Into The Realm

Valhalla-1

Valhalla

I jaunt up to our back porch and pole-vault over its two missing steps by way of a whaler’s gaff, then pull myself up with the help of an overhanging, deadeye block. The porch has seen better days, or it hasn’t. The same two steps have been missing as long as I’ve been alive. The porch itself sits about four feet off the ground on salvaged railroad ties, as does the rest of the house, and there is no cellar. A Wash-A-Shore might believe the house was built this way to let the King tides that we get from time-to-time flow underneath. But given the fact the house sits on an elevated bluff and is protected by a nine-mile barrier beach, this simply is not the case. Essentially, the stilts provide a way for the massive dune creeping across our front lawn to blow into the bay without taking the house with it. Not many building codes existed when the house was first raised. “Back then,” as Gramp likes to say, “folks just improvised.”

The primary structure was once a stately manor anchored to the cobblestoned streets of Nantucket; the island our family’s patriarch called home when not hunting the elusive leviathans east of the Azores. Around the time the mighty humpback and sperm were dipping into near extinction, whaleboat captain Nehemiah Forrest, or Captain Nehi, as he was known in ports the world over, shipped every board, brick, and nail across Nantucket Sound to Chatham’s grassy hillocks, with his many descendants adding rooms here, stairs there, and carpentered scrollwork everywhere.

My long-ago grandfather had foreseen the demise of whaling and moved his growing family to Cape Cod, where he’d purchased six-hundred-plus acres of rolling swath land for next to nothing. As a child I had a hard time understanding the reason behind such an epic move and would ask Gramp why the good captain didn’t just build another home here.

“Where’d him and his brood suppose ta’ live? In a thatch hut under a maypole? ’Tweren’t no trees back in those days. Most of ’em cut down for buildin’ the shipyards and salt works and such. Captain Nehi had his’self a vision to farm this land, which he done, till the last of his kin turned their backs on ’im and went to sea. And what good it do ’cept get us all killed with not a body to bury ’cept for our women, the poor darlin’s all dead from broken hearts.”

As a small boy, I always loved it when Gramp talked like a pirate, but what he said back then was mostly true. Those buried in our family plot are mostly women, along with the occasional infant who wouldn’t even garner a holystone, only a Plus One when mother and child died together in the birthing chamber. The real reason, however, that the men of the Forrest clan went to work behind the ship’s wheel, wasn’t so much the Call of the Sea, it was because the land purchased by Captain Nehi sat atop a shell midden created by generations of Monomoyick Indians dating back five thousand years. So, wherever an ancestor chose to sink his plow, a river of broken oyster and clamshell was sure to see the light of day, thus making the soil all but impossible to till.

The good captain was not one to give up easily, however. Instead of planting cash crops like corn and potato, which needed a foot or more soil to grow, he spread about sunflower seeds that could grow in any type of soil, shallow or otherwise. Once planted, however, the rest was deemed woman’s work.

In those days, the men living on the Outer Cape who remained on dry land either tended sheep, dried and cured fish, made bricks, or blew glass. Being the proud descendants of a Nantucket whaleboat captain, this simply would not do. So, my many great-uncles and cousins eventually all shipped out, only to freeze in the riggings high above the Hudson, get dragged down by giant sperms in the Pacific, become enslaved by the din of Algiers off the coast of Madeira or, if they did survive the rigors of a nomadic life at sea, they plain never came back.

There are tales of Forrest men staking gold claims in the Yukon and of one relation becoming a tribal king in the Solomon Islands. The latter eventually butchered when he failed to meet the tribe’s daily catch expectations. His barely legible marker still exists on an outlying atoll, or so says Gramp, the tombstone reading:

Her’n Lays Jaab Forrest

A True Pagan!

With No Hope of Redemption!

Beware!

The tombstone was carved by a Spanish missionary who had landed on the atoll in the winter of 1822 and is said to lie next to my great-uncle in an unmarked grave topped with empty coconut husks.

Some might believe these lives wasted, but I do not, and I can prove it. There aren’t many families on this sandy spit who can boast of having a collection of shrunken heads once attached to Māori tribesmen, or that ours was the first and only family to land a kangaroo ashore. For weeks the large marsupial terrified every dog in town, until the local constable came to our front stoop and shot the roo dead for biting off the nose of a Quaker bishop.

“Damnable bishop showed up at our front stoop one morn demanding your great-grandpap, Jeb Forrest, pay his town-ordered church tax, and when the clergyman wouldn’t leave our parlor door, after Jeb tellin’ him to ‘go smoke a pipe,’ Old Jeb sicked Roo on ’im! Now that Roo was a mean son-of-a-gopher, and if it were not for the bishop’s gold crucifix getting caught up in its maw, Roo would have bitten his head clean off! I only wish I was there to see his expression. I bet that stiff-necked, hymn-bellowin’ Come-Outer thought it was the devil his’self let loose from the Netherworld! Old Jeb never did pay that town-ordered church tax,” Gramp likes to reminisce.

Setting aside the hinge-less screen door, I call out, “Hey, Gramp! It’s me! I’m home!” Getting no answer, I call out again. “Hey, Gramp! Are you here or what?” Giving up, I hurry through the kitchen and head for the pantry, kicking away empty cans of Narragansett beer as I go. With walls constructed of horsehair and oyster shell plaster, the pantry is the oldest room in the house, dating back to when it was a sheepherder’s cabin. Captain Nehi liked what he saw when he first walked the land and put his Nantucket house down around it, preserving this room and the beehive ovens in the kitchen. Upon entering the pantry, I run my right hand over our long, beach-wood cutting table, stained red from past family feasts. I have a hard time remembering the last one.

There aren’t many of us left these days. It’s just Gramp and me, far as I know. I would like to have had siblings, only my parents never got around to it. They didn’t have time; both having died at a relatively young age. Gramp likes to talk about me one day filling the house with screeching rug rats, but all I ever wanted was to strike out on my own. Only I can’t. Not yet. I have to take care of Gramp and keep paying down our delinquent town property tax. Either that or get another Roo.

Before entering the house proper, I pass under a plank of worm-eaten driftwood brought back from a long-ago marooning, on which our family motto is written:

‘MAN PRAYS ON HIS KNEES WHILST HIS SALVATION LIES IN HIS HANDS’

I can only imagine what it must have been like sitting on that lonely atoll whittling away and dreaming of rescue. But why the good captain wrote what he did, I haven’t a clue. The motto has always been a yoke around my neck, like Captain Nehi wrote it for me, a disenfranchised fisherman whose wealth surrounds him and yet whose belongings he can neither sell nor take a profit from.

Sliding the pantry doors apart, I enter a labyrinth of interconnecting hallways that thread through the house like ruptured arteries: doors ajar, bleeding dust-covered relics, old newspaper piled high for some future avalanche, along with other doors that are locked shut, the rusted hinges providing afterlife storage for their long-ago tenants. I step under an archway of seaman’s gear left behind by past boat crews that, were it to collapse on me, I’d be completely buried, and it would take pirate captain William Kidd himself to dig me out. Only the mice would know me, intimately I’m sure.

Many a day have I had our International Harvester lashed and loaded with musty rugs, blistered and battered furniture, broken appliances, and empty parrot cages, only to have Gramp lean from his bedroom window and shout down, “That’s our history you’re mucking with! Let it be and I’ll let you be!” Cursing under my breath, I’d drive the IH coughing and stalling back into the barn.

Continuing down a Z-shaped hallway, I pass a decades-old lobster trap encased in petrified sea lettuce and smelling of rotten fish. I intend to take the trap outside and burn it after I get back from my visit with the ranger, Gramp’s protestations be damned! I haven’t seen the ranger since my hasty exit on a misty night over a year ago. He lives in a cabin on the southernmost tip of the Monomoy Island Wildlife Sanctuary. We have some unfinished business to discuss, and I want it to be a surprise. I have my reasons.

Looking down, I spot a coiled loop of braided hemp lying under a moth-eaten spool of sailcloth. I pick it up and check the line for tension, finding the line to be salt-encrusted and stiff, so much so that it would take a mule team pulling from both ends to straighten it. Having no use for it aboard my boat, I drop the line and let it sit for another century, then continue onward through the clutter.

I round a tight corner and our Grand Hall comes into view. I named the hall “Valhalla” after our Viking ancestry, though I’m not sure we go back that far, but I like to think that we do. Taking up the center of the house, the hall rises three stories to where chunks of coral taken from the world’s great oceans gather dust amid the crisscrossed rafters. It’s a massive assemblage of board and beam resembling what Noah’s ark must have looked like belowdecks, only without the animals. Though we do have a few cats whom Gramp calls his ‘familiars’ that prowl about the house without need of attention or feeding. The cats are a special breed of Siamese that have a diamond-shaped spot on their foreheads with litters going back to the Grand Palace of Siam.

I look above me to where a narrow gangplank runs along the second story in a boxlike formation past small, single bedrooms the size and shape of shipboard saloons. The rooms are uninhabited now, but that wasn’t always the case. In the past they were let out to foreign-born fishermen and those hired on to help with the harvest when the house was part of a working farm. Closing my eyes, I can almost picture how it was: the constant clamoring up and down the gangplank, the tall tales told in foreign tongues, the exotic spices of which to salivate over wafting from the beehive ovens. What rouses there must have been and revelry after a bountiful harvest or a successful trip at sea! I was lucky to have caught the tail end of it when I was a boy.

My father, Captain ‘Mad’ Jack Forrest, would quarter his crew when dragging the bay for scallops, and I recall how it was when we had a full house: the manly jousting and jawing, getting passed from one strong hand to the next, then set atop a butcher’s block and fed raw scallops by the grimy handful. I’d often thought of letting out the rooms to tourists and summer workers, but that would only invite building inspectors, fire marshals, and such, and we don’t need that.

It’s as quiet as a graveside funeral as I cross the cedar floorboards scarred with aged patina. Approaching our two-sided hearth, built of staggered brickwork in which a man can stand, I reach onto the rosewood mantle and take down a sepia-tinted photograph of my mother, framed in sterling silver. I never knew her, my mother, she having passed from viral pneumonia soon after I was born, except for the stories my father would tell of how a Charlestown girl of southern aristocracy ignored her parents’ pleas and married a long liner from the Cape, even going to sea with him on occasion.