Free Storm Tide by Marge Piercy, Ira Wood

salt marsh grass was silver in the sun, the creek swollen and meandering. To me, heaven would smell like a salt marsh, fresh and yeasty and sweet with life—a little like a woman. I rolled my window all the way down and inhaled. As my front wheels hit the first loose plank of the bridge, a great blue heron rose from the creek, the scythelike shadow of its wings guiding me like a bat to Nosferatu’s castle.
    Just beyond the first dune, the road made an abrupt left turn in front of Stumpy Squeer’s new house. About a quarter mile up a dirt road I made out the letters on an old driftwood oar, STONE – SILVER . I was hearing loud cracks, five or six in succession, pistol fire. Two men were plinking cans arranged on a picnic table. As I drove into the parking area, the taller man stopped shooting and turned. He was broad from the back but willowy, craning slightly forward at the waist as if nursing a pain in the belly. A baseball cap cast all but his mouth in shade. He moved in a slow straight line to my truck. “David Greene?” Gordon spoke my name like a bailiff in a court of law. I climbed slowly out of the truck. Judith appeared on the deck of the house just above us. Gordon said, “If you’re going to be coming to this house, do not be late for lunch again. I am famished. Damned woman wouldn’t serve until you got here.” He switched the gun to his left hand and extended his right to shake mine.
    “That’s a nine-millimeter automatic, isn’t it?”
    He seemed impressed. “A Smith & Wesson. Do you shoot?”
    “A little.” Before my uncle Georgie married and moved to Hawaii, it was something for us to do together that didn’t involve talking.
    “Got another shooter here, Stumpy.”
    Stumpy Squeer was a Saltash legend. Some said he never left the island, but actually he rowed across the harbor to town every couple of weeks for provisions. Stumpy was short and thick, fifty more or less, with barrel-like haunches that made him seem to roll forward as he walked.
    Judith stood on the steps. “Let’s go, you guys. Gordon? David! Lunch!”
    “Will you join us, Stumpy?” Gordon’s voice was deep and courtly.
    Stumpy shook his head no. People said that he had stopped growing at eleven, on the night his father shot his mother in the face. She had just returned from a party where she danced with another man. Her blood seeped through the floorboards on Stumpy, sleeping in the bedroom below.
    “Going to get back to your book?” Gordon asked him. “Stumpy’s been working on one for three years now.”
    “Four,” Stumpy said.
    “Really?” I loved the idea. Stumpy Squeer, hermit scholar. “What are you writing about?”
    “Not writin’. Been readin’ it,” he said. “Almost finished too.”
    Judith called again. “I said, let’s go!”
    The house was situated at the base of a tall clay sea scarp protecting it from the beach on the other side. Gordon climbed the outer stairs with effort. The Smith & Wesson seemed to weigh him down. I wantedto take it, or even grab his elbow to help him make the climb, but I wasn’t about to embarrass him.
    The deck wrapped around the house and offered a quick view of the compound, six wooden structures of differing colors and sizes and styles, some with porches, one with a cupola, one painted pink, all built in a protected bowl between the dunes. Gordon seemed to stagger as he led me through the kitchen door. Although the afternoon temperature hovered just above freezing, I noticed a few drops of sweat rolling into his collar.
    Judith took the gun, ejected the clip, then disappeared with him into one of the back rooms. As my eyes adjusted, I took in a large kitchen of hardwood and tile, mostly in shades of brown and yellow. Baskets were suspended from hooks on the ceiling. Bowls everywhere overflowed with fruit, with dried herbs, with balls of yarn; some filled only with other bowls. Where there weren’t windows there were bookshelves and hundreds of cookbooks with broken