Moon Tide Page 4

  Maggie continues walking through the summer village of East Beach, past the fishermen’s shacks and the dank heaps of sea muck, past the summer homes with their wide green lawns that line the road. Across the let, she can see Ben Soule shoveling huge clumps of red weed he has raked off the beach into his wheelbarrow. He is thin, his bark stripped from him like a girdled tree. The white tangled beard has grown halfway down his chest and stopped, refusing to grow farther.

  Maggie waits for the old man as he drags the wheelbarrow back up the knoll and empties it out into his garden. He turns over the sea muck and mixes it into the sand. She knows that he will grow carrots out of this compost that are straight and long and sweet. He will grow huge smooth potatoes that sprout like the skulls of men out of the sand.

  Maggie buys her hens from Ben, and he tells her that the sky is a table and when the clouds pass low over the earth, they are hungry and will take a woman in her sleep. He keeps a flock of Rhode Island Reds in a pen next to the cold cellar where barrels of salted venison and codfish stand shoulder to shoulder in the cool dark. On the south side of the house is the garden, and next to that a second pen, with a huge black- and green-feathered rooster. The rooster is solitary, proud, its red comb greased by the sun. It struts in measured circles around the inner perimeter of its wire mesh pen.

  When Maggie comes on Sundays, the old man breaks from his work. They sit together on the doorstone and he scrimps black lines into a whale’s tooth with a sewing needle and a small bottle of india ink. He tells her that when he was a boy, his father hired him out for two pennies an hour. He rode horse, dug potatoes, cut ice. He tells her that the soul is a thin bone in the shape of a maple leaf and it can leave the body through the mouth in sleep years before the body dies.

  Maggie watches the fierce circles of the rooster in its pen. She listens as the light bends down across the water and the old man tells his stories about hunting elk in the white hills of New Hampshire, about hawking his way down the Appalachian Range. Maggie listens for the cracks in what he tells her, for what he hides in the stories. She wraps her long arms around what is unsaid and watches the sewing needle nick the white surface of the whalebone. The needle has grafted itself to his fingers from years of the art. His body holds the smell of the red weed, this man who was a riverbed once.

  He tells her that his life has been a continual letting go. An over and over turning to realize that there is still something he is holding, some expectation, some preconception, some desire. Over and over, he says, he must learn to pry his fingers away from whatever it is, to let the thing go and be free. He tells her that sometimes his heart is as sieved as a dragonfly’s wings and all he can do is pick up the cries he has heard and keep walking.

  It is something about her, he says, that squeezes these things out of him.

  Maggie says nothing. She looks past him, a hundred yards across the let. She can barely see the break in the marsh where the maze begins in its gentle switchback curves through the tall grass where Ben Soule’s wife was found, drowned, with a bag of cobble she had roped twice around her own feet.

  Maggie comes to see the old man every Sunday. As he works the whalebone, they sit together and smoke corn silk she has rolled in burning paper. The sun grooves a straight and tethered path across the sky. The light flays the surface of the let and the distant mass of Cuttyhunk rises like a knuckled fist out of Buzzards Bay.

  Maggie rests her head on her knees and listens to the soft tick of the sewing needle on the bone. She takes small drops of the ink onto her fingers. The blackness coils in the creases of her skin. Her head light with corn ash, she lies down near the doorstone in a small patch of switchgrass, the smell of red clover close to her ear. She watches how bees crawl around on the flower and dip their back legs in, coating them with pollen dust. She turns over and looks up. The grass bends into a rush shelter above her and she traces the roots of the clouds in the sky.

  On Thursday nights, when Blackwood’s wife has gone to the Deaconess Bandage Rolling Circle at the Methodist church, Maggie climbs the narrow back stairwell to the room above the store. She finds Blackwood with his account ledger sprawled across the desk in the small yellow-lit room, an oil lamp on the floor and the curtains drawn.

  As their bodies twist under the sheet, he tells her that he remembers everything about the night he almost drowned. He says it is nothing like green gardens. It is not a gentle sinking of the body, a tender underwater light. It is not a slow loss of sound. It is a thrashing, a hurtling of limbs. He tells her that he remembers how the surf pounded him deep under the surface, and when he gave himself up at last to the sinking, it was that same surf that coughed him up again. The air tore in bullets through his lungs. He tells her how the oar struck the side of his head and he heaved himself across it. He wrapped it between his shoulders and his neck, and he floated that way, crucified, across the mountains of the waves.

  Water is black, he says. The blue skin of the ocean is a lie. It is a void, a devil, a sin. He takes her arm and bends it gently backward at the wrist. He puts his mouth against the inside of her palm.

  Maggie has heard the stories of other men in the town who have tasted their own death: Spud Mason’s cousin Jewel, whose neck was neatly severed under the front wheel of the trolley at Lincoln Park; Asa Howland, hit squarely in the chest by a six-inch ball of hail; Ezekiel Tripp, who scratched his leg tripping over a fence and thought nothing of it until he woke up a week later with a Paraguay-shaped strip of gangrene along the inside of his thigh.

  It is the death stories that she looks for. She knows that a man who has traded with his own death loves differently than other men.

  Blackwood lies back against the pillow, his dark face settling into the down. Maggie puts her cheek against his chest, and she can smell the cancer that has begun to spot his throat—the smell of ripened cantaloupe, the smell of ash.

  As he sleeps, she listens for the sound of that night of his drowning, the howl of the water in his lungs.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jake

  In August, Elizabeth hires Jake and his father to clear the lower meadow of its stones.

  “It’ll take three days,” Carl Wilkes tells her, a wad of tobacco in his cheek. “Dollar a day and fifty cents for the boy.”

  It is on the second day when they are working the southwest corner by the grove of baby spruce that Jake looks up from the pit he has dug around a boulder and sees the child Eve spring through the swinging kitchen door and jump off the porch. Her legs flash out of her blue dress, her hair like untethered wheat around her face. Above him, the hill grows suddenly liquid, unstable, as he watches her run past the maze of wild rose and honeysuckle, past the hand plow and Maggie’s wheelbarrow full of sea muck and hen manure, past the woodshed, the tents of summer squash, tomato vines, the trellises of beans. Her hands look red and she holds them outstretched in front of her as if she is reaching, asking to be lifted up into the air.

  Maggie appears and catches the girl at the root cellar. They waver together for a moment on the brink of the gravel walk that divides the hen yard from the lower meadow. Then the child squirms out of Maggie’s arms, breaks loose, and they tumble, a mass of gingham and legs down into the field.

  The child catches her balance first. She skirts between the boulder and the stone boat and rushes into the juniper woods. Maggie slips in after her. Jake stands there for a moment, leaning on the pickax. He looks toward the break in the trees where Maggie and the girl in blue disappeared.

  “Here, Jake,” his father says, his voice sharp.

  Jake’s head snaps around.

  “Free it.” His father nods at the spade he has levered underneath the boulder. Jake kneels down and slides the long end of the pickax under the spade to wedge the rock from the ground.

  “You keep your eyes on the work you’re paid to do,” his father says to him, his voice low. “That’s what they’re good for—to pay you good for the work you do.”

  Jake begins to clear the ne
st of earth and matted roots. But he glances up again as they pass back up the hill: Maggie dragging the girl by the hand. Eve looks at him through her tattered hair and he cannot look away and the boulder drops, falls in around his fingers. He jerks his hand free. The back of his wrist slams on the pickax. As he looks, a small blue mountain rises up where the vein has burst under his skin.

  Late that afternoon, an hour before dead low, his father and his brother, Wes, go out to dig clams on the flats by Split Rock. Jake watches them go from the tall grass near the muskrat runs, his bruised hand wrapped in camphor gauze. He presses his fingers into the pain by the wrist. In a day or two it will fade. He thinks of the girl, that moment of her spilling like a sunlight down the hill. She is not of his kind. He knows this. She will leave in the fall, come back in the spring, and her coming and going will be as predictable as any other tide.

  Across the river, close to the herring ditch, his father and brother row the skiff aground. They leave the bushel at the edge of the flats, tie buckets to their waists with string, roll their trousers above the knee, and wade through the soft bottom mud. They start together, then slowly spread apart like small black cells.

  Jake watches them for over an hour. As the tide drops and the green snake of the marsh rises up between them, he watches the ritual of this work he has done all his life, and it is suddenly foreign. He is foreign. The men he is watching—his father and his brother—they are strangers he is seeing for the first time, cut shallow in the lean silver afternoon light.

  That night Jake lies awake in the room he shares with Wes. After midnight, he presses himself from the knit wire cot and leaves his father’s house. He pulls a handful of needles from the Scotch pine next to the churchyard and crosses the road. The dirt slaps cool against his feet. He can see the sloped roof of Skirdagh above the trees. He slips behind the woodshed and the chicken yard. Maggie’s rooster stalks under his feet through dried pits of corn.

  The big house is dark, but one window is lit on the second floor. He can see the girl there, a small head floating through oily light. He climbs onto the low wall and chinks his body between the stones. He waits there, watching for her. The light moves through the window as he has seen it pass through gin.

  He waits. Gradually, he settles down into the night. He can smell the salt rose and the mint from Maggie’s garden, the deft stench of hen manure and fish skins. He takes pine needles from his shirt pocket and gnaws at them in small bites at a time. As he watches, the girl reappears at the window, and her hands begin to move, mapping the window glass, over and over, her fingers tracing designs. The moon begins to sink behind the roof. He knows that the pattern she is tracing has nothing to do with him, but he waits until her hands have settled back down, until she leaves the window and the light goes dark.

  He walks slowly home, across the gravel walk and up the wagon path. As he cuts through the grove of trees at the top of the hill, he stops and listens to the sound of the wind as it stirs through the pines. He can feel that something new has come into him, something unknown. For the first time in his life, he feels vulnerable to the night. It fills him with sadness. Loneliness. His body aches.

  He thinks of the girl the way he might think of a star, flung out into some distant recess of the sky. He closes his eyes and lets the sadness wash through him with the wind. It is a sea change. Painful, violent, inexorable, slow. He tightens his fingers into a fist, the sound of the wind as hushed and dense as a river passing over him. And it occurs to him then, standing there, that this wind crossing his face is the same wind that strikes through her window, that touches her face as she sleeps. The moon he sees, splintered through the trees above his head, is the same moon that casts its nettled light on her walls. It is this same inky summer night she would see from her room on the second floor—the same sounds, the same smells—the same hollow and trembling darkness filled with a solitude that is unspeakable, ancient, vast.

  He thinks of her as he continues home. A small match has been struck deep in him. He can sense its hard fierce light—as solid, as real as a stone in his hand.

  CHAPTER 8

  Elizabeth

  One morning in the first week of August, Maggie goes upstairs to pull the sheets, walks into Eve’s room and finds what she knows right away are death portraits of Eve’s mother painted with crushed berries on the wall. The child is sitting on her knees in the middle of the floor, red juice running down her arms. On that same morning, Jake, the younger Wilkes boy, is down in the lower meadow with his father clearing the field of stones, and Elizabeth is in the dining room, taking breakfast with Charles.

  Elizabeth pours her tea as Charles reads her the front-page headlines about the success of the British Fourth in the Battle of Amiens. As she is reaching for the cream, she hears the commotion: Maggie’s voice, doors, the hammer of feet down the stairs. The child flies past the entrance to the dining room, her hands soaked red. When Charles sees his daughter, he startles out of his chair, knocks over the pitcher of orange juice, his face turns white as a piece of dry toast lodges in his windpipe. He chokes and she is gone, out the kitchen door. Maggie is right behind her. They trip off the porch, careen down the hill. Charles grabs for the edge of the table to steady himself and, as he does, the bit of mangled toast shoots out of his throat and lands in the sugar bowl.

  Elizabeth watches them fall down the hill through the wide-flung window, her fingers on the handle of the cream. Cool china. In the lower meadow the boy is working up to his knees in a hole in the earth. He looks up as the girl tumbles toward him, and Elizabeth can see his face: the first wave of surprise and then the second—a different emotion—awkward—a kind of longing that lights, then passes quickly. A slim muscle through a stone.

  Can you build your life on myths and then realize, years later, that a small hunger you had when you were young—perhaps before you knew what hunger was—but that yearning—as slight and brief as it might have been—was true?

  The child disappears into the woods. Maggie follows. For a moment, the boy looks after them. Then he bends back to his work. Elizabeth looks away, her heart heavy. She stirs cream into her tea with two teaspoons of raw sugar and watches the grains dissolve.

  That evening, past nine, Elizabeth sits at the dressing table while Maggie unties her hair from its coil and runs the comb through it, pulling gently against the tangle.

  She knows that Maggie will leave the house later that night. She will crush baby mint leaves, rub them against the inside of her wrist, and walk the half mile down Thanksgiving Lane past the dock house to the wharf. She will slip through the door Blackwood has left for her unlocked and she will climb the back stairs.

  Elizabeth had been as young once. She had been strong enough to pick up the four corners of her failed land. She had taken the smoored hearths, the slouched fields and bogs, the unforgiving ache of limestone in the burren. She had taken the Battle at Clontarf, the fairie tricks and the cabbage patch skirmishes, the myth of the child who had changed her own name. She had been a girl once, dragging the full weight of her Irishness like gorgeous hair behind her.

  It was different now. Now, when she read about the Troubles—brief stints on the second page of the Evening News—it was as if she were reading about the struggles of a country that had little to do with her. She had followed the 1916 Easter Rising from a distance. She had followed it until they executed Pearse in the electric light of the stone breakers’ yard and wrapped his slim body in lime, and then she could not bear to read any more.

  Praise what is truly alive,

  what longs to be burned to death.

  Whose words? They did not belong to Pearse. Goethe? Yes. It must have been Goethe. Words introduced to her early in life at a time when she felt—when she might have felt—that same longing.

  Her thoughts drift back to the morning—to that moment she had witnessed as Eve ran down the hill and Jake saw her—the longing swift as water through his face. Elizabeth had recognized the look in his eyes. That unc
omplicated fire.

  Maggie digs the teeth of the wide-tooth comb into the root, and Elizabeth can feel the light pull of skin away from the scalp.

  “Too much?” Maggie asks.

  Elizabeth shakes her head and closes her eyes. “Did you see his face this morning, Maggie?”

  “Whose face?”

  “The boy, Jake—when he saw Eve. Did you see his face?”

  “No.”

  “It was enough to set an ache in my heart. I’m too old, you know, to feel that sort of ache.”

  “Ahh,” says Maggie. “Is that so?”

  “Did you see her hands? Eve’s hands. Covered with that red juice, they looked so strange.”

  “Like she was carrying blood.”

  “Yes. It was like that,” Elizabeth says slowly. “And the two of them there, in that moment. Beautiful and open and young. You know, Maggie, it all felt so familiar—” Her voice breaks off. She does not open her eyes. “Do you think it is a blessing to be able to see their dreams the way I do?”

  Maggie doesn’t answer. She puts the comb down and picks up the soft bristled brush. She draws it through the older woman’s hair.

  “I used to think it was a blessing,” Elizabeth says, opening her eyes. She looks up into the mirror. The bones around Maggie’s cheeks are sharp, her summer skin the color of deep copper, smooth as a mallet-flattened penny.

  It had been five years since Maggie arrived at Skirdagh—showed up one morning at the back door looking for work on her way through town. She was headed north, she said, to Canada. Through the screen, Elizabeth studied Maggie’s face—the dark eyes, lean at the corners like a holly leaf, the broad sloped forehead, the strong-cut jaw not unlike her own. And as they stood there for a moment, the white-haired woman and the dark-skinned girl, on either side of the mesh screen door, Elizabeth felt a sense of kinship pass between them. She took Maggie in. She gave her the knuckle of land around the root cellar, perhaps to buy her into staying for a while.