Mere's Store

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 8: Mere's Store

The bell above the door was brass, small, mounted on a coiled spring that the door's motion activated, and the bell had rung with every entry and every exit since 1978, which was the year Mere and Carl had bought the store from Dorothy Coombs, who had run it for thirty-one years and who had bought it from Arthur McIntyre, who had built it in 1936, and the bell was Dorothy's addition, installed in 1952, and its sound — a single bright note, not musical exactly but clear, decisive, the sound of arrival, of someone entering — was as much a part of the store as the shelves or the counter or the floorboards, which were pine, wide-plank, worn to a dip at the threshold where seventy years of feet had concentrated their weight, the wood thinned by passage, by the coming and the going that was the store's essential motion, its breath, its proof of life.

Mere stood behind the counter at seven in the morning and watched the bread delivery come through the door.

The bread came in the arms of Steve Pollard, who drove the delivery van for Penobscot Bay Bakery and who had been making the Dunmore delivery for nine years, every weekday, crossing on the 7:20 from Port Clement, driving the van off the ferry and up Island Road to the store, carrying the bread inside — four trays, sixteen loaves, white and wheat and rye and the sourdough that Steve called fancy bread and that the summer people had demanded and that the year-round people had adopted the way they had adopted the craft beer, reluctantly and then completely — and setting the trays on the counter for Mere to shelve.

"Morning," Steve said.

"Morning," Mere said.

This was the conversation. It was the same conversation every morning. It was the conversation in the same way that the bell was the bell and the bread was the bread — a thing that happened because the thing had always happened, a regularity that was not habit but structure, the store's skeleton, the framework on which the day was built.

Steve left. Mere shelved the bread. She shelved it in the order she had always shelved it — white on the left, wheat next, rye next, sourdough on the right — because the order was the order and the order was known, was expected, was the thing her customers looked for when they came in for bread, the white where the white always was, the wheat where the wheat always was, and the being-where-it-always-was was not just convenience but assurance, the store's promise that the world had not rearranged itself overnight, that the things you needed were still where you left them, and this promise was more important on an island than on the mainland because an island's supplies are finite, are bounded by the crossing, are limited by what the ferry can carry and the store can stock, and the arrangement of these limited supplies in a predictable order was the store's way of saying: we have what you need, it is here, it has not moved, and this was a form of comfort, and the comfort was Mere's work, and the work was not stocking shelves but maintaining the order that the shelves represented.

The store was thirty feet wide and sixty feet deep. The front section — the first twenty feet — was the retail floor: six aisles of shelving, the shelves metal, adjustable, stocked with the inventory that the island required, which was a specific inventory, not the inventory of a mainland supermarket but the inventory of a place where every item had been chosen, had been stocked because someone needed it, and the choosing was Mere's, the curation — though she would not have used that word, would have said she ordered what people asked for and that was all — the curation was the art of the store, the knowledge of what 380 people needed to sustain their daily lives and the judgment of how much of each thing to carry, how much bread and how much milk and how much coffee and how much toilet paper and how much beer, the quantities calibrated to the demand, the demand known not by algorithm but by memory, by thirty years of watching what moved and what sat, what was requested and what was returned, what the island consumed and what it left on the shelf.

She stocked canned goods: beans, soup, tomatoes, tuna, corn, peas, the cans arranged by type and by brand, the brands the brands the island used, which were not always the cheapest brands or the best brands but were the brands that the island's people had chosen at some point in the past and had continued to choose because the choosing had become the brand's identity on the island, because Campbell's soup was soup in the way that the Constance was the ferry, by accumulated use, by the weight of repetition, and to stock a different brand would be to suggest that the thing the island knew was wrong, was insufficient, and Mere did not suggest this because Mere understood that the relationship between a community and its brands was not commercial but personal, was an expression of identity, and to change the brand was to change the identity, and the identity was not hers to change.

She stocked hardware. Nails, screws, bolts, tape, rope, wire, the miscellany of repair and construction that an island consumes steadily and unpredictably, the nail that is needed now, the screw that is needed today, the urgency of maintenance in a place where the nearest hardware store is a ferry ride away, where the thing you need is either in Mere's store or it is twenty-two minutes and a drive to Port Clement away, and the twenty-two minutes is the threshold, is the calculation that every islander makes — is this need worth a crossing? Is this repair worth 44 minutes of round-trip travel plus the drive to the store on the mainland plus the drive back plus the wait for the ferry? — and the calculation almost always resolves in Mere's favor, because Mere has what you need or can get it by tomorrow, and tomorrow is the store's promise, the one-day turnaround that the ferry schedule enables, the call to the mainland supplier placed today and the delivery arriving on tomorrow's morning ferry, and the one-day turnaround is the store's lifeline, is the thing that makes the limited inventory sufficient, and the sufficiency is the ferry's gift to the store and the store's gift to the island.

The back section of the store was the post office — not the official post office, which was in the small white building beside the school, but the unofficial post office, the place where people came to check their mail in the sense that people checked their mail by coming to the store and asking Mere whether she had seen the mail truck and whether Doris had finished sorting and whether there was anything interesting, and the asking was not about the mail but about the conversation, the exchange that was the store's real commerce, the trade of words and news and gossip and opinion that flowed across the counter the way water flowed through the channel, constantly, in both directions, carrying the island's information from person to person, from morning to evening, from one side of the counter to the other.

Mere was the island's memory. This was not a title she claimed or a role she sought but a function she performed, because she had been behind the counter for thirty years and behind the counter she had heard everything — every birth and every death, every marriage and every divorce, every arrival and every departure, every scandal and every kindness, every loan repaid and every debt forgiven, every feud begun and every feud ended, and the hearing had become the knowing and the knowing had become the memory, and the memory was not her private possession but the island's collective record, stored in Mere the way files are stored in a cabinet, accessible, retrievable, available to anyone who stood at the counter and asked.

She knew that Paul Ouellette's daughter was not coming back. She knew that Louise Pelletier's doctor had found something on the X-ray and that Louise was going to the mainland for tests. She knew that Carl's lobster catch was down eleven percent from the previous year and that the decline was not the season but the territory, the disruption of the channel bottom by the bridge construction's preliminary surveys, the sonar and the coring and the test pilings that had driven the lobsters from the channel's eastern edge where Carl had set his traps for twenty years. She knew these things because the people who knew them had told her, not formally, not as announcements, but casually, as items of conversation, as the things you say when you are standing at the counter buying bread or milk or beer, the things that come out in the ordinary course of the transaction, because the transaction is never just a transaction, is always also a conversation, and the conversation is never just a conversation, is always also a confession, because the store is the place where the island's people say what they cannot say elsewhere, what they cannot say at home or at church or at the harbor, and the saying is the store's function, its purpose, its reason for existing beyond the inventory and the bread and the hardware.

At nine o'clock the morning regulars began to arrive.

First: Earl Pinkham, seventy-three, retired lobsterman, who came every morning for coffee and a copy of the Press Herald and who sat on the bench on the store's porch — the green bench, one of two, the benches that served the same function as the benches at the ferry terminal, as places of waiting, but the waiting here was different, was not waiting for a crossing but waiting for company, for the next person to come through the door, for the conversation that would fill the morning — and Earl sat with his coffee and his paper and his silence, the silence of a man who has said what he has to say over seventy-three years and who is now content to listen, to be present, to occupy the bench and the morning and the store's porch with the quiet authority of someone who has earned the right to sit.

Second: Margaret Hale, sixty-five, who taught at the island school for twenty-eight years before retiring and who now volunteered at the library — the island library, one room in the basement of St. Anne's Church, open Tuesdays and Thursdays, the collection donated, the shelves handmade by Margaret's husband, who was dead — and Margaret came for bread and eggs and the particular brand of tea that Mere stocked for her, Twinings English Breakfast, a brand that Margaret's mother had drunk and that Margaret drank because her mother had drunk it, the inheritance of preference that operates in families the way it operates in marriages, by proximity, by shared consumption, by the drift of one person's habits into another person's life.

Third: Bill Alley, forty-two, who ran the island's boatyard — not a boatyard in the mainland sense, not a facility with a marine railway and a paint shop and a parts department, but a patch of shore with a set of ways and a hydraulic trailer and a workshop that had been a fish house before Bill converted it, the conversion accomplished over three winters with materials bought at Mere's store, the lumber and the screws and the insulation and the wire, and Mere remembered every purchase because the purchases were the conversion's narrative, the story of the fish house becoming the workshop told in receipts and in the memory of the things bought and the order in which they were bought and the conversations that accompanied the buying.

Bill stood at the counter. "Bridge crew is pouring footings next week," he said.

Mere looked at him. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Owen. The project manager. He came by the yard yesterday looking for a mooring for the survey boat. I set him up on seventeen."

"Seventeen is Carl's mooring," Mere said.

"Carl moved off seventeen in August. He's on twenty-three now."

"Carl moved because of the survey work," Mere said. "He moved because they were running sonar over his traps."

"I know why he moved," Bill said.

"The bridge moved him," Mere said. "The bridge hasn't been built and it's already moving people."

This was Mere's way — the precise observation, the statement that was not opinion but fact, and the fact carried the opinion within it the way a shell carries the animal, and the animal was the feeling, and the feeling was Mere's feeling about the bridge, which was not for and not against but was the feeling of a woman who had watched the island for thirty years from behind a counter and who understood that the island's identity was not fixed but was maintained, was kept in place by the conditions that sustained it, and the conditions were the crossing and the isolation and the limited access and the self-sufficiency that the limited access required, and the bridge would alter these conditions, and the alteration would alter the identity, and the alteration of identity was not destruction but transformation, and transformation is not death but it is change, and change is the thing that islands resist, because islands are defined by their boundaries and their boundaries are water and water does not change — water moves, water rises and falls, water flows and ebbs, but water does not change, water is always water — and the bridge would change the water's meaning, would change the boundary's meaning, would make the water not a separation but a decoration, not a barrier but a view.

By ten o'clock the porch was occupied. Earl on the left bench, Margaret on the right, Bill leaning against the railing, two more islanders — Donna Crane, Eddie's wife, and Frank Webber, who ran the island's only B&B — standing on the steps, and the group was not a meeting and not a gathering but was the porch, the daily porch, the assembly that happened every morning without planning and without agenda, the assembly that was the island's version of a town square, the place where the community performed the daily work of being a community, which was the work of talking, of exchanging the news and the opinions and the complaints and the jokes that bound the 380 into a unit, into a population that was not just a number but a body, a living thing that breathed and ate and spoke and argued and agreed.

They talked about the bridge.

They always talked about the bridge now. The bridge was the island's primary subject, its obsession, its weather — the thing that everyone discussed because everyone was affected, because the bridge would touch every life on the island in ways that were predictable and unpredictable, and the discussing was the island's way of processing the prediction and the unprediction, of turning the abstract into the particular, of converting the state's announcement into the island's experience.

"Property values will go up," Frank said. Frank was for the bridge. Frank ran a B&B and the bridge would bring more guests and more guests would fill more rooms and more rooms would pay more bills, and the mathematics of Frank's position was as sound as the mathematics of the feasibility study, and the soundness was Frank's argument, was the ground he stood on, the solid ground of a man whose livelihood depended on visitors and whose visitors depended on access and whose access depended on the bridge.

"Property values going up is not the same thing as life getting better," Earl said. Earl was against the bridge. Earl was against the bridge for reasons that were not reasons but were feelings, the feelings of a man who had lived on the island for seventy-three years and who had seen the island change and who did not want to see it change more, and the not-wanting was not nostalgia but was preservation, was the desire to keep the thing that worked, the thing that had sustained a community for two hundred years, and the thing was the crossing, was the separation, was the island's insistence on being an island.

"Life's not going to change that much," Frank said. "It's a bridge. It's a road. It's the same island with better access."

"The same island with better access is not the same island," Mere said.

The porch was quiet. When Mere spoke, the porch was quiet, because Mere's words had weight, had the weight of thirty years behind the counter, the weight of knowing, and the knowing was not opinion but evidence, was the accumulated testimony of a woman who had watched the island's composition change with every season, had watched the summer people increase and the year-round people decrease, had watched the store's inventory shift from the needs of a working community to the wants of a visiting one, from rope and nails and work gloves to sunscreen and craft beer and the fancy bread.

"The bridge comes or it doesn't," Mere said. "The state has decided. The money is allocated. The project manager is here. The pilings are going in. The bridge comes. The question is not whether the bridge comes. The question is what the island does when it arrives."

"What does the island do?" Donna asked.

"The island stays," Mere said. "The island stays either way. The question is whether it stays the same island."

"It won't," Earl said.

"No," Mere said. "It won't."

"So what do we do?" Bill asked.

Mere looked at the shelves. She looked at the bread she had shelved that morning, the white and the wheat and the rye and the sourdough, the inventory that she had curated for thirty years, the stock that reflected the island's needs, and she looked at it the way a person looks at a room they are about to leave, not with sadness exactly but with the attention that departure produces, the heightened seeing that comes when you know you will not see this particular arrangement again, because the arrangement will change, the needs will change, the store will stock different things for different people, and the different things will be the bridge's inventory, the post-bridge store, the store that serves not 380 year-round residents but 380 year-round residents plus the tourists and the commuters and the weekenders and the people who will discover the island the way they have discovered every other accessible coast — by driving to it, by driving onto it, by converting the crossing from an act into a commute.

"We do what we've always done," Mere said. "We stock what's needed. We open in the morning. We close at night. We sweep the floor. We order the bread. The bridge doesn't change the bread. The bridge doesn't change the shelves. The bridge changes who comes through the door."

The bell rang. A customer entered. Mere turned to the counter.

The morning continued. The porch continued. The conversation continued. The bridge continued, somewhere to the north, at the staging area at North Point, where Owen Delaney's crew was preparing the footings, where the first concrete would be poured into forms that would become the abutment that would become the foundation on which the bridge would stand, and the standing would be the bridge's argument, its physical assertion that the channel could be spanned, that the 1.4 miles could be reduced from a crossing to a distance, and the reduction was not wrong, was not evil, was not the act of malicious people but was the act of practical people, of people who saw a problem and solved it, and the problem was the water and the solution was the bridge and the solution's cost was the crossing, and the crossing's cost was the ferry and the captain and the deckhand and the choreography of docking and the horn at 6:15 and the bell above the door that rang when the bread arrived and the porch where the island sat and talked about the thing that was coming, the thing that was already here, the thing that had been here since the announcement and that grew more present with every piling and every footing and every pour, the bridge materializing the way the island materialized from the fog, gradually and then completely.

Mere closed the store at six. She swept the floor. She swept it the way she had swept it every night for thirty years, the same broom — not the same broom, the same motion, the brooms replaced but the sweeping unchanged, the arc of the bristles across the pine boards the same arc, the starting point the same corner, the finishing point the same door — and the sweeping was the day's conclusion, the final act, the thing that said: the store is closed, the day is done, the floor is clean, and the cleanliness is the readiness, the readiness for tomorrow, for the bell and the bread and the counter and the conversation.

She turned off the lights. She locked the door. She stood on the porch in the dark and looked at the harbor and the water and, across the water, the lights of Port Clement, the mainland lights, the lights that had always been there, always visible from the island, always representing the other shore, the shore that was not this shore, the shore that was twenty-two minutes away by ferry and that would soon be four minutes away by bridge, and the soon was the weight, the pressure, the thing that sat on the store and the island and the woman the way the fog sat on the channel, close, heavy, patient, not going away.

Carl was at the house. Carl was always at the house by six, the traps hauled, the catch sold, the boat moored, the day's work done, and Carl's work was the kind of work that ended when the body stopped, that did not carry itself home, that did not sit at the dinner table and talk about itself, because lobstering is not a job that talks but a job that does, and the doing is physical and complete and when the doing is done the body is done and the body asks only for food and rest and the absence of further demand.

They ate dinner. They did not talk about the bridge. They had talked about the bridge enough, had talked about it for two years, had said everything there was to say, and the everything-said was its own silence, the silence that follows exhaustion, the silence of a subject that has been discussed until the discussion has consumed itself, until the words have been used up and the opinions have been stated and the feelings have been felt and what remains is the fact, which is the bridge, which is coming, which cannot be discussed away or worried away or argued away but can only be lived with, the way you live with weather, the way you live with tide, the way you live with any force that is larger than your objection to it.

Mere washed the dishes. She stood at the sink and washed the dishes and looked out the window at the dark, the island's dark, the deep and starlit dark that was the island's nighttime gift, the dark that the bridge would not change — not immediately, not directly — but that the bridge would eventually alter, because the bridge would bring lights, would bring traffic, would bring the illumination that traffic requires, the headlights and the streetlights and the signal lights and the construction lights, and the lights would brighten the dark, would push the dark back, would make the island's night less dark and less its own, and the less-dark would be imperceptible at first and total at last, the way all change on islands is imperceptible at first and total at last.

She dried her hands. She hung the towel on its hook. She went to bed.

The store waited below, in the dark, the shelves stocked, the floor swept, the bell above the door silent, the silence the bell's version of rest, the bell waiting for the morning, for the door, for the bread, for the ringing that was the store's heartbeat, its announcement that someone had arrived, that the day had begun, that the island was awake and needing and present and alive, and the aliveness was the store's purpose, was Mere's purpose, was the thing she would continue to do after the bridge, the thing she would adapt to the bridge, because adaptation was what islands did, what stores did, what women who stood behind counters for thirty years did — they adapted, they stocked what was needed, they swept the floor, they opened in the morning, and the opening was the act, was the faith, was the belief that the day would bring customers and the customers would bring needs and the needs would bring conversation and the conversation would bring the community into being, every morning, every day, the community constituted by the bell and the bread and the counter and the words exchanged across it, the words that were not just words but were the island speaking to itself, reminding itself that it was still here, still an island, still 380 people on 2.3 miles of rock and spruce and rugosa, surrounded by water, connected by a crossing that was ending, sustained by a store that would remain.

The store would remain. Mere was certain of this. The store would remain because the island would remain and the island would need a store, would need bread and milk and hardware and beer, would need a counter and a woman behind it and a bell above the door, and the need would sustain the store the way the tide sustains the channel, not by choosing to but by being, by the fact of its existence, and the existence was enough, and the enough was Mere's answer to the bridge, the answer she had found behind the counter over thirty years of stocking and sweeping and listening and knowing: the store survives, the island survives, the need survives.

But it survives as a different store, on a different island, serving a different need. And the difference is the bridge's price. And the price is paid not in money but in identity, not in cost but in change, and the change is the thing that the porch talks about every morning, and the talking does not stop the change, and the not-stopping is the fact, and the fact is the bridge.