Buried on the Beaches: Cape Stories for Hooked Hearts and Driftwood Souls

By Colin Fleming

“ ‘Because anything that can happen to you, can happen on the Cape.’ It was our version of the concluding words of a sermon, or a prayer, after which it was time to stand up, or sit down again, head bowed, knowing that you lived in a place unlike any other, and maybe more like any other, too, when you got into the internal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780997574296

Colin Fleming

Colin Fleming's fiction has appeared in Commentary, VQR, Glimmer Train, AGNI, and Harper's. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. He is a regular guest on NPR's Weekend Edition.

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PROLOGUE

So said a scribe who had been there often:

Cape Cod. A dune-swaddled, whitecap-lashed peninsula jutting into the Atlantic with the same determination required of anyone who has ever loved or lived fully.

A place where flora and fauna intertwine with the lives of the people who live there. Who pass through. Who’ve never been, but know wonder when they feel it. A place of discovery, respite and leisure, wisteria-entangled cottages, buckets of sand holding worlds unto themselves.

And yet, a place beyond geography, a map of the hopes, desires, and needs inside all. A means of travel to the far side of the next lighthouse, and the one after that, both being the physical cousins of those internal edifices of light—hope and clarity—that render the choppiest waters of our souls straits upon which we sail in greater confidence.

Where the ancient and the forever meet, dance, kiss in the lapping of every wave, the beat of every human heart.

THE CAPE PATH

If you believed the local legends—meaning, you put stock in what the neighbors said, and the articles my mother sometimes clipped out of the New Bedford Gazette—my father was the best tuna fisherman in southern Massachusetts on account of his even nature.

As a kid, that threw me. I thought, maybe, it’d be for his excellent choice in bait, or the indestructibility of his rods, or his boat, which was better keeled—unflippable, even—than anyone else’s, and faster too. Or his Neptune-like knack of knowing where the fish were hiding. Or even his muscles, when it came to standing at the ship’s edge and battling it out with nothing but a rod.

That’s how you think when you’re a kid; citing your father’s equanimity doesn’t earn you a lot of credit on the playground. But I knew there must have been something of deep, undeniable value in my dad’s implacability, because I thought the world of my dad, so much so that I wondered—and worried—if I’d ever have a child who respected me the way I respected him.

I didn’t know it at the time, but he labored a lot to instill those same values in me. I was an up and down kid. Chipper and bright one moment, taciturn and lonely the next. I guess it wasn’t hard to read me, or know in which direction I was headed. My father had a lot of variants on the same life lesson, but it was especially effective when I was most at odds with myself. Like when we were in the backyard, after my dad had come home from a fishing trip, having a game of catch—pun somewhat intended.

I was about twelve or thirteen when I started thinking about those games of toss, later on in the evening as I lay in bed, wondering when we’d play again. My father would have on his relic of a catcher’s mitt, from his mid-1960s high school days, and I’d be standing on the little mound we had made, imagining that the reels and lobster traps around the yard were parts of a nautical-themed Fenway Park, as I tried to decide which of the new pitches I had been working on to throw to the old veteran. My curve? A nascent sinker that drifted more than it sank? As soon as I decided, he’d stop me.

You know, Ban—I don’t remember him ever calling me by my entire name—people always do one of two things when they’re conflicted. They let you know it by acting out, and letting their face speak for them. Or they try to hide it. You let people know by trying so hard to hide it. Talk with your actions, not your face. And when you need to use words, make sure they’re words you can act on. Now let’s see how that sinker’s coming along.

My wife, Ellen, knew how hard it was for me when I lost my dad. I think that in any marriage, no matter how strong it is, one person is doing more of the lifting than another at a given point in time. That’s fine, so long as you trade off. So when Ellen’s mother got sick, I readied myself to do whatever she wanted, as long as I truly believed it for the best. For her best, I mean. If it wasn’t, I was prepared to fight, with actions and words if need be, as I knew she would have done for me.

Her mother had stayed with us for a couple weeks, before it got too bad. It was amazing how well she understood how much sand was left in the glass. Dace, our fourteen-year-old son, made a number of comments to me on the subject, like she was almost a witch or something. He didn’t mean anything by it, but Ellie—being seventeen and goodhearted—would run out of whatever room we were in, crying. It was a tradition in my wife’s family to have each female’s name be a kind of diminution of her mother’s. I didn’t know what that meant if Ellie ever had a girl—El, I suppose, which I think means the in Spanish, or a train in Chicago. But that was getting ahead of everything.

Our house was in Fall River, and Ellen’s mom was close by in Taunton, and that’s where she wanted to go, after she stayed with us, to die. And it looked like she’d be doing so in early July, which was when we made our annual trip to Cape Cod, for the family vacation.

I had worried, the year before, that we’d only have one more Cape Cod vacation as a full family. Ellie would be leaving for college after that. But then she fractured her back in a high school hockey game. She couldn’t move her legs for the first few days. We took turns in the hospital chapel, praying to God to let her walk again. She was within a few millimeters of never being able to do so, but in the end she got off with a cumbersome brace that she had to wear twenty-four hours a day, for the entire summer—at least—which was a miracle of relief to me and her mother.

So when Ellen’s mom got near the end, I figured, right, no Cape this year, there’s just way too much going on, and that trip that was to have been our last as a family had already happened. I worried that I wasn’t doing the greatest job with Dace, as my dad had done with me. I loved him as much as I loved anyone, but Ellie and I always had more in common. She was a tomboy—albeit a very pretty one—who enjoyed fishing, and watching the Red Sox, and skating on the ponds around our house. Dace was into old horror movies and sci-fi programs and while I’d try and sit through The Blob with him, or a Frankenstein picture, I could tell that he clocked on to whatever conflict was registering on my face.

It’s okay, dad, he’d say. You can have a catch with Ellie. More popcorn for me.

I’d tell him that my time was his, but sometimes your kids have a way of knowing you that you don’t. I think it’s how you know they’re on their way to not being kids anymore.

I was making coffee early one Saturday in late July when Ellen decided the summer fate for all of us. I could hear her crying in the living room, but I wasn’t expecting her to come up behind me as I poured the cream.

Hey.

Hey.

Look . . . I’ve been thinking about this. I want you to take the kids to Brewster. I think it’s important. She wasn’t crying anymore. There wasn’t even a trace of puffiness around her eyes. To keep things as regular as can be. And it will be good for Ellie to have some distance while this happens.

That line has always stayed with me. While this happens. The great inevitable. In which others have their part to play, as someone moves from one side of the line to the other.

It’ll be good for you and Dace too, she continued. With Ellie going off in the fall. You’ll have some momentum, the two of you. No more catch in the backyard. Better bone up on your horror trivia.

I figured, if she ever opted for this line, we’d be in for a battle, because she’d be doing it for the wrong reason. You know, taking on too much. But as I stood looking at her, serene, sure, I knew why my dad caught so many fish, and why my wife was right.

Okay. I’ll tell them as soon as they get up. It’ll be a surprise. We’ll leave tomorrow.

I already told them.

Ah.

The place we rented was owned by Ellen’s hairdresser, who was also an artist. His waterscapes—and collage pieces, with their shards of mussel shells, sea stars, and urchin husks—covered every foot of the walls of that squat Cape house. I don’t think there was ever much competition, in terms of tenants. Or so my wife told me. I guess they had some kind of special rapport, and we were the only summer guests, year after year. So the last minute trip wasn’t a problem, and there we were, bright and bushy-tailed on Monday morning. I tried to be upbeat on the ride, and had even come equipped with a dozen or so bridge facts that I figured Dace would like, for when we got near the Sagamore. Ellie was busy with what had become her regular routine: listening to classical music on her Walkman, and switching off between reading the Iliad and the Odyssey as prep for one of her freshman Princeton classes.

They were both a lot smarter than I was at that age. Or maybe any age. Ellie had even skipped a grade. I couldn’t quite understand how a girl could be so focused and gentle at the same time. I guess I equated focus with a certain steeliness, but she was a mother before her time, as a grandfather of mine would have put it, and not in a saucy way. She was popular. And she definitely inherited my wife’s good looks. But she never had a boyfriend, as all of her friends did—it was as though they kept trading them back and forth, like we used to trade Topps baseball cards—and she never had a single date to a dance, but rather made a series of promises to dance with whomever had asked her if she might go with them, so that no one was left out.

Ellen thought it was mature and democratic. I’d spent my fair share of time on boats though, and in locker rooms, so, naturally, I wasn’t quite so sanguine.

The night Ellen had the talk with her—after telling me, repeatedly, that it wasn’t necessary, not with a girl like Ellie—I about fell apart. I’d made tea while they were both in Ellie’s bedroom, and when Ellen came out, smiling in that knowing way of hers, I spilled some of it on myself.

Well? Did you?

Did I what?

Don’t make me say it. Please.

I did. Or she did, rather. I sat and listened. It’s almost like God’s eased up on you, in terms of your daughter. Most dads don’t have it nearly so good. She’s more interested in friends and studies than anything. ‘Until the right time, mom.’ You’ve spilt on the couch, you know.

That’s a good stain. I can live with it.

I always liked that first view of the house in Brewster, as we pulled into the driveway and the low-beamed roof became visible over the cedar trees that flanked the front yard. It was a tough, squat house, a soldier of domesticity in battle against the salt-encrusted air—and the winter winds, which had the advantage of being lashed on by the sea at their backs. We were what the fulltime residents of Brewster called ham-and-eggers. That is, we only stayed for breakfast, in the grand timetable of the place, a step up from day trippers, but without nearly the clout of the yearlong residents.

There were none of those in the development where we stayed, which was called Rum Cove because of the thin spit of beach where our family had spent so many happy hours. It had once been a landing point for spirit-toting vagabonds with no interest in tariffs, the sort of backstory that delighted a boy like Dace. Ellen and I only socialized with the McLaughlins, Jim and Ashley, who lived across the street. Jim—or Jimmy Mac, as I had always known him—and I had grown up together. He had a boat that fished out of Gloucester, on the North Shore, and liked to give me the business for becoming, as he put it, a pussy—Jimmy Mac was a bit old school, you might say—that is, for getting into my particular line of work of designing diving equipment, like such a vocation wasn’t suitably seaworthy, to borrow one of his favorite lines. But the hours were mostly my own, and I had no grand, romantic designs on the Georges Bank, or sea gold, which was also the name of Jimmy Mac’s boat.

What activity there was in the neighborhood was usually kicked up by Jimmy Mac’s boys, Ron and Dougie. When you saw people, you saw them at the beach. There was another development—Wild Harbor, a term which always seemed like an oxymoron to me—adjacent to ours. You couldn’t see it, but there was a path that emptied out at the top of our beach, which you could follow through the switch grass, sweet ferns, creepers, and serviceberry trees. The opening was clotted with spiky tufts of broom crowberry—the Cape’s green, fauna-based variation on steel wool—almost as a kind of vague deterrent, and we always stayed within our little enclave.

Dace and Ellie drifted off to their own personal enclaves just as soon as we got there. Here I was, all gung-ho ho to go down to the beach, maybe dig for clams, or bust out the Dracula kite, but Ellie gave me a hug, said she was tired, and headed to the downstairs bedroom. She used to share it with Dace, but they were far too old for that now, of course. The hairdresser/artist guy didn’t have a ton of rules, but he was very particular that the trash cans stay in the same place, outside that