The House on Salt Hay Road by Carin Clevidence

Author:Carin Clevidence [Clevidence, Carin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3290-5
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Clayton watched with fascination as his grandfather turned slowly into a bird. Not the rooster or hawk he had at times resembled, but the hatchling of some altricial species, a blue jay or a mourning dove. Scudder’s eyes were often shut, so that the closed lids veined with blue seemed not to have opened yet. His white hair stuck up from his head like tufts of down. His nose looked more than ever like a beak, but a fragile one that had only recently pecked its way out of a shell.

It was Clayton who asked Mavis if they should bathe him, when the sour, rotten smell began to permeate the room. He used a sponge and a basin of water while Mavis held her father under the arms and primly averted her face. Seeing his grandfather’s spindly legs and soft, extended belly made Clayton think of a hatchling again. When the wet sponge hit Scudder’s groin, the old man’s eyes opened in alarm and he struggled. Mavis kept him from falling as she tried to reassure him, but the bath was considered a failure and they did not attempt it again.

And it was Clayton who most often remembered to feed him. Mavis alternated between furious bouts of baking and trancelike states during which she sat at the kitchen table and stared up at the ceiling as if attempting to read something in the cracks in the plaster. Clayton fed the old man oatmeal, because it was easy to chew.

Standing over his grandfather with the oatmeal bowl, Clayton thought of the shipwrecks the old man had told him about: the Lucy Norton, the dark-eyed figurehead of which stood at the entrance to the Southease town hall; the rescue divers who worked for weeks to salvage bolts of cloth and bags of mail off the Belle of the Isles. Since before he could read, Clayton had known the names of ships that sank fifty years before he was born. He imagined those lost cargoes strewn across the shores of Fire Island, buried like treasure in the sand.

“Time to eat.” He rattled the spoon in the bowl. His grandfather’s eyes were closed. Clayton watched his chest, relieved when it rose with the old man’s shallow breathing. “Time to eat,” he said again.

His grandfather couldn’t just die, he told himself. Not a man who had lived through so much. Scudder knew more about Fire Neck than anyone. He loved the history of the roads they walked on and had told Clayton the stories behind the names. Fire Neck, for the signal fires the Indians burned on the banks of the river to guide whaling parties through the inlet and back across the bay. And he had mapped in his mind the shifting cartography of the south shore. It was not as solid as it looked, he’d told Clayton. Back in the 1700s the ocean burst through narrow Fire Island and made an inlet across the Great South Bay from Southease. With a single storm, the town became an ocean port.

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