Moon Tide Page 9

  He crosses the bridge. The warmth of the eggs still bleeds through the cotton into his chest. It fades as he walks the three miles down John Reed Road to his work at East Beach. In the afternoons, when he returns to Skirdagh, he helps Maggie with the planting. She will sow only on a waxing moon. In the last two weeks of March, if the ground is soft, she will plant carrots, potatoes, and rutabaga; in April, sugar snap peas. She uses rotted manure around the dahlias she plants in the front garden for Elizabeth and, when the dogwood comes into bloom, she sets two rows of corn.

  In midspring, when the mourning cloak emerges from its overwinter sleep under the bark, the pitch pine branches begin to cocoon at their ends. Their white tongues push out of the green needle clumps. As the weeks pass, they lengthen, leaving clusters of baby cones in their wake.

  In July, as the days grow long, Jake begins to look for Eve and her father. One morning, toward the middle of the month as he is walking up the lane, he will see the Model T parked in the driveway. He leaves work early that afternoon and heads toward West Beach. He detours through the cranberry bogs onto the paths through the high marsh and the salt meadow grass. He cuts around the Howe cottage at Cherry’s Point—its mosquito torches blazing. He climbs the dunes toward the pitch pine ridge.

  He can recognize Eve’s walk from a distance, the weave she makes along the tidal edge. The ocean pulls into a taut sheet behind her, tucked in along the lower edges of the sky, and as she trails behind her father down the beach on their evening walk to the breakwater, Jake walks with them, half a mile away, along the pine ridge. Year after year, he will watch them. He will note how the man’s shoulders begin to slope and the waists of the girl’s dresses loosen with the changing style. Her body softens under the straight linen lines. One year, she appears with her hair suddenly short—bobbed—and he can feel the imprint of the wind against her neck.

  She leaves at the beginning of every September. Through the fall, Jake’s work on the beach grows slow. As the storms move up the coast, he sets boards onto the windows of the summer houses he has been hired to caretake through the winter. He spends the afternoons at Skirdagh with Maggie. They pull the cabbages up by the roots, shake off the dirt, tie and hang them from a row of nails on the floor joist in her root cellar. They top-dress the fish with salt for the winter. They put down pollock, cod, and tautog. Maggie keeps the coal and stored vegetables in the back cellar below the kitchen at Skirdagh. She puts up the jams on the shelves in narrow-mouthed mason jars. She stores the potatoes in aerated fish cans, and once a week she turns them so they don’t set for too long on one side.

  In November, the rum-running trade picks up. The houses closest to the road pull their shades as the rum trucks pass, sometimes in broad daylight, stuffed with sacks of whiskey and bottles of bourbon packed in seaweed to muffle the sound. At night, Jake sits alone on the dock by the boathouse, watching the signal lights flash from a rum ship at sea to someone in a windmill lookout on land. He hears from Maggie that they are all a mess in it: Swampy Davoll, the Mason brothers, North Kelly, and Luce Weld. Even Blackwood and Jewel Penny, the draw tender of the Point Bridge, are paid well for sleeping soundly through the night. His brother, Wes, is up to his hips. He was there the night of the ambush on Little Beach, when the Star was riddled with machine gun fire off the shore, her fuel line ruptured when the bullets hit her engine room, and she exploded in a sudden rash of flame. He was there four months later, the night the Yvette June was chased up the river to the Point Bridge and Arthur Cornell was found cowering and drunk along with eighteen hundred cases of champagne and ale under a pile of sacks in the hold.

  Maggie tells Jake how they set small fires in the north part of town and call it in to the police when a load is coming in on the south. They will dump cases of whiskey at thirty dollars apiece overboard off Gooseberry and then come back to salvage the drop on the next dark night in small boats. They wrap their oars in flannel cloth and drag for the sacks with corkscrew poles. She tells him about Dirk Lynn’s wife, who hides the bottles her husband brings home in the pink-and-white-painted wardrobe in their six-year-old daughter’s room. She tells him how Russ Barre was caught in a shoot-out with the Feds on Barney’s Joy, and a bullet drove a hole straight through his hair. She tells him how Thin Gin Tripp cuts cases of whiskey with rubbing alcohol, fresh rainwater, and tea.

  Jake splits the wood for her and fills the wood box. He teaches her dominoes, and they play whist on the table in the kitchen. She brews cider on the stove with nutmeg and cloves and a liquor she has distilled from anise.

  From the time the ground is frozen to the time the ice is cut, his life grows still. He does not go down to the wharf or to the card games at the dock house. He wraps himself into the sullen orange light of the boathouse. Once in a while, he walks with Maggie to Horseneck. The dunes have hardened to solid hills with the still-life creep of dusty miller through the bowls. The wind has shaved the beach flat, and there is no give of sand under their feet. Surf clams washed up on the beach are encased in ice like small glistening footballs. Even the tidal edge is frozen. The salt forms a shield over the sand that cracks when they step on it. They walk down to Gooseberry. The causeway has trapped packs of ice in the bay, and a darker skin forms on the surface of the ocean where the waves still move underneath.

  Jake hears from Maggie that the old woman makes a killing when she goes short with stock two weeks before the crash of ’29. The following February, he finds her in the library wrestling with a pair of scissors, trying to split apart the jammed blades.

  “Let me do it,” he says.

  Elizabeth looks up startled. She did not hear him come into the room. Her ears have grown fickle and her hands have curled into themselves, her knuckles bruised from the swelling in the joints. The two middle fingers on her left hand trigger down from the base and stick that way. She drops the scissors into her lap, pulls the fingers out from the socket with her good hand, and resets them straight.

  There is a letter on her lap. She grips one corner of a page.

  “I need them for cutting this,” she says, pointing to a small sketch at the bottom. “Her father, my son Charles, posts a letter to me every other week. Recently, he seems to be writing more and more about less and less. But now and then, in the space left over, she draws a little something for me. She can’t put herself into words, you know. She’s just no good with them.”

  Jake takes the scissors from Elizabeth’s hand and pulls his knife from his pocket. With the point, he undoes the screw that holds the blades. He wipes the grit and rust from the hole and screws them back together. They move easily again.

  “I’ve cut them all over the years,” Elizabeth goes on. “Eve’s little drawings—of the beach, the let, her father doddering like Chaplin, Maggie in the yard with her arms heaping full with the wash and her plants and the pots and pans, Maggie with her arms full of practically the whole house. Evie never draws herself though.” Elizabeth turns the page toward him.

  It is a simple line sketch of the back of the house. The kitchen window, the rear porch, the pantry doorstone, everything drawn in black ink except the kitchen door that was filled in with a wash of blue watercolor, the door not quite closed, but slowly swinging open, as if there might be someone just on the other side of it, on her way out, or someone who had just passed through.

  Elizabeth takes the scissors, but they slip out of her hands and clatter to the floor.

  Jake picks them up. “Let me cut it for you,” he says.

  “No.” Elizabeth reaches for them. But then she stops, draws back. She looks up at Jake, her eyes dark. “I keep them, you know,” she says. “I paste them into my book of lists.” She hands him the letter. “At the bottom there, please, if you would, clip it for me.”

  Jake takes the page and sits down next to her.

  “Just the drawing,” she says, leaning over his shoulder. “That’s all I want.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Wes

  The boats they use are small and
built for speed. The one Wes works with Caleb Mason is a forty-foot double-ender with two Chrysler engines. She is named the Mary Jane. After midnight, they cut out from the wharf across the harbor to meet the mother ships waiting in the zone of Rum Row, twenty-five miles offshore. The liquor comes packed in two five-gallon containers or twenty-four-pack bottle sacks. They load up as much as they can below deck, pile everything else on top, then race back through the dent in the coastline that snakes into the narrow harbor channel. They unload at the wharf or farther up, north of Hixbridge, to trucks and wagons waiting. They cover the load in hay on its trip to Haskell’s barn on Drift or Caleb Mason’s icehouse on Main Road.

  Wes works twelve out of the fourteen new moon nights. They put in when the moon is full and he sleeps for two solid days. Once a week, he packs a cart full of liquor and then piles crates of lobster on top of it with rockweed socked around the edges, and he drives that mask down Rhode Island Way into the city.

  He hides most of what he makes. They all do. Some will cut slits in a bed mattress and bury hundred-dollar bills inside the stuffing. Others will keep their stash in a false bottom drawer or in a jar six feet under the outhouse. Wes doesn’t leave any of his rum money in his room down at the wharf. He digs a hole under the stone wall behind Caleb Mason’s icehouse, and he goes there, once a week after dark, digs up the steel box thick with cash and adds to it.

  Like the rest of them, he goes on doing the work he’s always done. They form a group that meets the way they’ve always met: for a smoke out on the bench, a dish of cards in the dock house. They shoot pool downstairs at Swampy’s workshop—a gutted room with a high-beamed ceiling, the pool table in the center, and fused chairs someone salvaged from an old theater set along the wall. They hang a quarter-board sign that reads THE SHUCKERS CLUB above the outside door.

  On the days between runs, Wes will fish with North Kelly or set seine for eels. They set on the turn toward the ebb to catch the eels coming out with the falling tide. They set the cork and lead lines in a half circle and then drag the net in for five hundred feet of the river bottom, before they cross the lead lines over the mouth and haul the catch in to shore. The bellies of the eels glint, long writhing gold in the midafternoon sun. By the time the cultch is shaken out, the trash fish sorted, and the eels barreled, it is late in the day. Wes goes back to the dock house for a draw and a spit and then to sleep for another three hours in his garret room above the Shuckers Club, before he meets Mason at the Mary Jane down at the wharf.

  They untie and push off the dock into the channel. They leave on the ebb. With their engines cut, they slip past the coast guard patrol boat docked next to Blackwood’s store. Once in a while as they pass the pier, Wes looks up to the window on the top floor above the store, and he can see a woman’s body framed inside it, slim and black in the kerosene light.

  CHAPTER 4

  Maggie

  She stalks him the way she stalks some dreams, the ones that are massive and do not have translation, the ones that she will steal, trick, ambush any way she can: in a dark wood, on a dead moon, in a crease of sand. He is like one of the long-legged dreams that she will follow for nights in a row. The kind she will track over distance, over hills and time, at an even pace. The kind she will seize at the point where they falter, grow weak or unsure.

  She does not think of him outside her dreaming. An abstract, he lies in direct opposition to her immediate day-to-day of feeding hens, pulling eggs, tapping sap, cutting wood, cooking, canning, and putting down fish. Her chores have an order that her dreaming lacks. The knitting, mending, shucking, gathering, weeding, pruning, all of it funnels into the circular, endless thread that is her waking life, and he does not cross her mind on that day in late spring, 1932, when she finds the black bitten crust around the edge of her tomato leaves and one fattened green tomato hornworm winding its thick corrugated body up the vine.

  The following Sunday, before the sun has hatched out of the fog, Maggie pulls down the old biscuit tin from a shelf in the wall of her root cellar. She empties twelve dollars in coins into a deerskin pouch that she ties around her waist. She puts a quart of molasses rum into a flour sack and walks down Thanksgiving Lane toward the bridge. She walks the two miles of new macadam road behind the Horseneck dunes.

  A wagon is parked by the path that leads up to Ben Soule’s house: four narrow tread wheels, an open flat bed, low-sided, with a plank seat set across the frame. One of North Kelly’s red mares scuffs its hoof into the loam.

  Across the shallow end of the let, Wes walks along the marsh bank with a long-handled fine mesh net and a bucket tied by a string to his belt that floats behind him.

  “He says they’re going for perch tomorrow,” the old man says as Maggie sits down next to him. “He’s come for two gallons of bait.”

  Maggie puts her hand on the ground. The small chicks run over it, pecking through the creases of her fingers.

  “I tell him I see him dragging three nights back,” the old man goes on. “That grappler he use won’t pull nearly as good as an iron pipe set with eight halibut hooks, four on a side. I tell him I’ll make him one of those pipes in turn for a new bottle of that Indian Hill. The new ones got the fancy seal and the screw cap. You seen ’em?”

  Maggie shakes her head.

  “No salt water gets in those kind of caps. I tell him he’d be wiser than to drag in the kind of moon there was that other night. Foxes were out. A full bitch moon—you see it?”

  “I saw it.”

  “He tells me they don’t look for him on the full of the moon. You bring me some of those hardtack crackers?”

  Maggie nods, picking up one of the chicks. Its small beak jitters into her thumb. She looks down the knoll to the man wading through the shallows. His arms rustle in the heat. He skims the net along the bottom and raises it dripping with mud and weed, heavy with shrimp. He empties the net into the pail and then skims it again through the bottom silt.

  “That boy’s like loose hair,” Ben says.

  Maggie glances at the old man and smiles. His eyes are blue, faded and like a silk on her face. She puts the flour sack and the purse of coins on the doorstone. He opens the jar of molasses rum, sniffs it, then screws the cap back on, and places the jar in a gap under the doorstone. He dumps the coins out into the sand at his feet. As he counts them into piles of a dollar each, Maggie watches Wes walk around the rim of the let. In one hand he carries the pail. The net rests across his other shoulder. His face is dark and leathered from long hours on the water. Unshaven.

  “Suppose there’s a reason you’re bringing me these coins,” the old man says.

  “I need the rooster,” Maggie answers.

  The old man looks up, following her eyes toward the water. “That boy Wes could talk a dog off a meat wagon. Could talk a person into deep trouble.”

  Wes has reached the pier. He places the shrimp pail on the end of it and walks up the knoll toward them. He is lean, long-armed, his fingers scarred from catching mackerel on a handline, twisting rawhide straps to set a blind, and culling through wild oysters with an old Ford tire iron. Maggie has seen him sitting on a bait pail behind the dock house with a mess of natives, some as long as twelve inches. She has seen him shuck the raw meat out of the shell, his hands cut to ribbons by the sharp edges. He will sell those oysters to Blackwood for thirty cents a solid pint, and once in a while she will steal a pint and eat them raw.

  Wes doesn’t look at her. He nods at Ben. “You got a tray?”

  “You think any more on my offer for the iron pipe? Eight hooks on it. Fish you eight bottles at once.”

  Wes grinds his foot into the dirt, slowly, thoughtfully. He bites a corner of his lip and glances at Maggie. His eyes are pale. They pass over her face, her throat, and down her arms, across her hip. He coats her like a thin frost, and when he looks away, she can feel the slow systems of ridge he has left in her skin.

  “You got a tray, old man?” he asks again.

  “Nope.” Ben shakes h
is head.

  Wes leans the shrimp net against the side of the house, then walks over to the wagon cart parked behind the shed and lifts out a galvanized tub. He crosses the yard to the hen pen, unwraps one end of the wire from its stake, takes a knife from his belt, and cuts away a strip of it, a foot wide. He moves the stake one foot in and wraps the cut edge back around it. He takes the screening down to the pier, fills the tub with rockweed, unwraps a piece of ice, and shatters it with a mallet. He mixes the ice in with the rockweed, places the wire screening on top, then empties out the bucket of shrimp and smoothes them across the wire with his hands.

  “I need the rooster, Ben,” says Maggie. “I got hornworms in my garden this year. They’ll eat my crop. I’ll give you eight for the rooster—what you paid for him. Plus three more and the rum.”

  “That’s not the kind of boy you should be walking out of your skin after.”

  “Who says nothing about him?” she snaps without turning around.

  “You think I’m that old?”

  “Never said that.”

  “You think I’m blind.”

  Maggie shrugs. “Nothing to be blind for.” Her face is even when she speaks, but Ben can see it, he can see through the cracks into her. He can see the raw wily light in her eyes when she looks across the eelgrass toward the man settling his shrimp onto ice. He knows that look. He has seen it before. And even now, with her face turned half away from him, he can see in the set of her bones something of Elizabeth Gonne Lowe. She would be old now. She is old. He knows this. He does not rest in the thought too long.