The Maytrees: A Novel

by Annie Dillard

  The first week after he showed up again, he built bookshelves. He asked, Should I grow back a beard? She liked his beard, but gave no answer. The last opinion she voiced had concerned Deary’s cherry furniture. —Why not sell it or give it away? She was sorry she had spoken. Afterward, she accorded his Maine life with Deary a sanctity never to broach.

  Tonight Maytree wanted to help her chop one onion. Now after supper he planned to walk the beach with her in moonlight. A fine activity, but she wanted to draw inside with vine charcoal. He seemed to like her within earshot. She guessed he saw for the very first time his lifelong exposure to enemy fire, probably because he had watched Deary die. For her the shelling never ceased, and beauty ditto—nothing hostile, nothing won. He possibly needed her as bulwark, foxhole, at best a trenchmate who could cook. Maybe a big dog would suit him, a very big dog.

  From the green kitchen table she could see him moving up the beach, head bobbing like a marionette’s. She was getting charcoal on her shirt. She had once tinted or dyed her one life the hue of his, this one man’s out of billions mostly unknown. She no longer leaned her life on anyone.

  Well, one time she fell in love; the next minute—in an apparently unrelated event—an unprecedented short person played with a roller skate on the floor. Without this new one (and presumably his ilk) she had absurdly considered her life full. When Petie was young, she assumed Petie would make his life around her—were they not miraculously, deliriously as one? Then the next minute this same one propped his own boggling-new, hitherto-nowhere child in his arms to display to her as if she had never seen such a thing. Who had? It was as if the tide came in under the door.

  In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty, over the tide slacked holding its breath at the flood. She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a shot. Having limited philosophy’s objects to certainties, Wittgenstein later realized he broke, in however true a cause, his favorite toy, metaphysics, by forbidding it to enter anywhere interesting. For the balance of Wittgenstein’s life he studied, of all things, religions. Philosophy, Lou thought and so did Cornelius, had trivialized itself right out of the ballpark. Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called “ultimate concerns,” unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability, and that drew nutty people, or drove them nuts.

  June 24 was the first—and as it turned out, the last—warm day in June. They cut each other’s hair on the front steps. She asked him to cut for her short bangs. Her braid was so thick it popped hairpins, as if surprised.

  In early July before they moved to the shack they drove out to what they called the New Beach. Others called it Herring Cove. They brought their respective books. Lou ran into the waves. Maytree took a walk. There was a lot to see. Locals had divided the beach informally. Half a mile left of the parking lot, that is, counterclockwise, he saw many talking women on towels. These women, as he had heard, wore nothing anywhere except bright plastic eye shields. Most were over forty, some probably in their seventies. “God and the neighbors,” his mother used to call that plein air jury that, so long as you were outside, was everywhere in session. He had never seen so many naked women, let alone naked women who could not see him. God and the neighbors had seen a lot worse—given earth’s thirty million years of hominid behavior—but not much weirder. The close-set eye shields—two hollowed ovals a nosepiece joined, like glasses—made all the women look cross-eyed.

  Beyond the women was a stretch of naked men sunbathing their every detail. What the Sam Hill? He hurried scandalized back to Lou, to their folding chairs and their two books.

  Lou asked him, Didn’t he remember Ross and Milo? Of course Maytree knew their parents’ openhanded friends, who had nothing to do with the situation at hand. These people on the beach ignored God and the neighbors, even little children! Ross Wye and Milo Matheson lived together on Pearl Street almost fifty years. Ross was an educated impressionist painter. Milo bred dachsunds.

  —At least they kept quiet about it.

  That night Lou dragged him to a drag show. Afterward, they walked home upstream in the crowd.

  —What are we supposed to think?

  —That it’s all a big joke, all pretence, and certainly “what people think,” and you can drop dead laughing. You’re going to drop dead anyway. He thought, She talks more in her old age. He thought, You wouldn’t catch any man in Camden going around as Carol Channing! He almost said it. He stopped himself just in time.

  Maytree would write one last book-length poem: There Will Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow, Aristotle’s conundrum. Can we establish the statement’s truth or falsehood? He had by no means finished with the sea, embattled or bare. Truth and falsehood were a barrel of laughs. He would for starters read Willard Quine, and The Odyssey again, and Aristotle and the history of the 1812 blockade. Why the 1812 blockade? Readers would see.

  They stayed in the dunes till mid-October that first of many new years. Cranberries came on. Dune people met at cranberry patches. Among them were the Maytrees’ favorite young friends, smart and funny, whose work over years had convinced the National Seashore not to demolish the shacks. One night an early frost capped ice on the pump jug. Clouds began to withdraw to their winter heights and thinned.

  They boarded up the shack. This fall as every fall, they guyed the outhouse ever more strongly against storm winds. Maybe this winter the outhouse would stay upright. They knew it would not.

  When they returned to their equally windy house by the bay, leaves had gone. In the neighbors’ wisteria they saw a nest. Maytree extricated it and showed Lou. Flown birds had lined it with her blond-white hair in threads and his red-and-white hair in threads. Their hair made a smooth cup inside twigs. Perfecting the circle, he knew, were the nestlings’ wars. Ants ate the ones that got pushed out.

  As they aged they grew more avid of beauty, the royal sea in their eyes in town, the dunes’ scimitar shadows, the ever-perishing skies. The two were storing all this—for what? Blind death’s long years. Bay tides amazed them again. Bay tides re-created the world, stink and all. Twice a month spring tides multiplied seas without diminishing sky. For three nights and days after full and new moons, the bay drowned the beach and climbed steps. It bore flat clouds upon it. From her kitchen window Lou looked down to the beach and saw clouds. People vanished. The sea swelled over ground without a sound and invisibly, as stars cross sky. Lou felt her eyes brimming with tears, but it was illusion. Dying fish stranded, as did party balloons that strangled sea turtles who mistook them for their chief food, jellyfish.

  Six hours later the same seas had withdrawn to Europe. Acres and acres of mud showed brown. People walked this absorbent surface, or sucking muck, cooling their eyes. They strayed among listing boats tied to dry moorings. Beyond, and back of beyond, Lou saw human forms wavering in distance wandering stretches at whim. Out there on the mudflats Lou wanted to wave her arms exhilarated, as did many dizzy children, children she had never seen. There were no paths or bounds, only the planet’s bare skin. Children could run anywhere and did. Only adults got stuck.

  Lou memorized the faces of her friends, of children, Maytree’s face and knees, clouds, the paintings she loved. She played Pete Fountain. They drove hours to see fireworks. She asked Maytree, Are these new people afraid of the dark? Why light everything? (Etc.) And, Would they look up more often if they had to pay?

  He once hoped to acquire what Pico della Mirandola had: Keats called it “knowledge enormous.” Maytree had settled for knowledge slim. Manny was pretending to be a truck. What was it, exactly—or even roughly—that we people are meant to do here? Or, how best use one’s short time? For a decade or so in Maine he read ethnographies and prehistory to ask people of every culture past and present, How did you divide your time? The Toltecs, Olmecs, et al. usually gave him the willies, till he read an old Mayan book, the book of the dawn of life:

/>   The first beings gave thanks to the gods:

  —Truly now, double thanks, triple thanks

  that we’ve been formed. We’ve been given

  our mouths, our faces.

  We speak, we listen, we wonder,

  we move…under the sky.

  Thanks a million? They sounded like good sports. Plus the Mayans saw in the Pleiades four hundred boys. Could skies ever have been so clear? For the Greeks, counting seven sisters was ordinary, and counting nine was perfect. Maybe Mediterranean mists dispersed another 391 sisters or boys? On a good northwester now he saw five or six Pleiades, not even the seven of his youth.

  All these peoples voted on what we are supposed to do here by portioning their time. Our forebears’ chief acts were raising children and gambling. Not even getting food. Getting food never took long before storing grain showed up. The few people tended to starve instead. Also popular: getting high, eating the salty, oily, and sweet, whittling, weaving, invading, and placating gods. Were people missing something? If we are missing something, why the big secret?

  Soon, but not soon enough, a Modern Library anthology of modern American poetry would appear containing slivers—as he poked a few pine needles between pages—from two of his book-length poems, likely alongside Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin.” With the book-length poem, the long-range cannon full-bore, Maytree had had a blast. Whether his work lasted was less crucial now than whether Manny would straddle his shins a little while longer.

  TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY only up to a point. One summer five years later Maytree began to die all over the place. Pete used to tease him about reading as if there were no tomorrow. There never were a hell of a lot of tomorrows, as Pete would see. Why should he live upstairs, he asked Lou, or even inside? The terms of the peace he had forged in these past five years with social convention had made convention surrender its tangle of keys. Lou reminded son Pete that Maytree always liked a change of scene. Those two broke down the ironstone bed once more and tilted its mattress and frame down one flight of stairs to the kitchen, then down another flight to the basement floor by the doors to their yard’s strand of cordgrass and sand and sea. On fair nights, they carried Maytree himself, long and light, through the doors and spread him in bed open-eyed.

  They were Arabic: Enif, Markab, Achernar, Hamal, Alfirk, Scheat, Rasalhague. They moved evenly over the black desert. They spread and kept their places as searchers sweep a field. Algenib and Denebola had gone before. Fomalhaut kept alone. Alpheratz and Saiph trailed out of sight.

  Long-necked Cygnus from afar pointed to the water like a spear and spent all night falling southwest unflinching. The breast of Cygnus was Sadir. Deneb, Altair, and Vega cornered a triangle overhead. The Milky Way smeared through it. The galaxy shed lights from far shores. It seemed to split in two streams that plied side by side over the top, north to south. Meteorites fell, six an ordinary hour. Ursa Major swung on its mooring as if tide loosed it. “But my eighties are passionate,” someone said in a book.

  Pete strung a tarp like a Baker tent to catch dew without closing sky. Lou slept like a mummy outside at the edge of their mattress. All Maytree’s adult visitors read to him in the dew. He wanted the stories of his childhood, “The Apple Tree, the Singing, and the Gold,” and “The Country of the Blind.” He wanted the lasting feelings only books could provide. If anyone asked, he would probably admit that he was unlikely to be up and around, really, again.

  Nights he rose to take companionable leaks with Jupiter. Comically, when he took his last outdoor shower a week ago, he did not know it would be his last. Nothing marked or would mark his last piece of pie, swim, tune—as presently he would see his last everything, kid, dawn, spoon, and familiar face—if he had not already. When he knew he would die, he found it first impossible, then sad, to near the falls’ lip, to yield to the ripping loss of the colored world and himself in it. Where would—say—literature be, if everyone mattered less than a speck? In all his work he avoided sentimental topics, say love and grief. But they came along, didn’t they.

  One morning Lou told him that their sleeping outdoors on fair nights was scandalizing neighbors—always invigorating. Sunny days she shielded him with a Red Sox cap—not that such shielded the Red Sox. She had a book of Trask Provençal lyrical poems and an anthology of old lyrical poems from East and West. She read to him in a murmur. Everything amazed these ancient poets as if they had just awakened to a world already moving and full of astounding stuff like hills, or a round of white cheese. Tandy often sat by the bed listening and gnawing her knees. Maytree refused the tapioca she kept sticking at him.

  When Lou woke beside him one rainy morning on their bed moved inside the doors, she watched his blue hand feel for a nautical chart. His hands’ backs looked glued over with blueberry skins. That his face was gray as a kneaded eraser she ignored. Now a month had passed since he could hold a book, a week since he asked her to read. After he took to bed he hoped, he told her, to learn more constellations. Cartoons of suns that look adjacent only from here, Lou thought, attracted her too. But learning why, now? Would he dead reckon among stars? And now learning a nautical chart? Lou watched his hand find it curled on the floor. He tried to fold it into submission. How little time—less than the verblasteder turtle’s. Today he would surely not try to memorize what muck anchors brought up whence. She creased the blue chart to display local waters north to Stellwagen Bank. For the next few days when he was alert she gave his hand the chart, right side up. His thumb pressed it to his fingers and he lapsed away. Any section she gave him was fine.

  Here came sneaking the tide. Its raised rims caught starlight that streaked along the beach like lighted eels. The son picked up a fish rack spangled in blood and threw it on the mudflats, where its stink would meld in the brine they rarely noticed but loved. Then the son sprawled on sand by the old ones and looked up. He and his mother watched the night with Maytree while they could.

  I scarcely knew how pleasantly the moments were falling, until now, when looking them over through the telescope of years. Last month he had read this to the woman from a book. He interrupted her reading. Had his moments fallen pleasantly? As a boy he sold cod cheeks door-to-door from pails.

  Diomede exulans exulans, the wandering albatross. He heard girls laughing down the beach. Orange and black specks rose from distant bonfires. Breeze lifted a blanket corner. The woman rose and tucked something over his feet. Which feet—he had seen and forgot—were turning black. The sea’s curve neared. The lighthouse turned; everything extended. His arms cooled. His eyes roved. Carina, the keel. Overhead Hercules ran like a turpentined horse. Cepheus, that crazy little house.

  Your face I keep inside my soul,…the days of September rising in my dreams…, whatever theme I touch, whatever thought I utter. These Cavafy lines recurred as he went in and out of sleep on the beach. Maytree’s adoring grandmother, always good in a crisis, showed up fitfully to encourage him. A radio said, Here’s the pitch! Mornings a bird repeated, You hit me and I’ll tell Mom! You hit me and I’ll tell Mom! He realized he had been hearing this bird’s whine all his life, and it would be his death song.

  He knew a crew had buried his grandfather at sea. The men sewed shut the canvas they shrouded him in. The mate used a leather palm to ram a curved sewing needle again and again through all the layers of canvas on either side of the corpse’s nostrils, and, in the middle, through the nostrils’ gristle.

  By day, dimming people circled. Cornelius brought Tandy. One day he faced Maytree. Wide whiskers wagging, Cornelius began,

  —Doc says, You have three minutes to live.

  —Anything you can do for me, doc?

  —Well, I could boil you an egg.

  When he woke at night, he saw Altair in Aquila, Corona Borealis, and the wild swan sluicing down the Milky Way. The Little Dipper looked like a shopping cart. They should rename it.

  Lou lay beside him, silent as bandages, her immense solitude so gloriously—he might say, for who will fa
ult a dying man’s diction?—broached. I wither slowly in thine arms, here at the quiet limit of the world. She got up to stretch in her long dress, and his body drooped to the low and midgey spot she left warm. What was he trying to remember? Was Alterf “the glance?” He thought he witnessed, and was now witnessing, the cutting edge of things. Had he helped cut? I scarcely knew how pleasantly the moments were falling. He had enjoyed what Brits call good innings. He had seen downy feathers on eggs. He saw auroras from the dunes. Once he saw a fireball.

  Now the rising sea drowned the flats with no struggle. The heavens slid down. Was dragging the bed outside Lou’s idea? He would trail off into skies like a cloud or sonic boom. Addio terra, addio cielo. Maybe like Lou he was more ironist than he knew. Around him her body, sawgrass, trash, seas, and skies altered, reeled, and gave way to dark. The gods in the night jumbled with beasts there, and moved through tools, thrones, machines. Their legs tangled in one another’s chariots. Their wings disrupted lovers. Horns’ tips ran through eyes. A mess up there.

  Only now did he reckon beauty itself was the great thing. As a deathbed revelation this required—like most, he suspected—more thought.

  Lou changed their sheets without getting him up, as she did in the rest home. Shifting him, she guessed he weighed about what his skeleton and teeth did. His rib cage through his shirt reminded her of a newsreel of the Hindenburg. Two days later he rarely opened his eyes. Still they moved him in and out; now he was out. Even in fog he wanted the bed on the beach. A gliding gull dropped its head, swiveled its neck, and peered under its tail to keep him in sight like a car crash.