On Little Wings Read online

  “So the bedtime story?” she asked when we were all arranged inside.

  “Right. I guess it isn’t so much a story story – just something she told me. She said that she looked at the fields all the time and when she got pregnant with me the fields soaked right from her eyes into me, and that is why I look like them.” I hoped she didn’t think I sounded vain and shook my head to show her I didn’t necessarily agree.

  “She says it isn’t fair that we name children before we know how they turn out because when I was born I had curly black hair – nothing like a wheat field.” The truth is that my mother threatened to change my name to Kansas often when I was a child. I think a part of her hoped I’d prefer Kansas and adopt a new name just like Cleo. Unfortunately for my mother, I was perfectly content being called Jennifer. And even as a child I recognized, without being able to put the complex idea into words, that Cleo cornered the market on name changes in our town and copying her would only look affected.

  “So how did you get the name Jennifer, then?” Every question rang with excitement.

  “Nothing special. A pretty waitress brought some chocolate cake to their table. They read her name tag and walla - here I am.”

  “Here you are,” she repeated with satisfaction. “I want to know everything. You’ll go hoarse from talking, but first, do you need food? We’re more than an hour from home so we should probably stop if you’re hungry.” My stomach was painfully empty now that it was no longer full of fear. I nodded and told her that sounded great.

  “Would you like to stop at a crab shack? Or a lobster house? Whatever you want. We are celebrating. We could grab some cod sandwiches at the next town.”

  “Oh,” I stalled uncomfortably. “It doesn’t matter. But I’m not really. . . I don’t, um, like … seafood that much,” I apologized.

  Sarah’s eyebrows inched up. “Really? Not any seafood?”

  “Fish is okay. I can do fish… sometimes.” I was stretching. My seafood tolerance usually ended at fish sticks with ketchup.

  “No shrimp? Crab? Lobster? Mussels? Clam?” I tried to hide my shudder at the word ‘mussels’. I once saw a woman eat them and thought I’d be ill just from the sight.

  “I’m sorry,” I answered, praying she didn’t hold it against me.

  Sarah’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, still unable to believe me. “What about Claire? Doesn’t she ever cook seafood?”

  “Not really. My father’s allergic to shellfish.” I cringed, waiting for her reaction. Her eyebrows contracted and she chewed softly on her bottom lip. “But we can go wherever you want. I’ll find something I like.”

  “No!” she exclaimed, grabbing my knee and smiling. “No, you don’t have to eat anything you don’t like. I was just thinking. I made lobster spaghetti for your first dinner tonight and that isn’t going to work, is it? I should have asked you first.” She smiled kindly and I felt my face melting with hot embarrassment. They put lobster in spaghetti?

  “I’m so sorry. I’m not trying to be rude,” my voice sounded small.

  “Of course not!” she cried. She pushed one hand toward the windshield and extended her fingers. “Stop. Don’t worry about it for a second. I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. I’m just surprised. More at Claire than at you.” She looked at me quickly. Looked through me is a better description – as if she were trying to see past me to my mother. “Do you know what your grandfather did for a living?” The teacher in Sarah became very plain in her querying, expectant face and I felt like I just entered an oral test.

  “Um, a factory, right? Didn’t he can fish?” I squirmed closer to the door as Sarah’s jaw dropped, dumbfounded.

  “Claire!” Sarah scolded the empty space in front of her. Tears crept to the bottom of my eyes. I didn’t want to look stupid in front of Sarah, or more importantly, disappoint her already. “Jennifer,” she said firmly, throwing a piercing look straight at me, “your grandfather was a waterman.” The last word reverberated with authority, as if nothing could be better. “He worked on the seas all his life. Anything the sea would grow, he harvested. He eventually managed to buy his own boat and employed three men. Four families, including our own, all fed and clothed and provided for by what my father could coax out of the ocean.” She held up four fingers, looking at them like the number surprised her even now. She stared at things I could not see before her eyes refocused on the highway. “There were bad years. He worked in the canning factory across the harbor to make ends meet. That’s true. But he was not a factory worker. He was a waterman.” Sarah’s eyes blazed with the luminosity of pride.

  I felt like an idiot: I had no idea what a waterman actually did. I didn’t know boats. Didn’t know tides, or stars, or engines or whatever they used these days. “I am so surprised that Claire never told you that. I guess I won’t know where to begin until I know where she left off. What do you know?”

  Wild horses couldn’t make me tell the truth and say ‘nothing’, so I stalled. “About what?”

  “All of this,” Sarah said, letting go of the steering wheel and throwing her hands into the air like she meant to encompass the entire world. “Our family, our home, your history, your heritage…”

  “I know grandma was a teacher. I know she met your dad when she took a job in Smithport.” I let my words out slowly, monitoring them carefully. I didn’t want to hurt Sarah more by reminding her that my mother never even hinted at her existence.

  “That’s something,” Sarah conceded with relief. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”

  “Yes,” I answered, thankful I could give her one answer that pleased her. “We went to San Diego when I was ten. My dad has a cousin there that he really likes.”

  Sarah wrinkled her nose in distaste. “I mean our ocean. The Northern Atlantic.” The way she said it one would think that all other oceans were second class citizens in the kingdom of Poseidon.

  “No, never,” I answered reluctantly.

  “Well,” she said with a strange thrill in her voice. “You will soon. I think you will love her.” The highway careened through hills covered in dense trees, taking us away from the airport until signs of humanity grew sparser. A few farm houses peeked out from intermittent clearings, showing advanced age in their sagging roofs and bowed walls. “Shelter Cove is just off the beach. Though it probably isn’t like any beach you’ve ever seen. Our bay is wild.”

  A tiny shiver ran down my arms in anticipation. “What is Shelter Cove?” I asked her, picturing a park or a marina.

  “Home,” she answered. “Shelter Cove is the name of my home.”

  “You named it?”

  “Heavens, no. Herman Miller named it Shelter Cove when he built it in 1901. It has been in our family for a hundred and ten years. All the homes have names around here.”

  “I can’t imagine naming my house in Nebraska. It’s a nice house, but just a house.” I pictured my two story stucco sitting pleasantly on our small, ordinary yard with a plaque that read Fred in gilded letters.

  “Well, houses here earn it. When something stands up to the sea’s temper for that long it garners a certain respect. Our homes deserve names because they fight the elements with us, beside us.” She pointed to a two story home covered in silvery grey wooden shingles. A clothesline bravely flapped unmentionables for all to see, including men’s long, white underwear I thought ceased to exist fifty years ago.

  “Does shelter cove look like those?” I asked pointing to it, “covered in roof shingles? Are they all like that?”

  Sarah laughed. “It’s called shake shingle. Surely you’ve seen it?”

  “I’ve never seen a house quite like that,” I said. In truth, I found them unsightly. The thick, uneven shingles ran from the roof’s peak to the ground, stopping only to shaggily outline the windows and door.

  “No, Shelter Cove is clapboard. White-washed. Beautiful.” She spoke of it tenderly. “Are you ready to see it?” I pictured a clean, white home overlooking the topaz ocean and the hunger in my stomach
turned into a longing. I needed to touch the water more than I needed food.

  “Let’s go home,” I answered wholeheartedly.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sarah ignored my claim that I could wait for dinner to eat and stopped at a small… I wanted to say restaurant, but that conjures the wrong image entirely. Shack is the nearest description I can find. It was a long, metal trailer with a tacky plastic sign almost too small to see from the road that read Phish and Chips. We had to park and walk up to a hole in the wall where a woman’s taciturn face appeared to take our order. The establishment was seedy at best and I earnestly doubted the safety and cleanliness of the food, but in all fairness, my hamburger was excellent. Similar ‘establishments’ littered our drive home, their names growing successively more creative until one entrepreneur gave up and simply advertised, “Same old, same old – But I fry it better!” I almost wished we had waited and stopped there, if for no other reason, to reward his honesty.

  It is a tribute to the scenery that it could distract my attention away from Sarah. The trees grew recklessly close to the almost shoulder-less road as if they wanted to stroke the car as it careened by. Meandering in an organic path, the small highway followed the lay of the land until it seemed as natural as the thin rivers that snaked in and out of view along the way. I couldn’t refrain from pointing out what must have been second nature to Sarah: the murky marshes ringed with cattails, the plaques on homes bearing impressive dates like 1790, the smooth forest floor covered in orange pine needles.

  The hour passed like minutes until the road, twisting ever more drunkenly as we went, stumbled to a halt at a Stop sign. “Almost there,” Sarah announced. “These are the first inland homes in the town, but Main Street is farther down. And Shelter Cove is a mile past that, on the bay.” She paused the car at the empty intersection to let me soak in the sight.

  There wasn’t much I wanted to soak, quite truthfully. The tiny, decrepit houses leaned wearily. Several lay in a tattered row, with no garages or sidewalks, and only a few weedy flowers for adornment. The towering trees blocked out the sun, casting the already dismal sight in deeper gloom. “They get prettier,” Sarah promised. “The hired hands without boats of their own used to eke out a living here from pocket change and fish scraps. These were built in the Depression. This is Langston Street, but for the last seventy years no one has called it anything but Shanty Street. Let me show you the real town.”

  The car creaked gently as it rolled slowly down the street littered with loose rocks. True to her promise, the homes began growing, both in size and cleanliness as we moved toward the town. A tiny sidewalk appeared, followed by old fashioned street lights. Soon garages and porches and trellises burdened with fat flowers came into sight. And then, with no transition between residential homes and businesses, a hardware store with a large burgundy awning stretched along the street, its goods spilling onto the sidewalk. Several more homes followed, two story with delicate stained glass in their narrow upper windows, each painted at least four different colors.

  “It looks like a postcard,” I said, gawking at the detailed, geometric carvings at the top of a porch post.

  “That might look like a postcard, but that looks like a poem.” Sarah pointed out her window as the car followed a wide turn. We broke free of a stand of trees and the docks of Smithport bustled into view. I pushed the button to roll down my window and with the first sweep of wind into the car burst the mingled smell of fish and salt and sea spray. Large rusted boats docked beside larger, rustier ones, with a mess of cranes, nets, cages, and crates littering the scene. One syllable shouts burst into the air like shots fired all around me. “Oy, Off, Down, Ho!” They really said Ho! Not to mention some other one syllable words that aren’t repeated in polite company. “They’re getting ready for dinner,” Sarah explained. “In the summer they take their catches across the harbor to the tourist towns and sell directly to the public. Put on quite a show, too.”

  Above the disorganized docks three wooden buildings crowded together on a stony rock ledge where two restaurants with small patios shouldered brutally against a general store, each pushing for a view of the water. I could see the waves bobbing and dying far on the horizon, but the current rolled in gently here, sheltered by the distant, rocky arms of land fending off the determined ocean.

  “Is this where my grandfather worked?” I asked as I watched the men in thick yellow overalls loading their boats as they called directions. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the scene fifty years ago. All I had to do is switch out the cars for older models and put the women in dresses.

  “Often. But usually he took his catch to the canning facility in Anchorton. They canned sardines. It closed ten years ago, but it did well in its time.” Sarah pulled over and parked so I could look longer. An annoyed car zipped past us with a rude swerve. “They think we’re tourists, coming to look at the fishermen,” Sarah said with a laugh, nodding to the disappearing car. “That’s why they got mad.”

  “They don’t like tourists?” I asked in surprise.

  “Not …really.” Sarah let the words out grudgingly.

  “Why?”

  Sarah deliberated, opened her mouth and closed it again thoughtfully before delivering a prudent answer. “Smithport is an old place. It is fiercely proud of its history and it tends to be just a bit … exclusive. Newcomers aren’t exactly embraced.”

  My pride rankled at her words. “So they don’t want me here?” I challenged.

  “Oh, no!” She said with a relieved laugh. “You do not fall under that category at all. There are a lot of people curious to see Claire’s daughter. You are a true Smither, without a doubt. Even if you didn’t know it.”

  “A what?” I asked

  “Oh, a Smither. It’s what we call each other. So,” Sarah said happily, as if all my worries had been put to rest, “do you want to see Shelter Cove now?”

  I nodded, my eyes still riveted to the men on the docks. They moved with a sharp focus, never still, never distracted. I wanted to stay longer, walk down the crooked planks for a better look, but Sarah reversed the car back into the street.

  The road to Shelter Cove followed the rocky banks, unwilling to leave the side of the ocean after working so hard to find it. Some scrawny pine trees tried to obstruct the view by pushing between the water and the street, but they didn’t get far. The ocean reappeared again, watching me, following me, tugging her foamy white skirts along the jagged rocks to keep up with the car. Her restless body defined everything in sight. Her waves crashed against the broken boulders that glistened like beached whales. Her endless blue framed the boats on the horizon, painting the heavy, metal vessels with sentimental strokes. Even the sky seemed nothing more than a massive looking glass for the ocean to admire her swirling face, the clouds imitating the waves as they heaved across the azure dome.

  The houses farther down the road lacked the grandeur of the structures on Main Street, but did not have the shabby, run-down feeling of Shanty Street. Here they nestled into the trees, contented and natural. No neighborhoods existed in Smithport, only clusters. A few homes huddled together, followed by the untamed wilderness, followed by another group of buildings, like tiny, inhabited galaxies scattered across the universe of the landscape. Sarah turned down a gravel road with trees nearly touching their tops high above the car. Haven Lane. Turning one last time, the car coasted into a short driveway and sat idling before Sarah slowly turned the key and killed the engine.

  “This is it,” she said. The square yard pushed the trees away from the house, but could not tame the sand and rocks. Grass grew intermittently between the sandy bare patches and clustered stones. In the middle of the struggle between lawn and wilderness stood a bright, orderly home. A small brass plaque reading Shelter Cove est. 1901 hung beside a faded, red door. The thin, white paint did not completely obscure the sheen of weathered wood, but every imperfection felt carefully calculated to add to the charm. Two colorful, decorative floats, just like the ones litte
ring the boats on the docks, swung from the porch railing and flower boxes sprouted red pansies beneath the windows framed in black shutters.

  Sarah didn’t speak while I took it in. The silence pressed in on my ears, but I couldn’t break it. I felt the Past push against the car window, its hands thrust to the thin glass, waiting to clasp me the moment I exited. I would meet ghosts here. Not the kind that haunt and wail, but the ones that make you remember. The very air seemed to be a memory. I could never explain it, but I felt it in the tiny bumps of raised flesh on my arms.

  “It is so beautiful,” I said at last. The words Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth leaped into my mind. I stepped outside, trying to remember who said it. Emerson? That didn’t sound right. Not Shelley. Regardless, I never agreed with it before. I can’t say I agreed with it in that moment, either, but it pierced my mind, cutting away all other thoughts. Truth is Beauty. Beauty is Truth. I met Sarah’s curious eyes over the hood of the car, watching her watch me. Somewhere in this beauty, I would meet the truth.

  CHAPTER 10

  I followed Sarah to the front door, my suitcase bouncing over the gravel driveway and clumping against the wooden porch steps. Before we reached the door handle there was a rustling from the yard and I turned to see a medium-sized dog burst from the forest and race across the yard.

  “Don’t be scared,” Sarah said, “that’s just Charlie, my mutt.” The dog reached us in less than two seconds and began a frantic dance on his back paws as his tongue waved indiscriminately, looking for exposed skin. “Charlie, sit! Sit down!” Sarah yelled, pushing his bottom rudely to the porch planks, where he commenced wagging his entire body back and forth in glee. “Sorry about that.”

  Charlie’s short white hair was only interrupted by a large, black patch that encircled half of his head, including one dark eye and a floppy ear. “He’s friendly,” I said, wondering if petting him on the head would calm him or just increase the hysterics.