2
THERE WERE TWELVE snakes in all, common garters. They had taken up residence in an abandoned shack at the edge of my property, secure among the fallen boards and rotting timbers. I spotted one of them slipping through a hole beneath the ruined porch steps, probably on its way home from a morning spent hunting for prey. When I ripped away the floorboards with a crowbar I found the rest. The smallest looked to be about a foot long, the largest closer to three. They coiled over one another as the sunlight shone upon them, the yellowish stripes on their dorsa glowing like strips of neon in the semidarkness. Some had already begun to flatten their bodies, the better to display their colors as a warning. I poked at the nearest with the end of the crowbar and heard it hiss. A sweetish, unpleasant odor began to rise from the hole as the snakes released their musk from the glands at the base of their tails. Beside me Walter, my eight-month-old golden Labrador retriever, drew back, his nose quivering. He barked in confusion. I patted him behind the ear and he looked at me for reassurance; this was his first encounter with snakes and he didn’t seem too sure about what was expected of him.
“Best to keep your nose out of there, Walt,” I told him, “or else you’ll be wearing one of them on the end of it.”
We get a lot of garters in Maine. They’re tough reptiles, capable of surviving subzero temperatures for up to one month, or of submerging themselves in water during the winter, aided by stable thermals. Then, usually in mid-March when the sun begins to warm the rocks, they emerge from their hibernation and start searching for mates. By June or July they’re breeding. Mostly, you get ten or twelve young in a nest. Sometimes there are as few as three. The record is eighty-five, which is a lot of garter snakes no matter what way you look at it. These snakes had probably chosen to make their home in the shack because of the comparative sparsity of conifers on this part of my land. Conifers make the soil acidic, which is bad for night crawlers, and night crawlers are a garter’s favorite snack.
I replaced the boards and stepped back out into the sunlight, Walter at my heels. Garters are unpredictable creatures. Some of them will take food from your hand while others will bite and keep biting until they get tired or bored or killed. Here, in this old shack, they were unlikely to harm anyone, and the local population of skunks, raccoons, foxes, and cats would sniff them out soon enough. I decided to let them be unless circumstances forced me to do otherwise. As for Walter, well, he’d just have to learn to mind his own business.
Below me and through the trees, the salt marsh gleamed in the morning sun and birds moved on the waters, their shapes visible through the swaying grasses and rushes. The Native Americans had named this place Owascoag, the Land of Many Grasses, but they were long gone, and to the people who lived here now it was simply “the marsh,” the place where the Dunstan and Nonesuch Rivers came together as they approached the sea. The mallards, year-round residents, had been joined for the summer by wood ducks, pintails, black ducks, and teal, but the visitors would soon be leaving to escape the harsh Maine winter. Their whistles and cries carried on the breeze, joining with the buzz of the insects in a gentle clamor of feeding and mating, hunting and fleeing. I watched a swallow make an arcing dive toward the mud and alight upon a rotting log. It had been a dry season and the swallows in particular had enjoyed good eating. Those that lived close to the marsh were grateful to them, for they kept down not only the mosquitoes but also the far nastier greenheads, with their strong-toothed jaws that tore through the skin with the force of a razor cut.
Scarborough is an old community, one of the first colonies established on the northern New England coast that was not simply a transient fishing station but a settlement which would become a permanent home for the families that lived within its boundaries. Many were English settlers, my mother’s ancestors among them; others came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, attracted by the promise of good farmland. The first governor of Maine, William King, was born in Scarborough, although he left there at the age of nineteen when it became clear that it didn’t have too much to offer in the way of wealth and opportunity. Battles have been fought here-like most of the towns on the coastline, Scarborough has been dipped in blood-and the community has been blighted by the ugliness of Route 1, but through it all the Scarborough salt marsh has survived, and its waters glow like molten lava in the setting sun. The marsh was protected, although the continuing development of Scarborough meant that new housing-not all of it pretty, and some of it unquestionably ugly-had grown up close to the marsh’s high-water mark, attracted both by its beauty and by the presence of older, preexisting populations. The big, black-gabled house in which I now lived dated from the early nineteen thirties, and was mostly sheltered from the road and the marsh by a stand of trees. From my porch, I could look out upon the water and sometimes find a kind of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
But that kind of peace is fleeting, an escape from reality that ends as soon as you tear your eyes away and your attention returns to the matters in hand: to those whom you love and who depend upon you to be there for them; to those who want something from you but for whom you feel little or nothing in return; and to those who would hurt you and the ones close to you, if given the opportunity. Right now, I had enough to be getting along with in all three categories.
Rachel and I had moved to this house only four weeks previously, after I had sold my grandfather’s old home and adjoining land on Mussey Road, about three miles away, to the U.S. Postal Service. A huge new mail depot was being built in the area and I had been offered a considerable amount of money to vacate my land so that it could be used as a maintenance area for the mail fleet.
I had felt a twinge of sorrow when the sale was finally made. After all, this was the house to which my mother and I had come from New York after my father’s death, the house in which I had spent my teenage years, and the house to which I, in turn, had returned after the death of my own wife and child. Now, two and a half years later, I was starting again. Rachel had only just begun to show, and it seemed somehow apt that we would begin our life as a couple in earnest in a new home, one that we had chosen together, furnished and decorated together, and in which, I hoped, we would live and grow old together. In addition, as my ex-neighbor Sam Evans had pointed out to me as the sale was nearing completion and as he himself was about to depart for his new place in the South, only a crazy person would want to live in close proximity to thousands of postal workers, all of them little ticking time bombs of frustration waiting to explode in an orgy of gun-related violence.
“I’m not sure that they’re really that dangerous,” I suggested to him.
He looked skeptical. Sam had been the first to sell when the offers were made, and the last of his possessions were now in a U-Haul truck ready to head for Virginia. My hands were dusty from helping him carry the boxes from the house.
“You ever see that film The Postman?” he asked.
“No. I heard it kind of sucked.”
“It sucked sperm whales. Kevin Costner should have been stripped naked, soaked in honey, and staked out over an anthill for it, but that’s not the point. What’s The Postman about?”
“A postman?”
“An armed postman,” he corrected. “In fact, lots of armed postmen. Now, I bet you fifty bucks that if you accessed the records of shitty video stores in any city in America, you know what you’d find?”
“Porn?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he lied. “You’d find that the only people who rented The Postman more than once were other postmen. I swear it. Check the records. The Postman is like a call to arms for these guys. I mean, it’s a vision of an America in which postal workers are heroes and still get to blow away anyone who pisses them off. It’s like porno for postals. They probably sit around in circles jerking off at their favorite parts.”