by Dawn Tripp
She slips out into the road and walks past the dock house. She can hear voices through the slit in the barn-size door and the chatter of dice. She walks along the piers, past skiffs tied between the piles. It is a new moon tide, and the river has swelled. It presses up against the boards, the water soaking into the pores of the wood until the pier grows supple. She can sense the pull of the current through the soles of her feet.
She lies down at the end of the west dock and rests her head in a coil of line. She listens for the wandering of soft-shell clams, the packs of mussels drifting in the shelter of the bottom that is mud and rock and unscaled. She unwinds herself into the light that flays off the end of the wharf and dices the river on the flood.
She dreams of crows. She dreams of her mother’s hands sifting through long wooden trays of coffee beans, turning them for an even dryness. She dreams of the highlands, the rainforest and the devastating vertical ascent of trees. The strangler figs that had bewitched her as a child; how they would hatch from the throats of other trees and eventually devour the host with their roots. She dreams of the shampoo her mother ground from fern and the low unraveling of mangroves. When Maggie was young, they lived by the coast, palm-thatched roofs and adobe walls, skirts made from the inner bark of a breadfruit tree. Her mother taught her to strip off the bast, soak it, and pound it with a stone so the fibers meshed together and it grew thin enough, soft enough to wear against the skin. They would split the hearts from palms and gather shellfish on a black sand beach at low tide. They dove from a bark canoe with blades in their teeth. By the time Maggie was ten, she had harpooned a baby seal.
Half a mile offshore was an island where the dead were buried in a small vale hollowed between the locust trees. Alone, Maggie would take the canoe across the reef that divided the home of the dead from the cluster of rush huts on the mainland where they lived. She would go at night and walk the grid of footpaths chewed through the forest as the smell of orchids descended from their aerial garden above her head. She would seek out the dents where the brush gave way until she came to the unmarked vale. She would lie down there in the absence of stones, and she could feel the dead moving like a river underneath her.
When Maggie was twelve, she and her mother moved inland. They packed into a boxcar with two hundred crates of bananas on a railway train owned by Minor Keith, the founder of the United Fruit Company, who had built the line between Cartago and Limón. They took the train into the cloud forest and picked coffee fruit on a highland plantation. From that elevation, Maggie first became aware that the land she was born into was a country of margins, barely a strip swallowed between two coasts. They slept with forty other workers in a long factory house that had no walls. She watched how her mother’s back began to bend. They would sit in the shade to eat their lunch at the edge of the plowed field, and sometimes, early in the morning, Maggie would walk up into the cloud forest, the maze of spider monkeys, scarlet macaws, poison dart frogs, and bushmaster vipers. The roar of the howler moved through her sleep. Years later she would remember the awesome reverberation of the sound. She would remember that she had grown attuned to it, the way one grows attuned to the sound of the ocean, and it pushes like blood under the skin.
She witnessed the death of the sun in the still wings of a hummingbird feeding on a heliconia flower, in the yellow explosion of the gallinazo trees at the end of the rains and, when her mother died, she cut one of her braids and painted her own face black and fasted next to the body on a mountain near the coffee fields until the rains washed the body into the mud slide. Then Maggie, fourteen years old, began walking with a small steel box that had once been torn from the cabin of a ship. She carried that box wrapped in a blue scarf on her back and walked until she fell in behind a stream of oxcarts. She rode with them in the last cart from the highlands to the coast, her light weight bouncing against the walls that had grown brittle and soaked with the dust and endless heat.
She dreams her past until it dies out of her, until she has lived it so many times it is threadbare. She leaves the pier before the sun breaks, before the catboats begin their daily trek across the harbor toward the point of rocks. On her way back to the root cellar, she passes Wes Wilkes on his way down to the wharf. He has a scowled face with pale eyes that bite out at her from under the cap pulled low across his brow. He has come from skinning. She can smell the fresh-cut hide and powder on his hands.
That morning, she turns his name over in the cold earth of her garden. She plants it into small holes behind the lettuce rows with a handful of tulip seed. The last tomatoes swell between their leaves. She twists them carefully away from the vine. She boils them until their skins burst and then squeezes them through the narrow mouths of mason jars. She puts sprigs of basil underneath each cap and stores the jars in the cool shade of her root cellar. In midwinter, when she unscrews the lids, she will taste his name in the tomatoes and in the reek of basil that has settled in the flesh.
CHAPTER 11
Jake
On the morning their mother goes to see the fever that is eating Blackwood’s baby, Wes challenges his brother to a footrace. They cross the bridge and walk along the paths of pitch pine and scrub oak through the dunes. It is late November. The waves have cut away six yards of snow and the sand is frozen. Wes leaves his shoes at the foot of the first dune and chooses a finish line half a mile down the beach. He will always choose a definitive end point: a washed-up lobster pot, the first row of bathhouses, a driftwood log. He digs his heel into the sand and draws a line from a clump of weed down to the high-water mark. He lines himself up behind it, his toe against the back edge.
—Set? On your mark. Go.
He lashes out, his body churning through the hard sand, but Jake, although he is younger and more slight, will always outrun him. Even heavy with wool pants and rubber boots, he will beat his brother to the first end line and then, as the winner, he will set the following race. He chooses a more impermanent finish line. Elusive. The next tidal edge. A recent cut-out wash where the water has left an inland sheen—nearly a looking glass—with a blue stain like weak chamomile tea that changes its dimension and loses its border in the drying as they run toward it. Again Jake wins. Over and over. His frame is smaller. With less density. He understands the value of lightness and wings. The farther down the beach they run, the more impermanent the end line he will choose. Until they are running only for the destination of wind, for the speed, and the elastic tension between them. Once in a while, Jake will deliberately slow his own body until his brother’s face unwrecks itself and grows tender again with the possibility of winning. Jake will make himself stumble, and Wes will force ahead, hard and determined with a rage that burns like coal and leaves an ash reek in his sweat. As Jake softens his stride, his brother bears down onto the jetty that marks the mouth of the harbor—always on that last race to the breakwater.
There they stop and fling themselves down on the ground. Wes takes handfuls of the snow and drains it to water in his fists. He drinks it like milk. Jake lies still, his body sinking down into the sand. His mind grows loose as the cold soaks into him.
Wes kicks him awake.
“Race to the Howe place,” he says.
“Seal Rock.”
“You lost. I call it. The Howe place.” Wes scuffs his foot at a three-story slipper shell. He picks it up and peels away the tiers. The dark foot of the snail recoils, trying to suck down inside itself and at the same time groping for the wall of the shell it had lost.
Jake wipes the snow off his pants, and they start back down the beach. Pulling one another forward, they run against the wind—thirty knots out of the northeast. The empty summer village of West Beach shimmers three miles ahead. The sand lifts up into long white snakes that chase around their ankles, and the wind cuts their eyes. It whittles them apart from one another as they move along the whiplash curve of sand slung between the jetty at one end and a herd of Spud Mason’s cattle at the other, crossing the low-tide flat out to Gooseberry Isla
nd.
It is a fresh snow, and they dig for skunk that afternoon. With a shovel and a pickax, they follow the tracks to the mouth of the hole. Wes slices a cherry branch and probes the inside. The hole is pitched at a gradual descent to a depth of nearly four feet, then cuts sharp upward toward the den. Wes marks a patch in the snow, and they take turns digging toward the nest, cutting roots and axing out rocks.
“Keep back,” Wes says. Jake steps behind him as his brother slides the long branch through the hole. He pokes it gently into that soft and unseen point of endings to sense the number of bodies and their size curled around one another in sleep.
“Two full. Four young,” he says to Jake over his shoulder. “You set?”
“Yeah.”
“You got the shovel?”
“Yeah.”
Wes nudges into the hole with the slit end of the branch, prodding the skunk until they move. One by one, their groggy faces emerge from the hole. Jake lets them crawl halfway out and then brings the end of the shovel down across the backs of their necks or between the eyes. He flicks the bodies by the tail over his shoulder. As Wes prods, the skunks file out, and Jake waits for them with the spade, its spoon end lithe and moving like a dream from the sky down.
They load the kill into two burlap sacks that they haul back to the woodshed behind their father’s house. They stretch the limp shapes across the board and skin them while they are still warm. They hang the pelts on old nails driven into the walls of the woodshed. When the fur is dry, their father will trade them to Blackwood for a cut of meat, tallow, bullets, shot, lime, and kerosene.
Their mother comes home late that night with the camphor wrapped in a sock around her neck. She says nothing about the fever or Blackwood’s baby, and no one asks. She cuts three cloves of garlic into the pot. Her face is heated, and Jake can feel the prickling spread across his own cheeks. He sits on the stool across the kitchen as she bends over the fire. He can see wings sprouting from her back. He can see a flock of white geese, their V shape in the flame. As she stirs the stew inside the pot, she is stirring the dream of those birds, naked, stripped, long-necked. She crosses the kitchen toward the sink. Halfway across the room, she stumbles forward. Jake catches her. Her face jerks toward him, and she starts back, her eyes wide.
“What is it?” he asks.
She shakes her head slowly, groping for the edge of the table behind her.
“Ma, what is it?”
She doesn’t answer. She stares through him as if a dusk has begun to steep inside her brain.
She does not get out of bed the next morning. Her toes and fingertips have begun to blue. Her eyes grow bright as if stars have hatched inside them. When Jake lifts her head from the pillow to lay the wet cloth on her brow, blood spits like scattered seed out of her lungs.
He presses the cloth against her forehead, and he can feel the heat pass off her and move through the cloth into the palm of his hand. It runs like a swift river through his arm and settles in the whorls of the joint. That afternoon, he walks to the library at Skirdagh. Elizabeth finds him that evening, barely conscious, tossing with books on the couch, his skin mottled red and burning. Maggie brings him to a bedroom on the second floor and rubs a horseradish salve into his chest. It stills him. For over a week, he wanders through the fever. He does not eat. He does not sleep. He follows slow-moving rivers of ice.
He is still at Skirdagh when his mother dies. He does not see how the fever thins her to a common reed. He does not see how his father gathers her in his rough arms as her chest swells through the sheet. Carl Wilkes forgets the pine coffins he has been paid to build. He forgets the saw and the hammer, the sheets of paper with the names and measurements of the dead. He leaves the boxes unfinished outside in the soft rain, and for days he lies awake with his cheek pressed against his wife’s ribs, listening to the sound that has come to live inside her chest. It is the sound of water sucked through stones.
Only Wes witnesses this strange gentleness of his father. He stands by the bureau behind the door and watches his father’s callused, knotted hands move across his mother’s face. He is struck by the uselessness of the gesture. He is struck by his father’s rustic grief, by the humble and shuddering movements of his thick hands as he tries to restore his wife, or to restore something unreachable that she might have meant to him once. For years afterward, Wes will be haunted by the vision. It will weigh down his shadow and divide his heart over and again like chaff struck from the grain.
An hour after the sound has left his wife’s chest, Carl Wilkes walks out of his house into the night and down to the wharf. He unhooks the skiff from the piling behind North Kelly’s catboat and rows out through the mouth of the harbor, his shoulders rippling against the pull of the oars. He rows past the Sow and Pigs lightship into the open water until he has lost the shore and the stars clatter down from the sky. He climbs up onto the gunwale.
There is no sound when the surface breaks. No sound afterward except the low and solitary creak of the oars against their locks as the boat drifts. Five days later, on the last dusk of November, Ben Soule finds the skiff washed up on East Beach. He finds a pair of wool gloves gripped around the oars. He pulls one of them onto his own hand, and he can read the grip of Carl Wilkes left on the inside of the glove. He finds a sea duck with its beak buried under its wing frozen in a coil of rope under the seat. He hauls the boat up the knoll to his house. He buries the gloves in a niche beneath his doorstone. He takes the bird inside, thaws it by the woodstove, plucks the feathers and adds them to the pile under his bed.
He waits patiently for Sunday, but Maggie does not come. Her absence wraps around him with the cold. He hears trickles of word from Spud Mason, who comes by once every two weeks in his express wagon for six dozen eggs and a barrel of salted codfish that he will take back to Blackwood’s store. In exchange, he leaves staples for the old man: two pounds of sugar, a sack of cornmeal, a gallon of molasses, hardtack crackers, and kerosene.
Spud tells Ben the details of the fever: pints of blood mixed with phlegm, sweats, chills, how the eyes rage with an unnatural brightness as the skin tints blue. He tells him they call it the swine flu, and already it has taken more than the war: the Point School closed, no public meetings, the church bolted shut. Even Blackwood shut down for four days after his baby died. He slept each night next to the small white casket laid out on the kitchen table, his arm across its open face.
Spud sits down on the trestle bed in the corner. His heavy weight curves the wooden frame. As he unscrews a twenty-cent plug of light B.L. chew, he tells Ben about the sacks of garlic they hang around their necks, the mustard spread on chests, the ground chamomile and indian weed boiled to tea that is said to lighten the bog in the lungs. He tells him that the families of the sick will come to the icehouse at night and huddle by the white ash across the field. Caleb’s son, Jimmy, brings the ice to them in buckets, wearing gloves and a gauze mask over his face. At least once a day, a wagon passes down Thanksgiving Lane with a box lashed to it. They draw the dead north to the cemeteries in Central Village and on Drift Road. The services are small, most of them no more than the gravedigger and the priest.
Ben says nothing about Carl Wilkes’s skiff. Nothing about the burlap sack of feathers stashed under the bed where Spud Mason sits. He asks after Maggie.
Mason shakes his head. Says that no one has seen her since Elizabeth Lowe grew a fever welt down her left side in the shape of a dragon, and her hands turned the color of ripe plums.
At the old woman’s name Ben stiffens, but he says nothing. As Spud Mason goes on talking, Ben draws his stool closer to the wood-burning stove. He takes an unworked piece of whalebone from the tin box on the mantelshelf, unstops the bottle of india ink, and with a sewing needle he begins to cut lines into the bone. He works slowly, carefully, and he does not look up again until Spud Mason leaves and he can hear the wagon wheels turn over the crushed shells in the road.
Late that night, he wakes with a desperate thirst. A
glass of water. This need for water. It is a burning need. He climbs from the bed and draws the water from the pump. His fingers stick against the iron with the cold. His throat is on fire, and he downs two gulps from the mug before he has the whole thing filled. The water spills across his nightshirt, a coolness running down his withered chest. He pumps more, and it overflows the neck of the mug into a pool on the floor between his feet. He looks down. The pool of water is almost a mirror in the dark—a window looking through the earth, deep into the heart of things. His own past floats up inside that strange and midnight pool.
He stares harder into it as if he could stare down the pictures looking back at him.
He mutters to himself and throws down a dish towel to cover it. He stamps the towel with his foot until the water has soaked into the rag, and he leaves it in a wet heap on the floor.
He goes back to the bed and pulls out the burlap sack stashed underneath. He empties the feathers onto the floor—pinions he has plucked from geese, the feathers of osprey, egrets, and gulls that he has gathered as the birds let them fall on their way to their upriver nests. Over years he has collected them, and now in secret he begins to work them together with his scrimshaw needle and the thinnest of galvanized wire.
All night, he sits outside on the doorstone, stitching. His thoughts pass like light-cloud shadows across the surface of the moon. Old thoughts, most of them, crippled and vague, but he stitches them into the hollow bored quills. When his fingers grow numb with the painstaking work and the cold, he pricks them with the end of the needle to bring the color back. He works deep into the dawn, until the fog drags in with the light off the ocean and the clouds rumble through the sky, massing into one another like the dream of stones.