Free Storm Tide by Marge Piercy, Ira Wood Page B

me outside, literally by the sleeve. “Help me with something, will you?” Four rolls of roofing paper, four pallets of asphalt shingles, were piled at the foot of the drive. Gordon asked me to carry them up the dune. As I lifted the first, he turnedhis back to the house and slipped a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket. “Ever do any construction?”
    “Some,” I said. I had worked for my father-in-law in Florida. Not a period in my life I cared to talk about.
    “After you played baseball.” He watched my reaction. “Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine. I used to take my son to watch you play.” He led me up the slope. “Wind lifts these damned shingles like feathers. Finish one roof, start another. One a year, every year. Used to do it by myself, if you can believe that.” He stopped outside a cottage with a peaked roof.
    I managed one roll on each shoulder, all four up the dune in two trips. I couldn’t carry more than one pallet of shingles at a time. On my last trip up, number six, I was laboring like an old mule. Gordon was waiting for me, smoking his pipe, staring at the purple silhouette of the peaked roof. “Don’t mention to Judith I was smoking. She won’t let me buy cigarettes, but she doesn’t know I have a pipe. So are you going to do it?” There was no question what he meant.
    “I don’t know.”
    “There’s a line drawn right down the middle of this town.”
    “If this is about the dike, it’s not as simple as that. People stand on both sides,” I said.
    “And where do you stand? With Johnny Lynch?”
    I didn’t like him trying to push me. “Why don’t you run?”
    “I’m an old man.”
    “So is Johnny.”
    “But he’s desperate now, don’t you see? He’s fighting for all he’s worth. Johnny’s been in and out of court for years. He never invested his money. Why bother? Saltash was a money farm. He could always grow more. Now all he’s got left are those lots in the river valley. As long as the dike stays closed and the land stays dry, he can build. To make sure it does, he needs the Board of Selectmen. He’s got two votes, we’ve got two. You’re the tie breaker.”
    “That’s a lot to drop on my shoulders.”
    “From what I hear, you’ve got some pair of shoulders.”
    What did Judith say about me when they were alone? How much did he know?
    “Will you do it?”
    Was he making me some kind of deal in exchange for his wife? “Why me?”
    “You’re bright. Fair-minded. You’re perceived as neutral.”
    “Tell me something, Gordon, have you people asked anybody else?”
    “Oh, yes. Maybe twenty people.”
    “And they said no.”
    “Every one.”
    Judith insisted on showing me around. Putting on a goose down parka, she led me down a lowland path through the pines. “He liked you!” She skipped ahead like an excited little girl and drew me into the forest. As the sun disappeared, the scent of pine sap overwhelmed. I walked faster and faster to catch up. “I thought it would work out,” she said over her shoulder.
    I liked him too, which didn’t make screwing his wife any easier.
    About fifty yards ahead, I made out a clearing, a gap where the trees opened to the twilight. As we neared it, Judith began to run. She stopped abruptly at the gate to her garden. It was an enormous square, protected by a wood and wire fence. On top of each fence post was a painted wooden finial, some red and white, some yellow, green and red, or orange striped with black like tigers. There were bamboo tripods for growing pole beans, the withered vines now frozen like brown lace; all kinds of structures made out of bicycle spokes and hammered fenders, torn nets salvaged from the sea, a huge scarecrow with a rusted muffler torso and arms of copper pipe. There wasn’t a plant left growing and yet it was alive, a frozen circus on the edge of a marsh.
    Judith took my hand and led me to a small A-frame beyond the garden, with a double bed inside, a desk, a computer and