Moon Tide

by Dawn Tripp

  She gets out of bed and goes downstairs into the library. She takes a match and holds it to the coals until they light. She lays the soapstone to heat on the stove, wraps herself in a thin wool blanket and sits in the rocking chair. She tries to untangle the design of willow buds through the window, her body pressed thin, rocking. Her feet grow numb, hooked onto the lowest rung. She has never sat in this chair, her grandmother’s chair. She listens to the stillness of the library around her, the winding paths of books. Some of those books, she knows, will never be opened again. The soapstone eyes her from the top of the isinglass stove, an orange heat held into its underside. She wraps it in cloth and takes it upstairs. She slips back into bed beside Patrick. She keeps her back turned toward him and curls herself around the stone.

  She knows that it can burn the way ice burns, placed directly against the skin. Carefully, she winds two of her fingers through a break in the folds of the cloth and presses them against the rock. At first there is nothing, then the scald hits, and she can feel her heart moving through her hand. She takes her fingers off the rock and wraps it closed again. Her hand throbs. The pain is sharp, the skin swollen with quick blisters from the heat. She places the stone on the floor and rolls toward Patrick, feeling for his arm. She buries into his shoulder, looking for a place she can lose herself.

  “Do you love me?” she whispers.

  “What did you say?” His voice is heavy with sleep.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have a busy day tomorrow.”

  “I’ve burnt my hand,” she says. “On the stone.”

  “You should be more careful.”

  “It hurts. I didn’t imagine it would hurt this much to feel.”

  “I have a busy day tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure you love me?”

  “Of course, I love you,” he says and his body settles back into its sleep.

  She touches the burnt places on her hand. She bends her fingers, then straightens them to make the blood run smooth again. She wraps them tightly in her other hand, and in the dark, with the vague shape of Patrick lying next to her, she realizes that she does not love him. She has never loved him. It is not a cruel realization. It is stark and simple and complete.

  At breakfast the next morning, she peels the rind from an orange and listens to the sound the yellow birch leaves make as they are falling. They have turned early. She counts the ones that are left, pinned like aberrant wings to their lean branches. The wind shivers through them, and they tinkle up against one another like glass. With her nails, she cuts away the white connective tissue around each piece of the orange. Piece by piece. The wind picks the yellow leaves off the branches, one by one, each shred caught in its own spiral that is sacred by the fact of being final, a source of joy, freedom, grief. She peels the rest of the white membrane off the orange until it is gone. By now, she knows that what will be left is something that to her is inedible. She leaves the pulp on the table in a small bowl.

  She walks away from the house into the woods toward the river and finds herself looking back across her life. She can see its twists, the breaks in the coastline, the sudden, abrupt shifts where she stepped away from herself, and now the slow, almost painful emerging into clearer air.

  She crosses the lower meadow and takes the path through the woods down to the river. She finds the boathouse door unlatched and the room cold. Jake has left a potato on the woodstove, its skin a thick crust holding the heat of the flesh inside. She walks through the room: a small table, a blue enamel cup, a tin bowl, the sunken frame of the bed. Her fingers hover above the blanket as if she could sense the weight of his body from the wool. She moves along the stacks of books against the wall. A half-mended lobster net with the massive needle at mid-stitch around the ring lies folded in a corner next to his rod and line, bait pail, eel spear, a double-barreled shotgun. She does not touch anything, not even the book that he has left face down in the lap of the chair, until she finds the heart carved out of pine on the nail keg behind the stove. She picks it up and turns it over in her hand. She presses her fingernail into the eye just off its midline and dents the groove deeper in. She closes her hand around it, opens it, then closes it again. The heart drifts without a sail in her palm.

  Heading back toward the house, she sees Maggie by the garden.

  Eve tries to avoid her, keeping close to the woods, but Maggie has already seen her. She waves. Eve cuts across the garden, stepping carefully around the small mounds of squash. Maggie’s apron is full of lettuce heads.

  “Do you need help carrying those?” Eve asks her.

  Maggie grins. “They’ll dirty you.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Maggie hands her two of the heads, and they start back up the hill. “Where you coming from?”

  “Just down there.” Eve nods back toward the woods.

  “What for down there?”

  “I just went for a walk.”

  Maggie looks at her sideways.

  “It was just a walk,” Eve says. “Nowhere in particular.”

  Maggie doesn’t answer. She glances down at Eve’s neck and the slight claws of red flush that have begun to spread around the collar of her dress.

  “All right then. We’ll call it a walk.”

  And they continue without words up the hill, Eve gripping the rough feathered heads of the lettuce, one in either hand.

  She finds Patrick upstairs. On one corner of his desk is a breakfast plate with thin johnnycakes and two slices of bacon he has not touched.

  She watches him from the shadow of the hallway. He is bent over his desk—shirt collar undone—with the unrolled blueprint of the hotel he has designed for Arthur Coles. They will break ground the following April, and it will be built on the spot where Blackwood’s store used to be. He does not notice her standing there. He does not notice when she leaves. She takes the narrow stairs into the attic. She climbs over the steamer trunks and the crates of books to the oval window. Below the trees, she can see the switchback turns of blue water at the bottom of the hill.

  Jake is out on the river. He keeps the boat on a slow drift in the margin between the flats and the deeper channel. He stands balanced on the stern as the tide draws him toward the bridge. Above his head, gulls whittle the sky.

  The river light cuts him into angles—his body is black, solid, against the silver, wrinkled surface. As the channel narrows, the marsh drops suddenly, and the boat pulls away from the flats into the current, toward the run where the water is deepest and goes still.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Storm

  It was before they had names.

  She was born in the warm shallows off the coast of Africa. A slender, wily shape, she began her journey west, her backside pushed by the prevailing pressure flow.

  On the crossing, she stripped currents of moist air from the surface of the ocean, and as the earth turned under her, she spiraled slowly toward herself, hugging the warm jet stream.

  She continued west until she had reached the southern ridge of the Azores-Bermuda high. She ascended its steep face, moved along its backbone ridge, then dropped down into a trough. For a while there, she paused, in that elongated, lower zone. Then she shifted her direction and began to head north, gradually gaining speed.

  She extended her arms and wrapped the power in her body. She grew broader, more twisted. She gathered mass. She pulled smaller storms into cycling bands around her eye. She absorbed squalls and winds and heavy rains and built them up into shuddering, unfixed towers. Walls of clouds heaved and fell around her.

  She struck hard into an island chain and then broke free back out to open water. She moved north up the coast, the waves along her front edge chewing up the ocean in her path.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jake

  When Jake stops by the Shuckers Club on Sunday morning, the eighteenth of September, to return a bucket of plugs he had borrowed from North Kelly
the Thursday before, they are sitting out on the bench debating what kind of storm it will be.

  The broadcast had come through earlier that morning on the new radio—the same radio they have been listening to all summer—three steps above the old crystal set with the homemade sound. They keep it on from six A.M. until ten at night. They place bets on every Sox game. They take in Amos ’n’ Andy and vague reports of Hitler’s continued march across Europe. They argue about whether or not there will be another war.

  They meet at the dock house now. A year ago, Swampy Davoll sold his workshop and the room above it to Arthur Coles when Coles made him an offer he couldn’t resist. They had kept the pool table. They had carried it across the street—six men bearing that huge slate table on their shoulders as if it were a coffin. Spud Mason and North Kelly had busted Swampy’s chops once or twice for selling out—but cash was cash, and they stopped their grumbling when he used some of the extra to buy the radio and a rack of new balls for the table. On the day the deal closed and Coles took possession, North Kelly pried off the old quarter-board sign from above the workshop door. He carried it across the street to the dock house and hammered it into the outside wall above the bench. He repainted THE SHUCKERS CLUB in black tar and drew an arrow pointing down.

  When Jake stops by on the morning of the eighteenth, there are four of them sitting on the bench—Swampy, Thin Gin, North Kelly, and Russ Barre. They crowd together on the seat, each one jabbing an elbow into someone else’s ribs from time to time.

  The broadcast had come through at seven A.M.—the U.S. Weather Bureau announced that ships in the South Atlantic were flashing warnings of a storm center zigzagging northwest at seventeen miles per hour, headed for Florida and the Keys. Swampy scoffed, said it would be nothing more than a line storm—that every-year three-day blow that passed through mid-September when the sun crossed over the equator line.

  When Jake stops by, it is just past eight. They have been bickering over it for nearly an hour.

  “How be ya, Jake?” Thin Gin waves. “On the radio, they be saying we could see a hurricane.” He is a slight man, eel-like with a shrunken face. His bottom lip was torn fifteen years ago when a codfish hook caught him in the mouth.

  “You’re a puddler, Thin Gin,” Swampy says curtly. “No hurricane in these parts.” He whittles down a piece of cedarwood.

  “On the radio—”

  “Cuts no ice with me. Hurricane down there maybe. Up here, we’re due for a line storm. Won’t be nothing but that.”

  They debate whether there will be a shift in wind. If it pulls into the northwest, it will spit the sea clams up onto the beach. Someone asks if Davy Santos has his corn cut yet—there might be enough of a blow this time of year to flatten the crop. It is close in on a full moon, an equinox tide, and they wonder if the wind will kick up the surf and whether or not they should pull their gear.

  Russ Barre stubs out his butt and remarks how last year’s muckraker tore up so much bottom, Gooseberry was left a carpet of dead lobster with smashed backs.

  “Might be a chance to make a beer on the skukes,” he goes on. “Five bills here and there boarding up windows. You’re in tight with them, Jake, you think that’d fly?”

  “She’ll shift course,” says North Kelly. “Bounce the coast at Hatteras and head east. She’ll be mid-Atlantic by Wednesday. Burn herself out there somewhere.” He packs in a wad of chew against his gum.

  “Might see a breeze though,” Swampy says. He whittles the tip of his pocketknife into the shadow of an eye in the wood. “Might see some surf worth watching.”

  Jake glances toward the river. The sky is mild, hazy, restless.

  “Still making those decoys, Jake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any pintail hens?”

  “Sure.”

  Down the road, a touring car comes toward them, full of leftover summer people heading across the bridge for a last splash at the beach.

  They watch the car pass by. A woman laughs. The man driving tips his hat and waves at them.

  They don’t wave back.

  Jake drops the bucket of plugs down in front of North Kelly, flicks his cap and leaves.

  CHAPTER 6

  Maggie

  On the nineteenth of September, the mute swan moves her roost to the whiskey barrel near the vegetable garden. Maggie mentions the swan to Jake that afternoon when she sees him on his way back from the beach, and he tells her that for the last few weeks, he has seen a pair down by the boathouse, squatting in an overturned dinghy that had been left to rot under the dock. The wood of the hull had begun to decompose into the marsh. He had no idea, he said, how long they had been living there. He had seen them by chance one morning when he went down to the river to clean out a bucket of wood ash and the female flew at him, her tough beak stabbing toward his arm, before she retreated back to the heather and dried corn husks she had built into a pile on the sweet-smelling rotten wood.

  When Maggie goes up to the main house the next morning, she finds the sheets soiled and Elizabeth walking circles in her bedroom, her hair uncombed from its braid, the tie of her dressing gown trailing on the floor.

  “Holy fear in the well,” the old woman says, shifting her fingers back and forth. “Holy fear in the well.”

  Her spine has grown hooked, folded over itself, a sudden humped rise between her shoulder blades.

  Maggie draws her to the water closet, pulls up the dress, and sits her down on the toilet.

  “Peeee,” says Elizabeth, her face puckering with the effort. “Peee. Peeeee.”

  Maggie stands next to her and strokes the back of her head—the clear spot where the hair has fallen out and now refuses to grow.

  “Peeeee.” Elizabeth clutches Maggie’s sleeve. Her hands are completely gnarled, the fourth finger triggered down, the tendon failed, frozen in place. Her skin bruises easily now, as easily as ginger.

  On the toilet she pushes, the vein straining from her temple, deep blue and crooked like a lightning.

  A burst of hard air comes out of her, a slow wheeze, and finally the water. It squirts, then runs in a trickle. Soft music.

  “Peee,” she says. “Peeeee.”

  Maggie wipes her with the cloth towel, dips the sponge in the sink, and cleans the dried shit stains from her legs. She leads Elizabeth back into the bedroom, sits her down at the dressing table, and unties the rest of the braid. She will use only the soft brush now, a baby’s brush. Even then, if the bristles scratch, the skin won’t heal for days.

  Since the stroke, the old woman’s mind has been a slow swerve away from order. There is still a predictable geometry of surface fears: has the telephone bill been paid? Seventy-five cents? How can they charge so much? Has the milk soured? Sean? Have we had any news from Sean?

  During the day, she will rarely spend time in the library. For several hours she will barely sit still. She devours her breakfast, then walks through the hallway, in and out of every unlocked room, shifting her crippled fingers back and forth as if she were trying to reopen her palm. Even as she eats, her body thins.

  When Elizabeth’s hair is combed and tied up into a loose knot at the base of her neck, Maggie picks up a jar. She unscrews the lid and rubs cream along the old woman’s jaw.

  Once in a while through the coolness of the cream, Maggie will feel a tremor pass through Elizabeth’s face—a deeper fear—cloaked and nameless. She will press her fingertips into the dent between the eyes until they close and the face drops its tension. She works gently into the frail skin around each lid.

  Elizabeth mumbles something about the warrior who built a stone table as a shelter for his love.

  “Yes, tell me,” Maggie says.

  “A butterfly burnt to nothing.”

  “No,” says Maggie, bending down close to her ear, “it is so much more.”

  The old woman’s eyes snap open, smoky, unnerved. She looks through herself, through Maggie in the mirror, to the antique vial lying on the bureau behind them that wa
s once filled with holy water from the well of a saint. The cork is still intact. It has never been removed, but the vial is empty except for a slight film of dusty sunlight that clings to its insides.

  Late that afternoon when Maggie finishes the chores, she returns to the root cellar. Wes is outside sleeping in a chair under the overhang, a small pail of whale teeth on the ground next to him and one unfinished piece in his lap. His left leg is a butt and withered. It droops off the edge of the chair. He keeps his right leg stretched out in front of him. In the months after the fire, the flesh of his body shrank as it healed. It grew tight around the joints, so tight that now his knee is unable to bend. Every day, he drags himself out of the root cellar to sit in the shade underneath the overhang. He waits until the midday glare is gone and the sun has softened through the trees.

  Maggie sits on the ground next to him, watching him sleep. His lids, seared by the fire, won’t quite close. As he sleeps, his eyes roll up under them—a quickening white—and she remembers back to that first day she drove with him in the wagon north up Horseneck Road, how she sat on the rough plank seat with the rooster in her arms and looked past the hard angles of his face to the rows of corn kneeling down under the wind.

  Six years since then. The icehouses have died, replaced by refrigeration.

  The North Side trolley has taken its last ride to the scrap heap. North Kelly and the other men Wes ran with still spend their days on the bench down at the dock house. A few have already burned through the bulk of their cash. Others, more thrifty, whittle it out carefully, investing small bits in the stock market or siphoning off portions year by year into out-of-state accounts. They take glib bursts of work with the WPA: building cemeteries and drain gutters along the new roads. They dig mosquito ditches in the low-lying areas to keep the water moving.