by Dawn Tripp
Muddied and bruised, her hand scraped, Vera pulls herself back across the yard. The wind catches under her apron and it flaps up, wrapping her face like a shroud. She pushes it down, her eyes full of tears. She crunches her head against the brunt of the wind.
CHAPTER 16
Patrick
Patrick leaves the city at seventeen minutes past three. Second Street, south of Pleasant, is blocked by a toppled roof, and he turns up Fourth, bears onto Spring, then back onto Second. He heads toward Rhode Island Way. By the time he has turned onto Main Road, trees have begun to topple like long rows of dominoes. Torn leaves fill the sky.
The house is empty except for Charles, who has bunkered himself into his study: the door locked. There is no sign of Eve, and Patrick gets back into the car and pulls out of the driveway. Across from the old hotel, he sees Vera and Elton Marsh in front of their house, struggling to board up the downstairs parlor windows. Patrick pulls off the street and steps out of the car.
“My wife,” he shouts. “Have you seen my wife?” But the wind shreds his voice. A gust snaps the glasses off his face, cracking the right lens. The hook wrenches hard around his ear. He begins to cross the yard toward Vera and Elton. Each of them grips one end of the batter-board as they try to raise it to the window. Their voices come to him downwind.
“Keep your end still, Vera!” Elton is shouting. “Keep your end still!” The wind catches under the plank, and the wood thrashes up. They drag left and then right, back and forth under the window in a clumsy dance with the wavering board between them. They do not notice Patrick. When he is less than ten feet away, he cups his hand around his mouth to ask about his wife, to ask if they have seen her, but before he speaks, Vera turns and sees him. Guilt wrinkles her face.
“Oh grief!” she bursts out. “Elizabeth. I should have gone after her.”
“Eve, her name is Eve.”
“I’m so sorry, I—”
“Vera!” Elton cries as the batter-board twists and heaves.
“Which way did she go?” Patrick shouts. “Which way?” And as Vera lifts her hand to gesture toward the Point, the board slips from her grasp. It tears loose, and Elton staggers several yards behind it, still holding on. He trips and lets go. The batter-board scythes across the garden, cutting off the heads of the phlox.
Patrick leaves them and continues on down Thanksgiving Lane toward the wharves. The huge ash tree by the cemetery has lost its kindling branches, and the elm in front of Ike Manchester’s place has been pulled up, one sinewy root still holding like a stubborn tooth to the ground. Jack Warren’s new picket fence bends toward the street at forty-five degrees. Patrick drives slowly, peering down lanes and driveways for a glimpse of his wife, huddled by a hedge, or in the leeward shelter of a shed. Salt spray plasters the windshield, and he strains to see through it.
He finds no sign of her. Men push past the car, three or four at a time, dragging their skiffs up the flooded road. Someone mistakes him for somebody else and grabs him by the scruff of the collar through the window. A red scraped face peers in, then lets him go. The river is already running over the piers. It flushes up to the front porch of the restaurant, ebbs, then flushes in again. Each time the level rises.
Halfway across the Point Bridge, the car engine dies. Patrick tries to start it, and when the engine fails to catch, he tries to drive it forward on the battery with the clutch in. The wheels stray sideways toward the bridge rails. He shuts off the car and gets out. The rainwater is thick on the bridge and covers the toes of his shoes. The wind whips sheets of salt spray off the surface, and they rise up in towers of moving light and dark against the rain—as if the world has tipped over on its side and the river current has begun to run from the earth up toward the sky. Three men in a skiff heave by him. They have anchored by two gaffs to the bridge, and they haul themselves along the rail, crossing toward the Point side of the river. One shouts at him, waves his arm frantically, but Patrick barely hears. His mind is suddenly seized, bewildered, by the magnificent catastrophe of it all. He forgets his wife. He walks on as if in a dream. Trucks rumble past him. One with a siren, its wail slicing through the wind, brief and alone. The wheels skin the unstable ground, slipping from one side of the bridge to the other. He knows that the trucks have come from Horseneck. The back end of one holds a crowd of people huddled together, their heads drenched and bent as if in prayer. A child glares at him, her eyes so wide, they are bottomless. The water runs down her cheeks, and Patrick is struck by a sudden, indescribable desire to see what he knows she has seen. He wants to stand on the tallest ridge of dune that overlooks both arms of the beach and watch the sea rise, roll after aching roll, out of herself.
The river has surged over the low point of the bridge. A hunting dog, dead, flipped on its back, sweeps by him. Patrick slogs past the jetty and a woman clutching a telephone pole directly in front of her home. The water is up to her hips and she cries out to him, one arm reaching. He skirts away, dodging her hand. Wreckage, planks, a window casement, a fishing pole, a floating shoe. He pushes his way through the flood and scrambles up onto the higher ground of the macadam road. He hurries on, through veil after veil of the rain, with the strange, burning desire to see the horror of the surf that has wiped every other thought out of his mind.
CHAPTER 17
Maggie
There is a moment when she is standing at the open window—the moment when she first sees that small and dark hooked shape on the pier at the bottom of the hill—old listener—she says softly, watching Elizabeth pass through the thick white gusts of spray peeled off the surface of the river—she moves slowly, nearly fixed, a small dark star at the end of that long pier while the world boils all around her—there is a moment, that first moment—when Maggie’s hands raise to the window on their own and she can feel the shiver of the glass under her fingers and she thinks—in that moment—she will go after her.
She hears Patrick in the house downstairs calling for Eve. She hears his feet on the stairs, up and down the hall, in and out of rooms, the slamming of the front door as he leaves.
The window quivers again under her hands as if it is alive, and she knows that it is not the glass, but the storm outside, this other kind of stranger blown in from a somewhere else and passing through—it is a living creature, it has emotion and a shape—intimate and free—she can see it as it plows through the trees.
She looks down again to the pier and the hunched and barefoot figure walking toward the end of it. She feels the tear of roots in her heart.
She leaves the room the way she found it. The way Elizabeth had wanted it left. She locks the door behind her, because it had been locked, and she goes downstairs. She pauses outside Charles’s study, then passes by. She cracks the door to the kitchen to check the hens, to be sure they are safely inside. She snaps the light, takes the bundle of food under her arm, and walks outside.
The sound wraps everywhere around her. It does not have a single aspect. She can feel the pierced shrieking of the wind, the squall of the rain, the deep bass distant howl of the sea, and then among them, on a middling pitch, the steady moan of the storm itself, long and sonorous, like the groan of an old and heavy door drawn slowly open.
It is a sound that she could follow. It runs like a song through her bones.
She crosses the yard toward the root cellar, her arm gripped tightly around the bundle of food. Twigs and leaves and small bits of debris whittle her down. She walks with her head thrown back because she wants to feel the tearing of the wind and rain against her, it reminds her of everything that she has loved, everything she has left, it reminds her of the place she came from and the long passing of the days as she waited with her mother’s body on the hill until the rains carved out the earth underneath them, the mud slid down, and she let the body go.
A loose bit of clothesline snaps across her throat. It draws deep as it splits away, breaking skin.
She is halfway to the root cellar when she sees the mute swan huddled on t
he north side of the shed. The roost is gone, and the bird has taken shelter in the lee. She wonders for an instant what has happened to the mate. A gust comes through. It sweeps across the yard, blasts the woodpile, strikes the shed and lifts the building up, flipping it once in midair. The bird turns to fly. Its wings flail. The wind catches it hard across one pinion. The body snaps around, one wing broken back, and the bird barrel-rolls across the grass, flung against the chicken wire. Maggie drops to the ground, flattened by the driving corridor of wind above her head. The gust steals the bundle of food from under her arm, and she crawls the rest of the way to the root cellar on her hands and knees.
She finds Wes in a nightmare of the fire—the scream of the wind, the sound of trees snapping—it is the crack of timbers on that night in Blackwood’s store, the beams of the floor above him giving way. His sweat has drenched the sheets. She can smell the smoke on him—how his guilt bears down for what he has done. He is delirious, his body torn again in those imaginary flames. She can see his suffering, she can see how it consumes him, how the sensation of the burning and the heat cracks through his skin until it becomes unbearable, his body thrashes up and she pulls him down again onto the bed.
She wraps herself around him as if she were trying to wrap herself in earth, but even through that firm clear pressure of her body against his, she can hear the desolate cry of the storm outside—it is almost a calling. She will let him go—she knows this—maybe not tonight, or even a year from now—she does not know how it will happen but it will—and this storm will pass through as every stranger in the end does. By this time tomorrow, it will be gone.
She clings to him and drifts, the way she might cling to a piece of broken piling, a sea-soaked wood, the skin barnacled and hardened, it seems solid to the touch, but the underneath is soft as sponge.
She holds him and they float together on the bed through the damp walled underground, and she knows that, for now, this is how she will travel—how she will stay, how she will leave.
He grips her arm, wrenches her toward him, his eyes feverish. Wild.
“The money,” he says. “Where is the money?”
She stares back at him. He is a knot-eyed branch of a man.
“Gone,” she answers, her voice flat. “It’s gone.” And at last his face is soothed. She puts her hand on his forehead. He quiets and his eyes roll down. She can feel the slow pass of his body into sleep. She gets up and goes to the loose stone in the wall. She lifts out the black steel box with the money inside. She unbolts the door of the root cellar, takes the lid off the box and holds it in her hand up through the open space until the wind takes it.
CHAPTER 18
Charles
Until now, Charles has always resented the fact that his study had no windows. He hears the panes shattering in the other rooms of the house—above him and on all sides—the hideous slaughter of glass. The most tremendous crash, he guesses, judging by its magnitude and direction, is the result of a thick branch off the willow tree, snapped and hurled through the library window. He experiences a pang of regret for the books left unprotected on the shelves.
He has stuffed towels around the frame of his study door to keep it from rattling. He has equipped himself with several biscuits, a bit of dried fish, fruitcake, and the bottle of apricot brandy. He has three small flashlights on his desk. He lights the box kerosene heater on the floor, takes off his socks and shoes, and warms his toes. As the house around him shakes, he thinks of his father and Mallory: men whose lives he hungered for, men who walked without fear into an indifferent nature, whose fates became mythic by the fact of being unknown. The room grows warm. The gas snakes in light giddy streams around his head—the stuff of thoughts, of dreams. Charles takes out a blank sheet of paper and begins to write, and he finds, for the first time in his life, with the racket of the wind and rain driving like a dervish through the house, for the first time he finds that the words fall easily from his mind onto the page as if an airtight cap inside of him has been unscrewed.
Once, in the course of the writing, it occurs to him that a vague smell has entered the room. He looks to the door and remembers that he has sealed it. He looks to the wall and remembers that there is no window. He sniffs. The smell is slight. Indistinct. And not unpleasant. He shakes his head, turns to the next empty page, and continues on.
CHAPTER 19
Ben Soule
He has pitched himself stomach down on the lee slope of his roof with the wings folded under his arm. The wind drives the rain in glib warm gusts out of the south. He listens to the roar of it build. Forty, fifty, sixty knots. He can feel a curious pressure in his ears. He lifts his cheek just enough to see the toad lilies and the sprawling yellow corydalis—cluster after cluster of flowers in late-bloom torn from the stone house gardens. Spindly roots cartwheel through the air above his head, spitting dirt. The wind slices through his hair, and he hears the first plate of window glass give way.
The barometer is tucked into his breast pocket. In a slight lull of wind and rain, he grips a crease between the shingles and, with his free hand, reaches in and pulls it out. The red has sunk another .02 of an inch to 28.08. He checks his pocket watch. Still one half hour off high tide.
A full moon tide, he notes to himself. He resumes his watch as the ice cream concession from the Town Landing floats by.
CHAPTER 20
Patrick
Water is knee-high in the pavilion, unnaturally warm. Dining chairs, cupboards, and stock float through the room. The chandelier has come loose from its chain and swings into the head of a buck, its crystal tangled in the antlers. Joe Gallows tries to lock the south windows closed but the waves keep smashing them open. He does not hear the knocking at the front door—loud, persistent—a steady rap. One of the ceiling beams falls in. It shoots down, an inch shy of Joe’s left arm, and javelins a small sofa. Mattress stuffing flings up off the springs.
As Joe scrambles after his cocker spaniel swimming through the thigh-deep indoor sea, the door flies open. A man stands on the threshold—a stranger—in a black soaked coat, his hair in fair, wild tufts, eyes electric. As Joe looks up, the stranger raises his hand. His mouth opens, and the wind roars out of it as the trough of the first surge strikes. It draws the foundation out from under the pavilion in a horrific sucking sound. The room teeters, then resettles into a precarious stillness as if they have come to rest in a sudden void. From the corner of his eye through the south window behind Joe Gallows, Patrick can see the crest—a solid black wall of water bearing toward them. He looks back at Joe, the ashen face, and a moment of understanding passes between the two men. They are together in this space. Slowly, they raise their eyes toward the ceiling beams and the trickle of water pattering the roof like a gentle rain. The wave crest drops, and the ceiling above them explodes.
Swept out the front door onto the porch, Patrick grabs for a post. His hand slides down it, the splintered wood digging in as the wave tears him loose, and he is carried like a matchstick up East Beach Road toward the lower dunes.
CHAPTER 21
Millie Tripp
Millie sees it before the old man does. Through the flying shingles, she can feel the houses begin to move. Dr. Carey’s two-story cottage starts northwest, twisting lightly clockwise, its upper deck out of sync with the bottom floor. Cars drive on their own down the road. They pinball off trees and skim along the marsh. One Rolls-Royce head-ends itself into a mosquito ditch, its pert rear trunk swinging up into the air as a new Chevrolet stockpiles in behind it. The cross snaps off the steeple of the Catholic church. The steeple smarts back and then is hit by another sharp gust. It breaks in half. Sections of the nave give way, deflating piece by piece from the top like meringue. A telephone pole ripped loose is picked up by the wind and thrust through the roof of the A & P.
From her window, Millie watches cottage after cottage slashed off their foundations and pulled into the floodwater. One floats by, and she can see an older couple inside it building a raft of beds.
Farther down, toward the causeway, the cement blocks around Joe Gallows’s pavilion have begun to crumble. The roof of the bar next door cracks up into the air, then folds back on itself and smashes down across the bathhouses.
She sees it then: a long black band out beyond the tip of Gooseberry, stretching clear across the bay. A squat and thickening horizon. It moves over the surface of the water, growing taller as it approaches the land. The wind has sheared off its top and it does not curl and break like an ordinary wave. It looms up over Gooseberry, and the spit of land disappears inside it. It swallows the causeway and then the Red Parrot Hotel. The sound of the wind heightens to a hollow wrenching scream as the wave strikes the Gallows Pavilion. The walls burst apart into a thunder of timber, shingles, spray.
The shock of the impact sends Millie reeling backward. She stumbles over the bedpan and bangs her left hip against the bedpost. She drops to the floor, then struggles to her knees, and crawls back to the window. She is determined not to miss any of it. They will ask her later. They will want to know whose house went when, where. They will need her to tell them everything.
The water level on what used to be the road has risen three feet. There is no trace of the Gallows Pavilion or Aberdeen’s Restaurant. The church has been uprooted by the surge and is drifting, slightly cockeyed, toward the let.
Through the window on the opposite wall, Millie can see the stone house. The two chimneys have been ripped off, but the building itself is still standing. She grips the sill and presses her nose to the window, her eyes straining through the horizontal rain, and there, just past the edge of the stone house roof, she can see Ben Soule still clinging to the shingles of his cottage, the mass of feathers next to him. His hair is plastered to his head, and he raises his fist toward the gathering sea in a gesture of deliverance or rage.