SO I WILL call myself Tom Burton, or Thomas Burton, as the name would appear on the novels I write. I am too difficult for some readers and my sentences are sometimes more than statements. Many readers are comfortable only with the simple sentences, and prefer books that reward a belief in the happy ending and the pot at the end of the rainbow, even as the rainbow retreats and those who follow are footsore. There is no ending, happy or otherwise, only a pause.
I live with my wife, herself a novelist; together we make a decent living. Except for the children, we would make a better living. But we eat, pay the bills and see our way clear to having the leaks in the roof fixed — or at least located. We consider ourselves lucky to do what we want in the place where we want to do it. We have not seriously considered divorce, but sometimes after a few martinis we shout and pick at old scabs. My wife once hurled at me a plate of salt mackerel and boiled potatoes, a favorite meal until then. Months later we still discovered elusive bits of fish set in potato on the iron railing leading down into the dining room, on the rungs of chairs, and clinging to the spines of certain books, Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds and Pipes's Russia Under the Old Regime, each discovery a reminder of the fruitlessness of passion. Ordinarily we laugh and talk and worry about the children, like anybody else. In the past, our sons have troubled us. They didn't seem to fit into the world as it was, and we blamed ourselves for setting a poor example and not taking the business world seriously. There are so many people out there in that world it is better to know how to get along with them, to learn their ways and how to trick them as they know how to trick each other.
Our daughter gives surprisingly little trouble; she and her husband have so far kept their trouble to themselves. That may change tomorrow. Things have a way of changing, I find. That fact keeps us on our toes.
The children are all gone now, which means they all live somewhere else, but they come back with their children, eight of them and all beautiful — to me, anyway. The grandchildren rather like to sleep on the floor; they pretend this is an Indian camp. Everybody is here for the holidays because I was brought up to believe everybody should be with everybody else on holidays. They like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's, which come so close together you can scarcely get your head up. My wife and I thought it might be easier this year, because of the small house and the new grandchildren, to have dinner out at Thanksgiving. The two youngest ones could sleep in those little trays you see now. We could get a big table in a good restaurant not far away that is built out over the ocean, as if we did not have the entire ocean right in front of our house, and we could sit there and watch gulls other than our own and have drinks and talk and order and everything would be brought and eaten and the remainders taken away, some in doggie bags, and we would all go back to a clean house. However, there was such an outcry among the children that eating out was found to be an impossibility.
“Daddy, we've never done anything like that,” my daughter said. “I'm surprised you'd even suggest such a thing.”
“Well you see, it was only a suggestion,” I said.
They said, the children said, that if now at our age we found it impossible to get together a simple Thanksgiving dinner of the things we'd been cooking all their lives and to clean up after it, well, they would be glad to get the dinner and clean up; one would bring the turkey, another the vegetables, another the pies. But a turkey is better cooked in the house where it is to be consumed; vegetables can't well be cooked ahead; they lose color and vitamins, the cream sauce for the creamed onions curdles, and neither my daughter nor the wives of my sons are much for pie crust, so that was that. The new Maytag dishwasher helped a good deal. My wife said she didn't know what we did without it, but I know what we did.
So we lived peacefully beside the sea on the coast of Maine on the rocks, and never a sun came up that we didn't thank God we lived where we lived. Each winter the storms shifted the rocks and each spring we found new ways down to the beach. A beach is a good place for grandchildren. (They never forget it.) Everybody likes picnics and when it got cold we built fires of driftwood and roasted frankfurters and our own childhood was close. We had enough frontage on the ocean so that later on my younger son could live in the house, my daughter and her husband could build on the next two lots and my older son on the next two lots and they could all see each other every day. My wife and I intended to be cremated, which is neater, and to have our ashes thrown off the rocks into the sea, although I understand that is now illegal, too many people doing it, people getting upset about it, afraid of having ashes cling to them. But it could be done where we lived because the place was isolated except in the summertime. In the summertime it could be done very quickly in the dark. I have read somewhere of a man who had his ashes put in under the bricks of the hearth and that seemed reasonable, but is it reasonable to wish to remind your son of you whenever he pokes up the fire? No. He will have his own problems. So my wife and I have decided to be pollutants.
Sometimes I felt I should be shipped out West where I came from, and have my ashes scattered over the sagebrush.
My aunts could not understand why I would want to leave the Rocky Mountains, which they called their mountains, and go and live on the coast of Maine. They said it was a lot nicer living where everybody knows who you are.
“Maine's sort of a crazy place to live,” my Aunt Maude said. “Like living in Arkansas or Delaware. None of us ever came from there. I don't think Mama would have liked it.”
Well, maybe Crow Point was a crazy place. In June the summer people came with their boats and their bathing caps and their ice buckets. The stomach muscles of the men were slack from abundant sitting, their skin pale from overexposure to fluorescent lights, and at sundown the wives pulled cashmere sweaters close and suggested a little fire. Some men had money, some advanced degrees; few had both. One pulled teeth. Another professed English.
Social status was based on how long one had been coming there summers. The first comers remarked that it was a shame the latecomers hadn't known the Point as it was, but latecomers, having established themselves with a sign bearing their names tacked to the birch tree at the fork in the road, were as suspicious of change and of strangers as the first comers. All sometimes trained their binoculars on those who clambered over the rocks with so little style, wearing shoes instead of sneakers. All stood against paving the road and the introduction of the telephone, but not against the power lines; after all, there are limits: people do need ice.
All objected to the removal of trees, even dead ones, except for those that cast confusing shadows over the tennis court and interfered with the view of the ocean.
Up the road, a couple conversed with spirits and had selected mediums down for the weekend. Down the road, an attorney had established contact with the mechanical world through the purchase of power tools, cranky in his hands. With them he cut off little pieces of himself, never enough to seriously cripple him or to threaten his happiness. He sometimes arrived, bleeding, to show me.
A congressman invited laughing friends down from Washington to drink and to eat native corn and lobsters. When he drank alone, he stripped down to his shorts and called to me from a rocky ledge.
“Tom!”
I sat in the early hours with a drink in my hand before his fireplace and watched him burn up old wills he had drawn up in favor of people he no longer favored.
There were parties. It was not uncommon to see an angry woman in fairly formal dress limping down the road with but a single shoe. Friendships blew up even before the tapers were set aflame. What had been said was unforgivable. Vows were taken never again to darken a certain door. Tow trucks came with flashing lights.
The day after Labor Day they all went away. The woods and the sea belonged to us and the birds and animals.
I believe I lived in Maine because Maine is about as far as I could get from the ranch in Montana where I grew up, and where my mother was unhappy, my beautiful, angel mother.
The morning in question — and it certainly was in question — was only a few years ago and began — for me — as I stood on the porch, which is so close to the sea you might call it a deck. The sea, that morning, was unusually calm; little ripples fled across the surface and caught the sun. Such a sun on similar waters had moved Aeschylus to write, “The many-twinkling smile of Ocean.” He knew what he was talking about. It might have been a joyous day.
Then suddenly a seagull swept past — and so close I felt the draft and the glance of its beady eye.
Two kinds of gulls command our beach and the sky above. Herring gulls are common, protected by law because they are scavengers, and loved because they are graceful in flight and suggest freedom. Their likeness is painted on driftwood and carved in pine and sold along Route One as souvenirs of another Maine summer, the rocks and the eternal tides.
The black-backed gulls are not so common. They are bigger and stand apart from the herring gulls. They like the isolation of ledge or island; they steer clear of human beings. And well they might, for they are detested. They search out and eat the eggs and chicks and ducklings of other birds.
The gull whose draft I felt and whose glance I knew was a black-backed gull.