I replaced the boards and stepped back out into the sunlight, Walter at my heels. Garters are unpredictable creatures. Some of them will take food from your hand while others will bite and keep biting until they get tired or bored or killed. Here, in this old shack, they were unlikely to harm anyone, and the local population of skunks, raccoons, foxes, and cats would sniff them out soon enough. I decided to let them be unless circumstances forced me to do otherwise. As for Walter, well, he’d just have to learn to mind his own business.

Below me and through the trees, the salt marsh gleamed in the morning sun and birds moved on the waters, their shapes visible through the swaying grasses and rushes. The Native Americans had named this place Owascoag, the Land of Many Grasses, but they were long gone, and to the people who lived here now it was simply “the marsh,” the place where the Dunstan and Nonesuch Rivers came together as they approached the sea. The mallards, year-round residents, had been joined for the summer by wood ducks, pintails, black ducks, and teal, but the visitors would soon be leaving to escape the harsh Maine winter. Their whistles and cries carried on the breeze, joining with the buzz of the insects in a gentle clamor of feeding and mating, hunting and fleeing. I watched a swallow make an arcing dive toward the mud and alight upon a rotting log. It had been a dry season and the swallows in particular had enjoyed good eating. Those that lived close to the marsh were grateful to them, for they kept down not only the mosquitoes but also the far nastier greenheads, with their strong-toothed jaws that tore through the skin with the force of a razor cut.

Scarborough is an old community, one of the first colonies established on the northern New England coast that was not simply a transient fishing station but a settlement which would become a permanent home for the families that lived within its boundaries. Many were English settlers, my mother’s ancestors among them; others came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, attracted by the promise of good farmland. The first governor of Maine, William King, was born in Scarborough, although he left there at the age of nineteen when it became clear that it didn’t have too much to offer in the way of wealth and opportunity. Battles have been fought here-like most of the towns on the coastline, Scarborough has been dipped in blood-and the community has been blighted by the ugliness of Route 1, but through it all the Scarborough salt marsh has survived, and its waters glow like molten lava in the setting sun. The marsh was protected, although the continuing development of Scarborough meant that new housing-not all of it pretty, and some of it unquestionably ugly-had grown up close to the marsh’s high-water mark, attracted both by its beauty and by the presence of older, preexisting populations. The big, black-gabled house in which I now lived dated from the early nineteen thirties, and was mostly sheltered from the road and the marsh by a stand of trees. From my porch, I could look out upon the water and sometimes find a kind of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

But that kind of peace is fleeting, an escape from reality that ends as soon as you tear your eyes away and your attention returns to the matters in hand: to those whom you love and who depend upon you to be there for them; to those who want something from you but for whom you feel little or nothing in return; and to those who would hurt you and the ones close to you, if given the opportunity. Right now, I had enough to be getting along with in all three categories.

Rachel and I had moved to this house only four weeks previously, after I had sold my grandfather’s old home and adjoining land on Mussey Road, about three miles away, to the U.S. Postal Service. A huge new mail depot was being built in the area and I had been offered a considerable amount of money to vacate my land so that it could be used as a maintenance area for the mail fleet.

I had felt a twinge of sorrow when the sale was finally made. After all, this was the house to which my mother and I had come from New York after my father’s death, the house in which I had spent my teenage years, and the house to which I, in turn, had returned after the death of my own wife and child. Now, two and a half years later, I was starting again. Rachel had only just begun to show, and it seemed somehow apt that we would begin our life as a couple in earnest in a new home, one that we had chosen together, furnished and decorated together, and in which, I hoped, we would live and grow old together. In addition, as my ex-neighbor Sam Evans had pointed out to me as the sale was nearing completion and as he himself was about to depart for his new place in the South, only a crazy person would want to live in close proximity to thousands of postal workers, all of them little ticking time bombs of frustration waiting to explode in an orgy of gun-related violence.

“I’m not sure that they’re really that dangerous,” I suggested to him.

He looked skeptical. Sam had been the first to sell when the offers were made, and the last of his possessions were now in a U-Haul truck ready to head for Virginia. My hands were dusty from helping him carry the boxes from the house.

“You ever see that film The Postman?” he asked.

“No. I heard it kind of sucked.”

“It sucked sperm whales. Kevin Costner should have been stripped naked, soaked in honey, and staked out over an anthill for it, but that’s not the point. What’s The Postman about?”

“A postman?”

“An armed postman,” he corrected. “In fact, lots of armed postmen. Now, I bet you fifty bucks that if you accessed the records of shitty video stores in any city in America, you know what you’d find?”

“Porn?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” he lied. “You’d find that the only people who rented The Postman more than once were other postmen. I swear it. Check the records. The Postman is like a call to arms for these guys. I mean, it’s a vision of an America in which postal workers are heroes and still get to blow away anyone who pisses them off. It’s like porno for postals. They probably sit around in circles jerking off at their favorite parts.”

I discreetly took a step away from him. He wagged a finger at me.

“You mark my words. What Marilyn Manson is to crazy high schoolers, The Postman is to postal workers. You just wait until the killings start, then you’ll say to yourself that old Sam was right all along.”

That, or old Sam was crazy all along. I still wasn’t sure how serious he was. I had visions of him holed up in a farmhouse in Virginia, waiting for the postal apocalypse to come. He shook my hand and walked to the truck. His wife and children had already gone on ahead of him, and he was looking forward to the peace of the road. He paused at the door of the truck and winked.

“Don’t let the crazy bastards get you, Parker.”

“They haven’t succeeded yet,” I replied.

For a moment, the smile departed from his face, and the under-current to his comments rippled his surface good humor.

“That don’t mean they’ll stop trying.”

“I know.”

He nodded.

“If you’re ever in Virginia…”

“I’ll keep driving.”

He gave me a final wave and then he was gone, his middle finger raised in a last farewell to the future home of the U.S. Mail.

From the porch of the house, Rachel called my name and waved the cordless phone at me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and watched Walt tear away from me at full speed to join her. Rachel’s red hair burned in the sunlight, and once again I felt a tightening in my belly at the sight of her. My feelings for her coiled and twisted inside me, so that for a moment I found it hard to isolate any single emotion. There was love-that much I knew for certain-but there was also gratitude, and longing, and fear: fear for us, a fear that I would somehow let her down and force her away from me; fear for our unborn child, for I had lost a child before, had watched again and again in my uneasy sleep as she slipped away from me and disappeared into the darkness, her mother by her side, their passing wreathed in rage and pain; and fear for Rachel, a terror that I might somehow fail to protect her, that some harm might befall her when my back was turned, my attention distracted, and she too would be torn away from me.