Moon Tide

by Dawn Tripp

  Elton disappears again into the shed, and Vera can hear him wrestling with the tin cans. He has collected them over the full fifteen years they’ve been married. A true hoard. He strips the labels, washes down the insides, and stores them in the back closet of the shed. They have grown so thick, he can barely crack the closet door without the hill of them flooding out.

  “They’ll be worth something someday,” he has told her. “All that metal. You can’t think it won’t be worth something.”

  She leaves his flannels and shirts in a small huddle on the porch and makes a second trip back to the clothesline. Her youngest, Abigail, runs over and buries her face into her mother’s skirt, frightened of the storm. Vera piles the sheets into her arms. They are still damp, bright with bleach. She will drape them inside on the kitchen table and hope that the heat from the stove will be enough to finish the drying by dinnertime.

  With Abigail clinging to her leg, Vera walks back toward the house, trying to keep the sheets and pillow slips from being picked off by the wind. She can barely see over the heap of white linen in her arms.

  “Look, Mama,” Abigail cries, pulling on her dress. “Look.”

  And Vera looks up past the side porch to where her child is pointing, and there she sees her—the old Irish woman from the big house, wandering without any shoes down the road.

  CHAPTER 12

  Maggie

  When Maggie goes up to Skirdagh, she finds Elizabeth’s bedroom door locked.

  She sees the signs of the storm: the coarse air, the sky-color like a dull weed, the queer green smell. In her garden, the stones have begun to sweat. The clover has pulled into itself, small fists bottled up before the rain. The ants file in weary trains back toward their nests. The kitchen salt is stuck together in damp clumps.

  The first floor of the house is empty except for Charles in his study. She hears him talking to himself. The words trickle through the closed door.

  She takes the trays of garlic she has dried in the sun and braids the withered stalks to hang them. She goes out onto the back steps off the kitchen porch with the last of the beans. She sets the bucket between her legs, picks up a few at a time, flicks one between her fingers and draws her nail down to split open the jacket. She turns it inside out, empties it, then tosses the pod into a pile on the grass. She will not do the laundry today. The wind has already begun to pull the needles off the pines. Clusters of juniper leaf chase one another across the lawn. The rooster keeps close to her, scratching at the dirt. He picks the earthworms that have come out and guzzles them whole. She will finish the chores, wake the old woman, wash her, feed her, then go back down to the root cellar. She can tell by the sky that the worst of the storm won’t strike until later in the afternoon.

  Eve comes to her uncertain. Awkward. She comes to the back of the porch by the kitchen where Maggie sits with the bucket between her legs shelling beans. Eve sits down a few feet away on the other end of the steps. The wind stirs through the grass.

  She studies Maggie quietly. Her age. The traces of gray hair. Her body is fuller now. Her face has softened its angles, and Eve wants to ask her if that softening is what it is to love. She wants to ask if love has the weight of a reflection on water. If it is perishable. Or indelible. If it is something she can measure, plant, cook, uproot, or cull. If it is like the inside meat of those discarded pods. Or if it is as ordinary, as overlooked, as the shell left over. She wants to ask if love is something that can rise up suddenly like a thirst or drought or flame, scorching paths through the half-lived day to day. She wants to ask if love is like a storm and has a soul; if it is the kind of thing one cannot strive for or seek out; if it is the kind of thing that is simply there, that has always been there, like a dream waiting to be dreamed.

  She wants to ask Maggie if it is love that keeps her tending the man in the root cellar. If the tending is gentle, as essential as a garden or breath. Maggie tells them nothing. Eve has seen her put together careful plates of food. She will take extra blankets down in the fall, and when she brings them back the following spring, they are more worn. She has seen traces of what could be him on Maggie’s hands: darkened bits of stuff that resembles tree mold or root or dried pith.

  “Where’s Nonna?” Eve asks.

  “Sleeping.”

  “This late? She’s still sleeping?”

  “She’s locked the door. One foot in some days, she sleeps more than she’s awake.”

  They move into the kitchen after one. As they are canning apples, Charles comes out of the study, gathers a few things, and tells them he is going back in. He is glad they are safe. He wants them to be safe. He wants them to lock themselves inside and ride this thing out. It is that kind of day, he says. The kind of day one just needs to ride out. And then it will be done. He kisses Eve gently on the face, his puckered mouth, a soft chap against her skin. He almost stoops to Maggie as if he would kiss her as well, the gesture close, something possible, nearly born. Their hands have never exactly touched, and he comes just short of touching her now. His hand reaches toward her dark head, stops, then falls back by his side as if he can still after all these years not quite imagine what she is to him—if she is a woman or a child or something animal he has imagined—some extinct and unturned pocket recess of his mind—she is none of these things—she is all of these things—he does not know—he has never known—only that she makes him ill at ease in his own skin—she does this to him—so he imagines—and he cannot bring himself to touch her—to be too close to her. They move around each other—have always moved—with a careful, measured distance—and today, it seems, will be no different. His hand drops back to his side, and he asks her instead if she would happen to have lying about a small flask of the dandelion wine.

  “None left,” she answers.

  “Fennel then?”

  Maggie shakes her head and goes on peeling the skin off an apple. The knife in one swift smooth motion pulls free the core, and Charles settles for a small bottle of apricot brandy he finds on the pantry shelf.

  The wind has begun to dice the willow pods by the time Peter Eaton comes to the back door, looking for Jake.

  “You check the boathouse?” Maggie asks.

  “Not there.”

  She shrugs. “Don’t know where else he’d be.”

  Peter Eaton sits down at the table with them and pours himself some cider. He drinks it quickly, wiping the sweat and rain from his brow. He pours another glass and tells them what he has seen—every-where’s mad, he says, a wild scurrying like rabbit litters in the spring. Pear trees down at the Tripp orchard. All dozen of them. Cornfields rolled over. Silage tipped onto the fields. He saw the outbuildings at Spud Mason’s farm dashed apart by one gust like a handful of shot.

  Up at Hixbridge, he says, the water drove high into the gully of Cadman’s Neck and pulled a summer cottage down—the wind skinned off its second story and drove it upriver toward Hixbridge. The metal roof battered up against the piles and the granite piers, a slight knocking at first, and then stronger, more brutal as the current grew, until finally the second story of that small summer cottage had chewed a hole straight through the deck of the bridge, and that was the beginning of the end.

  He pours a third cider and goes on telling how the river pulled and sucked and pushed and drew, widening the gap between the piles. The teahouse turned once and then fell in, pulled under almost right away. Even Remington’s pitched forward like it wanted to nod off. He pauses to drain the rest of his glass, and Eve knows it then. She knows it by the way the knife slips in her hand and she has to lay it down. She knows it by the way her mind keeps returning over and over to that image of the second story of the summer cottage and its knocking … slow at first, a soft rap, and then harder as the water level rose, the pilings pushing back against that piece of house … the resistance … the resistance … that bridge had stood intact, the same way, year after year, day after day … as the knocking continued, a dull persistent thought, growing sharper with the tid
e … and she can feel it now, the pilings as if they are inside her, how they begin to crack and split and give under the inevitable driving shoulders of the river until they cannot resist anymore … they draw up their roots from the marled bottom mud and let go.

  Collapse. Solace. Surrender. And the bridge itself—trusses, planks, deck, struts—all of it gives up its holding and gives way.

  Eve stands without a word, leaves the knife by the half-pared apple and walks outside into the blaring rain. Maggie watches her go. Peter Eaton too, cider on his lips and a dumb expression on his face.

  “Where’s she going?”

  “Out there.”

  “She can’t go out there. You don’t know what’s out there.”

  “I know,” Maggie says. “Now get yourself gone.” She shovels him out the front door.

  She wraps some food in a small towel, herds the rooster and the hens into the kitchen with trays of water and feed, and closes both doors. Before she leaves the house for the root cellar, she goes back up to Elizabeth’s room. Still locked. Curious. She knocks. No answer. She takes the other entrance through the east wing of the house, through the unused maid’s quarters and the small dressing closet next to Elizabeth’s bedroom. She cracks open the dressing room door, and she can see the humped shape tucked under the blankets.

  Lazy old woman, she thinks, but she lingers for a moment in the doorway to be sure, watching for a sign of movement, a sign of breath, when she notices, suddenly, the book of lists is not on the night table. She crosses the room and strips the red chenille from the bed. The pillow faces glare up at her. Plucked. Expressionless.

  The window is coated with leaves and rain. She hoists it up. The wind tears through and she scans the yard, the woods, the lower meadow, the empty wagon trail that leads down to the river. There—on the small dock at the end of Cape Bial, Maggie sees her. Elizabeth. A small precarious figure, the hunched back, walking barefoot toward the end of the pier. Her arms are open, not raised up, not yet, but turned slightly forward from the shoulders as if she might try to catch the storm in the palm of her hand.

  CHAPTER 13

  Millie Tripp

  Millie Tripp refused to leave the post office when they came for her in the police truck. She could see the Sawyers, the Lynches, Tim McIleer, his son, Ralph, and Martha Dwyer, huddled in the back. They sat in rows inside that truck, stripped of their belongings like dogs on their way to the pound.

  “No thank you, Danny,” she says to the young officer. She has known him since he was a wick in his mother’s belly. “I’s here in the storm of ’thirty-three, and the storm of ’twenty-four, I’s stay here now.” With a damp flick of her hand, she waves them on. Two years plus eighty, she has seen it all. She has heard the wind screech like a pack of wolves and shake the windows like the banshee. She has seen shingles borne off houses spin like mad hatter blades through the air. On a blustery day in 1917, she saw a pair of toads rain down in a hailstone. They fell on the road just outside the post office. The ice cracked apart, and those two toads just picked themselves up and hopped away, the smaller one, a little stunned, dragging his left foot behind him.

  For sixty-four years, she has been postmistress. She has sorted letters of love and death. Letters that altered lives. She sleeps on the second floor above the mail room and keeps her own hours. Over the years she has become adept at slicing through a seal, and if the knife won’t do, she will hold the envelope over a flame until it unfastens. She reads the contents, then repastes it closed again. She’ll watch for the addressee the following day, guardian of his secret until he arrives to claim it. She is one of the ladies of the thread—the three crones who spin and measure and cut. She knows a man’s fate before it strikes him.

  She watches the police wagon heading off down East Beach Road. It stops at every house, pavilion, store. She sees Mr. Burnam carried out on a stretcher, his wife and that sausage-shaped dog nicking at her slipper heels. When the truck passes behind several rooftops, Millie climbs to the second floor and watches from the upper window as it continues on its fitful stops and starts down the road—bracing itself into the driving wind and spray.

  And that’s when she sees Ben Soule walk out of his house up on the knoll, dragging some sort of immense dead bird after him. Crazy old gnat. Her family had been in a long-standing feud with his ever since the manure from his father’s herd ran down the hill on the runoff and formed a slop pool of shit and milky waste in the rows of Hubbard squash and cucumber in her father’s vegetable garden.

  Millie watches as Ben sets a ladder against the side of his house. The wind knocks it down. He picks it up and sets it again, deeper in the relative shelter of the north wall. He grinds the ladder’s stubby legs into the mud and begins to climb, hauling that tremendous limp bird after him. He nearly falls when he reaches the highest rung. The ladder sways like a living thing under his feet. He grasps for the base of the chimney with one arm and pulls himself up onto the lee pitch of the roof. He flattens down as a gust splits open the sky. The largest weeping cherry in front of the stone house is forked in two. A black smoldering mass in the heart of it.

  CHAPTER 14

  Israel Mason

  Halfway out, the calf shakes its head from left to right, the wet and bloodied face, a white dash on its forehead, the mouth gulping air as the front hooves paw to get free of their hole, then sink back in again. Spud Mason’s son, Israel, had brought the cow in from the field that morning when the weather got strange and locked her in the stanchion. He knew the change in pressure could bring on her labor, and sure enough, less than two hours had passed when he heard her first cry—a deep and low-pitched groan that reached him in the stable next door.

  As he pulls at the front hooves of the calf jutting from the cow, the wind tears the barn door loose off two of its three hinges, and the panel flaps against the frame. He sets it closed again with a heavy spade and an iron weight.

  The calf is too big. He pulls again on the forelegs. The cow’s belly contracts, and he can feel the back legs kick against her insides. She moans.

  He takes a coil of rope hung over the lantern nail and ties it around the front hooves of the calf. The wind bears down on the door—a hideous roar—the iron scrapes against the floor, and the last hinge snaps. The door rips from the frame and sets off like a feather to wild flight across the field. The rain surges through the gap, drenching Mason and the laboring cow. Her head twists hard against the stanchion as he pulls. She bellows.

  Mason tightens the rope and begins to walk slowly away from her toward the open door and the gray slash of the rain. His face is soaked, he can barely see, but he will have this calf, he will have it. He pushes his way across the rain-sodden straw toward the empty frame of the door and the heaving squall of the wind that drives against him.

  He feels the calf fall, the shake of the ground under his feet. The rope drops slack and free. He slips forward and lands on his hands and knees. Mud splashes up across his face. Warm. Silty. And he lies down in the smell—it is everything he loves—his cheek to the ground as the warm rain pours in sheets over him.

  CHAPTER 15

  Vera Marsh

  Vera Marsh’s twins arrive home from school with their metal lunch boxes and tall stories of the bus ride home: dodging branches and downed wires, roofs stripped off chicken sheds and sailing toward the woods.

  “Nonsense,” she says, “it’s not so bad a storm,” and she pushes them firmly inside.

  Her husband, Elton, has gone back into the shed, and her oldest, Albert, is still on the swings. Fifteen years old minus a good three-quarters of his brain, he has the mind and the joy of a two-year-old. His thick legs push up into the air. He is laughing, delirious, as the wind lifts him one way and then another.

  “Fly!” he cries out. “Fly!” The big box elder west of the pergola quivers like a reed. Vera’s youngest, Abigail, has not let go of her skirt, and she is whimpering now for a Little House story.

  “Fly, Mama, fly!” Albert crie
s out again. The same current of wind that carries his voice breaks one of the porch awnings loose. Abigail claws at her mother’s dress, climbing her leg, monkeylike. Vera peels the child off and shuts her in the house. She begins to wade across the lawn toward the swing where Albert is pumping his knickered legs as the wind bears him up and his weight takes him down.

  Leaves paste themselves to her bare shins. Elton comes out of the shed with a wheelbarrow load of his tin cans. Vera screams after him to help her. Her voice spends itself within several yards and ricochets back. He waves at her, and begins to push the wheelbarrow toward the house.

  Vera reaches the swing set. With one hand gripped around the pole to keep her balance, she grasps for the chain as Albert swings by her. She misses. Her knuckles bang the metal seat, and her son’s legs knock out to the side, wild, his shoe barely missing her cheek. She falls back into the mud, then struggles up and waits for him to swing by her again, but as he reaches the top of the arc, he lets go of the swing and sails off. His thick body meets the wind and drops gently, beautifully, to the ground. He lands on his feet and glances back at his mother on her knees. His face is twisted, the way it was when she saw him for the first time—just out of her, the tiny squished body covered with blood and that grotesque look on the face, eyes gasping from the pressure of the blue cord wrapped twice around his neck, and she knew, even before they told her, that something was just so wrong.

  Albert runs off in the direction of the house, where his father is unloading the wheelbarrow full of cans through the open cellar door.