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I drive slowly along South Bowers Road. I am still the only car on the road, driving from side to side on the road, avoiding the areas where the water looks too deep. I thank the woman at the door for helping me. She tells me I am doing her a favor. The woman at the door is grateful to her Mom for letting her stay in the house with the kids until she gets back on her feet. But all of them in her mother’s little tiny house can be friggin’ hard to take. The woman at the door says she has no idea how her brother and her kept from killing each other, growing up in that small house together.
I want to help the woman at the door somehow, to make her feel better, show her that I understand. “It will work out,” I say. Maura and I had two children, I tell the woman at the door. We tried our best but we screwed up a lot, I tell her. They are all grown and moved out long ago. Our son stopped talking to us years ago. Our daughter is doing all right. She has a family of her own. The woman at the door nods in silence. I resolve to contact my kids when I get home.
The woman at the door directs me through the handful of streets that comprise South Bowers. After just a couple minutes we are driving on the access road, Route 121. She points at a large patch of sand along the road, two or three feet higher than the surrounding marshes. It looks like a parking lot. There is nothing on the lot or in any direction for hundreds and hundreds of feet: no buildings, no trees, nothing but marsh, the road and the sandy lot. A low chain-link fence surrounds the patch of sand. I pull the car into the wet sand on the side of the road in front of the fence, wondering if the car will get stuck in the loose surface.
“This is it. Island Field. You must have driven right by it on your way into town,” the woman at the door says as the car comes to a stop. She gets out of the car before I can ask her any questions. I’ve been expecting the metal shed building and the asphalt parking area that I remembered from decades ago. Nothing is here except sand and a fence. A “No Trespassing” sign hangs from a gate which is padlocked shut. I walk over to the gate where she stands, and with each step, wet sand pours into my wet sneakers. Flooding brackish water is encroaching from the over-spilling marsh around all of edges of the fenced sandy lot. Hundreds of horseshoe crabs have crawled out of the water onto the , made their way under the fence into the lot. They form a crowning mound of spiked crab shells, which cover the edge of the lot like a halo of spawning horseshoe crabs.
“You’re not allowed in there anymore,” the woman at the door says. “It took the tribe years, but they got the building removed, shut the dig down, and reburied everybody, along with all the artifacts, right here.” The woman at the door looks at me: looks at my face, looks into my eyes. With her eyes, she is asking me if this is what I expected. With her eyes, she is asking me what I am going to do now that I am here, at my destination.
Standing in front of the gate, I reach into the pocket of my jacket and pull out a small ceramic figure. It is dark brown clay, about two inches long. The figure is a woman, seated crossed-legged and holding an infant in her arms. It easily fits in my palm which I hold up to show the woman at the door.
“I stole this from here 43 years ago,” I confess. “Maura watched me dig it out of the ground. She watched me put it in my pocket. I don’t know why I took it. Maybe I wanted to capture the excitement that Maura had about this stuff. Months later, she confronted me, but she kept my secret, because she loved me. You are the first person, besides her, who knows. You trusted me enough to help me find this place, so I trust you, too.”
The woman at the door looks at me but doesn’t say anything.
“I decided to return it. If I put it back, then it’s like I didn’t steal it, I just borrowed it. Maura and I held onto this secret for our entire life together. I came back to return it where it belongs. But, I would rather give it to you. I think this could bring you good luck. You need it.”
The woman at the door takes the figure from my hand and holds it between her thumb and index finger. She turns it around in the air, admiring and inspecting the few simple lines. Then she drops to her knees in front of the locked gate. The woman at the door digs with her fingers about a foot down in the soft wet sand. The woman at the door kisses the figure, then places it in the bottom of the hole and pushes the sand over top, covering it up.
“This belongs here. I know where it is if I need it,” she says as she pushes the sand into the hole.
The woman at the door needs to get back home before her kids drive her mother beyond her limits. The woman at the door is worried that the rising tide will cut off the access road and hamper my exit. The woman at the door waves to me when she gets out of my rental car to walk back up the stairs of her house. I don’t think I’ll ever see her again.
I think Maura would have liked the woman at the door. I will tell Maura about her when I see her again. As I drive out of town in my rental car, for once it doesn’t feel like Maura is still with me. I think she stayed with the figure in the sand.
About Brian Rodan
