Cape Cod Read Free

faces. They carried axes that flashed like sunlight .
    They were men. And they swarmed among the herd without fear, and drove their axes into the heads of the whales, and brought blood and death cries. And the biggest of them all raised his axe and came toward the old bull .
    But before the axe struck, an arrow pierced the man’s neck and came out the other side. Blood and gurgling sounds flowed from his mouth. His eyes opened wide and the axe dropped from his hand .
    Now men with painted faces came screaming from the woods. The old bull felt the clashing of the fight and heard sounds of fury unlike any he had known in the sea. Rage swirled around him, stone against iron, arrow against axe, bearded man against painted man. And with his last strength, he tried to escape .
    He pounded his flukes but could do no more than roll onto his side, his great bulk burying the axe in the marsh mud beneath him .
    Then a bearded man beheaded the painted chieftain and his painted followers fled. The victor lifted the head by the hair and flung it into the sea, but the other bearded men did not celebrate their victory. Instead, they ran off in fear .
    For some time, the old bull lay dying on the beach between the creeks. Then the bearded men appeared once more, this time with a woman of their kind. Their axes flashed like the sides of panicked fish, and like the fish, they were fleeing. But the woman stopped and looked at the old bull. She made angry sounds. She picked up a boulder and raised it over his head… .

Old Men
    One of them had seen every year of the century, the other a full three score and ten. One had trouble sleeping. The other wondered where the years had gone. Neither ever awoke without a new pain somewhere or an old pain somewhere else. And neither could drink much anymore, or he’d spend the night at the toilet, pissing out ineffectual little dribbles that wouldn’t even make a satisfying sound.
    But in these things, they were like old men everywhere. Other things bound them like brothers.
    Both were descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims. One was grandfather, the other great-uncle, to the same two children. They walked on the beach between the creeks because each owned half of it. And they had detested each other since the administration of John F. Kennedy.
    Rake Hilyard walked at dawn. The world was changing quickly, but he found perspective on the beach. Seasons passed, birds migrated, and tides flowed according to laws laid down long before the foolishness began. In the dunes, Indian shell heaps gave evidence of the first men. In the marsh mud, the bones of ancient pilot whales told of the first standings. Even the sea-smoothed boulders on the tideflats recalled the glacier that left them. And all of it made a ninety-year-old man feel a little younger.
    Dickerson Bigelow did not come out as regularly. But after the heart attack, his doctor had told him to walk more, and on the beach, he could work even as he walked. If the tide was low, Dickerson walked on the flats, studied the island from a distance, and imagined what the last development of his life would look like. When the tide was high, he simply walked, his eyes fixed on the sand between his toes, his soul coveting the land on the Hilyard side, his brain scheming to get it.
    At high tide on this summer morning, the beach was no more than a twenty-foot strand from wrack line to dune grass, which meant the old men could not avoid each other. But neither would turn back. They had been trespassing on each other’s beaches for decades, like warships showing their flags in foreign straits. So they ran out their guns and steamed on.
    Dickerson fired first. “Mornin’, you old bastard.”
    “What’s good about it, you son of a bitch?”
    “We’re alive and can walk the beach. How’s that?”
    “If it was up to you, only one of us’d be alive. Then you’d fill the creeks and hot-top the beach.”
    Dickerson Bigelow laughed and ran a hand through the beard