by Dawn Tripp
Before the sun broke, Ben started back as he did every morning toward his father’s farm. He passed through Old Dartmouth and Smith Mills. It was August 1880, and he was two days shy of twenty-six years old. He came to the turn onto Pine Hill Road that would lead him home, but when the horses went to pull left, he jerked the reins right and kept them driving straight down Rhode Island Way. He drove through the Head of Westport, across the uppermost reach of the Noquochoke, past river scows beached in marsh canals and the Macomber Store. He passed out of the village and continued through stands of inland oak and pine until he came to the stone marker at Sodom Road with its three carved hands. One pointing eight miles south to the Point, another eight miles west to Howland’s Ferry, and the third, eleven miles back toward the city from where he came.
He stopped there and considered taking that south turn, the wagon careening toward the Point, toward that new pine shell of a house still fresh with the smell of mason’s glue. He would park in the drive and slip in through the kitchen door. He would climb the back stairs toward the room floating at the end of an upstairs hall where a woman slept alone while early light poured in across her face through a window frame that had no glass.
He looked down at his hands holding the reins. The nail of his left thumb was fully black, fractured by the flat face of the hammer. He stayed there, at that crossroads, for a quarter of an hour, and his young life grew as ancient and worn as the road that stretched in three directions under him. Once an Indian path, the Way had been the route of the earliest settlers, the Sissons and the Tripps. It had been crossed by soldiers during the Revolutionary War and ground hard by wagons heavy with sawed wood, cotton, leather goods, barrels of sperm oil and grain. It was the main route of the stage that carried sacks of mail and the summer people as they spilled in from New York City off the Fall River Line.
The horses grew anxious, pawing at the soft dirt. The fingers on the carved stone marker pointed east and west and south, and Ben could feel that whatever choice he made would change his life forever. He thought of the woman. She might be awake now, moving through that unfinished house. He imagined the whalebone sled, fragile and waiting on the wall of the sitting room. He looked down again at the thumb of his left hand. The blackened nail, split in half. The skin had begun to wither around it, and he realized then that his life was already changed. He whipped the horses once and drove straight. At Howland’s Ferry, he hired a boy to drive the wagon back to his father’s farm with half of the milk money stashed in one of the empty cans. With the rest of it, he bought himself a rail ticket on the line bending west across Connecticut toward the Appalachian Range.
The wind has shifted out of the north. The rain drives toward the open door where he sits with the wings on his lap. It coats his bare toes. He can smell rotted grass, fish innards, the faint reek of the town dump two miles up John Reed Road.
He weaves the owl feathers in with the deep-barreled goose quills to find a balance in their length. Owl for stealth. Osprey for height. He knits the younger gull feathers thick into a flexible elastic on each end of the shoulder strap to socket the joint.
Aloneness, he knows, is a kind of stairwell one descends with age. He goes down more slowly now, one stair at a time, dropping worn sacks on the wide part of the steps as he goes. He is nearly empty-handed, bearing little more than a headlamp and a small box of mining tools.
Once in a while over the years, when he heard her name or some talk about her, he thought about Elizabeth Lowe and that day with the whalebone sled. He wondered if he had assumed too much. He wondered if he had made a mistake by pulling away as sharply as he did. He wondered if he had somehow read the moment wrong. It was a difficult memory. He could not quite make sense of it or resolve it, and so she haunted him, from time to time, the way a ghost might, unworked and hovering and out of reach. Once, as he was hawking through a western Pennsylvania coal town, one of the men took him down into the mines. They walked through mazes underground. Black dust. Orange light. The sweet dense reek of ore. Dead ends where the rock had given way and caved in. A cap, a shoe jutting from the rubble.
When they came back up to the surface of the earth, the sun’s brightness seared Ben’s eyes. He stumbled away from the entrance, his mind capsized by the realization that the solid everyday ground he was walking on, they were all walking on, was little more than a precarious crust.
In the late afternoon, the rain ends. He puts the wings and the still unused feathers back into their burlap sack. He goes out to the henhouse and shoos the chickens out into the yard. He drags up bucket after bucket of water from the let. He sweeps down the scour and droppings inside.
CHAPTER 9
Eve
It was the touch she couldn’t rub out. The memory itself blurred into a rush of river, wind, rain, fog, all of it gray. Jake had passed her to someone—she could not remember who—and that someone had shuffled her up to the Coles house, where her father and others were gathered around the fainting chair in the hall—her grandmother lying on drenched blue velvet—face ashen, lips violet, eyes skipping wild and then closed, wild, then closed.
“She will not be quite the same,” the doctor said, removing his glasses and folding them back into his breast pocket.
“Not quite the same,” echoed Charles.
“She will sleep it off and wake up tomorrow. But after this sort of episode, you cannot expect her to be quite the same. There’s really nothing to be done.”
“Nothing to be done,” said Charles.
The doctor’s black leather case lay open on the marble floor: the silver glint of the stethoscope, a small bottle of rubbing alcohol, a jar of pills.
Elizabeth was carried back to Skirdagh. Eve followed slowly with her father clutching tightly to her hand. She was soaked, and she noticed as they crossed the lawn that her body had begun to shiver. It wasn’t from the cold, she knew that. It was how Jake had touched her, it was as if he was still touching her, carrying her across the river toward the sandflat. She watched her shadow drag across the ground ahead of her, the other stuttering shadow that was her father attached by the hand to hers. They were awkward shadows, both of them, poorly drawn. As they crossed the yard, every so often she looked around for Jake, expecting to see him behind her, to her left or right. She would turn her head fast and from the corner of her eye she glimpsed him wading through the river toward her. She knew it wasn’t the river. The river was farther down below the trees and not visible. But she could see him moving through the current as if the moment were happening still, in some alterior space, she could feel it, the moment unfinished. She felt that way herself now—half-open, glaring, incomplete. It was as if her body were unwrapped—somehow he had unwrapped her, and now she could not find her way back to being closed.
After Elizabeth is put to bed, Eve goes down to the root cellar with Maggie. She has not been inside it since she was a child. She does not remember the small corner caves with dried roots and herbs and flowers hung in slipknot rows. She does not remember the pocket shelves built between the stones in the damp middle of the wall.
“Sit there,” Maggie says, pointing to a small stool by the woodstove. She digs out a jar of steeped thistle, orange rind, and a tin box of sassafras root.
“So you think it’s a fever you caught?” Maggie asks, lighting the woodstove.
“Maybe more of a chill. A shivering, you see how my hands shake, I can’t seem to stop them from shaking.”
Maggie sets the pot and pours a pitcher of water through cheesecloth rubbed in sage.
“It’s just a chill,” says Eve. “I thought you could rub it out.”
Maggie glances up at her and smiles. “Some sorts of chills don’t want to be rubbed out.”
“It’s just an ordinary chill.”
“Fine then, we’ll let it be that.”
“I don’t know why you would think it would be anything other than ordinary.”
“Fine,” Maggie answers, stirring the water slowly on the stove.
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Eve looks away. She will say nothing about Jake—there is nothing to say—she will say nothing about the sandflat and how he carried her through the moving water toward the bank, nothing about that strange sensation of closeness she had felt as the sky drew down around them. It was the closeness that unsettled her—that sense of waking up in someone else’s hands. Distance had a logic, a familiar geometry. Since she was a child, she had lived in distance, positioned herself in such a way so that even her own edges were as far away from her as stars. She did not have words for what she had felt on the sandflat—she knew only that she had felt it then and she could still feel it now—that closeness, an impossible closeness—it was nothing familiar, it was nothing she wanted to feel.
The pot of water on the stove has begun to boil. Eve watches as Maggie shaves the small petals off dried blue flowers into a wooden bowl. She grinds the juice out of rose hips and scalds the mixture with water, then coats a thin paste along the base of the tub.
“Get yourself inside it,” she says and turns away as Eve slips off her dress and climbs over the tall side of the tub. Maggie takes the pot from the stove, drains the water through a cloth to cool it, and pours it into the tub around her.
He comes up from the boathouse to find Maggie, to ask her how the old woman is. He stops at the door when he hears their voices and walks around to the back window.
He stands with his face at an angle against the beveled glass. The room comes to him uncertain. He can just make out the mass of kerosene burning from the corner lamp, the dark slash of Maggie and the ruthless way she moves. Her hands shudder like black swallow wings around the pale shape in the tub. The lighter floating head.
Eve takes Maggie in through her shoulders. The hands kneading her, she can feel the give in her neck, her spine. The space around them grows spare as if the atmosphere has lost its compression. She can smell the root before it is broken. She hears the sullen tear as Maggie draws it through her teeth. The bark flakes into the still water around her. She closes her eyes and lies back, resting her head against the rim of the tub. Maggie’s hands touch her face, the fingers working into the bones around her eyes, and they are close, so close, as if in that moment they are not separate, and Eve feels it all over again, the touch, his touch, Maggie, her hands and the root oil moving on her surface.
That night Eve returns to the house. Through the clouds, the moon is stretched to wet gauze in the sky. She comes into the kitchen and walks quietly past her father’s study. She can hear him writing, the scratch of the relentless quill like a rodent through the wall. She slips into the library, feeling her way across the darkness to the gooseneck lamp in the corner by the isinglass stove. She lights it, and turns the wick low so barely a film of orange coats the room.
On the middle shelf is the translation. She turns through the pages, through images of bread, rubies at sunrise, the beloved, until she finds it. She reads the lines slowly, matching Jake’s voice to the type on the page.
Lovers in their brief delight
gamble both worlds away …
A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken—
She rips it quickly. The tearing leaves a jagged edge along the seam. Through the closed door, she can hear her father leave his study, the twist of the key in the lock, his footsteps coming toward her down the hall.
She closes the book and shoves it into the coal bin beside the stove.
The footsteps pause.
“Hello,” he says, his voice slow and disconnected through the cracked door.
She does not answer.
“Hello,” he calls again, as if he is calling into a very great distance and waiting for an echo he is not sure will return.
The door opens slowly, inward. He stands on the threshold with one hand raised.
“Is that you, Alice?”
He steps into the room and carefully makes his way over to the gooseneck lamp. Eve does not move. She sits quietly on the stool. He is less than three feet away from her. “You’ve left the light on again, my dear,” he says gently and turns down the wick so the room falls dark.
He stubs his toe on the foot of the rocker on his way to the door. He leaves it open behind him, his footsteps retreating down the hallway and up the front stairs. They continue along the second-floor passage to his bedroom. Through the ceiling, Eve can hear the sullen creak of the bedsprings.
She draws the book out from the bin and dusts off the coal. She flips it open to the torn page. On her grandmother’s desk, she finds the letter opener and, carefully, she cuts away the edges down to the binding root.
The following morning, she is with Maggie in the kitchen chopping vegetables for stew. Through the window she sees Jake walking up the hill toward the house.
“I’ll be right back,” she says, shoveling the celery she has cut into the bowl.
Maggie glances up, surprised.
“I just have to run upstairs,” Eve says. “I left something upstairs. I’ll be right back.” She hurries out. She listens from the second-floor landing. She can’t hear their conversation, but she waits until the voices are done and the screen door has closed behind him. She waits until she can see his red flannel shirt moving down the wagon trail that leads back to the boathouse. Then she returns to the kitchen.
She sits back down at her place, picks up the knife and a new stalk. “Who came?” she asks, and she keeps her voice careless.
“Jake.”
“Oh. Did he come to ask after Nonna?”
Maggie stands up and walks over to the stove with the cutting board. She dumps the diced carrots into the pot. “I told him she’d be fine. As fine as she’ll be. Not worth his coming around. I told him she wouldn’t be quite the same after what happened yesterday. Might not know it yet but sometimes things happen to change you and no matter how you want it back the way it was, everything’s different then.” She looks up at Eve, squarely, her eyes dark. “But I told him I’d pass it along—that he came asking after her.”
Eve can feel the flush spread across her face. She looks away. She cuts the last piece of celery. She cuts it slowly, gently, working the knife down against the board until she can feel the wood dent under the blade.
Maggie pulls a gutted chicken from the soaking pail in the sink and sets it on the counter next to the stove. “You get what you went for upstairs?” she asks.
Eve smiles, awkwardly, her mouth tight. “You know, I couldn’t remember. Once I got there, I couldn’t remember what I’d gone for. It must not have been so important—I guess—you know, just one of those senseless things.”
Maggie nods. She slaps the chicken against the counter and breaks the thighs away from the hips. “Like I say, I told him I’d pass it along that he came asking after her.”
CHAPTER 10
Patrick
It might be out of guilt that Patrick calls at Skirdagh that following afternoon—his secret shame for having left her there, on the sandflat, as he did. He has told himself it was a mistake: he thought she was ahead of him, that the crowd of guests had picked her up and swept her back to safety on the hill. He has given the same explanation to others, and it makes sense, of course. In the light of day and appearances. He has told himself that the guilt is absurd. She was safe in the end, after all. The young caretaker—what was his name?—had gone back out for her. Patrick had watched them from inside the crowded dining room, he had watched the man as he waded up to his hips in the river and carried her—Patrick’s dream of what that unkempt town could be—drenched in his arms.
When Eve opens the door, Patrick is standing on the front steps with a bouquet of calla lilies that she knows must have come from the florist in the city. She invites him in for tea, and they sit out at the small wrought-iron table on the back porch. The afternoon sky is clear, and there is no trace of yesterday’s storm apart from some thin branches at the edge of the yard that Maggie has already raked into a pile.
Patrick makes no mention of the previous day’s events be
yond a polite inquiry regarding the health of her grandmother. She asks where he is staying and how long he intends to remain in the town. He answers that his plans are not altogether clear. The length of his stay is contingent upon a number of things that are still undetermined. He looks at her, perhaps meaningfully, as he says this.
Eve glances down at the table and the paisley design molded into the wrought iron.
He stays for a little less than an hour and asks if he can call on her again. She hesitates at first, then nods. That would be fine, she says, and he smiles. His teeth are perfect. Small. White.
In those last two weeks of August, he calls for her at the house nearly every day. They take strolls on the beach and drives into Padanaram. He takes her dancing at the Acoaxet Club and to hear chamber music at the Point Church. They spend the afternoons together on the back porch. He sits with a book several chairs away as she sketches out a still life of dahlias in a vase. They talk some but not too much.
She asks about his studies in architecture, and he tells her that he has a particular interest in city forms that place an emphasis on hierarchical order and function. “A mix of seventeenth-century urban design and the newer Bauhaus theories. Personally, I am not so fond of Gropius—too vigorous, I find. I prefer the work of Mies. Are you familiar with Mies?”
She shakes her head and notices that when he is turned a certain way, she can see pictures of the day she met him in his face: the long plank tables set out on the sandflat, the reflected silver light. She sees the terraced house up on the hill and the bare black skeleton of the pier at the end of Cape Bial. She can see herself standing on that pier, with the low-slung fleece of darkening clouds, the storm front massing in across the river. As he goes on speaking, she imagines that, deep below his voice, she can hear the sound of water filling in her ears. It is a sound that comes from a great distance, as if she has placed her ear up against the open lip of a conch. It is a sound that cannot hurt her from that distance.