Moon Tide Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  MOON TIDE

  “[A] powerful first novel … Through Tripp’s skillful use of an ever-shifting point of view, the town emerges as a character itself.… Moon Tide is the thinking woman’s beach book. It has all the great themes of summertime reading—love, luck, sex, and the sea. In Tripp’s absorbing novel, you’ll feel as if you’re reading about all of them for the first time.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “The writing in this exquisitely wrought debut novel is at times so metaphorical that it in effect grants the reader an ‘outside-of-syntax’ experience, pushing past words to create a wash of impressions. This is not to say that Tripp doesn’t tell a good love-with-a-little-danger story.… The book reads with a sealike syntactical cadence, and Tripp shoots it through with visual richness and detail.… Her themes blend and meld: social class and place, the effects of change, the power of words, the frailty of humans against natural life forces, the effects of memory and love.… Tripp presents with clear strength in language and literary tradition.… She’s set her bar pretty high.…”

  —The Denver Post

  “Evocative … [a] luminous first novel … a thrilling climax.”

  —People

  “Unforgettable … brilliant characterizations … shimmering descriptions … [a] gripping climax … [Tripp’s] poetic narrative will remind some of Michael Ondaatje and others of Barry Lopez, but she’s an original.”

  —Library Journal

  “[A] dreamy novel … dangerous and beautiful.”

  —The Improper Bostonian

  “Here is a lyrical debut novel about the magical and mysterious ways science, history, geography, and family interact, and personalities endure.… This is a fascinating and pleasurable reading experience.”

  —Fred Leebron, author of In the Middle of All This

  “Tripp’s poetical prose turns some scenes into lyrical feasts for the senses.… [She has a] painter’s awe for the beauty of sensual details.… The reader feels transported by an indelible sense of a time and place.… A young writer with impressive talent and heart.”

  —The Providence Journal

  “The characters are vividly drawn, but the real star of this novel is its setting, which is described with such great feeling that the fierceness of the sea, the solitude of the village, and the volatility of the climate seem to surround the reader on every page. Tripp is a young writer, blessed with the descriptive powers of a mature poet and writes of breakers and tides and crested swells as though she had spent a lifetime at sea.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Tripp is adept at illuminating how age shreds the fabric of both memory and consciousness.… [She] writes wonderfully of the characters’ dawning awareness of the storm’s magnitude. In Tripp’s hands, the storm becomes a complex piece of music that builds note by note, swelling to its deadly crescendo.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Tripp takes the reader on a journey through these characters with words and images that one usually reserves for dream. It’s as if the author knows that the times she is writing about are gone and is writing a sweet, but often somber epitaph.”

  —The Dartmouth Chronicle

  “There are dark secrets. There are lyrical set-pieces, which we admired and savored. We hope you will, too. This one goes on the shelf with the books we want to read again someday. It’s not a very big shelf.”

  —Voice-Ledger (Millbrook, N.Y.)

  “[A] compelling human story … Through lush prose and radiance of the natural world reminiscent of Rilke, Tripp explores memories and feelings that lie within the emotional layers of [the] ordinary.”

  —The Standard-Times (New Bedford, Mass.)

  “[A] beautifully written first novel … Tripp is an unusual stylist who filters all of her characters’ perceptions and emotions through their connection to the land. Haunting, ethereal, and often brutal, her novel achieves the resonance of myth.”

  —Booklist

  “A shimmering work, an audacious debut; a gem.”

  —Edna O’Brien

  2004 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2003 by Dawn Clifton Tripp

  Reader’s guide copyright © 2004 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House

  Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in

  Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  for permission to reprint four lines from “Storm in Massachusetts,

  September 1982” from Dream Work, by Mary Oliver,

  copyright © 1986 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission

  of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  This work was originally published in hardcover by The Random

  House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2003.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Tripp, Dawn Clifton.

  Moon tide: a novel/Dawn Clifton Tripp—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-210-0

  1. Women—Massachusetts—Fiction. 2. Westport (Mass.: Town)—Fiction. 3. Grandparent and child—Fiction. 4. Fishing villages—Fiction. 5. Seaside resorts—Fiction. 6. Grandmothers—Fiction. 7. Hurricanes—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.R57 M66 2003

  813′.6—dc21 2002031720

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I: Elizabeth Chapter 1: Westport Point

  Chapter 2: Maggie

  Chapter 3: Eve

  Chapter 4: Elizabeth

  Chapter 5: Jake

  Chapter 6: Maggie

  Chapter 7: Jake

  Chapter 8: Elizabeth

  Chapter 9: Jake

  Chapter 10: Maggie

  Chapter 11: Jake

  Chapter 12

  Part II: The Sandflat Chapter 1

  Chapter 2: Jake

  Chapter 3: Wes

  Chapter 4: Maggie

  Chapter 5: Patrick

  Chapter 6: Elizabeth

  Chapter 7: Jake

  Chapter 8: Ben Soule

  Chapter 9: Eve

  Chapter 10: Patrick

  Chapter 11: Patrick

  Chapter 12: Wes

  Chapter 13: Jake

  Chapter 14: Maggie

  Chapter 15: Eve

  Chapter 16: Jake

  Part III: Summer 1938 Chapter 1: Ben Soule

  Chapter 2: Elizabeth

  Chapter 3: Eve

  Chapter 4: The Storm

  Chapter 5: Jake

  Chapter 6: Maggie

  Chapter 7: Elizabeth

  Chapter 8: Jake

  Chapter 9: Ben Soule

  Chapter 10: Patrick

  Chapter 11: Vera Marsh

  Chapter 12: Maggie

  Chapter 13: Millie Tripp

  Chapter 14: Israel Mason

  Chapter 15: Vera Marsh

  Chapter 16: Patrick

  Chapter 17: Maggie

  Chapter 18: Charles

  Chapter 19: Ben Soule

  Chapter 20: Patrick

  Chapter 21: Millie Tripp

  Chapter 22: Ben Soule

  Chapter 23: The Shuckers Club

  Chapter 24: Elizabeth

  Chapter 25: Eve

  Chapter 26: Patri
ck

  Chapter 27: Afterweeks

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  A Discussion with Dawn Clifton Tripp

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  … and the wind turns

  like a hundred black swans

  and the first faint noise

  begins.

  —Mary Oliver,

  “Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982”

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1938

  He knows the places in the river where eels will collect under the ice the way he knows the rooms she keeps inside her. He has walked through damp entryways and unlit corridors, opened doors, crossed thresholds. He has stretched himself out on her floor. He sleeps there until its hardness gives way underneath him.

  When she comes down that last afternoon to the boathouse, already the sky has turned the color of sulfur. The storm wind rakes off the surface of the river and splits through the trees. The great oaks at Skirdagh bend their heads down toward the stones.

  She pushes through the woods and the lower meadow, the sky shredded with bits of debris, branches, leaves. A swallow caught on a gust, a tangle of feathers, sails past her. The rain twists through her hair.

  The river has begun to rise. The air is drenched with the damp salt reek of the marsh, and the shriek of the wind—hollow, unearthly—cuts the sky loose from the ground as the water washes in over the pier. She wades through the eelgrass toward the boathouse, her face soaked with spray. The salt sears her eyes but she pushes on, toward the square orange glow of the window.

  She reaches the wall and flattens herself against the leeward side. She looks in at him through the window, her face beyond reach of the light.

  He sits on the floor with his knife, carving a bird out of pine. He smoothes the wood along the wing, rubs seed oil into it, then runs the flat edge of the knife down so the feathers darken.

  It is her shadow that he sees—a darkness that moves over the knife in his hand. He looks up and sees her as she is turning to go. He drops the knife, opens the door, pulls her inside.

  She tastes of the salt hay, of rain. He touches her, and her body runs like water through his hands.

  PART I

  ELIZABETH

  CHAPTER 1

  Westport Point

  Early June. They wash in over the bridge and down to their huge cottages on East Beach and behind the Horseneck dunes. The Hotel Westport sheds its window boards, and the music off the phonograph circles the wraparound porch. It sticks in the slats between the shingle wood, notes of new and unfamiliar jazz spilling down the front steps with women in sandal heels and long city dresses that slowly rise with the years toward the knee.

  They swell like driftwood down Main Road and fill the pews of the Point Church on Sundays in July. They race swift teak boats with names like Anemone and Bonito from the Harbor Rocks to the bridge and back. They dance up huge white tents for parties on Saturday nights at the Gallows Pavilion, chauffeured clambakes at Remington’s, and knicker barbecues on the west branch sandflats at low tide. They are faceless, the way light is faceless. Gone by the second week in September.

  Elizabeth Gonne Lowe stays on. When her son, Charles, and her granddaughter, Eve, leave the town with the rest who return to their homes in the city, Elizabeth closes off the guest wing on the north side of the house. She arranges for groceries to be delivered once a week from Blackwood’s store. She stuffs old towels underneath the doors that have warped and hires a local man to set a layer of storm glass on the exposed windows of the upstairs rooms.

  Elizabeth does not fit in the corners with the people from town. They are Swamp Yankee—they come from old families that have been in Westport since King Philip’s War. She was born in 1848 Ireland, three years after the blight arrived from North America, spread with the damp cold through the potato crop, and sucked the leaves and tubers black. She lived in Connemara, on the mainland next to Omey Island. Her father owned one hundred acres of land in barely a town called Skirdagh farther north in County Mayo. In 1856, he traded that land for some coins and a keg of salted meat, then packed his wife and children onto a cattle boat bound for Liverpool. From there, they boarded a ship to America. On the crossing, the six of them slept with their provisions on two pallet bunks. The youngest daughter died of the black fever and was buried in a sailcloth sack thrown overboard. When they landed in Boston, their skin was the color of heath and hung like washed linen on their bones.

  They walked their way inland to Concord. Elizabeth and her older brother, Sean, grew sick on the handfuls of raspberries they tore from the briers on the side of the road. For six months, the family crowded into the attic room of an Irish-owned boardinghouse. Her father spread himself into whatever odd work he could find while her mother took shifts in the village bakeshop, sifting flour, cutting the steam out of bread, and coating the stiff loaves with a milk wash that soothed the roughened grain.

  When Elizabeth was twenty-one, she met Henry Lowe, the only son of a prominent Transcendentalist. She married him the following summer under the grapevined trellis in his father’s apple orchard. Lowe was a graduate student in zoology at Harvard, obsessed with the relationship between the migration of glaciers and obsolete fish. He shared the belief of his professor, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, that while climactic and geologic change could bring about extinction, each new species was a thought of God. He helped Agassiz start an experimental school for marine science on Penikese, the afterthought of an island off Cuttyhunk on the fringe of a deep rip shoal in Buzzards Bay. Less than a year later, Agassiz died. The Anderson School stayed open one more summer, and Henry Lowe lived on the island with his young wife. Three weeks before the school closed, they went out sailing. They followed a small flock of gulls trailing a catboat and sailed through a break in the coastline into a narrow switchback harbor. They docked at the tip of Westport Point and had walked less than a mile up Main Road when Elizabeth fell in love with unanswered boulders lying in the middle of a field. She begged her husband for the tumble of land down to the river. Henry bought it for her, and she named it Skirdagh, after the town her father had sold for meat in the wake of the Great Famine.

  They made love in the juniper woods and Elizabeth lay there afterward, her bare arms scathed in sunlight on the dark cool soil. She looked up toward the new pine shell of their house rising against the sky, the inside still damp with the smell of mason’s glue and paint mixed from a base of linseed oil. She did not know then that in less than a year she would bear a son and her husband would leave to go in search of God among the ice floes. Henry would sail on the Jeannette with naval lieutenant George De Long to the Arctic Circle. They would prove the existence of the Wrangel landmass, they would discover the De Long Islands, and Henry Lowe would come to understand the secrets that live in a blue glacial flesh. He would hear the thoughts of God in the slow ticking of the ice. Two years into the voyage, the Jeannette sailed into a black lead that narrowed, and she was crushed between two sheets of moving ice. Her wreckage drifted for two hundred and fifty-four miles; the crew perished, among them Henry Lowe; and the journey of their wrecked hull came to be interpreted as evidence of predictable polar tides.

  When the first snow dusts the sandhills on the far side of the river and her own footsteps begin to spook along behind her through the house, this is the past that Elizabeth Lowe thinks back on. She pulls the hand-knit afghans from the sea chest. She boils up a thick porridge on the stove, and when the salt wind drives in off the river and howls like a living thing along the edges of the sill, she folds herself into the house for the winter.

  CHAPTER 2

  Maggie

  The end of summer, 1913. After the town had emptied itself of strangers and thinned to its slower blood, there was Maggie. Long bones and dark hands, living in the root cellar on a handful of juniper land behind the big house called Skirdagh that belonged to Elizabeth Lowe.


  Blackwood never said where he thought Maggie came from. He’d be scrubbing down the fish counter at the wharf store and he’d listen to the silt they talked about her that churned up in spurts like mud off the bottom in surf. He watched how eventually they grew tired of it, and so she settled into them, the way ballast gravel settles in the belly of a cod and eventually grows to become a part of the fish. After the first few winters, no one seemed to remember that she had come from anywhere but the land by Skirdagh’s root cellar. She was as much a part of the air as the salt and the iodine reek off the flats.

  Blackwood says nothing, but he knows things about her: that she reads faces in smoke and talks eggs out of infertile hens. He has seen her catch the sun in her hands when it is red and deep in one socket of the sky. She can see storms in the clouds four days away. Her fingers are long and brown; he has watched them picking through the gingham in his store. They are the kinds of hands that twist like soft roots through soil. He knows that six days of every week she works for Elizabeth Lowe, tending the old woman’s needs.

  When Maggie is still young, she will trade him baskets of peas, yellow crookneck squash, carrots, beets, and parsley. She smells of butter. In summer, she wears galoshes and a straw hat with a tremendous brim that shelters her face.

  Every day at noon, she walks down Thanksgiving Lane, past the wharf across the bridge to the dunes with a basket she has woven out of reed. Blackwood will take his horse sometimes down the rut path to Cummings Brook. He will see her cutting alder bark and the leaves off white violet. He will see her in the garden as he passes by on his way to Central Village. From the road, she seems small, as if she could easily fit into one of his hands. When he gets home late in the afternoon, he will make love to his wife on the wood shelf in the pantry while Maggie wades behind his lids, bare-legged, through the tomato vines, her dress tied up around her knees.

  He knows that she can down a fever with bayberry tallow, cut the sleep from chamomile and gut oil out of corn. She can talk skunk cabbage up through the ice and draw the first trout into the creek to spawn, but she is the kind of woman who would blow her nose on a man’s shirt when he wasn’t looking, capsize his boat if she stepped on it.