The Sinking of Salt House

I only heard about it at a Chat, one night with my father and grandmother, and I guess it didn't really sink so much as blow away, but the end of Salt House certainly must have been something. It still gives me goose-bumps to think about it.

My great-grandfather was alive then, my grandmother too, although she was a little girl. I doubt even he saw it end. I only know what he told my grandmother - she talked at the Chats about things he told her and her sister, about the moon and the tides and the planets. And about soldier cells and cuts and viruses and all that. He talked a lot too, I guess.

There must not have been anyone left to watch when Salt House went, under the boiling sea. It probably came apart in one of the hypercanes that started about the time the world fell into the Hot Age. By that time, though, Salt House was the only thing left above the water for kilometers around. They say, Pop and Grandma, that it was on a hill, right over the water. And Gram - who has seen a hypercane or three - tells the story about how the burning needles of spray... and how the waves like unbound herds of muscular rivers... and how the banshee wind... and the bits of shattered wood whipping through the air... and the heavy wooden sofa and the mirror brought from China two centuries ago were open to the sea when the walls ripped apart... and the kitchen full of fine sand and sea stars. And I can see it all, like she saw it, though she could not have been there herself. Like the fairy stories.

I suppose you could still see it now, whatever is left, at low tide, since the hill was mostly black rock that had resisted the glaciers of the Ice Ages. There might even be some of the tougher bits left, under the seaweed and the barnacles. We sailed out once, to look. Gram was a good sailor still, and even tried to teach Pop a few things, but he worried too much about us to concentrate, and I think he was a little seasick, too. We caught a few fish, and Grandma Jay made sure we thanked them properly for their sacrifice and returned their bones to the sea after we ate. My sister and I were all over that boat, and Grandma Jay said we girls would make fine sailors one day, laughing. I will always remember her laugh, like she could see right through you, and what she saw made her happy. The sea made her happy too. Sailing is a good business these days because the land gets smaller every year, and most of the old cities are either gone or built on Floaters. Gram says that there were lots more people back then, millions, but I think that is a baby story, like The Man With Strong Arms Who Flew to the Moon. Sometimes old people have trouble telling when a kid grows up, and doesn't believe the fairy tales anymore. They are still fun to listen to, because they are so pretty, and so diaphanous, and because of the thrill they raise on the back of your neck. Even when you know they are fairy stories.

We threaded the islands out there, and maybe we found the spot, but I doubt it, really, because the GPS isn't the same as it was back then. Grandma Jay explained once, about how even things that never touch the earth don't stay still. I didn't quite understand what she was talking about - it seems like it should be the other way around, doesn't it? She was very serious though, that look she gets when she explains something that her father used to tell her, that full look in her eyes, and I can almost hear his voice, like a recitation, like a long droning book, but with that lilt that reaches out and catches you when you drift off. Like you can tell that he thought it was real important, you know? And that she feels the same way, that it has to go from her to you, something so important it can't be lost in the between-ness. It wasn't until years later that I understood that the important part was not the thing, but the not getting lost in between.

So we looked for the Hill, the one that was Green and now swirls under the blue-green-black waters, hairy and crusty and primal, like it was before Salt House and like it will be again and again until it is all gone, and in its place a coral reef or a forest of algae towering hundreds of meters out of the darkness toward the flickering sun. And we found it, or something like it, some rocks, and the tide was low so we could see it, hulking underneath us, waited upon by carp and mussels and sly crabs looking for their chance. And maybe that was even it, or probably not, but it was like a fairy story is, and the going and the looking felt so alive that my sister and I talked about it for years afterward - "sailing to the old house". Like the fairy stories, the emotion was more important than the thing itself.

That was just one of the things I remember about Grandma Jay. My grandmother was as tough as hell, and deserved all the respect she got. She made it through the Slippage, and that is not something that many people did. My sister and I always asked her to tell us, but that is the one thing she wouldn't talk about, except to say that people back then had to do things and eat things that people just should not have to do or eat, and that it was better to let all that be. We all know about the Slippage, when the Hot Age made people pay for what they had done, but we never got many details at the Chats in the Sacred Grove. I think even the treebeards don't want to talk about it too much anymore. You could see it in her, the tension in her body sometimes when someone tried to cheat her at the market, or there was a ruckus on the road. People usually backed down when that happens, when her eyes turned hard and dull like rocks in the deep water. I tell my grandchildren about her, my grandmother, and I can see that she is like a fairy story for them too, but I know that she is real, and that somewhere out past the islands there is a place where she used to play when she was a tiny girl, laughing on the soft grass before the sea returned.