The Easter shell

She found a sea monster, once, washed up on the beach. Just a small one, like a salamander with gills, its dull gray-green coat streaked with red like a trout. It had purple claws. Her father stuffed it and hung it in his tower. He said it looked enough like a crocodile.

Peggy spent hours on the beach, and the bay beyond continued to cough up treasures at her feet. Marvelously wrought glass floats, for one, with scowling faces painted in black slashes. Were they supposed to bring good luck, she wondered, or scare the fishes?

She was a miser with shells -- there were no exotic ones on this ordinary beach, anyway. As a child, she had brought home buckets -- every chipped clam shell she could find. Nowadays, it took a piece striking or beautiful to make her dust off the sand and marvel.

The Easter shell is one such. She called it that because she found it that day, wandering after Mass, her good shoes left up by the path and her good hose tied for the time being around her waist. There were many people on the beach that day: surf-gazers, beachcombers, children, the occasional horse, a man who sells pancakes.

Peggy, watching the sand, is not aware of any of it. She keeps her hat on; it seems odd to be wearing one in a place where the wind wants to whip and combs her hair, but she finds it comforting. She feels, somehow, closer to her mother this way, dim memories skimming by of church and candlelight and talcum and a hazy drowsiness next to a large firm body. Not rational, she tells herself at the next instant. A phrase of her father's.

Her dress whipping against her bare legs, her hat covering her face; she can't see well. So when the old man touches her arm, she nearly jumps into the surf. She peers at him from under her hat, wary, but he seems benign.

"Missy, a shell for you."

She's never seen him before. His clothing is not ragged so much as very old -- a leather jerkin or coat stained with salt, with salt in crusty streaks on it. He has a beard, not dark, not gray, indeterminate, like the rest of him. She never could, later, remember the color of his eyes, or, really, anything remarkable about him at all, except the god's eye that hung around his neck, suspended by a leather thong. Green as the deepest rollers it was, with a clear stone in the center.

He is holding what she first takes to be an orb, but then realizes is a shell of voluptuously round proportions. It's slightly open, lying in his hand with lips, as it were, parted in breathless anticipation. And of course it is breathless, because it is a shell, not a live mollusk, that he hands her.

He hands it to her and she takes it, starting to protest. She certainly can't pay him for it.
At the notion of payment, he looks bemused. He doesn't usually ... his gifts are free ... but since she asked, could he have those? And he points at the hose tied around her waist.

She gladly gives them; they were her second pair anyway. He takes them, and, with no further small talk, walks away, leaving her holding the foreign shell.

It's not really white, she notices, but of a light ivory, delicately ridged, with a bit of a blush along the edges of the lips. It is the most voluptuous thing she's ever seen, but that's not much, since she lives a pretty straightforward life. Voluptuous to her father would be a bit of fat on the Sunday roast.

Roast! She had better get back. Father will be hungry.

The shell sits, forgotten, on her bureau (where it rests, so odd for a shell, on its hinge end, with the gap at the top) while she deals with the roast and her father's usual Sunday cantankerousness. She tidies the kitchen and sweeps the hearth and reads Keats to him while he ties flies in the back study. He has some ale with his supper of beans and bread and falls asleep soon after, dreaming of wheat fields.

Peggy sits and crochets during the long spring evening, sitting on the front porch and watching the surf pile up and up in the near distance. A horse is running on the sand, now deserted, the setting sun painting it now gold, now red. But there is no rider. A cold breeze comes up, and Peggy packs her yarns indoors.

It's still twilight as she goes to sleep, so she does not notice until she awakes in the night that the shell's opening is edged with inflorescence. It glows dimly, like the numbers on her father's pocket watch. Curious, she touches the shell and finds that it is warm, just a bit warm, like a cup of tea that's been sitting for a bit.

She leaves the shell where it was, on the bureau, and goes back to bed. Waking again much later in the night, she can see that it is still glowing faintly. She touches it, though, and it is cold.

The next morning, she finds her father has died during the night. It's not a particular surprise; his health had not been good. She is too busy after that to think much about the shell or find any more out about it, but she notices it every night when she darkens her room.

Only on moonlit nights does it not glow, overglowed by the light of the moon. Peggy lets the moon in, opening her curtains so that it can shine on her room. She has always felt the moon was powerful.

Old women in the village have noticed, and they tell her it's a bad idea. Too much moonlight, they warn, can drive a person barmy.

Peggy moves into the front bedroom at the rear of the house -- her father's room, overlooking the surf. She can hear the boom of it and watch the shell. She never dreams.

She takes in borders, two or three at a time, as many as she really can handle. People come to the village, stay a week or two, or a year or two. It is very popular with writers and artists. There are also, Peggy thinks, an unusual number of clowns on the beach these days -- men in ragged pants with zany shirts and big red noses and hair that flies all over the place. They play tricks on passers-by and throw balls so that people duck, thinking they're coming at them, but at the last minute they curve away and other clowns catch them. All the clowns are barefoot. Some of them have six toes.

One day, a boarder departs and Peggy puts up a notice that she has a vacancy. There is usually no problem filling her home because it's so close to the beach and artists love to sit on the porch and watch the water. Writers, some of whom are not even staying there, sit on deck chairs in the wind and let the wind comb their hair and their thoughts.

But this time, it is several weeks before a candidate appears. As is usual, it is a man. Women seldom travel alone in these parts. The old women in town are always telling Peggy that she needs a man. Among themselves, they are sure that having her curtains open on moonlit nights has kept her single.

The man, when he does appear, is familiar, a bit older, a bit more bent than the last time she saw him. It is the old man who gave her the shell. And did you take good care of it? he asks. Aye, that I did, she replies. And she asks him if it was proper for her to let the shell sit in the moonlight. He is bemused for a bit, but says that may have been all right.

Nevertheless, she closes the curtains now. Men on the beach, she reasons, could look in the window and see the shell glowing in the night. A few weeks, later, she notices that some of the house is different. Parts of it have become translucent, flowing, mother-of-pearl without quite saying. First the mopboards, then the walls, then the pearliness covers the floors.

Slowly the house is lined with shell. Pieces of the house close off from one another. Proportions change. She begins to notice the walls are longer, that the circular stair in the center has more landing than it used to.

Nobody else seems to notice, although some of the artists seem energized.

After the old man has been staying there for some time, eating the Sunday roast she now makes for a small family, he makes her an offer. He will trade her the shell for a smooth round stone that he has, a moonstone.

Why did you give me the shell? she asks.

Because, he replies, I thought you could take care of it. And so you have.

What about the house?

It will be, he assures her, the same as ever. She can't tell if he has seen the transformation.

They make the exchange, and she likes the moonstone because it can be carried around. It's smooth like the shell and has a similar pearly quality, but it never glows. She likes to have it in her apron pocket. Sometimes, she feels it warm against her thigh, but she figures it's just picked up some of her own body heat.

Be rational, she tells herself.

When the old man leaves, his room is empty for a long time. There is only that room left in the part of the house that had not become mother-of-pearl. She supposes people could live in the mother-of-pearl room. She starts braiding rugs with sticky backings to keep people from slipping on the slick floors. The windows seem untouched, but when she opens them, it makes the walls pulsate. She finds she had little energy for the house. She shops in the village and cooks for herself.

Slowly, over a long season of misty days and gray surf, the mother-of-pearl in the walls subsides. The pictures of her father's ancestors reappear, looking none the worse for being pearlized for a number of months. The wallpaper is damaged in places, but the floors revert to the familiar marks and scars of a long, hard life.

One of the clowns comes to live in the empty room. His name is Yurmm, with a long satisfied sound at the end of it, and while he has red hair, it is his natural color. He has six toes on each foot, but his feet aren't large enough for him to make it to the big time under the big top.

Over time, Peggy notices things about Yurmm, like the mole on his left cheek that is usually covered up by clown makeup. He's handy around the house, figuring out clever ways of attaching pictures to the slippery walls.

One day he captures one of the wild beach horses and takes Peggy for a ride. She lets the wind comb her hair and feels Yurmm's strong arm warm about her waist, where she once tied her hose, near where she now feels the moonstone warm against her thigh.

Stay with me, she tells Yurmm after the ride is over.

All right, he says.

The circus of their life, Peggy and Yurmm's, starts that day. And many years later, their daughter Elizabeth goes walking on the beach, laughing with the clowns and playing with the horses and buying pancakes to feed to the sea gulls.

Then, one day, after Mass on Easter, she gives a pancake to an old, old man in a salt-stained tunic. In turn, he hands her a shell. It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. She keeps the curtains of her bedroom open so she can admire it as it glows gently beside her bed.