Wind Clouds

        

         When Earl came silently around the corner of the cottage, we were sitting in the late September sun on the lee side of the porch, out of the wind, our backs against the warm, desiccated cedar shakes and a view of white-capped, rolling waves before us stretching all the way to Spain. “ Looks like wind clouds a'comin'”, Earl said, catching us by surprise, following our gaze out past Seguin.  A man of very few words, unhampered by context or elaboration, nearly everything Earl said seemed profound and pithy, though most people probably never heard him say anything at all. “Ayuh,” he continued, “she'll blow up good by tonight.” These two sentences concerning the forecast may have taken a good minute and a half to deliver and, because of this protracted style, I never really knew if he'd said his piece or if there might be more to come. We looked up at him expectantly as he stood there, back-lit by the fierce, low Autumn sun, sporting his customary ensemble of rolled watch-cap, plaid Woolrich shirt and suspenders tugging up the soiled Dickies tucked into his tall, rubber boots. His prognosis on the weather apparently complete, Earl stood mute, bristled, pink face turned toward the sea, one massive, swollen and spotted hand tucked into his galluse, the other at his side, covered, oddly, by a long, winter-wool sock. “Did you hurt your hand, there, Earl?” I asked, committing to the challenge of making conversation. “Or have you got a gun in there?”  This half in jest, but anything was possible. With a slow grin he peeled back the sock, revealing an improbably long revolver. “ Bad blood from Winnegance...” he offered cryptically, by way of explanation.

          Earl was born and raised, together with his brothers Phil and Don, in a tiny shoe-box of a house out here on the end of the Point, sometime around the first decade of the last century. For the most part, the family fished from open boats and dories moored in the cove behind the house, so there was little call for Earl to “get out much” and it showed in his charming, nearly paralytic shyness and an almost agonizing loss for words, traits no doubt exacerbated by not having occasion to speak for six months out of the year. Battered by wind, sea and solitude, Earl had always appeared old to me, living alone in the house long after his brothers had moved away and started families. Reticent as he was, I never heard a single word pass from the lips of his brother Phil, yet Don, the baby of the family, who passed away a few years ago at ninety, was a veritable chatter-box, always ready to sit for a spell and tell one apocryphal yarn after another. Because he was there – had always been there – as the last living soul on the way out to our place, Earl was the keeper of the keys and generally had an eye out for such things as “bad blood from Winnegance” in the off-season.

         In college, in the 70's, we'd load a car up with beer and spaghetti and show up unannounced on a late November evening at Earl's house. Earl had a phone; The Ladies had insisted on providing one, although I'm sure he never used it and I wouldn't have dreamed of calling him, given the conversational challenges inherent in that. I mean, how would you ever know when to hang up? So I'd stop at his place and let the engine rev a few times in order to let him pull himself together in the face of unexpected visitors. He'd probably heard the car a mile away when we'd turned in off the main road, but I always waited till the outside light went on before heading up the steps to his porch, rolling my eyes smugly at my friends to indicate the oddness of the interchange they were about to witness. In those years, as a callow kid, I couldn't begin to think of anything to say to Earl by way of small talk – wasn't much interested, actually - and he doubtless felt the same way about me. I'd leave the car running, maybe feign a shiver or two in the headlight glare in a futile effort to hurry things along. He'd invariably come to the door without the old ring of keys, crack the storm a few inches and invite me in.

             

         If demurring seemed impossible - despite my friends in the car, the engine running - I'd venture in to the snug, overheated parlor off the tiny kitchen and stand by the pot-bellied stove awaiting the keys. Earl didn't have running water in those days, so there may not have been a proper bathroom. In fact, other than the kitchen and that parlor, I don't remember seeing any other rooms at all. There must have been a bedroom, but even if there was, it's hard to imagine how Irving and Julia and their three boys managed. As it was, the couch and chairs in the parlor were stacked with the accoutrements of the mild bachelor-hoarder: stacks of old newspapers, shotguns and boxes of shells, coffee cans, axes and hatchets, empty glass carboys, the short-wave, buoys, nets, bits and pieces of deer. Where there might have been a faucet, a massive, ancient hand-pump loomed above the kitchen sink, presumably tapped directly into an original surface well beneath the house itself. Empty cans of Dinty Moore, partial sleeves of Ritz Crackers and crumbs of strong Cheddar with cotton cheese-cloth still intact lay about the counter top.

         Earl would begin, then, with something like, “Your Mother.........came by.....last month.....”, which might have taken a few minutes to deliver - such were the lengths of his pauses - while reaching behind the twelve-gauge for the ring of keys and slowly extending them towards me. I'd nod and smile and back towards the door, unsure if that was it or if there might be more to come. “Brought me..... some jam.....she did.....”; I'd have my hand on the old, pitted brass knob, one foot out the door. I'd stand there for another ten seconds and finally bolt before the next installment, sucking in lungfuls of crisp, fresh air and leaping the porch for the car, leaving Earl in the doorway to finish his thought.

         One day, some years later, my brother and I were fishing for stripers from a rowboat near Earl's Cove. Earl and Phil had been out pulling traps nearby and waved when they saw us, indicating we ought to come alongside. As we approached, the two men, smiling broadly, began tossing lobsters in to our boat, maybe ten or a dozen, altogether. “Woah! Hey, you guys! What the...?” we shouted across the water. Earl and Phil, looking a bit like Dopey and Sneezey Dwarf, simply motored off without a word. Maybe they did this because we always brought Earl the fish heads from our catch; he'd save the cheeks for himself and throw the rest in a huge barrel to ferment for bait. Maybe it was because Earl loved and was devoted to our mother, but we never learned the reason for this sudden generosity. We couldn't have deserved it; that's certainly safe to say.

         The last time I saw Earl he was standing on his porch in his Sunday suit and rubber boots. Some say it was those boots that did him in; that, in never, ever taking them off except to replace them with a new pair every few years, Earl had done some grievous, circulatory damage to his legs. By this time I'd grown up a bit and stopped to say hello and ask about his town clothes. Earl was waiting for Don to show up and take him to the hospital, he told me. One of his legs had gone funny and he guessed they wanted to do some tests on it, he said. Trouble was, he said, that once they get you into those places, you never come out. Or so he'd heard. He'd never actually been in a hospital before. And he was right.      


Earl's long gone now, even the house that had been there all those years is gone; the tiny house past which square-riggers and barks and schooners had cluttered the horizon when he was a boy and upon whose modest patch of flinty lawn he'd once played with sea otter pups under the watchful gaze of their mother. Wouldn't it be worth all the bass-cheeks in the sea to sit by that stove today and listen, however patiently, to Uncle Earl finish a sentence!