Moon Tide

by Dawn Tripp

  Maggie touches Wes’s arm. His head curls toward her. The whites of his eyes unroll, the irises drop, and he stares.

  “What?” “Nothing.”

  “You hungry?”

  “Soon.”

  She runs her finger across the warp of his left eye. It will not open as wide as the right. The skin of his face has hardened, almost labyrinthine, like the maps on turtle shells she used to trace when she was young.

  When it grows dark, they move inside. He leans on her, dragging his left foot behind him down the steps.

  He sits on a chair, and she takes off his boots. She hands him the whale’s tooth he was working and sets the bottle of ink with the scrimping needle on the table next to him.

  “You see the swan out by the garden?” she asks, peeling strips of bacon out of a tin.

  “Nope.”

  “She came up from the boathouse. Set a new roost in the whiskey barrel by the tomatoes.”

  “No bird moves unless there’s something to move for.”

  “Two girls from the town—I hear today—both due three weeks from now—already started their pains.”

  “A line storm, you think?”

  “Jake says there’s talk of it.”

  “Soon?”

  Maggie shrugs. “Few days from now, I’d guess.”

  She leaves the bacon outstretched in the iron pan on the stove. She takes lean cuts of oak and kindling and sets them for the fire. She stuffs dried sea moss inside the cracks. She peels a potato, a white turnip, three carrots, and what’s left of an onion. She boils them until they are soft. She shreds the bacon into the pot. The woodsmoke swirls in clouds above the stove, dropping bits of ash.

  That night as they eat, Wes remembers the money. He remembers how much of it there was and where he buried it.

  “Under the stone wall,” he says abruptly. “Seventh stone in from the east side behind Mason’s icehouse.”

  “I know,” Maggie answers, dipping her spoon into the soup.

  “How’d you know?”

  “You sent me for it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “One night early on, you did.”

  “How many days back?”

  “Two years.”

  “Haven’t been here two years.”

  “You been here over three.”

  “Been less than a season. Not even a winter yet.”

  “Four winters now.”

  He stares at her dumbly as she goes on eating her soup. She breaks a piece of bread off the loaf and sets it on the table near him.

  “I sent you for it?”

  She nods and breaks off another piece of the bread for herself.

  “So where’s it now?”

  She points to the wall. “Behind one of those stones.”

  “How much left?”

  “Most all of it, I’d guess.”

  “You sure?”

  She smiles at him. “Unless you eat it when I’m not around.”

  Wes leans his arm against the table and rests his head on his hand. His eyes are sad.

  Sometimes it seems to her now that he has softened. Perhaps it was the burning that softened him. His brain half-poached in the fire, he does not have a normal sense of time. His mind will thicken like a summer fog and then it will clear. He slips in and out of what he remembers, what he forgets. He will argue with her harshly, then all at once he will give way and fall into the sudden realization that the edge of who he was has been lost.

  At night when they are lying in bed, he empties himself to her. He talks in circles, in abstract, wandering lines. He tells her stories of blue-water ships that were built at the Head and floated downriver on empty oil casks.

  “Whose ships?” she asks, and he does not remember, but he goes on to tell her about a blacksmith shop at the Point, smudged between the tailor and the sail loft. How as a child he would sit inside that shop to be near the holler of the anvil, the soot smell and the ash. He would make small hills of the shavings off the hooves.

  She listens as he tells her these things. She follows him down the switchback turnings of his mind, and when he grows quiet and she can feel him still awake lying in the dark beside her, she will ask a question, and he will answer her with yet another story that has nothing to do with what she has asked. And she listens. She knows that this is how they walk now. This is how they move. In the bed, she spoons herself around him, she drapes her arm across his ribs. She does this gently, and the arm covers him like lawn.

  She wakes early. He is still asleep, his fingers closed around her hand. She does not remember what day it is. How many days she has been lying here. Three? Four? Has it been only one? She thinks of the milk, sitting at the end of the lane by the stone wall in its aluminum cans. She thinks of Skirdagh, and the inside of the house comes to her like the residue of a dream: the massive oak sideboard, the isinglass stove, the unwatered flats of her potted herbs above the kitchen sink. Basil. Coriander. Chives. Through the small beveled window, the sky is heavy, a sulfur-colored light.

  CHAPTER 7

  Elizabeth

  The National Geographic calendar pinned on the wall next to her dressing table mirror reads September 21. Every box before that date has been crossed with a red pen. Every box before. She had done that for years. She had made those X’s through the wide open space of a day. And when her hands failed and she could not hold a pen, Maggie had crossed out the days for her.

  On that morning of the twenty-first, Elizabeth pulls herself up and ties her own hair. The pins are not quite right. She can’t get them to stay. The birds will come for her, she knows. They will dive at her, swoop down with their sharp beaks, and prod her, pick at her, digging in the pins so they will stick, a prickling in her scalp.

  Early. The sun barely up over the river. A strange thinness to the day as if the air has been stripped overnight. It comes to her lightly, without definite smell, taut like an ironed silk.

  By evening, you will come … By evening …

  and she wonders why it is this she remembers. Sourceless words. They must have come from somewhere once. They must have had roots or a meaning that was traceable. She puts the pillows back into the bed, fluffs them gently, and pulls the red chenille blanket up over their heads. They will be warm. They will keep sleeping. She takes the key from the inside of the door, locks it from the outside, then putters down the hall. She passes her granddaughter’s room. She drops a bit of herself in front of the closed door, then another bit on the lacquered table by the railing. She sheds her imprint into the ether of the house. She drops it in small handfuls. Like seed. She checks her face in the mirror at the top of the stairs. Not her face, of course. Too old to be her face. A thin net of lines holds the cheeks secure. She descends.

  By evening, you will come on the moon tide.

  Let ye not be crying, m’Lizzie. Nà ag … my Lizzie … nà ag …

  what was the last of it? The word, the thing, the rest she cannot grasp. Why is it always that last essential bit, the crux, why is it the crux that escapes her?

  Charles is already awake. Or no, not Charles. A man like him. But not quite. Almost a Henry, he seems. They have all grown up. They have grown old. She can barely tell one from another. The same rotten apples in the fields. Pocked faces. Stalks licorice black. Shaved thin. Body, hair, soul, ribbons turning, dancing, flailed about by the wind in those foul fields.

  Once they had names. Every field had had its name.

  The sky has grown swollen. Gulls wheel up off the river in droves, their wings singed by that strange and murky pressure she can feel. He is reading the newspaper. This man who is not Charles. A stranger in her house. The uninvited. He snaps the paper out away from him to break the fold. One hand reaches for his cup. Black coffee. An absentminded sip. Noiseless. The world to her now is almost entirely noiseless.

  Old body, wild soul.

  A shiver in her heart. This. A fluttering life. Is this what Oisin felt when he first saw her? When he gave up his earth and let
himself be led?

  She remembers a man who once came to the back pantry door selling bouquets of wild violets, scrimshaw, and salted herring on a stick. Is this that man? Did she let him in that day, and has he lived here since? Has he taken coffee with his paper every morning in her house?

  There is no sign of Maggie in the kitchen. Through the window above the sink, the sky is a deepening yellow. Fleabane. Wild dog rose. Asphodel. The sky is the color of kerosene.

  He had blue eyes—that peddler with his scrimshaw and salted fish—searing eyes she recognized from years before. He was one of the workmen who had helped raise the house when it was still young. She had asked him to stay late one afternoon to hang the whalebone sled. He had slammed his hand with the hammer—she remembers it even now, that delirious crushing sound of metal into flesh—and she had touched him, she had wanted to touch him, and he had glanced up—his beauty so rough it took her off guard. Then, for no reason she could see or explain, he had jerked his hand away.

  The house was young back then. A new pine shell. They were all young. Most of them unborn. The wood was not yet weathered. The salt had barely kissed it. Blond wood. Moist with sap.

  In her book of lists, Elizabeth has written their deaths: lips black from having eaten the poisonous stuff. Their bodies falling back to seed. The book of lists held the eyes of that workman who came as a peddler years later to her door. He came once and never came again, but she was certain on that day, she was certain, as she swung back the screen and met him standing on the pantry stone, with his black ink and bone carvings, his salted herring and a basket of red hen eggs, in that moment, she knew that he had come for her.

  Why now? she asks herself, standing in the doorway on the porch. Why this burst of springtime in her chest? A godless springtime.

  The willow tree—slim branches quivering. The absence of sound frightens her. She strains, her eyes squinting into that murky yellow oil of the sky. It is burning. Not even noon, and already the sky is in flames. She strains for the sound of the willow tree—she knows it is there—she can feel its shaking—the tremulous cry. She puts her fingers in her ears to pry the deafness out of them.

  To the west over the arm of the barrier beach, she can see one spot still clear: a brutal patch of blue. The clouds rush toward it out of the east. She hears nothing.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jake

  For two or three days, the breakers down at Horseneck were huge. Massive surf straight out of a clear sky. No wind. Flat calm. Long crested swells building to inexplicable heights. On the flood tide, they broke fifty yards up the beach and washed over the front porches of the cottages at the foot of the dunes.

  On the morning of the twenty-first, the sky changed: mare’s tails and a musty yellow light lying offshore, belted underneath by the horizon. Jake goes out to dig an hour before low. The tide is running a good two feet over normal, and he has to ground the boat higher up on the flats off Split Rock. He takes the rake and pail and leaves his lunch wrapped in wax paper with a battered copy of Hemingway’s stories in the bow.

  When the wind shifts at noon, he looks up and notices that the clouds have begun to rummage into packs. They are strange clouds: thin spirals between darker silty bands, shredding off the top. They move in, bearing toward the Nubble and the Lion’s Tongue, chasing huge flocks of seafowl toward the safety of the harbor.

  Jake leans against his rake and looks up the hill toward Skirdagh. He can see the two women, one dark, one light, their heads bent close together, sitting on the steps of the back porch.

  He goes on digging until the water has eaten the edges of the flats. He goes back to the boat, loads the two pecks of clams into the stern, and heads in.

  CHAPTER 9

  Ben Soule

  The old man can smell it: a green smell, pungent, deep. It easily drowns out the reek of the stone house gardens next door. The smell creeps through the shade and blankets the marsh. It levels the surface of the let to an ominous still. For the past few days, he has watched his barometer kicking back and forth, rising a bit, then getting fidgety, the gauge pumps up and down, and then begins to drop in slow erratic plunges. He readies himself.

  On a day in September 1892, from a farmer’s front porch in the middle of Kansas, he had watched a dust bowl tornado move across the flat-cake plains. It filled the sky with a funnel of black dust, sweeping haystacks and small privies up into its shaft. It was headed for the house, but five hundred yards away, it took an abrupt turn toward the barn, sucked up the plow and the henhouse, then continued on its way. The farmer roped his fastest horse from its stall and set out after it, his spurs digging into the flanks of the terrified horse, drawing blood to chase down that tornado demon thief. The plow was lost, but he found the henhouse, two miles west. The tornado had spit the thing from its spout, and it landed right side up next to a decimated barn. When the farmer opened the latched door, the hens glared at him calmly from their nests, eggs still underneath them, unbroken and warm.

  Ben washes the dirty dishes in the sink, wipes them dry, and puts them away into the cupboard above the ice chest. He stuffs rags into the open spaces around them so they will not break up against one another. He tacks shingles across the cupboard doors to keep them shut. He nails boards over the outside windows and caulks the frames to seal the cracks from the rain. He places everything else that is loose—chairs, guns, broom, bottles of whiskey and gin—into the stove or on the bed. Then he removes the wings from their burlap sack and goes outside.

  He will wait for the eye. The dead center. The vortex. The calm in the heart. The deep core. The abyss. The blackness. He will wait until it comes close, and then he will launch himself from the roof and fly toward it.

  The wind moves out of the southeast just before noon. By one it has begun to shake through the weeping cherry trees set along the drive of the stone house. Small branches snapped loose whiz around him. One plucks the cap from his head. He sits in his chair on the knoll, oiling the feathers to keep them from taking on rain as the last birds hammer in off the sea—geese, duck, heron, osprey, gulls, even the land-hating storm petrels—they fly in rafts over East Beach through the warm gray mist: fugitive, harrowing tribes.

  CHAPTER 10

  Patrick

  As he left for the city that morning, Patrick noticed that the barometer appeared to be broken—its bottom dropped out. He looked for Maggie to tell her to pick up a new one, but she was nowhere around the kitchen, nowhere in the yard. He made a mental note to buy one himself and then forgot about it by the time the car had taken the right-hand turn onto Stafford Road.

  He was at Arthur Coles’s office when the eleven o’clock broadcast came over WJAR. The Weather Bureau reporter was forecasting a storm—the remnant of a tropical cyclone—moving up the coast from Cape Hatteras. There would be strong winds, possibly reaching gale force, with heavy rains likely along the northeast seaboard that night. He rang Skirdagh, and Charles answered the phone. Yes, he said, something of a wind, a few rocky clouds, nothing that wouldn’t blow over. Eve? No. She wasn’t in the house. He could check the porch or the yard. Was it urgent? No. Well then, when he saw her, he would tell her that Patrick had called.

  Patrick steps out with Coles to take lunch at quarter past one. The wind has begun to freshen. A page of newspaper flutters up the street. It plasters around a lamppost, then rips loose. Patrick holds his hat to his head and bends his face down. He will ring the house again, he decides, when they return to the office.

  He and Coles are taking lunch at the club restaurant on Main Street when the bells at City Hall begin to ring, summoning the guards to the armory.

  On their way back to the office, the church bells of St. Mary’s set in, clanging, a cacophonous hollering against the wind. A young uprooted beech tree sails into the rush of traffic and lands across the front end of a Buick Roadmaster. The car screeches to a halt, its wipers fouled with the branch roots. At the corner of Second, Patrick tells Coles to go on ahead, and he cuts into the
Portuguese Market for a five-cent pack of cigarettes. As he is turning to leave, a wrenching sound wails in off the street. The shop window quivers for an instant, then gives way, sucked out by the wind, and Patrick is left, dumbstruck and exposed to the dark and massing sky, the window hole gaping in front of him with its transparent, jagged teeth.

  CHAPTER 11

  Vera Marsh

  I was a beautiful woman once, Vera Marsh thinks to herself as she unclips a sheet off the clothesline. She gets one end untangled, and the other end snaps loose, tucked and whirled and twisted by the wind. She grasps after it, and it flaps away from her.

  Two of her children have still not arrived home from school. The other two are at the far end of the lawn playing on the swings. Her husband is in the shed, boxing his peat trays and winter seedlings.

  Beautiful eyes, they used to say. And the eyes were still the same. Deeper in their sockets perhaps. Not quite as bright. She remembers looking into her first hand mirror when she was a girl. The eyes flickered. Burst out of her face like twin green lights. She strips her husband’s flannels from the second line. One leg catches under the pin. She tugs harder, her mouth pruning at the corners. The clothespin pops up into the air, splashes for a bit on the wind, then lands in the grass.

  The sky has begun to thicken. A few drops of rain nick her face. She cries out to Albert, her oldest, to bring Abigail, the baby, inside. Her husband, Elton, comes out of the shed, backward, dragging the bait barrel. He is a knobby man, lost a foot sorting brick for the WPA. He dumps the barrel over in the grass. Dead herring spill out, maggots writhing like small white shreds of chewing gum.

  Vera looks away from him and pushes the hair back from her face. It has grown wiry over the years. She wears it up now, and she will pull a tendril or two loose when they go to the raccoon suppers at the Grange, and she will remember how, when she was a girl, the hair was a mane. Blond. Evenly trimmed. She had worn it long.