Moon Tide

by Dawn Tripp

  Maggie glances up and catches him watching her.

  “What?”

  “That man you’re looking at—I see how you look at him, don’t tell me I don’t see—he’s not the sort who’ll give you what you want.” He says this bitterly and digs his hand into the tin pail next to the steps. He takes out a whale’s tooth. Rough, unworked, and long, it came from deep inside the gum. With a coarse file sharpened on the grindstone, he begins to take down the ridges. He sands the tooth with a piece of dried sharkskin, then coats it with a pumice made from wood ash. When Wes comes back up to the house, he pumps water and drinks it straight from the well pail. Ben holds the polished tooth out to him. The younger man takes it and tucks it by the cigarette pack in the pocket of his coat.

  Maggie drives with Wes on the cart back to town. They drive east, down the stem of land that divides the let from Buzzards Bay. The gulls roll in off the ocean, dragging an avalanche of fog behind them on their wings. He takes the left turn onto Horseneck Road hard, and she falls in against him. He smiles as she pushes herself back into balance, wrapping her hands more firmly around the rooster in her lap.

  He tells her they will have to stop at Ada Howell’s farm a mile north to trade a barrel of codfish for ten pounds of butter that Blackwood will sell at the wharf. He lets the name float in the space between them and, from the corner of his eye, he watches her. The name makes no wrinkle in her face, no crease or indentation. She sits beside him on the wide plank seat, reinforced with a broken oar, and says nothing. They wind up Horseneck Road past wrecked stone walls marking abandoned tracts of land that have been newly sold and cleared. The sun breaks through, and he can feel its heat crack across the back of his neck. His mouth tastes of brine, and it occurs to him that as close as she is, she holds a distance that he has experienced only in open water. The first time he went out with North Kelly past the three-mile mark, the wind was northwest. They steered directly south toward the lightship. They pulled the traps off the dogfish ledge, then pushed another mile south, and Wes watched the land fold down over the rim of the earth and disappear. When they turned north, it rose again as if it were the sun or a storm or something alien that he had never witnessed. Like this woman, her long hands wrapped around the belly of the rooster. The smell of her mixes with the taste of brine and cow dung from the fields of the Ashworth Dairy Farm. On the cow path he can see the black-and-white flanked herd, moving in a slow trail toward the river.

  “You go a lot?” he asks her.

  “Where?”

  “To see him?”

  “Who?”

  “The old man.”

  “Sure.”

  “On Sundays?”

  She nods.

  “Every Sunday?”

  “Close.”

  He waits for her to speak more, but she doesn’t, and her silence, her unwillingness to engage, frustrates him. They pass Gifford Hollow and the Quaker Meeting House by the slow-running creek. The heat builds as they move inland, winding through the thick groves of oak and maple. They lose the wind, and the horseflies beat around them. They tick at his neck, drinking sweat, and he whips them away, sharply. He slaps the reins.

  He tells her they will stop at Spud Mason’s farm to pick up potatoes and four sacks of Macomber turnips. She waits for him in the cart next to the barn, the horse pawing through the soft dirt. She holds the rooster on her lap, and her hands move through its feathers. Through the reek of cow earth and pig manure, she can smell the faint sharp tang of herring on the southwest breeze.

  Except to tell her where they will stop, he does not speak again. His face is wrapped in a toughened outer skin from long days on the water. She watches him carefully. She notices how he holds the reins loose across his fingers, how he guides the mare with the slightest touch of leather to the neck. Each time they stop, he takes an apple from his pocket and feeds a piece of it to the horse. He breaks the flesh out of the softer side, peels the skin off with his teeth, spits it back into his hand, and places it under her mouth.

  At the Tripp Farm, half a mile before the crossroads at South Westport, Wes pulls the wagon off the road under a locust tree. He gets out and ties up the horse on a stake.

  He pauses by Maggie’s side of the wagon and points to the mass of blooming flowers that have sprouted up beside the water ditch.

  “See that loosestrife there,” he says. “Fills in thicker now than this time last year. It crowds out the cattails and the mallow. Gets them at the root, so they got no room to grow.” He pauses. “Didn’t come from here, you know,” he goes on without looking back at her. “Same like the gypsy moth, got brought in from a somewhere else.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Maggie says.

  “Know what a gypsy moth can do? Strip the trees and bush.”

  “I said, I know what you’re saying.”

  “Not saying you’re like them, but you see how it is. Skukes come in, buy up the farms, chew them to nothing for a house to live in two weeks a year. Like that stone place put up by Soule’s. That house got built so big, eats up all the old man’s sun.”

  “Your brother did most of the work on that house.”

  Wes digs his foot against the front wagon wheel. “Yeah? Well, my brother does what he does.”

  “You’re sour on him for it?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  “He’s like anyone else. Needs his work.”

  “Lots of ways to work. Don’t have to do work that talks out both sides of your mouth.”

  “Is that why you run?”

  “Your Blackwood’s no better, you know. Rakes himself pretty fine with the business the skukes bring him this time of year.”

  “You think running’s different?”

  “Who says I run?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Yeah? Well, you hear what you hear.” He smiles at her, and there is a wickedness about the smile. A slant. He nods at the driveway that leads down to the Tripp Farm. “They got a bag of feed for me waiting at the barn. Two jugs of cream.”

  She smiles wryly at him. “Go get it then.”

  He looks up at her, his eyes lingering over her face. “Come with me,” he says. She is about to refuse, but his face—she does not know how or when this happened—but his face turned up at her in the shade of the locust tree is suddenly open, curiously vulnerable, as if he has stripped himself quietly without her knowing.

  “All right then,” she says. She binds the rooster’s legs and sets it on the floor of the wagon and climbs out. They walk together down the lane cut through the rows of corn. The house rises abruptly past the stalks on a sudden hill that empties down across a field in fallow. Farther down, the river twists.

  As they pass behind the woodshed, he stops and pushes her up against the wall. The touch plummets through her. She can feel her heart under his hand. His face is hard again. That slanted cruelness in his eyes. He pulls at the front of her dress. Not gently. She pushes him off, and without a word walks back to the cart, hoists herself inside it and picks up the rooster. She feels her way along its belly to the knob of its shoulder under the wing. Her skin is burning, sweat gathering in her hair and down her neck. The heat grinds against her as she waits. The deerflies scour in around her ears.

  A quarter of an hour later Wes comes back with the feed and cream. He loads them into the back of the wagon, setting the feed around the jugs as cushion for the ride. Maggie does not say anything to him as he climbs in next to her. She keeps herself separate, and when he takes the hard curve at the cross of Pine Hill and Hixbridge Road, she leans against her own side of the cart, her feet pushing into the floor.

  They pass the general store. Carl MacKenzie and Ernie Manchester are out on the porch, drinking coffee milk and playing pitch. They pass the stagecoach with its sacks of mail and laundry parked outside Jack Oliver’s house and the Telephone Exchange. They pass Long Acre Farm and the thin road down to Cadman’s Neck that cuts south across the ridge.

  At the top of
the hill, Wes snaps the reins and they bear down on Hix Landing. As they cross the bridge, the wheels of the cart burn into the salt-eaten wood. They speed past the teahouse, then Remington’s, with the long rows of cars already gathered for the clambake at four. The women wear long gloves with small parasols balanced on their shoulders. The men are dressed in top hats and penguin suits. Maggie can smell the burning rockweed mixed with wood ash, the steam of tripe, onions, and soft-shell clams.

  He leaves her at the top of the drive at Skirdagh. She climbs down from the cart with the rooster in her arms and walks away down the middle split of grass between the wheel ruts of the wagon path. Wes waits, watching her, and when she does not look back, he slaps the horse. The cart lurches, takes off fast, and he drives the rest of the way down Thanksgiving Lane to Blackwood’s store. He unloads the butter, the sacks of potatoes, and the white-fleshed turnips with gray dirt still in the creases of their skins. It has begun to rain. A soft drizzle. He leads the horse up the road to the stable behind the old sail loft on Valentine Lane. With an ox-hair brush, he grooms the mare, running his hands over her coat until it is smooth and wet. He feeds her fresh hay and the last quarter of the apple that has baked in his pocket to a sweet mud.

  He walks down to the dock house through the rain, rolls back the barn-size door along its iron tracks, and slides into the game of craps with two of the Mason brothers, North Kelly, and Russ Barre. They play on an oak door balanced across two sawhorses. Red Mason is bragging about his grandfather who pitched three seasons for the Wamsuttas and threw sixty-nine strikeouts in 1892. North Kelly pours Wes three glasses of Canadian White Horse Scotch whiskey, and before he has finished the third, he has lost the ninety-five dollars he made on his last run, the Thursday before.

  He looks at the pile of bills and silver coins in the middle of the table, and thinks about having that money and spending it to buy a crate load of bananas for Maggie every week on Sunday for the rest of her life. The thought enrages him. He pours himself a glass of Tommy Kent’s one-ninety proof, made in a still in the woods off Blossom Road. It is the kind of pure and homemade fire that can wash thought out of a man’s brain. He is fully loaded by the time Blackwood closes his store and comes down to join them.

  Wes sits out two games and eyes Blackwood across the table before he sets himself back in with a bet on margin. He wins big twice, and Red Mason accuses him of pulling a one-eyed jack off the bottom of the deck. Wes pushes back his chair and unwinds his body across the room, tumbling glasses, cards, piles of ten-dollar bills. He punches Red Mason in the throat, and they roll onto the floor through tobacco juice, spilt whiskey, sawdust, and nails, before they wrestle one another back to standing. Mason’s fist hits Wes at the side of the head. Wes goes down, then slashes up again, his back slams Mason under the chin so the head snaps, jaw cracked. Red stumbles back against the wall. Blackwood catches Wes from behind and holds his arms. Wes lets his body grow limp and when he feels Blackwood’s grip release, he turns and lunges for him, leading with his shoulder. He drives full force into Blackwood’s ribs, and he can feel one of those slim blades give way. They tumble outside into the rain and the guts of fish that coat the wharf. They slip, grasping after one another, and fall into the river. Wes pulls himself across Blackwood’s back, holding him down until the older man’s body goes still. Wes hauls him back in to shore and leaves him lying facedown and unconscious in the marsh off the Point Meadows just east of the bridge. He shakes the mud from his clothes and walks in the soft rain back up Thanksgiving Lane to the thin wedge of Maggie’s land between the Coles house and Skirdagh. He waits for her by the shed behind the house.

  Early the next morning, when she lets the chicks spill out onto the lawn with handfuls of split grits and corn, she finds him there asleep, his face white in the tall grass with a thin trail of blood winding from his ear.

  She kneels down next to him and pulls his head into her lap. She takes the dreams out of his skull—a small boat, its departure from the harbor, the gradual loss of land. She can smell the hull wood baked into a brittleness by the sun, the drop over an edge into nothing but water and horizon, the slackening of time that accompanies the absence of spatial direction.

  She sits there for a while, culling through his brain. Then she rolls him away onto his side and walks to the end of the drive for the milk. She carries the two aluminum cans back to Skirdagh and empties them into pitchers that she replaces on the cool shelf in the pantry shielded by a mosquito net. She waters the trays of herb seedlings set on the window ledge above the sink. Lavender, thyme, the tiny green fists of oregano pushing up through the soil.

  She cooks breakfast for Elizabeth. She slices off two cuts of bread and paints them with soft butter, then drags the buttered side through sugar. She leaves the plate with the sugar bread, an egg, and four strips of bacon wrapped in cloth on the oak side table in the dining room.

  When she goes back outside to draw water from the stone well, she does not look toward the bushes by the shed. She does not look to see if Wes is still lying there. She draws the bucket up slowly to keep the hinged leather flap at the bottom closed under the weight of water. The rooster has begun to pace out his station in the yard, and Maggie watches him as she draws the bucket over the well curb and empties it into the white enamel water pail. She lowers the rope until it falls slack. She herds the baby chicks back into the kitchen, into their basket of wool and soft hay next to the stove. She pours them a bowl of the fresh water to drink and leaves the rest of it on the counter next to the sink.

  She takes a handful of crushed corn and goes outside to sit at the edge of the tomato garden. The rooster has found the hornworms. He has one in his beak and he shakes it furiously until the thing splits in half.

  She calls him slowly. He circles toward her, then stalks away, the large waxy red comb nodding on his head. He eyes her from the corner of the yard, preens his beak into his wings, and draws it through until the feathers grow smooth and oiled. She calls him again. She names him, and clucks under her breath, the soft ticking sound of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She keeps the call low and in the back of her throat. She opens her hand with the corn mush inside it, and she sits there, waiting, until he comes to her, still stalking out his slow and unkempt circles. He moves closer, then balks away, then moves closer again. Each time he circles back, the distance shrinks until his beak pecks gently at the yellow crushed corn inside her hand.

  Finally, before she goes back into the house to start the wash, she glances over to the spot where Wes was lying an hour before. The grass is empty, but she can still make out the slight bent pocket where he slept.

  For the rest of that day, she pours herself into her chores. In the afternoon, when the linen has been bleached and strung up on the line, she goes out into the hen shed. She sweeps the floor, straightens the banana crates she has set for laying along each wall, and fills them with new straw. She herds in the hens. The rooster flaps away from the rest of them and flies to the highest perch crossed along the back wall just below the ceiling beams. She leaves feed for them on the floor and latches the door behind her.

  It is not until early evening when she is chopping wood that thoughts of Wes begin to wind again inside her brain. The wood yard is out behind the garden shed: a square of clear ground softly padded by chips and dead leaves with a heap of undivided logs piled on one side. Maggie works until dark, the ax blade slicing bluish silver through the dusky fog. Sundered pieces fleck out, surrounding her, as the pile of raw wood shrinks. Her palms grow wet on the handle of the ax, slipping back and forth between her ungloved hands. She divides the larger cuts of wood in half and then in half again, so they will be small enough, contained enough, to burn inside the stove. And it occurs to her as she works the branches off a pine that until now, her longing has been an impersonal thing. Pure and unattached and undefined. It has been a vague reaching toward some abstract beyond. Her longing was something she had walked with since she was a child. It had carved her, f
ormed her substance, her awareness. It was a thing in and of itself and had no object. A region of emptiness she had defined herself against. Until now. As her shoulders grow sore under the rhythmic swinging of the ax, she begins to realize that her longing has become quite suddenly specific. It has a face attached to it. A figure. A name.

  She leans the ax against the chopping stump. She gathers up the split logs from the new mat of pine chips and shavings. She stacks the logs into a second pile closer to the house. She leaves a nook for herself built into the cords and, when the last log is placed, she climbs into it to rest in the stark smell of wood, freshly hewn.

  That night, she goes, as she has always gone, to Blackwood. She finds him asleep, bent over the ledger on the desk, the damp ink figures imprinted into the side of his cheek. She pulls him back onto the bed, unties his shoes and eases the shirt from his shoulders. She finds the bruise on his ribs—small, a deep black, and in the shape of an eye. She puts her fingers into the palm of one of his tremendous crippled hands. It closes around her in his sleep. He has grown into her over time, mixed in her thoughts, in her blood. As he moves his aging body over hers, she can sense her own death in him.

  She loves Blackwood. She knows this. She loves his swarthy age. The disfigured strangeness of his hands. His chapped and all-consuming way of loving her. But tonight as he wakes up and takes her, she is aware that something has shifted. Tonight, this night, is different from the nights that came before. The outside darkness pressing in against the window has a texture, a presence that is new. She looks past Blackwood’s shoulder toward the ceiling and the sullied patterns of orange light. The kerosene pools in gassy shadows through the beams and, as she watches them, she is aware that she is waiting. Even as her body moves under Blackwood’s weight, another part of her is lying separate, half-dormant and waiting for the sensation she had with Wes—in that moment when he touched her by the shed at the Tripp Farm—that lightning in the chest.