by Dawn Tripp
Blackwood falls away from her onto his back, his breathing ragged. Maggie runs her hand over his heart and finds the broken rib. She touches it gently, tracing the jut where the break stubs the skin, and she senses, without knowing for sure, how it happened. She puts her head against his chest and listens—the slender fracture has a sound that is not unlike the sound wind makes through a halyard—a slight persistent ticking in the bone—as the blood pushes through—a slow leak widening inside.
Over the next few months, Maggie passes Wes four times on John Reed Road. She sees him on North Kelly’s boat tied up at the dock house unloading his catch into the floating pots. She sees him on his way up to Caleb Mason’s icehouse, the wagon stacked with pots and weed. She sees him once at the end of the causeway. He stands on the rocks with a gaff hook balanced on his shoulder looking out across the bay and, as she watches, his head bends back slightly, as if the movement is unconscious and against his will. The sun pours across his face.
He catches her watching him. His eyes harden, and the light breaks away from him.
He follows her back toward the bridge. He cuts through the deer path that parallels the macadam road. When they take the bend and the river drops through the trees into view, he pulls her into the oak scrub.
For an instant, she imagines fighting him off. She imagines the ways of defiance—how she will slip, filch, scrap herself away from his swift hands. His mouth is wet on her ear.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she says.
“You did.”
As he comes inside her, she grips her fingers into his shoulder, gathering him into her like a dream out of the wheelbarrow that has stood for days at the edge of her garden, its wooden belly full of sea muck, a compost of sod, wildflowers, and shells that she will grind to ash and lay across the tomato seeds. She feels through the muscle of his shoulder toward the bone. She feels for the nakedness of the man she saw less than an hour before standing on the causeway rocks. She digs toward the vulnerable in him, and he runs through the cracks in her hands.
“I need you,” he says. Her body opens under him like earth.
They walk back to town separately. He is ten yards ahead, then twenty, and by the time she has reached the bridge, she can see him at the top of Thanksgiving Lane past the church. He turns onto the wagon drive that leads down to her root cellar.
There is a dead swan in the marsh. She takes the path by the old ferry dock along the small beach and crosses the mat of salt marsh cordgrass. The bird lies on its back, its legs hooked underneath, its heart pulled out by the crows. Farther off, by the dock, she can see the mate, peddling its tireless moored route back and forth along the shallows.
Maggie stands in the dry grass and looks across the river. From here, she can see the room where Wes lives on the top floor above the Shuckers Club. For months, she has crossed the bridge at dawn and felt him there, watching her through the blinds. This morning, she sees, as she has seen many mornings, a shadow bend across the glass and, for the first time, she recognizes that shadow for the trick of light it is.
He is waiting for her in the root cellar. He catches her wrist as she comes down the stairs. He makes love to her on the dirt floor strewn with geranium petals and ginger stems. He comes into her from behind and pulls her hips back into him.
Later as she sleeps, he runs his hand lightly down the midline of her chest, then back up over her breast. His fingers pause for a moment at the dent in her throat and then his hand begins to move again, in long ovals, circling her ribs. She doesn’t stir.
He digs a whale tooth from his hunting coat pocket, a small paintbrush, and a four-ounce corked bottle of india ink. On one of the wooden shelves by the stove, he finds a sewing needle stuck into a pincushion. He sits back down on the spring cot next to her long body lying still under the sheet. He uncorks the bottle and spills a few drops of ink onto the flat edge of the brush, and he coats the bone until it is a blackness in the palm of his hand. Then, slowly, he begins to cut the lines: a ship, the slight boats, the sullen thrash of a tail. He etches the harpoons the way he has etched them before—as thin as the needle he uses to cut them. They sprout from the whale’s curved flank like misplaced bones. Once in a while, he will lose the image. Even squinting, he will not be able to differentiate sea, spear, man, whale. Each one is a simple scratch of whiteness in black ink.
He knows what happens next: one boat will be hit by the tail and capsized; a spear will be thrown to strike the beast in the head; the whale will run for two miles on a length of rope unwinding in the bow until it tires. Then, its tremendous body will be dragged back to the ship and hoisted halfway up the port side. The blubber will be stripped into blanket pieces, which will be cut again into smaller horse pieces, and then again into bible leaves until its massiveness has been distilled into oil casks, an acre of baleen, and three stave barrels of bone.
But for now, it is only the moment before—before the tipping of the first boat—before the harpoon strikes the head. Ben Soule has taught him this art. He has taught him this moment, and Wes has sketched it over and over. He has held it still and learned it by heart. No matter how many times he cuts the same scene, he will never exhaust it, because what he is looking for is something already written, already lost.
He glances up. As if she can feel him watching her, Maggie turns over on the spring cot, her body long in the deathly yellow light. Her eyes are closed, and yet he has the eerie unsettled sense that she is watching him. Her eyelids shift as if she tracks him in her sleep.
He goes on working the tooth: he cuts lines that are delicate, precise. He carves the scene until it is done. Then he coats the tooth again with ink and takes a piece of cardboard that he bends back and forth in his hands until it grows as soft as cloth. Slowly, carefully, he sifts the ink away from the bone.
He buries the finished tooth in the mattress close to the springs. She is still asleep. He touches her face, gently, the closed eyes, her mouth slightly ajar, and he sees his father’s rough hands as they moved across his mother’s face when she was lost inside the fever. He remembers how futile it was—that unwieldy tender gesture of him loving her. Now, he opens his hand and holds it just above Maggie’s skin. He will not touch her. He will not come that close. He cups his fingers around the wide plane of her cheek, an almost imperceptible pressure, hovering there, the heel of his palm close to her mouth as if he could capture her breath in his hand.
The next morning, he watches her dress. He lies propped on his side. His shoulder takes the light, pushing out from the sheet. She pulls on her boots, straps the laces once around, and ties them.
“Come back,” he says.
She shakes her head. Straightening, she tightens her skirt at the waist.
“Come back.”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I’ve got things to do.”
He scowls for a moment, and she can see in his expression that he has assumed, the way it is easy for some men to assume, that by his need he has marked her.
She considers it now—what stirs in her for him—not love exactly. No. It is an unpolished hunger. It thrills her, stings her, frightens her. He is the kind of man she could lose herself to.
“Come back,” he says again, his face softening. The gentleness takes her off guard. “Come back,” as if those are the only words that he remembers how to say. Maggie lets herself be drawn. She reaches the edge of the spring cot, and he pulls her down, removes her dress. He unties the laces of her boots and slips them off her feet. His arms wrap like deep sea roots around her.
“I won’t choose,” she says quietly as his mouth moves over her breasts. “You can’t own me, and I won’t let you make me choose.” She holds his head in her hands, twists her fingers through his hair as he makes love to her, and when she comes, she grips him tightly, even violently, trying to hold this moment between them for as long as she can.
She leaves him lying on the bed, picks up her clothes from the floor and backs away,
slow steps backward away from him across the room.
“Where are you going?” He laughs at her. “Why are you walking backward like that?”
She doesn’t answer. As she retreats, her vision clarifies again, and she can see his face change through different skins—wanting, pulling, needing her, cutting her off, pushing her away, because his desire—she can see it now—it is like her own, unlivable, it heaves like clouds across his face—a desire too big, it leaves him ashamed, desperate, angry—with a need to leash, possess, own because he thinks, mistakenly, that she has done this to him.
She continues walking backward, watching him, his shoulder knobbed with yellow light, the damp earth walls of the root cellar behind him. She will see these walls a thousand times. She will see them every night after he is gone.
She does not tell him this. She does not tell him that he will forget her. He will resent her for his wanting. He will keep a distance from her the way the rooster hefts a distance from the hens to keep them contained. Over the next several weeks, he will cut her to pieces and put her away. Piece by piece: into the back of a bottom drawer; wrapped in burlap into one of those crates of stolen whiskey; sealed under a trapdoor in Mason’s icehouse under a mountain of soaked hay. He will take his runs in the skiff. He will drive his rum load to the city at dawn in the back of Kelly’s cart packed under lobster catch and rockweed. He will drink and fish and hunt, he will push deep into his life—she does not know how far—and someday perhaps—someday—No.
She walks up to Skirdagh, lets out the chicks, and climbs the stairs to Elizabeth’s bedroom on the second floor. She empties the thunder jug, pours fresh water into the washbasin, and lifts the shade. The light pours across the old woman’s face. Elizabeth reaches out, her eyes weakened by the brightness. As Maggie turns to draw back the covers, through the open window she sees Wes leave the root cellar. The rooster is out in the corner of the yard closest to the garden. Wes leans down, picks up a small stone, and throws it in a cutthroat path angled toward the rooster’s leg. The chicken jumps, and the stone whistles past it, just missing the edge of its wing.
Maggie will think of this for days afterward. In the mornings, while she is breaking eggs into the fry pan, in the afternoons, as she gathers kindling for the fire. At night, lying with Blackwood in the yellow-lit room above the wharf, she will think of the rooster—that other one she buried years ago—its gangrene leg. She will remember the inexplicable wound—how it would not heal—and over and over again she will see Wes throw the stone. She will hear the mindless cruelty in the shrill cry of that pebble through the air.
That morning when he leaves the root cellar, Wes stops in at the dock house. Russ Barre is alone in the back room overhauling his gear. As he fixes a new hook to the trawl, he tells Wes about the ship due in from the north that night around the Sow and Pigs.
After dark, the wind picks up, and a crescent moon rises over the bridge. Caleb Mason meets Wes at the dock and they push off just shy of ten. They reach the mother ship by quarter past eleven. They bring the first load to the tip of Gooseberry, tie a cork mooring to one end, and dump the crates overboard into the shallows. They take a second trip out for another load, storing the unmarked wooden crates under tarps and lobster pots. They come back into the harbor, silently. They slip through the black water with their engines cut, on a rising tide. As they pass the wharf and Jewel Penny raises the draw of the Point Bridge, Wes glances over his shoulder to the room above Blackwood’s store and thinks of her.
Three trucks, six pleasure cars, and fifteen men are waiting in the turnout north of Haskell’s barn to help them unload. As Wes is lifting the last crate from the deck, he decides that he will go to her. He will find her in the root cellar asleep in the thin light from the woodstove. She will be waiting for him. He loses his grip on the crate. One bottle slips out. He reaches down and arrests it, just barely, above the ground. He bites hard into his lower lip.
That night when the work is done and the new roll of cash digs hard into his thigh, Wes goes back with North Kelly, Thin Gin Tripp, and Caleb Mason to the dock house, where they drink three bottles of Indian Hill bourbon and lose to one another at cards until dawn.
On the next full moon, from the window of his room above the Shuckers Club, he sees Maggie cross the lane and slip through the back door of the wharf. He sees her shadow climb the inside stairs toward the yellow kerosene light above Blackwood’s store.
He watches the door. The moon washes over it, striking a slow, lean path across the wood, before it continues on its route west down the street and toward the river. He watches that door all night. Shadows climb around the frame. Close to dawn, she slips out. He moves quickly down the stairs and follows fifteen yards behind her up the road toward Skirdagh. He keeps himself off the sidewalk, walking at the edges of the lawns. She looks back once, and he thins himself behind an elm. She stands still. Her eyes play the street from one side to the other, down the lane toward the wharf. She scans every inch of what is behind her with the exception of the spot where he is. Then she turns and continues walking.
CHAPTER 5
Patrick
When Patrick Gerow first comes to the Point, he sees only water—the wharf, the boathouses, the docks, the marsh islands, and even the bridge tremble as if they are rinsed in uncertain light.
A silver day, she calls it. The pale-haired young woman in the white dress. Eve. They are standing on the small pier at the bottom of the hill. The pilings are awkward—rough-hewn, young cedar posts—with pine slats lined between them.
Patrick had arrived in the town that morning. Drove to the end of Main Road and then realized when he reached the bridge that he must have missed the turn. Two men sat outside a beaten-down building with a crude sign that read THE SHUCKERS CLUB strung above the door. One of the men sat on an overturned crate shelling a pail of oysters. The other was red-faced, older. He sat in the shade on a straw-backed rocker with a corncob pipe and a felt hat pulled across his brow, eyes closed under the brim.
“Excuse me,” Patrick addressed the younger man. He did not look up from the oyster in his hand. A tremendous shell, eight inches long. He had his left palm wrapped carefully around it.
“Excuse me,” Patrick said again. “But can you tell me how to get to Arthur Coles’s residence? Eighteen-fifty Main Road. This is Main Road, isn’t it?”
The older man in the rocker tilted forward, pushed the hat out of his eyes, and shook his head. “No, this here is Thanksgiving Lane. You got to go back that way.”
“Right,” said Patrick. “How far would you say it was?”
“Well, for you, it’d be quite far. Keep going back. You’ll find it, and if you don’t, you can just keep on going back.” He tilted the hat forward again and leaned his head back against the chair, shifting the cob pipe to the opposite side of his mouth. He ground the stem of it gently between his teeth.
Patrick looked down at the other man, still shucking oysters. He had wedged the blade of his knife into the hinge between the closed shells and now he pried the two halves apart. The beige slimed meat slid out into his hand. He dropped the meat into a second pail and tossed the shell into a pile on the ground.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Patrick.
“No bother.” The man didn’t look up.
“Could you tell me how to get to Main Road?”
“Think so.” The man fished another oyster from the bucket and wedged the tip of the knife between the two halves.
“Is it a great distance from here?”
“Not far.”
“Well, could you tell me then how I might reach it?”
The man stopped his work and looked up at him. His eyes were light, the color of sand.
“I’ll pay you,” said Patrick. “If that’s what you want.”
The man’s head dropped again to the shell in his hand. He slid out the meat and tossed the empty halves into the pile. He was barefoot, his toenails untrimmed.
The older man’s head
had cocked up from the chair. “For two dollars, I can tell you,” he said, this time without raising his hat.
Patrick reached into his pocket and peeled two singles from his wallet.
The oyster shucker looked up at him and grinned. “Don’t give it to him. He’s a bad sort with strangers. Send you to Rhode Island and keep your money. I’ll tell you how to get where you’re going. Take this road here, take it north, back the way you came. Pass a lady selling vegetables on a board across two stones. That’s Mary Perry. Take the next right past her, follow that down the hill until you come to the pavilion. Take a right before the bridge. Drive that road to the end. At the top of the hill, take a left. That’s Main Road. Can’t miss it.”
“So a right, and then a right, and then a left.”
“Yeah.”
Patrick held out the two dollars, but the man shrugged away his hand, picked up another oyster, and wedged the knife into the shell.
Patrick drove north for five miles, and when he passed the woman with corn and snap beans set out on a board laid across two stones, he took the next right down the hill, and when he came to Remington’s Clambake Pavilion, he took a right onto Drift Road. The river ran on the left, parallel to the road, its blueness slashed between the trees. The day was humid, and flies died thick across the windshield of his car. When he reached the top of the hill, he took the left turn and kept going until he arrived at the spot outside the restaurant where he had stopped three quarters of an hour before.
The oyster shucking man was gone. The older man still sat on the chair, the pipe sticking out from under the lid of the felt hat.
Patrick drove another twenty yards to the end of the road, where a Sinclair gasoline sign was set outside a two-story building hung with a sign that read BLACKWOOD’S STORE. He went in. There was an older man behind the butcher counter with a thick block of beef he was cutting into thirds. Unruly jet hair. A scar folded through the left half of his face, and his right hand was gapped two of its fingers.