by Dawn Tripp
CHAPTER 12
The rest of that winter is like every other winter. Jake and Wes shoot black ducks on the marsh in Masquesatch meadows. They go at dusk and set themselves behind the blind made of juniper and cordgrass lashed together with rawhide strings. They set their traps on land, baited for rabbit, fox, and coon.
The river freezes through the deepest channel from the Head to the Lion’s Tongue at the mouth. In mid-March, when the ice has hardened to a depth of twelve feet, they go, as they have always gone, to harvest Caleb Mason’s ponds.
They don’t speak much to one another and, when they do, the phrases are abrupt and shorn. Several times a week, Mrs. Whitney or Gertrude Paul will leave a casserole dish of peas or lamb stew with a can of sugared peaches on the back porch, and when there is nothing else, they will split a loaf of bread with some cold tea. They learn to cook slowly, scorching the first several meals.
The following spring, Wes goes to work for North Kelly, fishing for tautog and flats with a rod and reel. He casts for white perch on Cockeast Pond and spends less and less time on land. His shoulders grow thick culling oysters with the tongs. He hoists them to the surface in clumps. Twice a week, he pulls the traps set along the reef offshore. He packs the lobsters into crates of ice and rockweed and drives them by wagon to the wholesale market in New Bedford, where they will sell for eighteen cents a pound.
Jake is hired by the mason, Will Ash. He learns to dress stone with a chisel, a hammer, a gouge. He learns to set cobbles, carve terraces, and paste facades. He takes work on the tremendous summer houses that continue to rise along East Beach. He knows that stone can control sound, resist fire, and has a tendency to give way under its own weight. Once in a while, as he is digging a three-foot trench to set the base of a wall below the frost line, he will think of the girl. He will see her in the gap between two shims and in the way a certain type of chink rock fits in his hand. He ticks off the months and then the seasons on the north pole of the duck blind, and in the red light of summer dusk, when the sky has burned itself into a fever, he will see her in the stain.
Elizabeth’s health returns slowly, spooling like a yarn back to her body. The flu ate her thin, and it is months afterward, almost to the spring, before she can shake it from her bones. Even then, there is a new weakness in her hands. She can feel it on humid days when she goes to grip her fork or wield a pen. She presses down and her fingers fail. Other days, dry days, her hands are strong the way they used to be, and it spooks her, not the weakness itself, but how it comes and goes.
Maggie sets her peas in the spring. She puts up her tomato seedlings in the warm light window of the kitchen above the stove. She scrubs the floors with lye, empties the cupboards in the pantry, scrapes off the old paper, and wipes down the shelves. She drags the rugs outside to beat them and leaves them outstretched on the grass. She changes the winter drapes to spring curtains. She takes out the summer china, soaks the plates and cups and saucers. She packs the heavier ceramic bowls away.
Elizabeth follows her through the house as she strips the beds, empties the bureaus of their linens, and sprinkles new cedar shavings in the drawers. She sits with her in the kitchen as Maggie mixes a fresh batch of brown soap and lays it out on cookie tins to harden. They talk about how the shadbushes have blossomed and soon the herring will begin to run.
Maggie opens up the guest wing on the north side of the house and pulls the sheets from the unused rooms. She washes them with a dart of bleach and, in the late afternoon, she pins them to the line. They fill with the dusk—great and billowing, unmasted sails—Elizabeth watches them as she and Maggie take their supper in the dining room. She can feel her own grief flush through them with the wind. Once a year, at this time, Maggie will leave the sheets on the line overnight to be washed out by the darkness. The next morning, early, when the frost still coats the grass, they hang stiff, almost to the ground, a thin wrinkle of ice baked into their hems.
One day, late in April, when the wind is unnaturally warm, Maggie throws every window open to strip the last settle of winter from the house. The sunlight sweeps through the corners and the halls.
Elizabeth is in the library with a book of Blake’s songs when Maggie brings her the child’s dress—a blue dress that she found in the center of one of the empty dresser drawers with two small white gloves lying crossed over the heart.
“Folded neat as neat,” Maggie tells her. “Left it that way on purpose, I’d say.”
Elizabeth takes the dress in her hands. She recognizes it as the dress Eve was wearing that morning Maggie found her painting with the food, the morning she flew from the house and down the hill like some strange cry, the morning the Wilkes boy saw her for the first time. It is a simple dress, without ruffles or lace. Two pleats in the front at the waist. It would be too small in the shoulders for her by now. It is something she has already outgrown. Elizabeth searches through the pockets. Empty. She hands the dress back to Maggie, and she wonders why it was that particular dress the child chose to leave behind.
That summer of 1919, the thermometer at Blackwood’s wharf climbs to one hundred and five degrees. On Main Road north of the Hotel Westport, the loam is black with the carcasses of insects that have dropped dead from the heat. Jilted by a traveling salesman, sixteen-year-old Edie Howland hangs herself in her father’s dry well, and the packed ice in Caleb Mason’s icehouse melts until the floor is six foot deep in warm soaked straw.
On the Fourth of July, Jake goes out with Wes to fish the run of blues in the rip off the Hassagnek reef. Blues are the sea wolves. They move in packs and will drop out of a region of the coast for years at a time. The last run of blues came in 1881, the year Blackwood washed up on Gooseberry Neck, the year Gladding’s long-handled horse-powered hay fork sold at Cory’s Store for eleven dollars with the claim that it could pitch two thousand pounds of hay in thirteen pitches in three minutes.
With a bag of beef sandwiches stashed next to the gear in the bow, Jake and his brother row out of the harbor. They leave on the ebb, when the wind comes from the southwest and the sky is dissolute. They use live silversides for bait. Wes rubs the leader and hook with pork rind to wipe out the human smell. As they drift along the rip, he stands in the bow. The line whips out behind him, coiling into itself before it splits, knifelike, and cuts the surface folds.
Jake sits down facing the stern and leans his back against the thwart. The hard edge of the seat digs into his spine. The clamming baskets are stacked in the corner next to the lantern, a coiled trawl, and the fishing box. The lid of the box hangs open. Hand-carved wooden lures spill out. The sun flashes off the grooved barbs of the hooks.
An inch of water covers the floor of the boat. It has leaked through the splits between the cedar planking. Jake runs his fingers through it. Fish scales, bits of line, a bottle cap, cigarette butts, and a pack of matches sift back and forth across the boards as the boat twists down the currents of the rip. The water soaks through his trousers. It washes over the copper rivets that bind the planking to the ribs of the hull. His father built the boat eight years ago and Jake remembers how bright the rivets were when his father first set them. Over time, they have been eaten by the salt, their edges worn down, and yet now, in the slight skim of water running over them, they glisten, a tropical, luminous green.
“You going to fish?” Wes asks.
“I might.”
“Got a line on one. She’s big I’d say. Tracking down the bait, but not biting.”
He talks the way their father talked. He clips his sentences off at the neck and he always refers to a fish as a female. Jake has noticed these things. He has noticed how his father’s hardness has begun to surface through his brother’s face, honing the skin to a tougher, older grain.
“Won’t touch anything you give her, somedays,” Wes says.
“They’ll always take an eel.”
“Not even that, somedays.”
Jake looks up across the bay to the Nubble rock that marks the harbor mouth
. He can just make out the tip of the Point Church steeple behind the long strip of the barrier beach that buffers the town from the open sea. Figures move like small dark flak along the shore.
The oarlock set onto the gunwale next to him is tarnished. A hairline crack runs through the brass. It will break within a day if his brother bears down too hard.
He drops his hand over the side and trails his fingers through the swift, unsettled water of the rip. The sun pools on the surface, but through the shade cast by the boat, he can see the sand along the ridge ten feet below piled into underwater dunes. The blues will work against the current. They will keep to the lee side of the shoal. They will rest in the holes and the jogs. He stares down through the meager reflection of his face, down into that strange-moving geography underneath him, and he watches for them—bony glints of shadow—as the hull moves like a ghost across the ocean floor.
He lies down on the floor of the boat, his hair soaked in the warm musty water. The planking smells of salt and weed and blood. He can hear the creak of the oars against their locks and the slow and rhythmic hiss of his brother’s line cast out, drawn in, and then cast out again. The waves slap against the hull. He looks up at the sky. It is a perfect sky. Endless. Blue. Domed like the inside of a robin’s egg.
The shadow of his brother’s arm breaks across his hips. It startles him: the elbow hooked scythe-like, the knob of Wes’s hand gripping the rod, and Jake realizes that the boat has begun to edge north under the sun. The shadow of the arm snaps out again, extending smooth and long as the line is released. Back and forth, the arm cuts across Jake’s body, curling, lengthening, then curling in again, and it is as if the shadow is a solitary thing, divorced from weight or body.
The current has begun to shift. He can feel the slackening of the tide through the plank floor, the turning toward the flood. The nose of the boat pulls around. Water runs into his ears, filling them with a hollow purling sound. His brother will have more luck now. The fish will begin to run in the slack the same way they begin to feed, ravenous, at dawn. Jake knows it is the change that matters. The change from dark to light, the change from one tide into the next.
He closes his eyes. He can feel the white sun eat the corners of his face, the shallow skin around his lids. It bleaches his lips until they crack, and it occurs to him, lying there, that the world men walk through is the world men dream. They stretch their lives into long journeys of barely lit roads, corners, vagabond turns. He thinks of his mother buried in the small graveyard south of Central Village and of his father’s boat that returned on its own into shore. He had known only the coolness between them, and yet there was something—at one point there must have been something—a moment that had burned enough to draw them in to one another. And it strikes him that love is the only thing that is truly wild. It cannot be grasped or built or made and yet, in the end, it is the seed that is always left over.
“Got ’er,” Wes shouts. He kicks Jake in the shoulder. “Get yourself up, she’s a weight.”
The rod tip hooks down hard to the surface. Wes jerks it, gives slack to the line, then plays it left and reels in. “Get the gaff,” he says as he draws the fish against the gunwale. Her tail slaps at the surface, her nose slamming hard into the hull as she tries to swim herself loose, back down into the shadow. As Wes draws the line tight, Jake slips the gaff hook under the gill of the fish, and together they lift her over the side. She is tremendous. Her body is huge and old and marked with scars, but the skin shimmers, still wet, steel blue and green with that queer iridescence that a fish will only keep for several minutes once she has been exposed to air. Jake can see the rim of fresh blood along her gill.
Wes sets the rod down. He kneels on the floor of the boat and holds her body down with one hand. The tail beats against the boards, her jaw snapping at his wrist. He holds her at the throat to keep her from biting. Drops of water cling to the fine pale hairs along his forearm and glimmer there, brilliant with the salt and fish oil in the sunlight. He taps her flank with the tip of the knife. Her belly is huge, stone-hard and swollen.
“Pig’s been feeding.”
Jake doesn’t answer.
Wes cuts into the head and the body goes flat. Her color has already begun to dull. With the edge of the knife, he scales both sides of her, working against the root. Then he dips the blade into the throat and, in one swift motion, slivers her open from gill to tail. Her guts are crammed with silversides. They spill out, half-chewed. A few have been swallowed whole and the bodies are still intact. One is still alive. Tiny—a childfish—flipping through the mass of the rest. Its small mouth gasps, the eye round and unblinking, rimmed with a perfect yellow line.
As Wes works the blade along the spine of the blue to cut down the meat, Jake cups his hand underneath the minnow. He closes his fingers around it. He can feel its nose flutter in his hand, the working of the dorsal fin—a frantic, beating pressure—almost a heartbeat against his palm. He holds his fist over the side of the boat in the water until the motion settles and the small fish stills. Slowly, he cracks his fist and lets the fish drain through his fingers. He watches it, a limp silver that could almost be mistaken for a trick of light. It lies motionless, several inches below the surface, falling away from them on the current. Then its tail flips and it rights itself. It wriggles off. Jake scoops the rest of the guts off the floor of the boat and dumps them over the side. The fish oil streaks like living threads off his hands.
Wes has stripped one side of the blue down to the ribs. The blood runs out and lodges in the planking cracks. He cuts the meat free from the bone and slaps the fillet on the thwart.
“Clean it,” he says and, turning the fish, he begins to work down the other side.
Jake holds the fillet in the water over the side of the boat to wash it down. The blood and oil pool around his hand. The sun fractures off the surface—a sudden white flash that seems to sear up from the depths as the boat pitches forward through the middle of the rip—and he is blinded for a moment, as if it is his life that has cracked open underneath him and he is falling toward it.
“What the hell—”
He can hear his brother’s voice behind him. It is there and not there. Close and not close. But Jake does not turn around. His mind is smashed with that sudden brilliant whiteness of the sun, and he is aware that his hand is empty, that he has let go. The flesh of the bluefish floats underneath them. It arches down through the shadow of the hull as if it is a new and separate thing, alive.
PART II
THE
SANDFLAT
CHAPTER 1
In 1920, the year after the Eighteenth Amendment is passed, women win the right to vote and the Hotel Westport burns to the ground. The Acoaxet Club opens in the harbor, boasting two tennis courts, a banquet hall, and a nine-hole green. More often than not, Blackwood spends his nights at the store waiting for Maggie, and eventually he does not bother to go home to his wife at all. Jake and Wes sell their father’s half acre to Arthur Coles and the Westport Real Estate Trust that has begun to gather up tracts of land between the Methodist church and Salter’s Hill. Wes moves down to the wharf and rents a room above the workshop that belongs to Swampy Davoll. Jake moves into the boathouse at Skirdagh. He rebuilds the west-facing wall that has rotted from lack of use. He hacks long boards out of young pine still beaded with sap. He pries the drops of resin free and keeps them in a blue enamel cup. In the evenings, he will chew on them quietly as he reads.
In 1924, the stone causeway is built between the mainland and Gooseberry Neck, Mallory disappears on Everest, and R. A. Nicholson begins to publish the collected works of the thirteenth-century Sufi dervish Mevlana. Charles devours the volumes as they are released. He hauls crates of books down for the month he spends at Skirdagh in the summer, and when he returns with his daughter to the city, he leaves them, their covers slightly beaten, on the shelves.
By the time Lindbergh takes his cross-Atlantic flight in 1927, the cottages on the west end of Horseneck
Beach have spread through the dunes and the wetlands like a greenbrier. At East Beach, there are three new restaurants, a post office, a church, and a bowling lane. The fishermen’s shacks are torn down. Rake McIleer’s market falls under, beat out of business by the new A & P. The price for renting a bathhouse jumps from two cents to ten. Burt Allen’s boardinghouse for duck hunters is leveled and replaced by the Red Parrot Hotel.
Jake is hired to build the stone house directly west of Ben Soule’s. It will be the summer residence of Whitney Bowles, a mill owner from New Bedford. There will be three toilets, running water, four marble fireplaces, a stone terrace, and two gardens divided by a box-hedge English maze.
The old man shakes his head as he and Maggie sit together on his doorstone and look out across the tremendous squared-off hole that has been dug in the sand for the foundation of the stone house.
“It’ll sink,” he tells her, “right up to its knees.” He lights a rolled cigarette and tosses the match into the corner of the door.
Over nine months, they watch the house rise, stone by stone, until it is four thousand square feet and three stories, casting a seasonal shadow over one half of the old man’s vegetable garden.
Every day, Ben drags his chair outside to watch them set the slates into the roof and a second chair too for Maggie in case she arrives. As the sun turns through the day, he moves the chairs, several feet at a time, to escape the encroaching shade.
CHAPTER 2
Jake
He is awake before dawn. Fibrous light. He rises from the spring cot, sets the lamp, and puts a pot of water to boil on the woodstove. He boils two eggs for four minutes each, until the insides are slightly less than soft and the yolks are orange, the color deep and still wet. He will let them congeal in the cooling. He wraps the eggs in a cloth and tucks them carefully into the pocket of his shirt. He leaves the boathouse, walks up the drive, and turns down Thanksgiving Lane. In the fog, the bridge at the end of the Point is insubstantial—a thread across the river ahead of him. As he nears the wharf, the fog thickens around the houses until they disappear and he is walking alone—a slow-moving fingerprint along a disembodied road.