Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [82]
Driving back to Vermont, under ragged patches of cloud raining and hurrying across a sky scrubbed a clean April blue, we drove past the tail end of a rainbow whose ending place was plainly visible; you could actually look through the end of the rainbow into the wet grass. Home again, we almost didn’t even need to say it out loud: what were we doing here? I’d stayed five years in a job I was wearying of, and neither school nor the display business which Wally had built were priorities to him. We loved our house, I loved my garden, but these didn’t seem enough; now we needed community, like-minded company. We needed both support and a place that would leave us alone to work on what was essential, which was trying to understand what was happening to us, feeling our way, finding how to live well. Who knew how much time we’d have? Nothing, nothing erodes one’s patience like that question.
Solutions materialized as easily as our rainbow, emblem of promise and futurity. A friend called from Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, and offered me a job as her replacement during a year’s leave. Sarah Lawrence is a long way from Provincetown, but because the job involved teaching only on Mondays and Tuesdays, it was perfectly possible to drive down to the college, stay over and teach, then have the rest of the week on the Cape. Though the house was sold in fifteen minutes, there were endless things to do: cleaning out the accumulations of two men absurdly fond of barn sales and auctions and flea markets, deciding what was essential, letting go of one life and reaching uncertainly toward another. But a kind of ease prevailed, a sense that the rightness of what we were doing made a complex set of exchanges and arrangements possible. We seemed to be offered a series of gifts.
Walking Arden one morning by the rotary at the end of our town’s arterial street, where civilization ends and the road gives way to a wide, luminous salt marsh, I stopped to read what I’d been walking past for weeks, a neglected historical marker hidden in a bushy clump of junipers. Its verdigrised lettering noted that somewhere near the site, in November of 1620, the Pilgrims made their first landing before going on to Plymouth. This was a considerable shock to me, for one reason: my ancestor, Edward Dotey, was a passenger on that overcrowded, brightly painted boat.
This ancestry is no conventional source of pride. My family has been for generations a ragtag batch of poor Southerners; my mother’s father was a subsistence farmer in East Tennessee, lugging what millet he could to the mill every summer and living off the meager income it provided. My father’s father was a carpenter who, during the Depression, served time in prison for shooting one of his creditors. Southern to the bone, intermarried with dirt-poor Irish escapees of the potato famine, we found the idea of a noble Yankee ancestor oddly distant; I can understand now why my mother laughed, in the late fifties, when she was invited to join the Memphis chapter of the DAR.
And Edward Dotey himself is a bit of a problem, as near a figure to the archetypal American scoundrel as the first citizens of Plymouth can provide. The facts of his early life are scant, but it appears that the young man from London sold himself into indentured servitude to escape some fate worse than seven years without liberty in a relatively unknown and certainly inhospitable country. Perhaps he was avoiding debtor’s prison. Whatever his motivation, the hot-tempered Edward probably was a central figure in the Mayflower mutiny, in which the declaration of a group of young men that “when they came ashore, they would use their owne libertie” led to the signing of the Mayflower Compact.
Once settled in Plymouth, he distinguished himself by fighting the first duel on American soil, with one Edward Leister. He went