the surface of the water. Everything was lit up silver and rose—the dew, the spider’s webs, the puffs of mist, even the damp backs of the dunes on the barrier beach that divided the salt ponds, the marsh, and the creeks from the sea.

Where Pierce Creek joined up with Sawtooth Creek he let the outboard down and cranked it up. He could see the breachway and through the breachway the horizon, a pale streak. The skiff
climbed onto a plane with ease. Eighteen-foot, but she was as light as any sixteen-footer, and almost as narrow. She held as much as clunkier skiffs, he didn’t clutter up the inside with knees or thwarts. She was extraordinarily high in the prow; he didn’t mind taking her out in moderate seas. The only thing he couldn’t do was run a deep trawl of pots way offshore. And that’s where most of the lobster were in summer. He dared go twenty miles out, but it wouldn’t do him any good without the heavy machinery to haul even a single trawl of heavy pots and heavy warp.

Dick throttled down as he went past Sawtooth Island to line up for the run through the breachway. He could see the line of surf on the sandbar just outside the mouth. He nipped through and turned hard to starboard to follow the tidal channel around the sand. He cut back to port, feeling the chine and the skegs catch and hold through the turn, and so out onto the glassy swell; for all his troubles, his skiff was sinless, and her sweetness sweetened him.

He soured a little after he’d pulled ten pots—trash in all but two—spider crabs and whelks. A fat two-pound tautog which he kept for bait. After he’d pulled a few more empty pots he began to think of the tautog as supper. Things looked up—three small keepers, one more questionable. He put the gauge on it and threw it back. Five for twenty. The kind of day he’d put up with in August but not in early June. He ate half of his cheese sandwich and drank half of his thermos of hot milk and coffee. He considered whether it would be worthwhile moving some pots to a deeper hole. It was a couple of miles away, might have someone’s pots there already. And that hole was more frequented by sport fishermen who weren’t above pulling a pot if the striped bass weren’t biting.

Dick had caught a pair of them at it once. He’d come round the rock just in time to see them drop his pot overboard. A college kid and his girlfriend in a deluxe Boston Whaler, all white fiberglass, white vinyl rubrails, and chrome rodholders. Dick had come alongside, jumped into their boat with his six-pronged grapnel in his hand. He swung it against the kid’s outboard casing, cracking the plastic.

Dick said, “I see you near one of my pots again, I’ll put this through your goddamn hand.”

The kid said, “I was just taking a look.”

The girl said, “You’re crazy.”

Dick got back in his own boat. The girl wrote down Dick’s boat number, cranked up her engine, and left.

It turned out it was the girl’s boat. Her father sent Dick a bill for the engine casing. Dick sent it back with a note. “Your daughter and her boyfriend pulled one of my pots. That is stealing.”

The father called him up. That was when Dick still had his phone.

“Mr. Pierce, my daughter tells me she and her boyfriend didn’t take anything. Is that correct?”

Dick said, “They pulled my lobster pot.”

“They may have pulled your pot, but they didn’t take anything. You threatened them. You do that again, I’ll have you charged with assault with a deadly weapon.”

Dick said, “Go to hell.”

The father was still talking when Dick hung up.

Some time later Dick went to Westerly on his annual round of banks. While he was waiting to see the loan officer, a man came up to him and said, “Mr. Pierce?”

Dick got to his feet and said, “Yes.”

“Mr. Pierce,” the man said, and Dick recognized the voice. “I’ve had a look at your loan application. If you’d care to step into my office …”

Dick thought of his application. The list of his jobs, the crews he’d quit, the crew he’d been fired from. His house. His mortgage. His wife’s job as a piecework crab picker. His puny income from lobstering and quahogging. His pickup he was still paying for. His claim that his half-built big boat was worth forty thousand. His power tools …

Dick said, “Give me back the application.”

The man said, “Are you saying you wish to withdraw your—”

Dick said, “Yes.”

The man sent a secretary out with the form. Dick went around to the Hospital Trust, Old Stone Bank, Columbus. Nothing doing. At Rhode Island Federal Savings & Loan he got a woman loan officer. She suggested he get someone to cosign. Then they’d consider giving him half what he asked. At 17
^½
percent. On ten thousand dollars that was 1,750. Unless he built someone else a boat, he couldn’t do it. If he built someone else a boat, then he wouldn’t get his own boat built.

The woman said, “You’re a family of four. If you depreciated your tools and your workplace—you work at home, right?—you could qualify for certain assistance programs for your family—”

Dick said, “Welfare?”

The woman took a breath and said, “Yes.”

Dick didn’t get angry with her. If she’d been slick, young, sure of herself, crossed her legs with a little scratch of nylon on nylon as she leaned forward, he might have blown up. But this woman wasn’t sure of herself, was trying to be nice. Her cheap navy-blue jacket, the unevenly crushed ruffles of her blouse, the way she picked at the frayed leather corner of her desk blotter—were all awkward and nice. Dick said, “I know you’re trying to help.” The woman started to say something, Dick went ahead. “From what I’ve heard, welfare people come round to inspect your house. I’ve just told four banks more than I care to about my life. In the
second place, I’ve got a half-built fishing boat in my backyard. I don’t mean a little dinghy. She’s over fifty foot long, eighteen-foot beam. She’s damn near the size of my house. The welfare people could see she’s worth thousands and thousands of dollars. The wood and hardware alone. Even half built she’s worth more than welfare allows. But I can’t get anyone from a bank to come look at her, I can’t get you to ask someone who knows half a thing about boats to tell you she’s already worth more than I’m asking to borrow. You could ask Joxer Goode, he owns the crab plant—”