Moon Tide

by Dawn Tripp

  Coot, she murmurs and giggles to herself. He was gorgeous as a young man. Slim, deft hands. Blue eyes. She will tell them this. They will come to the counter for their mail, and she will pass them every tantalizing detail of this day. As she watches, Ben Soule hauls himself to his knees, still crouched on the lee side of the roof. He pulls the dead bird like a cape across his back, and she can see them now for what they are: multileveled wings. He tightens the shoulder straps, then positions himself on the pitch of the roof, he begins to creep toward the peak, scaling up the shingles, his knees bent to his ears as if he is some kind of heavy-winged frog.

  Far off across the bay, Millie can see the second black band moving toward them. By the time it reaches the outer rocks, it is a cliff of solid water, its head flayed by the wind. As it reaches the shore, the top has still not curled. The wind turns. Millie’s window quivers, jumping back and forth. She hears the crash as the water strikes the stone house, pieces of slate burst up into the air: sinks, chimney, gutters, a child’s rocking chair—all of it blown to bits like a peppered flock of birds. The old man peers over the peak of his roof to see it. A bed flies toward him and he ducks back down. A grandfather clock, bent in half, boomerangs out of the wreckage. It surfs out in front of the wave as if it has been shot from a cannon. The wave bears down on the old man’s house, a moving black wall bent at the top of its crest, and Millie knows—in a split second she knows—that same tower of water is bearing down on her. She sees Ben Soule stand—blades of slate pelt him like gravel as his knees lift and the wings extend—he pushes off the roof to rise above it, he flaps his arms, once, twice, as the water nicks his feet, and he slams his head on the shelf of solid wind above him. The gust rips through the wings, the feathers shred like salt. Stripped bare, he rolls, ass-over-teakettle, down the slope of his roof, as the wave comes down.

  CHAPTER 22

  Ben Soule

  A loft. Airborne. The twisted shock of his body through space, a sharp intake of breath, and he can feel the pressure change around him, the cool wash of the wind across his face, the rush of the storm in his ears, and then silence. It is unlike anything he could have imagined. The slowness of flight. The ache through his chest as the wings stretch out behind him. He can feel the strain in the sockets of his shoulders, his spine arches like a bow. He tries to push up through the tumbling clouds, the air in slow dark motion all around him. The light is not what he expects—it is olive-colored, silty—bits of the uprooted world pass in a mad collage around him: a soapstone sink, a dead chicken, an upholstered library chair, a rowing skiff with one side busted off, the broken face of a grandfather clock—they drift, suspended, and sink down gently toward the earth below. Again the wind roars, but the sound is dampened as if his ears fill with the distance as he floats. He looks up, and it is as if he is looking through the surface of the sky; it ripples like glass above him, a rare flawed light, and there is a moment of stillness, a moment of joy. His heart shatters. He opens his mouth to cry out and the water floods his lungs.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Shuckers Club

  At the Shuckers Club, they sat out on the bench all morning, just like every other morning. They dished cards and whittled and talked cracks about Thin Gin Tripp who wasn’t there. They bitched about how there was no good work, no steady work, and how this winter might be a good winter—as good as any—to take a car down to Florida or New Orleans to see how the slow life rolls down there.

  They knew the storm was coming. They’d heard talk on the radio. Someone had read another clip in the papers. They could smell it in the surf and in the air. It would be a line storm, they had agreed. It would be what they had seen every other year.

  When the sky thickens early afternoon and the wind begins to steal the cards, they move into the dock house. North Kelly stands in the doorway for a moment, rests the whiskey on his hip, and chews on his cob pipe, looking around the place—this one place that has almost stayed the same.

  Fishing gear on the floor and strung up on net corks. Stacks of anchors, buoys, oars, and locks. The old ice chest, nail kegs, and stools. The pool table in one corner. Crackled yellow oilskins hang spread-shouldered on the walls. In the back room, Tommy McDonough is tarring his nets. In the corner by the sawhorses, Russ Barre is overhauling his gear, replacing the lost gangion on a trawl. His old fingers twist the new strings fast.

  The wind bellows through the rolling door. North Kelly and Swampy Davoll play cards on a folding table. Every so often, they glance up from their whiskey and butts to see the chaos on the wharf: Noel Keyes pulling out his floating pots. Andy Waite bailing rain out of his skiff.

  When the first window blows out, Tommy McDonough comes in from the back room to see it. The window in smithereens on the floor.

  “You going to just sit there?” he says to North and Swampy who are deep in a round of pitch.

  “Not much else to do,” North answers and swaps his ace on a king.

  Swampy raises the bet in the pot by twenty dollars.

  McDonough flicks open the first trapdoor cut into the floor. River water surges through it, and the second two pop out on their own, hinges torn. As the surge ebbs, the water level sinks, and then it comes again, stronger this time. The water heaves up to their shins.

  “Get the gear,” someone shouts, and then they are all standing, tripping over themselves, one another, benches, table, sawhorses, traps, the river climbing, surge after surge, it slams up against the boards, flooding through the trapdoors, higher and higher, reaching over the rims of their boots. They wade through it, pulling gaffs, nets, oilskins, whatever they can salvage. They clutch their gear in their arms and crowd toward the door as the river bears up on the next tidal surge. It floods the road, lifting boats, cars, men—the wave arches, pitched over the tops of the telephone poles. As the river pushes up through the traps behind them, the wave rushes in through the door, water on all sides, blocking them in.

  CHAPTER 24

  Elizabeth

  The light on the river is the stonebreakers’ light. Electric light.

  Light of poetry. Light of execution.

  Clutching the book of lists, she walks toward the end of the pier. Past the salt-meadow cordgrass, the surface torn to white butterfly shreds, the river’s shoulders rolling underneath.

  And he drew his sword against the sea.

  Eelgrass blown off the marsh wraps her face, her throat. She pulls it loose. Mermaid green. Banded with gold. She throws it off into the gray and soddy water.

  May the rain fall soft upon your fields. May he hold you … may He hold you …

  These are the blessings that she knows.

  The river is wild. Diced, fugitive surf. A muscular sky. Black bands of clouds that heave and ebb and force their way up out of themselves. Edges torn and spinning. Thin-spoked wheels. They will notice her missing at some point. They will send someone after her. There will be shouting and the peal of sirens. She might even hear them now—a far-off drone—like insects buzzing through her sleep. She has told them how useless it is to shout. She sees only their gaping mouths.

  The river has pushed up to the step-downs. What a different day it was—that day of the clambake—not this kind of sky at all—when she had sat up on the Coleses’ terrace, looked down the hill, and watched her granddaughter—Eve—walking down this same fragile pier.

  A life is like a sky, she could have told her. It is not what you think it has to be. Soul is not something we are born with. Not something we strip ourselves away to become. It is something out there. For the reaching. Beyond us.

  And she is here now, walking down that same wooden path. The planks have begun to shake with the pressure of the river underneath them, the slats rough against the soles of her feet. The piles are thin. Cedar. Taken when they were still young. Unsanded. They are weak now. They have not been repaired.

  She could have told her granddaughter then, she had wanted to tell her on that day, when she saw her standing with the young architect and ho
w he hunted with his eyes, how his whole self greeded out for her, Elizabeth had wanted to tell her that it was everything she had seen before. Everything of Henry and the choice that she had made. On that day, she had seen her granddaughter, Eve, who had always seemed so different, so alien and strange, Elizabeth had seen it then—she remembered it long before it happened—the straining of a girl into a narrow, even band.

  She takes another step. She could have warned her. She could have told her the story of an unused life packed for years into a small room with a flat-paneled door.

  As a child, Elizabeth had dreamed of walking out into the waves. She would keep walking. She would let herself be led down into it, the sea opening, the white horse speeding through.

  She has written this into her book of lists.

  She has written that regret is like learning to breathe underwater.

  The river runs over the tops of her feet and she can see the crows, a hollering tribe, barreling, blackness, tier after tier, they crack out of the sky and something rises in her, something quiet and unseen, with that pull of the water against her crooked legs, it sears up out of a fissure inside her, perhaps through a crack in that small flat-paneled door. They will not come for her. They will not save her now. She does not want to be saved.

  May the rain fall soft upon your fields. May He hold you in the palm of his hand.

  Green. Everywhere. Tumbling. Her body wrapped into current after current of green as it swept across the moors, over limestone rock and mound and bog, the brightness of it scalds her, slicing through, and at the edge of the pier, she yields under the knifed wind. She lets herself fall, not grasping anything now—her body tumbling down into that county of green water—her tongue washed with brine—and she can hear them—at last—the wind and water—they run like playful trains through the deafness in her ears. And it takes her—a greater, more titanic force than any she has ever known—it tears the flat-paneled door from its hinges: faces, names, living, dead, stories, truth, myths, what is told and untold, named and unnamed, it all breaks free—the book of lists—loose pages flapping up like soaked white birds. They wheel around her. And she lets herself go, as everything she sees, everything that she has ever seen, turning, here, now, beating glyphs of light.

  CHAPTER 25

  Eve

  She finds Jake in the boathouse. A fire in the woodstove. He sits on the floor carving the decoys out of pine. She stands outside the window, watching the orange light move across his face and the half-finished bird in his hand. He keeps his palm cupped around its breast as he splits the blade like a file down between its wings. There is a bottle of seed oil on the floor next to him, and he dips the knife into it, spoons the oil onto the wood, and rubs it in with his hand.

  She is stranded by the window. Unable to leave. Unable to reach out and unlatch the door. The wind writhes through the grass, and the river has washed in over the pier. The half-rotted skiff is snagged on one of the pilings still exposed.

  She grips the outside sill to keep herself from being pushed against the wall, and she tries to come up with a reason. There are a dozen she can think of. She could tell him she has been sent. Peter Eaton had come looking for him. She could tell him he was needed at the house or down at the wharf. She could ask him if he remembered that last line of the poem—it did not end with forsaken, did it? She raises her hand to the window to knock, then stops short when she remembers it herself.

  A thousand half-loves

  must be forsaken to take

  one whole heart home.

  Her hand is still raised, frozen by the window, her fist loosely clenched. The rain runs down her arm. But she will not knock. She knows this now. No. She is too close. It is too much to be this close.

  Her hand drops back to her side, and it might be that gesture—that brief aborted flash of shadow and light—that flings a slight change on the floor of the boathouse, enough so that he looks up and sees her there, her eyes muddy blue through the water that coats the window-pane like some thick oil, her hair so wet it looks dark, rain streaming down her face.

  He brings her inside and gives her the wool blanket off the bed to wrap around her shoulders. She sits in the small chair by the fire and stares at the heap of wooden birds in the middle of the room. The orange light darts through their wings, feathers ruffling as if they are alive.

  “Did you come from the house?” he asks her.

  She nods.

  “Is everything all right?”

  She nods again.

  “Is there something they need?”

  “No.” She doesn’t look at him.

  “Is there something you—” He stops as she raises her eyes, and they sit that way for a moment, her face emptying into his through the quickening orange light. It is only a moment, but it expands and grows as endless as the crack of the wind against the boathouse walls. He is less than three feet away from her, and when he touches her hand, everything inside of her moves toward him and at the same time pulls away so she is torn—she can feel herself, torn—the fragments and dismembered parts—the longing she has kept in one drawer, the fear in another—it is too much—and she lets herself fall still—into that calm, unbearable place of feeling all of it at once. His hand moves over her wrist, and he draws her down onto the floor next to him.

  “I want you to know,” he says, with his mouth on her ear, “that there is nothing—”

  She pulls him back onto the bed, so she is under him, the soaked blanket wrapped between them in the unstable light. She touches his face, and the features give and shift under her hands. She puts her mouth to his, taking his breath and exchanging it for hers. He buries into her, his mouth on her neck, in her hair.

  “There is nothing,” he says, and her body rises, alive underneath him. She prays. She has never prayed before, but she prays now—a slow and treacherous prayer that she sends out to the rain as it beats against the roof. The first wave of the river washes under the door. It pushes the flock of wooden birds ahead of it, and she prays, closing her eyes, as he turns to roll underneath her. He lifts her above him, holding her ribs in his hands.

  She says nothing to him about the water. She watches it from the corner of her eye. The second wave sweeps across the floor and then the third. Each time the level rises. It is the decoys that warn him—the grating sound as the water scrapes the heap of them against the wall. He turns his head from the pillow and sees the water pushing through the crack under the door. He slips out from under her, off the bed, to his feet. He flings open the traps in the floor. The river gushes through the holes up to his knees. He climbs back onto the bed, stands, and reaches for the lowest beam that holds the roof. He pulls himself up, wraps his body around the truss and reaches down to pull her up beside him, and they stay there, draped over the rafters, watching it flow through, wave after wave of the river. It surges up through the cuts in the floor and sucks out again, gutting everything inside.

  CHAPTER 26

  Patrick

  He has lost all sense of time. All sense of orientation. His arm is pudding, sore and grating in the shoulder socket. He trips over a mass of branches and wires, the fragment of a wall. The salt blurs his eyes. The water in the bowls is up to his waist, and he wades toward the line of secondary dune. He grasps the trunk of a scrub oak with his good arm and pulls himself up. He climbs higher, the sand pushing out from under him, to get out of the path of the next surge. He reaches the top and looks toward the beach. Shaved clean. There is nothing. No houses. No structures standing. Planks and timbers drift through the flooded lowlands like great unmanned canoes. Houses turned on their sides, cars face down or belly up, they bob and dance and float in circles through the water, ghost-driven. The road has been washed over. The let washes into the sea, and the sea washes into the let, and it is all one body of water in the almost dark. Patrick strains his eyes. Blinks. Then shuts them hard. Sure that when he opens them again, it will be different. He will awaken from this dream.

  Close to night,
when he can barely see, he imagines that the wind has dropped and the sea has begun to lie down.

  He hears their voices. A clipped calling and then another shout. Louder this time. Nearer. He stumbles to his feet, his ankle asleep, it wrenches in the sand.

  “Here!” he cries. “Over here!” On his twisted ankle, he runs down into the bowl of the dune and up the other side toward a thin light beaming back and forth across the dark.

  It is a truck that was caught on the Horseneck side of the bridge: two police officers in the front and five other refugees in the back. A woman wrapped in a soaked blanket clings to her husband. Another couple with a baby. An old man with a broken leg.

  “Any others with you?” the policeman asks.

  Patrick shakes his head, his ankle throbbing now. He kneels and touches it with his hand. The tissue is tender, hot, swollen.

  They make their way back toward the Point Bridge along the remains of John Reed Road. They go in darkness—the truck’s headlights smashed out. The baby whimpers, and the mother gives it strips of wet cloth to suck on. The man with the broken leg is in fever. He tosses on the floor of the truck, moaning about. As they reach the break in the trees by the entrance to the town dump, the right front wheel catches the edge of a rut. The driver swerves, and they slam into an oak, crushing the front end. The engine steams out a long hiss and then falls still. They climb out and go the rest of the way on foot. Patrick and the two other men make a sling with their arms for the broken-legged man. They crawl over poles and under trees that have fallen in the path. There is a boat tied up at the place where the clam shack used to be. It ferries them across the river through the darkness.