Moon Tide

by Dawn Tripp

  “Do I know you?” she asks him when he reaches her.

  “It’s just me—Jake.”

  He has brought her a plate of the shellfish, peeled from their lids.

  “Are they limpets?” she asks.

  “Clams.”

  She puts one in her mouth. It is a limpet. She recognizes the tough and briny taste.

  She looks up at the young man standing near her, spray caught in his hair.

  “It was a fragile place,” she tells him.

  “You want some potatoes?”

  No. None of those. Reaching out, she takes another limpet from the plate.

  “Oisin,” she says. “He was in love, you know, and the time had seemed so short to him.”

  He smiles down at her. “You like the clams?” he asks.

  Verweile doch.

  “Will you stay for a while?” she asks him.

  He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

  “Do you think sometimes that we would rather die than feel?”

  He looks at her for a moment, his eyes shielded by the rim of his cap. Then he glances down toward the river and the girl standing at the edge of the pier—her body outlined by the silver light.

  “No,” he says slowly, shaking his head. “I have never thought that.”

  He puts the plate of shellfish on a small folding table that he places next to Elizabeth’s chair, and then he slips away, as they have all slipped, or was it the other way around? Perhaps all this time, she is the one who has been slipping, reaching for them as she goes, her feet sliding out from under her, they pass on the current just beyond her reach.

  She looks down at Eve standing on the pier. The guests are flowing down the hill toward the river and the tables set out on the flat. Jake and the younger Mason boy have laid a wooden plank across the shallows and the guests filter across it—laughing, white dresses, sun umbrellas to cup, reflect and block that silver light—a woman slips, and Jake catches her arm. He guides her the rest of the way across. He is up to his knees in the river.

  A fragile island. They would cross on the low-tide spit.

  Clouds, Elizabeth told Maggie once, are not secular at all. They are moving toward her now. They rise up out of the land across the river like mountains, tremendous solid peaks rising through the fog. She counts them—four, five, six, all Twelve Bens—she can see them out beyond her. They have always been beyond her. Solid, heavy-massed and rooted things—and just there—between Split Rock and the marsh, she can barely glimpse—as fine as gray thread—a line of black tar curraghs making their way slowly across the bay headed south toward Galway and the colonies of puffins nesting in the rock shelves of the cliffs.

  She has seen it. The gardens and the fields, the houses on the moors, a pot of thyme, coals with the orange smolder beckoning inside. She has seen the world soaked with light. She has sat in the midst of it—a wrenching light that straggles through the grass and bathes the snow. She has watched it in every season, on the river and on her bedroom walls. She has seen it sink and rise and stretch and breathe. She has called it God.

  The river is a mirror now. A cruel reflective glass, and Elizabeth wants to cry out to her—to that young girl standing on the dock. She wants to tell her what she knows about unused dreams. But her body is stiff. It has grown into the shellacked weave of the chair. She wants to stand up. To fly down the hill toward the grief of the Owenglen. She wants to draw the sky behind her the way she did once, her arms spread until they were long and full enough to catch the wind—they are all around her now—she knows—the dead—they are as common as grass. She stands up—there is another burst of air in her chest—brighter this time—sudden—the river flooding toward her up the hill and, as she falls, the sky breaks down around her.

  She quiets herself—rain on her face—they are running now, the crowd of them running by her. The thunder shakes the deep inside of the ground. Her fingers clutch through the blades of grass for the nubby texture of the heath and sweet rank smell of burning sod.

  Maggie’s face bends down out of the sky toward her, and Elizabeth is lifted. She lies back into their arms, her chin settling into the blanket tucked around her face. She turns her head slowly, and she can hear it still—the thunder rolling—the sound of wild hooves past the curved edge of the land that she can see.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jake

  Lovers in their brief delight

  gamble both worlds away …

  He has memorized twenty from the newest volume. He has studied them at night, lying on the dock with a lantern. He recites them now under his breath as he works, head down, bucketing the clams and dumping the bowls of used shells. When he looks up again, Eve has come to the table with the young architect. She halves a child potato with her knife. Quarters it. She chews gently. Her cheek smooth and white like a bark cut from the moon. They sit on the farthest bench, closest to the end. Israel Mason hands Jake another bucket of used shells, and Jake empties them off the sandflat. The shells pile into small hills in the shallows. The current, gradually rising, whittles them down.

  From the corner of his eye, Jake can see the rain moving toward them, a darker, uneven mass carried in the fog. It occurs to him that he should tell someone. He glances around. At the other end of the sandflat are Mrs. Coles and George Baker. They are just sitting down to their plates. He should warn them, he thinks. He glances back in the direction of the rain traveling stowed inside the clouds. He will not warn them. He knows this. And it is not out of malice or resentment that he makes this choice. They are who they are. They see what they see. A storm is as much a part of the sky as the sun, and it will rise and set. It will come when it comes. He puts his head back down and works the shovel under the mounting pile of shells. He pushes them loose off the flats toward the moving currents of the channel.

  They do not notice until it is directly above them and the first break of thunder splits the sky. The fog lifts. Lightning forks down, igniting the water less than a mile from where they are, on the other side of Cory’s Island.

  It is a summer storm and sudden. The rain empties down in torrents and they freeze. Forks halfway to their mouths. One clam belly poised above a butter dish. As if they cannot quite grasp the change. When the thunder claps, it unthaws them, and they all rise at once. Benches, plates, tables overturned. The ones closest to the river rush in, up to their knees, they slog toward the bank. The tarp is blown off the bake, the stakes ripped out, it sets across the harbor, billowing, catches on one of the new teak boats moored by Split Rock and shrouds it. Plates of food spill as the rain sweeps the guests into one scurrying flood toward higher ground.

  Patrick grasps Eve by the hand and presses through the crowd toward the edge of the sandflat. He has his eye on the model of the house up above them on the hill—the painstaking hours he spent—it is his only copy, and he must reach it, he will reach it—the crowd dragging him—her fingers wet and cool are slipping from his hand, a blur of parasols, white suits, unpinned hair. His grip fails, and he loses her, he lets her go, running now, the rain pastes his clothes onto him, he is guilty, he knows it, and he looks back for her once in the rush of faces—she is there—for an instant, she is there, and then lost again, behind a red-haired woman screaming openmouthed, he looks away—his eyes straining to the spot above him on the hill—the copper-flashed twin chimney—not ruined yet—and he gives himself up to the roar of the current, drenched bodies scuffling, a bare leg, a waistcoat. A cane slams his shin and he winces, trips, but hurtles himself over it, half-running, he slogs up the hill through the grass. There is a bald-headed man on his knees. Patrick skirts around him and pushes on, the hill has the sudden vertical ascent of a mountain and his heart beats ferocious in his chest. He reaches the model on the patio—the cardboard soaked but still intact. He throws his dinner jacket over the roof to shield it from the rain. He gathers it into his arms and rushes inside as the lightning strikes again, lifting the sky away from itself. The light forks down into the heart of the ma
ssive cedar tree. The dry young branches, parched by the long August heat, burst into fire.

  Eve stands still. Barely moves. They crush around her. Pass. A new wave closes in, then ebbs away. She is soaked. Her body soaked. Hollow and quiet with the rain rushing down her insides. They push and pull and suck and scream around her, and she waits, watching them scramble over one another; they break up against the riverbank, wet skins, wet shoes, pushing helplessly against the bright, slick moss. They slip on the grass, the grass skidding out from under them, and they are down on all fours. The hill is drenched. A delirious green.

  Except for the grass, what she sees is black and white. The rain dashes everything. Breaks it up so it comes to her filtered through a static. Close to the house, a slash of red that might be Maggie’s scarf, and her father—is that her father?—a man huddled by a square pillar, his arms wrapped around its sharp angled shape.

  Through the blur, Eve can see Elizabeth. The old woman stands, her arms lifting to the air as light as eiderdown. And then she falls, gently, her hair loosening out of its pins as the rest of them swarm up the hill, frantic kicking tiny fish, against that brilliant livid green.

  No land only water,

  and a herd of sacred cattle that lived under the waves.

  She cannot remember where she heard it, if she ever did hear it. A story poured into her ear. Or one of those myths that is born in the cells, the kind one will spend a life unraveling.

  Thunder cracks the sky, and her grandmother is lifted. They bear her on their shoulders the way they come to bear the dead. They lift her high as if they are offering her up to the rain.

  Slowly, Eve begins to back toward the far edge of the sandflat. Through the churning surface of the river, she can see the struggle of the cows; their heads twist, waves kicked up under their hooves. She stares at them transfixed.

  —the holler from my father’s slaughterhouse—it would wake us in sweat—

  and she can hear it now—through the wind and the torrent rush of water pressing toward her.

  She takes another step back. The heels of her shoes stick in the mud, and she steps out of them.

  The marsh drops off suddenly, the river is up to her chest, the current tugging at her legs, drawing her into the swift moving flush of the channel. Their bellowing surrounds her. It grows into a vast untethered roar, filling with the water in her ears as the sky lowers down across the river, and fog, wind, water, clouds merge into one smothering gray. She struggles to keep herself afloat, her head above the surface. Something snares her ankle. She kicks, and it draws taut, a ropy teeth towing her down.

  She does not notice Jake until he has reached her. The touch startles her, and she fights against him, thrashing out of his arms. He grasps her by the waist and begins to pull her from the current. When he realizes she is caught, he dives down, following her legs to the crab pot line wrapped twice around her shin. He cuts it loose, pushes back to the surface, hand over hand up her body. The river is pulling them both now, fast downstream toward the mouth.

  “Hold on,” he yells above the rain. He slings her arms around his neck and begins to swim in a diagonal to the current, slowly edging toward the slack of slower water off the marsh.

  He pulls her through the eelgrass, and they crawl onto the sandflat that has thinned to three feet, the tables sloped into the rising tide, their legs broken at the knees. One remaining bench is wedged at odd ways, half-toppled, half-standing, in the disappearing sand. Eve is sick in the mud, heaving air and salt water. Jake picks her up, still choking. He wades with her in his arms off the flat into the shallows toward the shore.

  Everything happens then. In that small journey of less than ten yards, her body soaked, heavy with the river and crushed against his chest, she looks up to his face and the rain pouring through it. The sky looms above them, its unceasing grayness slung across his shoulders. The water clings around his eyes, drops from the lashes. He does not look at her. He is speaking under his breath, not to her but to everything around her, as if the steady flow of small words could carve a passage through the relentless pressure of the wind and storm and tide. And in the words, which are barely audible, which she can barely hear, she finds something of herself, something of him, still and hovering. They are encased together, a skein of light shelter moving through the violence of the rain.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ben Soule

  When he was a boy, he fenced with lightning. Broke a cedar post off a neighbor’s front fence and carved it to a sword point at one end. He walked out alone into his father’s plowed fields and dared the crooked white light to strike him.

  It is a southwest wind. He sets his chair by the open door to watch the storm. The wind burrows under the surface of the let, raising the water in long ragged sheets. The water piles up onto the marsh. He has the wings on his lap. Half-knitted. He knows that they used balsam wood at Kitty Hawk, but he chose willow for the frame. He has carved two arced tiers for each half, the upper slightly longer. He has set sticks vertically between the tiers, stitching the twigs into the porous wood with galvanized wire. He wraps the frame in silk, pulled taut, and he attaches a rawhide strap that will lie across his shoulders. He sews two leather grips halfway down the underside of each wing for his hands.

  He has heard what happened to Icarus and he will not use wax. He nicks small holes with the sewing needle into the lower barrel of each feather and threads them with a leader wire. As he weaves the needle through the cloth, then through the quill and back again through the cloth, he thinks about a luna moth he trapped once in his hands years ago as he was setting joists in the attic of a house near the Point off Main Road. The moth’s wings were pale green. Velvet. Antennae like fern. He could feel the creature fluttering inside his palms. Its body covered with a silky fur.

  It was a house raised in one summer out of a turnip field. The first house of that size to be built on the Point side of the river. It seemed gangly, ostentatious, overhuge. It would be the summer home of a young couple from Boston—a Henry and Elizabeth Lowe. Bill Hawkins had the contract. They broke ground in early June. Land graded, cleared. The cistern marked. Well dug. Each window ordered custom-framed. A heavy oak front door. Sixty-nine crates of furnishings shipped overland from the New Bedford piers. It took eight trips on Brick Gallows’s wagon with a sixteen-foot bed.

  The wife was about Ben’s age—maybe a year or two older—still childless. She set bowls of everlastings, bittersweet, snapdragons on the floors of the empty rooms. She set vases of hawkweed to mark where she wanted a bed, a sofa, a hutch, a chest of drawers. She was a particular woman. She wanted her things to go where she meant her things to go. Just so.

  She wore a pale yellow dress on that last day. Sleeves rolled up past the elbow. A white lace ruff. Ben had come down the stairs from his work in the attic in the late afternoon. She was in the dining room, surrounded by unpacked crates. Piles of damask napkins on the table, bone china, Waterford crystal, a butter dish. Her husband had left earlier that day for Boston. Ben had heard them arguing. Their voices carried through the hollowed rooms. The wife had insisted on being left behind alone.

  There was a slim-waisted pewter oilcan on the dining table next to her, scissor snuffers, and a pewter cone. On the floor by her feet was a child’s sled made of whalebone with a wicker seat and, next to that, a baleen fishing pole. She was polishing her silver.

  “You’re done then for the day?” she asked him without looking up.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered.

  She did not seem to be the kind of woman who would choose to live on this side of the river, but Ben had heard from Hawkins that she had begged her husband for the craggy sprawl of land. He could tell by her talk she was a foreigner. Not Cape Verdean or Port-a-gese. A different kind. Rich with a pale face.

  There was a pile of books in German on the end of the dining table closest to him.

  “These yours?” he asked her.

  Elizabeth glanced up. “Yes.”

 
“You read them?”

  The corners of her mouth curled slightly. “That is what one does with books.”

  He flushed. She was laughing at him. Her eyes were sharp. Dark blue. She studied his face for a moment, then looked down at the polish rag in her hand. She had a proud neck, her cheek cut high in that dusky light, and he wanted to touch her. He wanted to sand the angles of her face the way he knew how to sand oak until the grain had the texture of silk.

  She asked if he would help her hang the whalebone sled.

  He nodded, and she led him down the hall into the sitting room by the north side entrance of the house.

  “There”—she pointed—“by the long window.”

  He drove two nails into the wall. As he was setting a third, he slammed the hammer hard into his thumb. Elizabeth cried out, her hand reaching, and she touched him. Briefly. Suddenly. Her fingers brushed his wrist. His eyes flew to her face, and he could see a slight electric hunger passing through. She stared back at him.

  He looked down at their hands, still touching, hers slight, long-fingered and white, his dashed with paint, sawdust, dirt, the thumb dented, blood rushing into a black pool under the nail.

  He jerked his hand away, confused, and ashamed of his own confusion. His hand throbbed. He fumbled with the third nail, settled it, and slammed it once hard, this time on the head.

  She stepped back as the nail drove into the wall. Ben lifted the sled and laid its gentle spine across the nails and, without a word, strode out of the house.

  He returned to his father’s farm, ate, and went to bed as he did every night by seven. He woke at midnight and left at one A.M. with the fifteen ten-gallon milk pails covered in horse blankets on the wagon. He reached New Bedford by three, wrapped the horses’ hooves in cloth, and they made the rounds through the cobbled streets of the South End.