by Dawn Tripp
“Et toi?” Madeline says, nudging her shoulder. “What do you think?”
She pushes Eve gently toward Patrick as the three of them walk, and they make a game of her, nudging her back and forth as if she were a piece of driftwood caught between them. She is aware of her own light weight, as easily swayed as a blade of eelgrass at slack tide.
As they are turning onto the vast and tree-lined esplanade that will lead them back up to the street, Eve notices a man farther ahead along the quay. She pauses for a moment. He has his back to her and he is scything down the weeds along the bank. It is the motion that reminds her. It is the motion he seems to inhabit, that steady hooked flow of the blade.
“Viens toi, cherie,” says Madeline, tugging at her sleeve, but she does not turn.
“Eve,” says Patrick firmly. “Come.” He takes her by the elbow, tucks her arm under his, and draws her away from the river up the esplanade. She does not look back. The pressure of her arm clipped under Patrick’s is decisive. It grounds her and she lets herself be led.
They take their coffees at a smaller street café by the Dôme. They order a raspberry tart and a plate of biscuits with cheese. They are drinking their coffees when Patrick spots a colleague of his from the States in a group on the other side of the café. He excuses himself and leaves the table. Madeline leans over and whispers to Eve that she would like to bring him home. Her breath is full of almond. He will lie between them on the white sheets, she says, they will make love and drink wine and then he will sit slightly apart on the window seat and he will watch them together. He will tell them what he wants to see.
Eve looks after Patrick stepping around the small tables that stumble out onto the street—his gray suit weaving through the yellowed light—a slight forked wrinkle between the shoulder blades.
Under the table, she feels Madeline’s hand press against her thigh, and it occurs to her that they will not be this close again. It occurs to her that the way Madeline touches her—fingers curious and lithe—is something she will miss. The affair itself was careless, she knows this, but it had its own playful life, skittish and surreal, that she will miss.
She leaves them that night—she kisses Madeline on each cheek and offers Patrick her hand.
“Of course I’ll see you home,” he says, standing up.
“Thank you. I’m quite all right.”
“I insist.”
“Again, thank you but I’m fine.”
“A taxi then. Let me call a taxi for you.” He takes her arm, but she gently slips it loose.
“I assure you,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”
His face is red and disarranged the way it was that first day she saw him on the Coleses’ terrace by the Brie. He sits down again.
She glances back at them once. Madeline has leaned across the small table, and she is whispering something to Patrick as if the level of noise around them has prevented proper distances. His chin is bent, listening, but he glances up once, and his head raises slightly when he catches Eve looking back. She turns away toward the stream of traffic through the street. It is September again, she remembers, as she waits for a horse carriage to pass. She crosses to the other side.
She does not go directly back to her apartment. She walks through the narrow streets to the painting studio above the boulangerie. The bakers have already come. They are setting tomorrow’s loaves into the oven, painting them with a wash of sugared milk.
The easels are set, stripped in their rows—awkward skeletons in the dark. She opens the drawers of stones and steals the chunk of lapis. She steals it for the white vines that web through its surface. She steals it for its weight in her hand. That night she packs the green steamer trunk and sets the blue rock next to her pillow. As she lies in bed, the curtains heave up like white ghosts around the devastating freedom of the open window space. She can feel her face in colors when she closes her eyes. She dreams of standing in the lower meadow at Skirdagh knee-deep in sunlight with the birch trees close by—their small leaves trembling, a wild green music in the wind. She dreams of walking with her father on the beach at Horseneck. She dreams of the moon on the river at night, the way the light unravels. She dreams of a time once when she was a child wading barefoot with her grandmother through the maze of eelgrass in the let. They were gathering elderberries, and as they walked, Elizabeth told Eve that once the let was open to the sea. It was filled when the road was laid down across East Beach and the summer people began to build. She told her that over the years the let grew into a haunted place, and its hauntedness came because it was not often touched. Eve walked on quietly beside her grandmother through the shallows, her skirt tied up around her knees, mud running soft between her toes. She looked for the fish hiding in the ridges where the water level changed.
She is not entirely surprised when she meets Patrick on the ship pulling out of Liverpool. They have already lost sight of land when she turns the corner on the first-class deck and he is there, strolling toward her.
She asks him about the conference in Cologne.
“Canceled,” he answers and smiles.
As the days deepen across the ocean, she senses Paris growing farther and farther away.
Patrick finds her nearly every morning after breakfast on the deck. He sits with a book several chairs away as she sketches, the way they sat together in the afternoons at Skirdagh the summer before. Once in a while, when she looks up at him, she can see the aliveness of the city she has left in his face. She can see Madeline, red geraniums, crushed zaffer, her own free body, and the wrought-iron window grates. They take four o’clock tea together, and he tells her that, in the year she was away, he went to work for Arthur Coles and the Westport Real Estate Trust.
“Coles has great plans for the town,” he says, stirring cream into his tea.
“For the harbor side?”
“No, for the Point. North of the Point. Farther up Main Road from your family’s house.”
Eve breaks a scone and sets half down on her plate. “There’s nothing but farms farther up Main Road.”
“It’s the farms Coles wants.”
“They won’t sell their farms.”
“Oh yes, I think they will,” Patrick answers, heaping out a teaspoonful of sugar.
“That’s their land. You don’t understand how they feel about their land.”
“Arthur Coles is a certain kind of man,” Patrick says. He pours more tea into her cup. “He knows how to offer someone not too little, not too much, but just enough.”
She takes the half of scone and breaks it again. She nibbles at the dried currants that have soaked in butter and flour.
“Are you that kind of man?” she asks.
He takes her hand gently, tucks it into his. She clings to the bland screen of his face and the images massing there.
“I can offer you enough,” he answers, and she notices that when she is with him, she does not feel. He reminds her of things that have mattered: of Skirdagh, of that day of the storm on the sandflat, of Madeline and the strange, unbandaged span of time she spent in Paris. He is linked to these disruptions in her life, these moments of irrevocable impact, and yet when she is sitting with him, when he takes her arm to steer her through a door, even now, as he is holding her hand across the table, she finds herself curiously numb, her fingers like clay-cold fish. His rather dispassionate attitude toward the town, his work, even toward her, mutes her own desire, and she notices as if she is studying herself from a distance that she derives a sense of comfort from the absence of feeling. She is safe, detached, like a shadow unhinged.
CHAPTER 12
Wes
On the second Sunday of September, 1933, Caleb Mason stops down at the Shuckers Club to tell Wes about the schooner coming in that night with six hundred cases of Indian Hill. Sailing down from Nova Scotia, she will anchor past the wreck for one night before she continues down the coast to drop whatever’s left to Chape Fisk’s gang at Sakonnet Point. They plan to meet at the wharf after dark an
d to push off close to ten. That same morning on his way back up Main Road, Mason busts a wheel on his wagon by the Tuttle Farm. As he is fixing it, a truck comes over the hill, bearing straight toward him. Mason slides out from under the wagon and runs across the road. The truck swerves to avoid him, sideswiping the wagon, which ricochets across the macadam, picks Mason up on the edge of its flatbed, and pins him, head first, into Joe Tuttle’s new stone wall.
Billy Gallows comes down to the Shuckers Club to tell Wes the news.
“Dead?”
“Not quite.”
“He will be?”
“Not sure.”
Wes lights a cigarette. He racks the balls on the pool table, breaks them with the cue, and begins to shoot a game against himself. He sinks a stripe in the corner pocket and glances up at Billy. “What you waiting on?”
“You’ll need someone to go with you tonight.”
“Nothing’s doing tonight.”
“I hear there is.”
“Yeah? Who’d spin that for you?”
“Someone who’d know.”
“No one knows nothing, ’cause there’s nothing doing.”
Gallows scuffs his foot into a loose board.
“Who told you?” Wes asks, chalking the end of the cue. He drags in on his cigarette and watches the younger man’s face. “Thin Gin?”
“Naw, he’s a dumb fuck.”
“Davoll?”
“Nope.”
“Penny?”
“Old man’s cracked.”
“Blackwood?”
In the eyes, a brief flicker. “No way,” says Gallows.
“Was Blackwood, wasn’t it.”
“Said no.”
“Blackwood’s wet. Always been wet. You know that, well as I do. He ain’t from here.”
“Wasn’t him, I say.”
“All right then.” Wes stands up. He blows off the tip of the cue and stubs his cigarette out on a sawhorse. “Get yourself gone.”
That afternoon, Wes goes out alone to dig. He leaves the skiff aground at the edge of the bar. As he drives his feet into the shallow murk, and his toes scrape the rough-lined shells of clams, he knows that what he is looking for is the solidity of Maggie—the taste of her. He digs deeper—down to the point where the grass takes root, the point where he lost her, where she became vast, and his own desire unintelligible and frightening to him.
When he sees her now in the town, he has visions of Blackwood stealing that taste of her on the meat cutting board in the store behind the Nabisco bins, the shelves above them stocked full of Campbell’s soup and condensed milk—a red-and-white-labeled jury peering down—when he sees her, he sees Blackwood’s huge hands and the imprints they have made, that they still make—the anger caves him in around himself like the white shadow heat makes on a new paved road.
Now digging on the flat, Wes can feel her the way he wants to remember her—the way she was to him that night they spent together in the root cellar—her body soaked around him with the smell of earth and geranium mold. She bled lightly, and he took her blood into his mouth. She marked his throat with her scent and, for days afterward, he could taste everything about her—who she was, where she came from, how she had split into him like a rogue wave that builds suddenly out of itself with no other source. Even now, as the tide begins to turn, he can sense her blood in the cracks between his teeth. He walks through the marsh, stopping where the sand grows soft. He digs down, feeling for the hardness of the clams—he mimics their burrow—it is a route he knows. As the tide begins to flood, his feet push down harder as if he could dig to the heart of things—and he senses her—an impression that might be her—in the reek off the marsh and the tug of the salt air. His skin rises to it.
On his way back to the wharf, he passes a swarm of gulls feeding on schoolie bass in the deep channel. He casts into the rip and catches six in a quarter of an hour.
He ties up at the dock house by the Sinclair gasoline sign. He carries the pail of fish down to the Point Meadows and guts them by the water’s edge. He sharpens the knife tip on a flat rock, lifts each one from the bucket, and eases the tip into the throat. He cuts them down the center, peels them inside out, whittles the scale away from the skin, and then cuts the wings of meat into thin strips off the bone. He sets the fillets down on the higher ground of the bank. The crows come while he is slivering the last of them. They stalk around the bone pile and then dart in to work what is left. He knows they will always go first for the jellied meat of the eyes, as if they could swallow that different way of seeing.
At ten that night, Wes goes out alone. He takes Mason’s dragger out to the schooner waiting in the Rum Row zone two nautical miles east of the Sow and Pigs. He loads his boat and heads back toward the harbor. One half mile off the Nubble, the engine catches over itself once and dies. He fiddles with the choke and starts her again, but she is limping, and he makes his way in short glib bursts until he reaches the breakwater. He has missed the tide, it has already turned toward the ebb. He sets the boat on drift off the Lion’s Tongue. As he is wrapping the engine head with a tarp to stifle the sound, from the corner of his eye he sees a black shape moving across the channel from the Charlton Wharf toward his starboard side. A six-bitter patrol. He goes on working, tying down the tarp around the engine. He picks up a screwdriver and jams his pistol into his belt. He keeps himself in a crouch and throws the throttle hard into reverse, aiming the stern directly at the mass of shadow moving toward him. The chaser throws her lights, and he can see the lean bright arc of tracers through the dark above his head. One bullet tears into his shoulder, clean through the muscle and out the other side. The hull of the patrol rises up out of the blinding whiteness of the searchlight and, just before impact, Wes swerves hard to the right and then slams the throttle forward, wide open, around the Lion’s Tongue into the deeper water behind the jetty. The dragger engine makes a pathetic slow thrust forward, and the guard boat is just pulling up along his port side as Wes runs the dragger aground on Cory’s Island. He slips off the stern into the black water and pulls himself along the bottom until he reaches the shallows. For two hours he lies belly-down in a gutter of mud between the reeds as they comb the marshes for him.
It is after one A.M. when he reaches the Point. He swims in along the west pier, a crippled stroke; his left shoulder aches with the bullet wound. The pain is erratic. It shudders through his arm—stark and unpredictable. It is the pain that makes him think of her—it chews him down in that same way. He can see the coast guard six-bitter tied up at the wharf and Mason’s dragger tied alongside. In the dock light, he can see the stash. A young guard with a shotgun sits on top of the crates. Wes pulls himself around the west pier onto the beach of one of the summer houses at the end of Valentine Lane. He drags himself along the hedge, across the garden, up the road toward North Kelly’s barn. He finds a tin of gasoline in the shed, wraps it in a horse blanket, and carries it in his good arm. At the end of Main Road next to the dock house is the constable, Jeb Gifford, and two of his officers. They stand with three other men in coast guard uniform. They are waiting for him. He slips through several backyards, crouched with the moon on his back, his shadow thrown against the stone walls. When he reaches the pier, he keeps himself low, close to the boats, until he has made his way past the group of men to the back entrance of Blackwood’s store. With a jackknife he jimmies the lock and slips inside.
He cuts four yards of fishing wire off the spool and five yards of three-quarter line from a coil by the door. He unfolds one of the reinforced seine nets, picks up a spade, and climbs the stairs. He pauses at the top by the closed door, and then slowly, gently, he turns the knob and pushes it open.
Blackwood is alone, asleep on his back, his body washed in the yellow kerosene light left burning on the desk. A tremendous bruise spreads across his chest, its center darkest at the fractured rib bone just below the heart.
Wes closes the door. The lock clicks shut. Outside in the small hallway, with the seine,
the line, and the spade, he rigs a trap. He strings it between the stairwell posts and the door handle. Then, he goes back downstairs for the gasoline. He empties a quarter of the tin under the door and leads a trail down the stairs. He douses the counter and the shelves and then backs his way to the door, emptying the tin as he goes. He lights a match and sets it down to the end. The room explodes around him. As he turns to push his way out the back door, he trips on the coil of rope that he had drawn out to cut minutes before. He falls, striking his head against a dory piled with galvanized pipes.
The light shatters Blackwood’s sleep. A blinding surge of yellow-blue light, and he sits up in bed, his eyes wide, still dreaming, scrambled brain, the bedclothes around him flooded with a raging orange heat. Everywhere color. It seems impossible that there could be so many colors implicit in a single fire. White. Sulfur. Violet. Red. Even the shadows bristle with hue. He had always imagined a death by water—the drag of his consciousness down by the reins through black and heaving waves. The merciless shutting down of light. But this? He had no history for this. He can hear the sudden crackling of skin, the reek of wilting flesh he knows to be his own. He had never dreamed of this. His eyes swivel around the room to grasp it the way he remembered it, the way it was. He can see the breakdown of everything familiar—the dissolution of the wall, the bureau gathered into smoke, his desk and ledger books, papers scrapping up like shredded wings through vertical bursts of flame.
He feels relief. Inside. It is almost a comfort to know that this is how he has finally come to die. There will be no drowning. No squeeze of water in the lungs. He has no fear of this. It is an unknown. The fire will eat him as fire does, from the outside in.