by Dawn Tripp
The magic of a salmon who ate the nuts of a hazel tree. A boy-hero who caught the fish, boiled it, and drank its wisdom from the scalded broth.
The child’s eye has begun to tear. She does not touch it. She just sits there, painfully still, with her hands in her lap and a slight fluid running from the corner of the swelling down her face.
Elizabeth cancels the trip they were supposed to take to the Grist Mill in Adamsville. When Charles pulls up in the car, she tells him to go on his own or not at all. She sends Maggie down into the cold cellar for three apples. She boils one and grinds it into a poultice. The child’s eye has grown so swollen the iris is barely visible. Elizabeth puts two spoonfuls of the apple mush into a square of muslin, and she sets it firmly against the infected lid.
“Hold it there,” she tells the child. “We’ll bake the other two.”
Eve nods, one-eyed, her small hand holding the cloth against her face.
Elizabeth sets the two apples into the wood oven and, together, she and Eve sit in the kitchen. They wait until the skins crack, until the warm smell of apple surrounds them. They take the pulp from one outside and bury it under the willow tree in the late summer ground. Then they eat the other one.
CHAPTER 9
Jake
He does not see the girl again. He goes back once more to the field with his father to load the last few stones. As they haul the two-horse sled up the wagon path, he notices a small red sweater hanging on the back of one of the porch chairs. They drive the stones across town to Old Pine Hill Road, where they will begin the work of building a new wall. He does not come around the house again until the end of August, and by that time she is gone.
In September, when classes start at the Point School and the mitts of the sassafras leaves begin to brown, Jake walks through the bleat of sparrows to the library at Skirdagh. He lets himself in through the latched side door.
As he reads Elizabeth’s books, he begins to understand that a story can be hunted out like small game, or like light. It is an interim of trance with flaws and scars. It changes being touched. He will skin what he reads, separating gut, lung, scale, the open flay from tail to throat. He struggles after the innards and floats in the fibrous gap between words. Once in a while, he will surface from a text, short of breath and incomplete, and he will sense the girl the way he saw her that day, blond and falling through grass.
He turns the pages through the fall, wrapping himself in the thin flannel blanket Maggie leaves for him folded on the sofa. He extracts brief passages and takes those nuggets with him. He chews on them as he sits at the small wooden desk by the back stove in the Point School, or as he is chinking sod into the gaps of one of his father’s walls, or when he is alone in the kitchen with his mother and she is boiling the raspberries for jam. He watches her string the cheesecloth jelly bag to a broomstick laid across two chairs. He does not tell her about the books he reads, about the ideas of nothingness and being that he has begun to gather like ripe plums from the dunes. He sets the iron kettle for her on the floor, and together they watch the fruit distill to a clear juice through the pores, and he is aware that what they witness is like any other work of art: the honing of a being to its essence.
As he reads, Jake grows displaced from his own life: the life of docks and skiffs; the seasonal trapping of muskrat, rabbit, and mink; the harvesting of wood and ice and stone. His world acquires an alien luster and, in the library of Elizabeth Gonne Lowe, he seeks out passages that will throw the growing distance he feels into a lucid and explicable relief. He wonders if he has always been removed and is only now finding the words to articulate that sense. He pores over the tremendous globe set on a rosewood stand in the corner behind the old woman’s rocking chair. He touches the continents, the warp where a mountain range has torn up from the earth. He moves his fingers across the wide and unkempt chunks of blue. The oceans fit like shim stones in his hand. He has read Wegener’s theories of Pangaea and continental drift, and he knows that the jigsawed edges once meshed together into a single mass of land that broke along its weaker faults. He will glimpse how they are still splitting, how the continents are as rootless as the men he has seen digging on the flats: fine, black splinters crawling on a skin of rippling light.
He spins the globe through his hands, trying to regather a sense of its wholeness. The foreign names of countries stumble in his mouth with the winter smells of lanolin and coal. The rain falls through the long window and clings to the branches of the willow tree as the wind cracks along the edges of the sill, and he will think of the girl, pale and tumbling down that summer hill. He begins to map her vibration the way one might sense the heartbeat of a bird.
That fall, the fever moves through the town. It grows the way the sea blight grows, its seeds thrown to a strong wind. It spreads through the grass, sinks into their water, and they drink it from the well. It sticks tough like the grainy meat of an old rabbit, quartered, when the leg sinews refuse to give way from the bone. It lodges under their fingernails and eats them from the insides.
Jake senses the wrongness a month before when Wes, eighteen, his hands already sprouting huge out of his sleeves, strides out onto the front steps and takes down the goose on the wing. The goose flies alone, black in the sky, a lean and solitary pattern that slices the bottom third of the moon. Wes takes it on one shot, and the bird drops, a plummet of wings and thick body, passing through levels of the dark until it is lost in the field across the road behind Maggie’s root cellar.
Jake goes out with Wes to search. He is looking for a black-on-black shadow. He leaves the wagon path and cuts through the wreck in the stone fence and the tangle of greenbrier. Without knowing, he has begun to move the way his brother moves, boneless, his limbs cut free like the silk of milkweed pod.
He comes out into the lower meadow. The bird lies still, a twitch of the moon in the grass. It is white, not dark, and its whiteness catches in his throat and grows fear, swollen there. Maggie’s rooster strides in tight circles around it. When Jake comes close, the cock flies at him with its beak, furious, and a high-pitched cry.
Wes peels out of the shadow from the juniper trees on the opposite side of the field. He pelts the rooster with a stone and hits its leg. Screeching, the cock limps off.
He stops when he sees that the bird is white. It’s bad luck, he knows, to kill a white goose.
“I thought it was a brant,” he says.
Jake doesn’t answer.
“You pick it up.” Wes nods at him. For a moment they stare at one another. Neither of them moves.
“I told you to get it.”
Jake moves in and picks up the snow goose. It is as light as dried rosemary in his arms. It smells of salt and the cold.
They walk back toward the house.
“I thought it was a brant,” Wes says again. “Looked like a brant from where we shot.”
“From where you shot.”
Wes turns on him sharply. “You don’t tell Ma, hear?”
“I won’t.”
“You tell her and I’ll thrash you good.”
“Said I won’t.”
They continue up the hill.
“No such thing as luck anyhow, wrong or good,” Wes says, bending to pick up a handful of stones. He skims them toward the woods that line the wagon path. Jake hears the dull thud after thud as the rocks strike the trees. “Just ’cause a certain kind of bird don’t come around these parts much don’t mean there’s wrong luck to kill it. A white goose plucked and cut is the same as any other.”
“Might look the same.”
“Is the same.”
“All right then, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Sure’s not.”
“Right then.”
Wes looks at his brother sideways. “You don’t tell her, Jake.”
“No.”
Wes skins out the goose on the lawn behind the privy. Jake stubs his foot against an empty tin of lime as the black-tipped pinions fly apart and the down sticks in his
nose.
“Dump her in the dead hen pile,” Wes says. “I’ll take in the meat.”
Jake wraps the feathers and skin in his coat and carries them down the hill toward Drift Road. But when the house has dipped from view, he cuts back. He glances over his shoulder once, twice, to be sure Wes has not followed him, and then he walks through the cherry wood back up to Thanksgiving Lane. He comes out behind the church. Its slow windmill turns against the yellow moon. He crosses the road back to Skirdagh.
He brings the bird to Maggie because he has seen her work small spells to soothe the dead. He finds her out on the woodpile, asleep, her legs dangling over the stacked cords of juniper, oak, and pine that he and Wes had chopped the spring before. He moves close to her face, and he can see how her eyes shift under the lids as she crawls after dreams. He sits down on the cutting stump with the feathers in his arms. The rooster hoists its leg in crippled circles around the woodpile. He will not tell Maggie that it was Wes who made her rooster lame with that small and pointless pebble, although he senses she will know. He will not tell her that he has seen her with Blackwood by the alder and wild violets at Cummings Brook. He has seen Blackwood’s tremendous broken hands spin her flesh as if it were a net. He will not ask her about Eve. He can smell the blood of the white goose. It has begun to soak through his shirt into a warm paste along his arms.
He does not wake her. He waits for a quarter of an hour, then unwraps the feathers from his coat and leaves them on the stump beside the woodpile.
Back at the house, he finds his mother alone in the kitchen. The smells of woodsmoke and spices spill with the orange light through the back door. He stands by the shed watching her scrub the iron stewpot with an ox-hair brush in the sink. She is black-haired, high-boned, her forehead strung with walking lines. Her husband’s rage has worn her to a hollow silence, but she is warm the way wool is warm, spun light with a thin weave. When Jake was young and his father took Wes shrimping in the East Branch, Jake would stay close to her as she swept the house and walked down to the Point to trade at Blackwood’s store. Sometimes in the afternoons, they would lie in the field at the bottom of the hill near the creek, and she would read the clouds to him and tell him stories of her grandfather, Beans, who had built the warehouses for the cranberry bogs behind the dunes. He built the ferry wharf on the Horseneck side of the river and then built his own house beside it. Twenty-five years later, when she was still a child, the land was bought and he floated that house with her inside it across the narrow channel to the Point, where it was set on a new shallow foundation in the middle of a peach orchard at the northeast end of the Pacquachuck Hill.
Now, leaning against the shed with his wet coat folded in his arms, Jake watches her pass back and forth through the kitchen. She cuts up the goose and empties the pieces into the iron pot. She adds stewed onions and carrots she has brought up from the cold cellar. She stirs in a half cup of milk and chips of dried basil. She covers the pot and leaves it to simmer on the woodstove. She kneels on the doorstone off the south porch with a pail of rabbits Wes brought home that afternoon. She gutted them earlier, when they were still warm and the skin peeled easily. Now, she tests the sinews close to the haunch to sense the age. If it is a young rabbit, the flesh will be nut-sweet and come without trouble from the bone. If it is older, she will sharpen the knife against the doorstone and then cut the animal, always the same way, into five pieces, four legs and a lower back section. She puts the meat in a washtub of fresh water with a teaspoonful of baking soda to soak out the rest of the blood and the gamy taste.
Jake watches his mother until she is done. It is the residue of the act he loves, the rose-colored water left over and the fresh metallic smell of white soda on her fingertips.
Later, when the white goose is fricasseed and they eat, Jake will not taste the long journeys stored in the bird’s flesh, the meadows of arctic ice it came from. He will taste the grief of its mate. He will taste the aborted flight and swallow it whole.
After dinner, Jake helps his mother wash up the plates. His father and Wes have moved into the front room for a smoke and a game of dominoes. When the pots are scoured and put away, Jake pulls on his boots and walks outside. He crosses Thanksgiving Lane and walks down to the river on the wagon path through the juniper woods that divide the Coles property from Skirdagh. The nightjars roost on the roof of the house. The library window is lit, and he can see the old Irish woman, Elizabeth, hunched in the beveled light. She nods slowly like the shadow of a fish through the glass.
He walks down to the Point Meadows that jut into the west branch of the river. The wet earth sucks at his ankles, and he keeps to the wheel ruts made by the wagons that come down twice a year to harvest the meadows for salt hay. He crosses the stone bridge to the marshes and walks along the narrow stream until he reaches the beginning of the muskrat runs. At the edge of the creek, he can see the steel glint of the mink trap Wes has set on the east end, by the tidal mouth. It pulls him, a gentle tug that he imagines is magnetic and not unlike the way a spawning trout is drawn back into its natal stream. He finds two minks in the trap. A thick female and her slender child. Their black pelts are unscarred. She will bring thirty dollars at least, the little one maybe fifteen. The moon coats their fur like oil. Wes has set the trap close to the burrows that run under the marsh and baited it with duck skin and rat grease. He will not trap on dry land. A land trap will bring only feet. They will chew off their own legs to get free.
The tide is on the flood, and the water has already risen to their chests. The mother nibbles at the rawhide binding, and Jake hears the crack as she breaks a tooth on the steel. He does not touch the trap. He waits with them, crouched on a flat rock as the tide soaks around his knees. The cold draws the blood from his legs until his flesh is taut and has the hardness of bone. He waits with them, keeping three feet between himself and the trap so when they cry, their voices strained against the dark, he will be too far away to reach out.
He offers words, soothing passages he remembers from the books he has read, bits of stories about men who have perished under waves by the thousands, whole cities that have fallen into the ocean, nameless continents drowned in ancient seas. He tells them about the girl he saw rolling down the hill with the sun tangled in her hair; how she was a wheat field, a bale of hay, ivory-skinned.
He does not meet their eyes. He does not watch how their mouths wrangle to chew themselves from the trap. He waits with them until the tide has covered the steel and the black surface of the water has grown still. Then he walks along the river to the gravel beach at the end of Cape Bial and sits down on the high-water marsh, his clothes soaked in the cold. He looks up into the sky. He listens as the ebb tide pulls through the stones, and he floats there, on that extended margin, his body hovering between the dream of the gravel and the cries of the minks that seem everywhere. Their coal eyes fill the dark around him.
CHAPTER 10
Maggie
She wakes in pasted early light, fog stuck between the cords of wood. She finds the white feathers on the stump. The blood has begun to crust and dry brown. She carries the feathers to her garden, where she digs a flat grave. She lays them down into the shape of the goose they were.
By midmorning, the rooster’s foot has yellowed, the skin puckered around the wound. Maggie wraps it in a strip of cheesecloth soaked in rosemary and marjoram, but by midafternoon he has pecked the cloth off, and it trails in tatters behind him through the dirt.
“Who did this to you?” she asks him softly, watching from the doorstone of the root cellar as he stumbles his proud route through the yard.
That night when she goes out to draw water from the well, the leg has turned the color of camouflage. The rooster hobbles back and forth along the length of the pen, his feathers drooped and the red comb turning dull. He follows Maggie back toward the house, hefting a distance from the hens. They have noticed his limp. Curious, they dart in at him, one at a time. His beak flails to keep them away. By the next mo
rning the foot has swollen to a marbled green. Maggie takes rose-hip paste from a glazed pot in the shed and, holding the bird firmly, she coats the wound to stifle the gangrene. She pries open his beak and feeds him handfuls of corn and oats she has soaked in the drinking water from the well. He spits it up. Squirming away, he drags across the yard. She lets him go. That evening she watches the reds tighten into a pack around him. They fly in one at a time and peck until his feathers tuft out in small explosions. Maggie leans against the door of the henhouse, her eyes wet. She watches him until he cannot stand and the sun has thinned to a pit. She watches him as he sits, the proud waxy comb outlined in the moon, his feathers plucked out by the other chickens. As the dark mixes into the fog, he rises up, floating for a moment in midair.
She wraps the body in a scarf and lays it down in a wicker basket with the four corners of the cloth hanging over the outside edge. She rakes juniper twigs, wood chips and dry leaves into a pile. She lays the basket on top with a branch of holly, takes a lucifer match, strikes it, and sets fire to one corner of the silk.
Past midnight, Maggie leaves Blackwood asleep in the yellow-lit room above the store, the oil lamp turned down to an unkempt glow that washes his naked shape into hard, uneven bones. She pushes away from his chest, dresses behind the closet door, and slips down the stairs. In the dark, she can see the harpoons suspended from the ceiling, the narwhal tusk and the deer head breaking through the wall behind the counter, the empty aisles of Nabisco tins and Campbell’s soup, cans of peach syrup, molasses, and blackberry jam, the nail kegs stacked into one corner, rows of hammers, paint, and window glass, tackle, cigars, rubber boots, chewing tobacco, oarlocks, cleats and lines, wire baskets, tar paper, and galvanized pipes; the sail chest against the far wall piled with oilskins, foul weather gear, and halfgallon tins of kerosene. She can see the knives through the glass case and, next to the cashbox, the mason jar with the massive spider skewered by a lady’s hatpin inside it.