Maria Elena had hair the color of coal. Eyes that matched the polished ebony of her father’s machete. Lips the flesh of saints. Her smile was like the sun, and she smiled now. Her face turned radiant, and the sparrow took flight, circling once in a halo around her head and once around the grave. Then, straight as an arrow, it flew at Luis.
Afterwards, he would remember a parting kiss. An inner quickening. A sudden burst of heat. The bird vanished inside him, and moments later his precious daughter, his treasure, Maria Elena Hermosilla Rodriguez, was gone.
They named her Angelica. The baby. Angelica, for angel. At her birth nine months later Dr. Admonson used a modified Caesarean approach. He had no choice. Despite an exhaustive search, he had failed to locate the mother’s vagina. The operation served a secondary purpose: it allowed him to look inside Luis to see just what the hell was going on.
What he saw was not so different from what he always saw: a term infant attached by a cord and placenta to a source of nutrition, in this case the blood-engorged wall of Luis’ lower intestine. After removing the baby and severing the cord, he took a sample of the attachment site for further study. He looked around for anything else out of the ordinary and finding nothing, sewed his patient up. Then he went to talk to the media.
Rosa, who was not present at the birth, met her husband and new daughter in the recovery room. Luis’ impregnation, which to many had come as a shock and embarrassment, was to her a miracle, the answer, if slightly outlandish, to her prayers. She was as thrilled as any new parent. More, perhaps, because she had just landed a new job she would have hated to leave, even for a month or two. Now she wouldn’t have to, and at the same time she could have the joy of a new face, a new spirit in the family. It was as close to Heaven as she could imagine. She felt deeply blessed.
Luis was still recovering from the anesthetic when she entered the room. He didn’t completely recognize her, but she kissed him anyway and held his hand while he slept. The baby was wrapped in a flannel receiving blanket and tucked in a bassinet next to his bed. When she started to cry, Rosa instinctively picked her up. She cradled her in her arms and held her to her chest, but the child’s wailing only grew louder. Finally, Luis opened his eyes. He motioned to his wife.
“Give her to me,” he said sleepily.
Rosa complied. “She’s hungry.”
Luis pulled his gown aside and placed the child at his breast. She rooted a few moments before latching on. Luis waited, his anxiety growing, then all at once evaporating as his milk began to flow. It was an incredible sensation. He thought of all the things that might have happened, then all the things that did. Who was he, he wondered, to deserve such a miracle? The Devil had been inside him. Now the Devil was gone, and in its place he held an angel in his arms.
He transferred the baby to his other breast, where she promptly fell asleep. Luis soon followed, and what he dreamed did not remember, and when he woke was ravenous, and ate a meal that was quite enough, said the astonished nurse, for two grown people, or even, God forbid, three.
ISOSTASY
I found the rock yesterday. It was more or less where Uncle Matthew said it would be, halfway between the knoll and the pond, at the edge of a shallow sink of dead leaves and rainwater. I would never have found it had it not been for the hurricane. I wasn’t even looking. Instead, I was watching the sun play through the leaves and listening to the birds. I was marveling at my ability to enjoy these simple pleasures, marveling at the absence of that heavy feeling in my chest, that dread. It was pure luck I found the rock. Pure chance.
Jack calls it paradise here. The pond, the ocean, the woods in between. The woods especially, his own personal Garden of Eden. It used to be pasture when my grandfather was alive, sixty acres of cows and pigs, apple trees and a few struggling crops. Before that it was forest, pine mostly, which was cut down for the ships, the big whalers they were building in Mystic at the time. There’s not a pine left, except what’s been planted since. And now the pasture’s gone too, where we used to play as kids. It’s woods now, dense thickets of viburnum and choke cherry, honeysuckle as big as your arm, wild rose and bull briar, and grape and bittersweet everywhere.
No one had stepped foot in the woods for twenty years until Jack cut a path last summer from my mother’s house to Uncle Matthew’s and Aunt Lillian’s. It took him more than a week. And this summer, on account of how fast everything grows, it took nearly as long to make the path passable again. And then there was the hurricane, which blew everything to hell. Jack had to start pretty much from scratch. Uncle Matthew gave him a compass and wished him well. Moses had found his way through the wilderness. He had faith that Jack would, too.
When he was younger, Uncle Matthew had been the one to keep the paths clear. Then his ministry moved, and by the time he came back to Aponeset, all the kids had grown, so there was little reason to put in all the time and effort necessary to keep the woods at bay. He preferred nature to take hold, or at any rate this is what he said whenever anyone asked. It was his father who had originally cleared the land, and I think the truth was that he finally realized he had no obligation to keep it that way.
Of the four men of his generation in my family, three uncles plus my father, Uncle Matthew is the only one left. Partly because of that, we’ve become closer over the years. He’s also become more approachable. And I’ve become more tolerant. I see him once a year, every August when we come to Aponeset. I paid my first visit the day after we arrived.
It was mid-morning and already hot. The patchwork blacktop at the end of our driveway that follows the curve of the pond before taking a sharp turn inland was soft underfoot, the tarry areas especially, which felt like gum. I passed my Aunt Mattie’s and then my cousin George’s driveways, relatives I never saw because their houses were rented out every August to pay taxes for the year. Their mailboxes used to be marked simply with their names, hand written in black paint. Now the names were gone, replaced by stenciled numbers. And the blacktop had a street sign, two of them, where before it had not even had a name. At its intersection with Beach Road was a new house, taller than any other, extravagantly landscaped with wide beds of petunias, topiary shrubs and a turf-perfect lawn that was being picked at by a flock of starlings. We do not welcome starlings in my family, as they are aggressive birds that chase our native birds away, and had I known these new residents, I most surely would have driven the interlopers off. But I did not.
Beach Road is our main thoroughfare, running pretty much down the center of the Aponeset thumb, from Route 1 where it originates, to the breachway, where it peters out in a broken concrete parking lot whose exact boundaries shift according to how the sand has blown the night before. The current breachway was machine-dredged and lined with concrete and native rock after the ’39 hurricane dammed up the original breachway and made Aponeset pond effectively a lake. This suited neither the commercial fishermen, who wanted access to the pond for flounder and clams, nor the sports fishermen, who wanted access to the ocean for black fish and blues. Now, of course, the pond and coastline are all but fished out, but that hasn’t halted the flow of fishermen, especially the weekend variety, who seem perfectly happy to spend half the day idly trailing a line while awaiting a bite. Such languorous lack of ambition would have been roundly ridiculed by my grandfather, who equated ambition with success and success with happiness. Not that he was all that successful, either as a farmer or, as some of us have come to believe, a family man. Where he did excel, where he prided himself, was on his fishing, which, in the summers, when I knew him, was his major and abiding interest. He knew every cove in the pond, every sand bar and rock bed, every deep and every shallow. He knew what fish were where and what time to get them. He knew the tides and the weather and the phases of the moon. Boats, bait, hooks, lines and lures, he knew them all, a hundred tricks, a lifetime of experience. He passed on what he knew to my father, and after him, to my brothers. But never to me, or any of the girl cousins. There were other things he gave us.<
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The breachway is the only public access to the pond, the only piece of Aponeset that isn’t private, and as such, it attracts a fair number of locals. There was a steady stream of cars that morning, Rangers and Cherokees pulling boats, Chevy and Ford wagons piled high with beach chairs and coolers and vinyl inner tubes the color of glossy lipstick. I walked on the left, well away from the poison ivy that lines the road, remembering last summer when Emily, who is terribly allergic, had gotten blisters all over her legs. Though I had warned her, I felt responsible, but also vindicated in my fears. I expect calamities to happen here, which is why I’m always on guard, always vigilant and tense. To me Aponeset is no paradise. To me Aponeset is a place where from the day we arrive, I start counting the days until we depart.
Uncle Matthew and Aunt Lillian live on the pond side of Beach Road, at the end of a pebbly driveway separated from the neighboring lot by a break of cedar and willow. Their house is a converted barn, left over from the days of my grandfather’s farm. Years ago they added a second story and a front porch, and recently, they built a smaller, more private side porch off the kitchen. The house sits at the eastern edge of the woods, which surround it on three sides. The fourth, the front, faces the ocean, which lies across sand dunes and sea grass on the far side of Beach Road, about three minutes’ distance by foot. It’s visible from the second story, and the sound of it, even on the quietest day, is continuous.
There was no one in sight as I walked down the driveway, and I took time to admire Aunt Lillian’s garden. Since last summer she has been working with a raised bed and enriched soil, not the nutrient-poor Aponeset sand and rock that she’d had to contend with through the years. The difference showed. The tomatoes were fat and heavy, the peppers a deep and luscious green, the corn and beans and zucchini all thriving as never before. There was a huge clump of basil and at least three kinds of lettuce, as well as onions, cabbage and chard. In the center of the plot she’d built a dangling contraption of aluminum pie pans and soda cans to scare off birds. There was also a hose on the front porch with a trigger nozzle to shoot them from a distance.
I was about to climb the front stairs when I heard a screen door open, then saw Uncle Matthew amble out onto the side deck. He was carrying a cup of tea and a newspaper, both of which he set down on the outdoor table. Instead of sitting, he went to the edge of the deck and gripped the railing, gazing solemnly into the woods as if to draw solace, or inspiration, or both. He was wearing a short-sleeved orange jumpsuit, the kind that highway workers and sky divers wear. It looked brash against the quiet greens and browns behind him, which was probably what he intended. He was a man who liked to stand out. As my mother was fond of saying, he thought himself a vein of uncommonly precious metal in a mass of very common rock.
I coughed to be noticed and walked around to meet him. He was elated to see me and motioned me up the stairs, then gave me a big bear hug.
“What a delight,” he crowed. “What an unprecedented pleasure. Dear Sharon, come to visit her old uncle.”
“You’re not that old, Uncle Matthew.”
“Less by a shake than a moment ago. The very sight of you strips the years like autumn leaves.”
He held me at arm’s length for a look, then squinted, as if something drew his attention. He reached toward my neck.
“What an enchanting charm,” he said, touching the necklace I was wearing.
“It’s a hummingbird,” I said.
“Indeed.” He lifted the tiny silver bird for closer inspection, then let it fall back on its chain. “Remarkable.”
“Louise made it.”
“Louise? My daughter?”
Louise was a silversmith and had been for years. We were born within a month of each other and felt like sisters.
“This can’t be a surprise to you, Uncle.”
“I’ve seen pictures of her work. She sends her catalogues.” He leaned in for another look. “What a lovely creation. The girl has talent.” He seemed surprised and somewhat abashed. “Such a delicate figurine. So airy and full of spirit.”
“Yes, that’s why I wear it. When things get too heavy, it reminds me to lighten up.”
He gave me a look as if to say what did I know of such things. “Child. These are the years to cherish. The burden only grows greater.”
He had been sick, and I assumed he was speaking of his illness. “My mother told me you were in the hospital.”
“In the hospital?” His voice rose an octave. “My dear girl, I nearly croaked.”
He proceeded to describe with great relish his hospitalization, from the transient stroke-like attack that felled him to the baby-faced surgeon who slit his neck length-wise like a sausage to clean out the clogged artery responsible. He spent a total of a week in the hospital, seven days that he recounted in delicious, if somewhat grisly, detail. When he finished, he gave a great sigh.
“The burden of age,” he said, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “Mitigated for the present. But ever growing. Ever ready to subdue us.”
It crossed my mind that maybe he should be the one wearing my necklace. Louise would probably die of shock.
“I’m forgetting my manners,” he said. “May I offer you a cup of tea?”
I declined but urged him by all means to drink his own. I asked if Aunt Lillian were home.
“Gone until Labor Day,” he said. “Visiting her dear sister in Vermont.”
“I was admiring her garden.”
“A remarkable achievement,” he agreed, but his mind was elsewhere. He sipped his tea and settled back. “I was reading a book the other day and came across a word. Isostasy. Do you know it?”
I shook my head. “What book?”
“A history of New England, a chronicle of sorts. Geologic, paleontologic, anthropologic. A potpourri of ideas. An ontology, if you will. Full of surprises. You would enjoy it.”
Uncle Matthew and I share a variety of intellectual interests, though I couldn’t imagine having the time for this. “I’m reading Agatha Christie right now.”
“A gifted writer,” he said without enthusiasm. “Isostasy is the word that describes the balance between the weight of the earth’s crust and the fluid material underneath. One presses down, the other up. Increase the weight of the crust, and it sinks. Decrease it, say by glacial evaporation, and it rises. Or rather it is pushed up. A few millimeters a year, perhaps a foot or two a century. In a thousand years, a few yards; in a million, what? A mile? Two? It’s an astounding notion. Plains become hills. Hills, mountains. Mountains, alps of incomparable grandeur, vast cathedrals of stone lifted to the sky.”
His voice had become oratorical, as if he were beguiled by his own words, which he probably was. Beguiled by them and of the firm opinion that they were equally beguiling to others. It was a voice I knew well. He was a preacher after all, and after a dramatic pause he continued.
“What a marvelous idea. Jesus himself couldn’t have picked a better word to describe his work. His promise. Give me thy burden and ye shall be uplifted. Ye shall be swept aloft to the very gates of heaven.”
When he was a boy, Uncle Matthew had a reputation for rebelliousness. Against his parents’ warning he rowed alone to Block Island and back again. One winter he took a dangerous solo sailboat trip up the coast to Maine. Some years later, again against their advice and expressed desire, he enrolled in a liberal arts college, where he studied drama, music and dance. He wanted to be an actor, which disgusted his father, who thought that actors were sissies and loafers. He believed his son should have a profession, and eventually he got his way. Uncle Matthew took up the study of religion and upon graduation joined the ministry. His father, a Protestant like all of us, was satisfied, not understanding that becoming a minister was perhaps the most rebellious thing his son could have done. He had made a covenant with a power that was higher than his father. It gave him, at the very least, a moral edge.
If I had been a boy, I might well have gone into the ministry myself. The calli
ng runs in the family. Besides Uncle Matthew, there’s Bradley, uncle by marriage and a minister too, though fallen in our eyes since he ran out on my Aunt Mattie. And my father was a deacon in the Church. All of us have been touched by the teachings and promise of Christianity, although religion as it’s commonly practiced seems to have taken hold of the men of the family more than the women. Possibly because the men are just naturally more devout. Possibly because they have a greater need.
When I was a girl, it seemed hypocritical that my granddaddy could go to Church in the morning and molest me at night. Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that I was being too kind to think that way, too lenient. Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe how I felt. You can go to Church and be a killer. You can go and be a saint. I can’t go to Church at all anymore, but I’m more pious in a way than I ever was before. I believe in God, and I believe in other spirits too. I also believe in evil.
Uncle Matthew had more to say about this book of his.
“The author also speaks of shrines. He devotes an entire chapter to the topic of holy sites and sacred spaces. Magical circles and the like. Geometries of stone, revealed by nature and arranged by man.”
Louise had once spoken to me of such places. I asked if he knew where any were.
“He describes one near Point Judith. Another in the Quabbin. And a third somewhere in the White Mountains. Most have been scattered. Some few remain partially intact.”
“I’d like to see one.”
“Indeed,” he said, a glint appearing in his eye. “So should I.”
He raised himself from his chair and went into the house, returning a moment later with a glossy eight-by-ten aerial photograph of a pasture rimmed by woods, which themselves were surrounded by water. “Aponeset” was printed at the top of the photo and beside it a date, 1950. There was an arrow pointing north and various other marks and notations scribbled by hand.
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