by Joan Connor
“Yes. I was lucky—running aground on sand bottom.” He shakes his head at his own stupidity. “This part of the bay’s new to me. I usually fish north of here. And when I do cross here, I usually cross to the west. I lashed the steadying sail hard to the shore. ‘Mistress,’ that’s my boat, is pretty forgiving. She should free up as the tide rises.” He kicks off his left boot and slumps against the wall. The door is a blinding rectangle of light in the dark room. An oily steam seels the windows. He sniffs. Fish chowder. A pot hangs on a tripod above barely smouldering coals in the fireplace. He searches for small talk. “It’s warm,” he says. “Indian summer. But it’s a fresh breeze out there. Twenty knots, gusty.”
She doesn’t answer. She scoops up the chunks on the cutting board, crosses to the hearth, carefully sidestepping a rolled pallet, and plops the fish into the suspended kettle.
“Mackerel?” he asks.
“Blues. If you’re hungry, help yourself.” She nods at a stack of bowls on the counter.
But he doesn’t move. It’s too hot for chowder. He mumbles, “Thanks,” and scans the shimmer of water and sand for Mistress. He shifts on the rough bench. The sparsely furnished room—three rolled pallets, two rockers, a table, a large wardrobe, and some scattered straight back chairs—has been outfitted for function rather than comfort. He wonders when he’ll be able to get back under way, tries to calculate the tide, figure whether he’ll make his cove before nightfall.
The woman’s cleaver cuts the silence.
“Plenty warm,” he says again. “But it’s a strong Sou-westerly out there today. A lot of chop.”
The woman only nods.
“Your husband fishing?” He’d noticed no mooring near the island.
The woman shakes her head. “Dead.” The cleaver crosses the board with blunt little thunks.
“Dead.” He shifts on the bench, murmurs, “I’m sorry,” then asks, “Lost at sea?” Under him, the flappy boots slouch against each other and gape.
“No. Just dead.” Her voice admits no sorrow.
It is a hard life, he thinks. Scraggles of hair have worked free from her hasty bun. He cannot see her face, but he remembers its lumpiness. She was beaten perhaps. He has known lobstermen like that—rarely at home and, when home, drunk and, when drunk, cruel, their wives quiet and sullen as bruises. No one mourns these men when they die. He studies his feet, picks some lint from his rag wool socks. “You’re alone then?” he asks.
“Alone,” she repeats. Her voice whets to an edge sharper than the cleaver’s. She slaps a filet onto the board. The cleaver drops rhythmically.
“Yours the only house on the island?” He pokes his boots with his foot. They skid forward a few inches, glued together with mud.
She nods. “Only one.” She plows the fish chunks to the edge of the board with the cleaver, slaps down another filet.
“Chop, chop, chop.” The sound startles him. Not the sound of the cleaver, but a voice. A soft voice. A girl’s voice. Only then does he see her sitting on the stool in the corner, half-obscured by the opened door of the wardrobe.
“Chop, chop, chop.” Her voice again. Her hand pushes the door aside.
How did he miss her, he wonders. She is the only brightness in the room. Shiny as a jigging lure.
The old woman taps her temple. “Don’t mind her,” she says. “She’s simple.”
But he minds her. He gawks. In the shadowy corner of this fish shack with its stingy light and dingy future, sits the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She is younger than he by a few years, he guesses, perhaps sixteen. Even by this light, her hair, agleam, tumbles to her shoulders, not blonde but impossibly yellow like goldenrods. Her eyes appear gray; in brighter light they might prove blue. But her eyes hold nothing but their color. Expressionless, they consider him.
“Chop, chop, chop,” her mouth says again—her perfect mouth, a mouth he cannot imagine saying “no.”” Her skin, undisturbed by the motion of her mouth, glides fluidly. Her face unsettles him—something glimpsed through layers of blue and placid ice beneath which sluggish waters stir—a face of great calm, except it is beyond calm. It is empty.
Her dress is plain, a gray-blue cotton, and reaches almost to her crossed ankles. Her bare feet perch on the rung of the stool. The curl of her pink toes makes him think of small birds—chickadees, titmice. But she stretches long and slender beneath her dress. He can imagine the hollows just inside her hips, the taper of her waist, silky in his salt-chapped hands. He wants to turn away from her; he knows he should turn away from her, but he cannot. His eyes fix, strive to read some response in her face. But there is nothing there. And this he realizes is what transfixes him—that vacancy, the lack of guile in her eyes—offset by her beauty.
His hands yearn to stroke her imperturbable skin. His fingers long to snarl in her yellow, yellow hair, his teeth to bite the plump ring of her mouth. In her gray stare, his eyes swim.
Chop, chop, chop. Not her voice now, but the cleaver’s. His neck strains as he turns away from the girl.
“She’s not right in the head,” the old woman says.
He squirms. He feels as if the old woman is staring at him, but her eyes remain lowered as she talks to the rhythmic accompaniment of the cleaver.
“Born slow. Not much point in sending her off-island to school. Can’t even dress herself.” The woman waggles her head slowly from side to side.
He pictures the old woman dressing her, and he has to shut his eyes to keep from trembling at the image of the yellow-haired girl, pearly and naked.
“Her father named her Lily. I never much liked the name. Lee, I call her. It hardly matters. She doesn’t answer to names. She doesn’t really talk even. Just repeats sounds. So I call my daughter Lee.”
He startles at the word “daughter.” What magic tricks could time perform that would make this aged woman the mother of this girl? Or had the hardness of this woman’s life prematurely aged her? “How did you lose her father?” he asks.
The old woman blurts a short laugh at the question. The laugh rasps, the laugh of someone unaccustomed to laughing. She coughs, recovers. “We didn’t lose him.” She stresses “lose,” shaking her head.
“Chop, chop, chop,” says the girl.
He turns toward her voice. Her beauty jolts him. He breathes hard as if he’s been thumped on the chest.
Observing the senseless motion of her mouth, his eyes slide down her hair, her shoulders, her arms to the small hands nesting in her lap. Incapable of resistance, he thinks. Fingers as delicate as twigs, fine as straws. Only then does he notice that the joint of her little finger is missing. The finger stubs, blunt just above the knuckle. He thinks of the sweetness of dark rum undercut by the sourness of lemon, the off-note that reminds you that you have an ear for melody.
“Chop, chop. chop.” The meaningless words sound like an invitation, a chant. “Chop,” she says, “chop.”
He rises slowly, pulled by her voice. Forgetting the old woman, he crosses to the girl. He takes her hand, rubs his thumb over the shiny skin of her stumpy finger. He inhales the close lemony tang of her hair. He places his hand under her chin, tilts her head back and stares into the upturned face. He lifts her hair, brushes it back over her shoulders. He feels as if he has been fishing a long time. He cannot remember when he last had a woman. Perhaps many years. Perhaps never. He cannot remember what women at home look like. He thinks all women should look like this girl, this girl he now realizes he has spent a lifetime imagining. He leans over her, lifting her torso toward him.
One chop stops him. The sound travels along his spine. He pivots. The cleaver stands on its own, its tip buried in the cutting board.
“Tide’s coming. It comes fast when it comes there in the gut,” the woman says. The cabin broods, still and airless. “You should be able to free her now,” she adds. She yanks the cleaver from the board and cradles it.
His skin shrivels. The hair on his forearms bristles in animal reflex, tiny antennae transmitting d
anger. The woman says nothing, but his breath catches on something close to intuition or alarm. The cleaver glints with sharp intelligence, suddenly the most sensate, most conscious presence in the room—keener, more brilliant than yellow hair. Without looking at the girl, he releases her. He feels her weight shift from him as she settles onto the stool.
Time attenuates. A season has turned since the woman last spoke, but only a minute has elapsed. His jaw works woodenly. “Yes. I should get my boots on and get back to the boat.”
Watching him, the cleaver gradually lowers itself to the board, lies down on its side.
But he does not turn his back to the blade. He eyes it intermittently as he pulls on his boots. He consciously averts his eyes from the girl, checks Mistress’ lie. She’s vectored toward deep water, headed up. He stamps his heels. Dry cakes of mud drop from the boots, puff small silty clouds as they land on the floor. He inhales slowly, self-consciously. The history breeding in the oil smells and fish smells of this dark, sad room rises, surface like a body lost at sea. Preternaturally alert, he sees the father, drunk, forcing himself against the girl, threatening his wife that he will kill their child if she interferes. She tries to force herself between her daughter and her husband. And her husband, who is a man who keeps his word, chops off the child’s fingertip as a caution to her. Chop. The child screams. The woman waits, endures. When he is done, he passes out on the pallet. She binds the child’s finger, listens until sleep mutes the girl’s whimpering. While the child sleeps, the cleaver kills him.
The story loops through his mind. He doesn’t know why he suddenly knows this story, but he doesn’t doubt it. The knowledge is simply there like preliterate knowledge : breathe, suck.
He slaps on his oilskins and stands in the door frame. “Yup, she’s floating free. Thank you,” he says. But he barely looks behind him at his boat. As he leaves, he never shifts his vision from the cleaver.
Wordlessly, the woman slaps another filet onto the board. As he walks down the bank, he hears the chop, chop, chop diminishing behind him.
But sometimes in the shuttered darkness of his dreams, the sound grows louder, closer like his heart. He keeps time as it beats, chop, chop, chop, with a yellow-haired girl who sits on a stool. She does not age. Behind her cabin is an unmarked grave. He knows this although he never returns to the island misnamed “Mystic.”
He might have earned himself such a grave. For a while, he thinks he’s made an easy choice of life over death, survival over lust. But as he’s gone farther asea, the choices no longer seem distinct, either one, a desire to preserve his life. Either one might have affirmed him.
Had he been a different man, braver, perhaps, or crueler, he would have a memory now to warm him, a memory of taking the beautiful girl who burns her way nightly into his dreams, a memory cleaving his heart. But he was not that man.
Her father was. Sometimes he considers him. How could a man commit such an act? No answer comes. Some hearts are uncharted.
The yellow-haired girl comes and goes; his days and nights entwine, intermingle sleep and waking. They no longer separate into distinct states. Sea and shore. Sky and sea. Once, rocking in the dream, he rips the gray dress, falls heavily on the naked girl. She disappears beneath him into a gray rag on the floor. When the dream ebbs, he lands, waking to his hips grinding into his bunk tick.
“Missed it.” Again he runs aground.
Tide Walk
AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, I walk alone. Even the fishermen are not up yet. The sandbar rediscovers itself in the draining tide, in a world trickly and silvery with phosphorus and moon, tricked out with water and stars. The sandbar extends a path from Great Chebeague Island to Little Chebeague, and it flutters with gull wings, a white tremor in a dim world, the tremor of a gullible heart. At my approach, a rush, a flush and flurry of white. The seagulls betray themselves as they carve ellipses in the sky.
A curve is the shape of a wing is the shape of an unfinished sentence, the silence defining the unspoken word. Rocks emerge from hovering sea fog as all things emerge from their absence. The ledges compose themselves like letters contemplated but never written or mailed, letters written in the solitude of the irrecoverable chance, addressed to the teacher who affected you, the lover who disaffected you.
What motivates a middle-aged woman to rise before her dreams complete themselves, before the day stutters back into its introductory clause? What motivates the pen to write the letters it does write?
When you were my mentor, you said the epistolary form is dead. The second person is unmanageable. The apostrophe, you said, is an outmoded device. By apostrophe, I assumed you meant a symbol for what was missing, not an address to an absentee, only to learn later that what is missing is who is missing. For brevity, we punctuate our lives and letters with apostrophes, ellipses....
But first, a story. Douglas Marsh, a man twisted by age into driftwood, sat in the shadowy interior of the Chebeague boatyard he once oversaw, a decoration like the shark jaws pegged to the wall, the oversized lobster claws, prized for their oddity. While he watched his son work, his jaw worked, munching first one anecdote, then another. The stove steamed against the fizzle of sea fog. It was a cold morning, but warm inside, when he said, “Little Chebeague was settled when I was a boy. A whole fishing town there, a cannery, a store. Actually,” he revised, “it was unsettling then, when I was a boy. The families were just starting to leave because the cannery was closing. Most of the families took their chances here, relocating to Great Chebeague which had a ferry to the mainland.”
I watched Marsh’s son consider the damaged daggerboard I’d brought in. “Can it be fixed?” I asked.
He nodded. “Maybe.”
“I wasn’t watching where I was going,” I said, apologizing for running aground.
He turned his face away from me, the repair an imposition, an avertible accident.
Douglas Marsh droned. “Pretty soon nobody lived there. Pier collapsed into the water, pilings rotted. Brush grew up. We island boys used to walk over there and chuck rocks at the windows at low tide.” He chuckled. “Later, we tried to coax our girlfriends to walk over with us.”
I smiled. “And?” I asked.
Shark-like, he grinned. “Some did. Some didn’t.”
“How do you walk over?” I asked.
“From the hook.” He squinted at me. “You want to be one who did, eh?”
We laughed together. Then he started another story, opening it from its middle like a book with a cracked spine, a story about a rabbit swimming over from Cliff Island, a fox a stroke behind. “I didn’t know they could swim,” he was saying as his son’s finger scolded the ding in my daggerboard, and I reentered the mist beyond the boatyard door.
After hearing the elder Marsh’s story, I knew that I wanted to smash windows, that I’d wanted to smash windows my whole life, that I was one of those people who never smashed windows, being either too civilized or too timid. I knew that, sooner or later, I would smash a window, walk at low tide to Little Chebeague and hurl a rock with the pent-up wildness and recklessness of a lifetime.
A walk is not a straight line, but a zigzag through time. Water trickles in rivulets back into the ocean, which bridles, bucking at a distance, near dead low. Everywhere movement but no urgency. A story is not a straight line but a blue and rimless bowl rising to contain the shape that will define it. Ten years intervened between Douglas Marsh’s telling of the story and my bare feet slapping across the hard, emerging band of sand. In that interval much happened.
The story teller died. I married the man I’m divorcing. He sold the boat with the damaged daggerboard and bought a bigger boat that drew more water. My son was born.You loved me for a while.
What motivates a woman to rise before her dreams complete themselves, to leave the house as quietly as a folding sleeve so the husband and son she betrays can sleep? To break a window. To displace herself, to wander off like a memory belonging to someone else. To assume the unnamed longing teena
ged boys’ faces wear as their eyes glimpse an out-of-state license plate passing through their small town.
Gulls etch their circles, sweeping down, again and again, for the blue mussels which they swipe upward to drop to crack upon the rocks, the blue jewel-boxes unhinging, splaying stories begun in the middle, their book spines split. The mussel centers quiver, a life form as simple as a nerve. They open themselves to a squawk, a beaked jab. Perhaps there’s an instant, a shiver, when the mussel shrivels into its shell, but no concealing chamber opens to receive the reflex. How quiet endings are after all the commotion.
Gulls skim the draining flats. My feet pad over a road paved with chipped shells, the cobalt blue of mussels, the nacre, the furze of the beard. Little Chebeague grows bigger. As the fog retreats, the day becomes itself . A boat, unseen, chugs. A radio crackles, amplified by water, a static of unindividuated words, atmospheric disruptions. A lone woman, her skirt looped up between her legs, bends rhythmically, scalloping in the shallow waters off the island. As my feet slap up the exposed beach, remnants of the abandoned life, an iron cleat ring, a rusted mangle of machinery, a corroded outlet drain, press their memories through the sand and the high-tide detritus on the shingle. The scalloper wades off toward her anchored pram.
Last month two gestures informed me I would leave my husband. My favorite red sweater packed itself in my overnight bag, intuiting I wouldn’t be returning to the summerhouse next year, and anxious not to be left behind. And when the family drifted, mackerel-jigging on the Loki, my husband’s hand pressed its affection on my shoulder. While my nerves managed to contain the reflex, my soul cringed, shrugging off its touch. After bickering years, shouting doors, love ended with a folded sweater and an undetectable flinch. I’m glad I’m leaving him for me and not for you, but still I wonder, now that we no longer write, what ended it for you, a tilt of my head, the way I drank my iced coffee, never stirring the sugar settled in the punt of the glass? Once when I asked you if you still loved your wife, you said, Love leaves the back door open. Later, you said, Love like a hospital gown opens at the back. And you slipped out.