The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver

Author:Elizabeth Graver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780062184849
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of such chatter that someone brought up Dick Wilson and the land. Charlie wasn’t paying close attention. He was picturing them all as skeletons; he was remembering his pee that morning after his run, how it had come out the color of Coca-Cola, a dark red-brown—should he tell his father or just let it go, for it had seemed, as he’d watched it arc into the bushes, a sort of purging, a purification, appropriate, even as he’d had a jolt of fear. By the time he tuned in, they were in full swing: three house lots, maybe more, a new road being cut, planning board meetings, and was one of the developers really from Japan, and was it true that the elder Wilsons were getting divorced, and if they didn’t want the land, why wouldn’t they just pass it on to their children? The land and house had been, before the army took it, in the Wilson family since 1882, but the first time the army shot all its guns at once, every window in the Point House had shattered, and then the radar caved the floors in and the army bulldozed the house, and when the Wilsons returned after the war, they settled on another parcel of their land midway down the Point, where they built a new house next to their old playhouse, which was put on a flatbed truck and moved, like a parade float, down the road.

“Three modest houses might be better than one monstrous one,” his mother said.

“What are you talking about!” Charlie cried out, and for a moment, everyone was silent, remembering, he and they both, what they all knew—the drugs, the hospital no one would mention out of tact or fear or both. Remembering too how Charlie was, had always been, the wildest of his generation of summer children, burrs in his hair, chokecherry juice on his limbs, and how the end of the Point had been his favorite part because the most untamed, and also rightfully (if you believed in the ownership of land; he both did and did not) half theirs. Throughout his childhood, as new houses went up along the road, as suburbia built and trimmed and mowed (here, in New Jersey, everywhere), the base lived in an opposite cycle—its buildings decaying, bushes and trees growing up from cracks in the road.

Just six years earlier, Gaga and Grampa, together with their old friends the Wilsons, had bought the land back from the army, with the fourteen acres adjacent to the Big House, Red House and Portable going to the Porters, and the twelve acres of the choicest part, the tip, to the Wilsons, since it had been theirs before the war. A hotel outfit from New Bedford had shown up at the public auction; so had—everyone was sure of it—a Mafia man looking for a hideout, who gave up $5,000 before the Porter-Wilson limit. At the time, the purchase, $125,000 for the twenty-six acres, had

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