The Northern Reach

by W. S. Winslow

  “Needs salt,” Edith says. She stands up and retrieves a jelly glass from the dish drainer on her way to the living room, returns with three fingers of Canadian whiskey. She sits down next to the kitchen window, then pushes her plate away and lights the cigarette she has filched from the pack on the coffee table. Margery and Eldridge eat in silence, each checking the other’s reflection in the window. Edith steams most of the cigarette in eight hard drags, then stubs out the butt on her plate. The ember sizzles when it hits the cream sauce.

  “Don’t you think you should put something in your stomach, Mother? At least some bread and butter. I can’t remember the last time you ate,” Margery says.

  “My house, my rules, dear,” Edith says, and turns her chair around to face the window. She can just make out the shape of the schooner and its sails against the snarl of evergreens and bare branches on the far shore. In the window, she sees her son and his wife exchange a look. She picks up the book of matches and strikes one, holding on until it nearly burns her fingers, then drops it in the overflowing ashtray next to all the others. The charred stems remind her of burnt bones, ghosts of heat and fire.

  Eldridge sips his milk, wishes it were beer. He looks at Edith’s drink and feels like he used to at the sight of Margery’s ass. Although he has agreed to take the pledge with his wife, he occasionally slips downstairs for a nip when he can’t sleep. And then there’s the fifth in his desk drawer at work, but that’s just for warmth.

  Edith watches Eldridge in the window and realizes how it is the whiskey bottle drains itself. “You look like you could use a drink, son,” she says to his reflection.

  “No thank you, Mother. You know Eldridge and I’ve quit,” Margery answers for him. She seems on the verge of quoting scripture, so Edith makes a hrumphing sound while Eldridge shovels in another mouthful.

  Edith watches Margery’s reflection take a righteous sip of Tab, then asks, “This local shrimp, Margery?”

  She nods.

  “Bottom-feeders,” Edith says without turning around. “Ever think about that? They’re bottom-feeders, just like the crabs and the lobsters and all the rest. They eat the shit and the dead things on the bottom of the bay. The bodies.” It takes Eldridge a second longer than Margery to get the point, but both drop their forks. Margery covers her mouth with her napkin and runs from the room. The slam of the bathroom door rattles the window frame.

  Eldridge stares at the back of his mother’s head. She meets his gaze in the glass and would like to ask what he thinks that boat is doing over there but instead presses her lips shut. She won’t concede the game of chicken her boat-watch has become. Eldridge pushes his plate away and grabs her glass. He’s pale, ghostly even. Everything, she thinks, is at least half-dead here.

  * * *

  It’s nearly dawn and the rising sun is starting to push against the fog, but it cannot burn through. So begins the second year of Edith’s widowhood. Why, she wonders, is there no name for women who’ve lost a child? Maybe because those with more than one are still mothers, though they are more changed even than widows. There should be a word for it. Moths, maybe. Abbreviated versions of what they once were, cold and dried up inside, fluttering madly toward any source of light or heat.

  She recalls a story Mason told her about seeing a funeral pyre years ago in some foreign country, India maybe. There, he told her, the dead were burned, not buried, and it was customary for the widow to throw herself into the fire with her husband’s body. Most had to be dragged, he said. Must have been a rule some man came up with. Who else would decide women should follow their husbands into death, but not their children?

  All night long Edith has been propped up in bed, watching the schooner bob and dragging on her cigarettes until the embers warm her fingers. She is parched and her throat burns. In the cold room she pulls up the quilt that has covered her bed since she was first married. It no longer smells of Henry’s body. She misses his presence more than Henry himself. In forty-eight years together they were seldom completely miserable; still, she’ll never forgive him for losing her son. She’d give anything to have Mason back but knows there’s only one way she’ll ever be with him again.

  Across the room, next to the window, stands the maple chair that used to be pulled up to Mason’s desk. Outside, the schooner is still anchored to nothing, crewless and dark under full sail. A phrase floats to the surface of her mind: in irons. The boat must be in irons. She marvels at the cleverness of the image, a boat imprisoned by the nothingness of absent wind, unable to move forward or tack, bobbing and drifting, waiting and waiting.

  Why does no one else mention the schooner? Maybe Eldridge and Margery can’t bring themselves to look at the water; Edith can’t stop.

  In the half-light, the fog seems to be rising from the reach, smoke-like, in shifting banks like low clouds. When it thins she sees that the schooner is closer than it was yesterday. She squints at the gray mass of the boat and picks up her glasses. It looks like there are markings on one of the sails. She was sure they were white, but now there are two dark smudges on the main, up near the gaff boom. In a moment of near clarity she sees: there are eyes on the sails, and they are looking at her.

  * * *

  Eldridge’s boyhood room can barely accommodate their double bed and is stuffy even on cold nights like this. Margery turns over to face her husband, who groans at being jostled but goes right back to sleep. When he snores, she smells whiskey on his breath and asks God to forgive him for breaking his vow. Quite often she wishes for a drink herself, and this night is no exception. What a horrid thing that was for Edith to say. Margery is trying to think kindly about her mother-in-law, but as always, it’s a struggle.

  She hates living in Edith’s cold, shabby old house, hates Edith for not giving them the money to stay in their trailer when Eldridge couldn’t work anymore, hates Liliane for selling everything and running off downstate, even hates poor dead Mason for dragging Eldridge out on that damned lobster boat he was so proud of. Margery’s father always said you couldn’t trust a skeg-built boat in heavy weather; he swore by the sturdier built-down models and was still pulling traps on his at the age of seventy-three. Mason loved the speed of that boat, the flashiness, and since it was his money that bought the pound and the equipment, he got what he wanted, like always.

  Margery had always assumed Mason and Liliane would move away, back to France, after he finished his twenty years in the merchant marine, but instead they stayed in Wellbridge, and right off he started picking through the ledgers, questioning every expense, and swanking around the pound like the lord of the manor. She knows it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, so she keeps her opinion of Saint Mason to herself.

  The one person in the Baines family Margery doesn’t hate is Eldridge. Truth be told, she prefers this new phase of their marriage in which he relies on her but makes no demands. Freed from the obligation of sex, she can cuddle up to him anytime she likes without fear of starting something. He pays more attention to their children than he used to and even talks to her about them sometimes. When Edith dies, they can sell their share of the pound and this horrible house and buy a place in town. It would be a sin to wish her mother-in-law ill, but she doesn’t seem to have much interest in living and there’s no commandment says you can’t plan ahead.

  * * *

  Edith fails to stare down the schooner and slides low in her bed, eyes squeezed shut as if she’s a child playing peekaboo. When she opens them, Mason is sitting on his desk chair; his oilskins drip on the carpet. “Where’s my boat?” he asks.

  This is not the first time Mason has appeared, but it is the first time he’s spoken. Though Edith feels nauseated and barely able to form the words, she manages to ask, “Which one?”

  “Orion.”

  “Your wife sold her.”

  His anguished keen, like the sound of a dying loon, pierces her chest. Orion was their shared passion, a custom-built Dark Harbor 20 just like the ones the summer people race. With a navy h
ull, teak decking, and tanbark sails, she was distinctive, sleek and low, like a knife through the water. Edith and Mason used to take her out on summer afternoons, just in time to catch the late breeze, then run for home with the wind at their backs. Edith handled the tiller while Mason manned the sails, all the while telling his mother stories of his travels in the merchant marine, bringing her the world she would never see, spooling out the time she thought they’d lost.

  She and Mason were the only ones in the family who liked to sail. Henry couldn’t be bothered, Eldridge never took to the water, and Mason’s wife made it her mission to queer her children on sailing from the cradle.

  “Why didn’t you keep her?” he asks, staring out the window.

  “I can’t keep anything,” Edith says.

  “It’s so cold here, Mumma.”

  Before Edith can answer, her son has gone. Now it’s her turn to wail. She stumbles out of bed and over to the window, willing him to come back. The sail’s eyes bore into her. The rising sun peeks through a break in the fog and spills its weak light across the water. The schooner is drifting, and its bow has slewed toward shore. Now Edith sees the white skin and red hair of the figurehead on the prow. Suspended over the reach, Fanny Battle leers silently at Mason swimming for the ring buoy just beyond his grasp. Again and again the tide pulls him under. Fanny shifts her gaze to Edith and smiles.

  Edith runs downstairs and makes for the back door, desperate to rescue her boy from the cold black water, wanting only to be with him. By the time she steps onto the porch, Mason has made it to the Fanny Battle and climbed aboard. He turns to Edith, beckons her from the deck. There is something shining in his hand, almost like he’s holding a pinch of the sun. He looks from it to his mother and throws it into the air. Now Edith sees, all around Mason the fog is not fog, but smoke. Above his head the sails ignite, flames scorching away the eyes that have been watching her, consuming the masts and running down the lines to the deck. “Fire! Mason, get off!” she screams, and runs for the water.

  The commotion has jerked Margery and Eldridge awake; both assume the house is burning. They race downstairs in robes and slippers and run for the back door, following the sound of Edith’s voice, ragged as rusty iron and screaming something about a fire.

  Through the mist, Eldridge sees his mother, barefoot and dressed only in her nightgown, running toward the reach on the hard crust of snow that covers the lawn. He and Margery take off but cannot catch her before she reaches the shore. Luckily she loses her footing and falls, giving them time to grab her and pull her out of the water that is so cold it burns. Though he is only ankle deep, Eldridge feels like he is drowning. He, too, is screaming.

  Edith kicks and flails at the arms that restrain her, begs them to let her go. She can’t see Mason anymore.

  “It’s burning, the boat, the pyre. Mason lit it. For me. I’m the moth, it’s for me.…” Together Margery and Eldridge wrestle her to the ground.

  “There’s no fire, Mumma, there’s nothing out there, nothing,” Eldridge yells, but Edith doesn’t listen. It’s only after Margery slaps her, twice, good and hard, that Edith’s entreaties turn to whimpers and the fight goes out of her. She embraces the darkness and says no more.

  * * *

  It’s early March; several weeks have passed since Edith’s first midnight swim and the three attempts that followed. The ground has nearly thawed, with rocks heaved up through the topsoil like bones through skin. What little snow remains has melted into crags of tar-black ice, lurking in shadows and corners that will warm only after the sun has baked the mud to hardpack. In the kitchen of the house on the reach, Eldridge is outlining his plans for this year’s garden between bites of peanut-butter toast.

  “Mouth full, El,” Margery says, waggling her finger, and obedient as a puppy, he stops talking until he has swallowed. He’s just begun his explanation of why Mother’s Day weekend will be the best time to plant when the phone rings. They both check the clock. Seven-thirty, it could be Earlene’s husband calling to say the baby is coming, but by now they both know better than to hope for good news, especially at this hour.

  Margery answers. “Not again … Yes, I understand.” She thanks the caller and hangs up.

  “The hospital. About Mother. Tried to get out and go swimming in the river last night. Again,” she says, and sighs. “That woman is like a moth to a flame around cold water.”

  Eldridge slumps in his chair.

  “El, they said if the drugs were going to work, they would’ve by now. She’s a danger to herself, and she could be to us. That’s what the doctor said. You heard him. I can’t watch her every minute of every day. Keep her out of the bay and away from the matches. She almost burned the house down that last time. And that business about seeing Mason is just, well, it’s crazy, El. At least they can keep her fed and washed.”

  Eldridge picks at his toast while Margery jabbers. He is thinking about his brother and father, about how they knew the difference between right and wrong, about how blood takes care of blood. His wife can talk all she wants, but it’s not up to her.

  “The doctor wants to see us,” Margery says, and leaves the kitchen.

  In preparation for yet another trip to the state hospital, she grabs her handbag. Inside are the involuntary commitment papers Eldridge has so far refused to sign. Margery hands her husband his coat and pats his shirt pocket to make sure he has a pen. He stops in the bathroom on the way out and drops the pen in the trash can.

  RUNAWAY

  FRANK AND STELLA, 1904

  “You brung the boy,” Ray Moody said, inclining his head toward Frank, who was standing by the pond. This was not the plan. She and Ray had agreed to leave together, get settled on the farm, and return for her son later, after the new baby came.

  “I couldn’t leave him, Ray. All alone, with no one but that old … witch to look after him.” At the thought of her mother-in-law, Stella’s fists clenched. The old lady cared for Frank as much as she did anyone, but hers was a cruel, destructive love that twisted people up in knots, made them hard and cold. Stella’s husband had proved that—every single night she’d slept alone for the past five years. She could count on one hand the number of times since they were married that Wesley had come to her room; he seldom lingered, never stayed the night, and afterward he avoided her for days.

  “He’s still your husband. You take his child, he’ll come after you.”

  Stella was afraid to breathe. Even if she could go back to that house, she wouldn’t. There was no laughter or music, nothing to read but the Bible and dusty old history books with no pictures or romance. She was carrying a baby that wasn’t her husband’s. They’d throw her out and keep Frank, who was just four years old, far too young to be away from his mother. She’d rather die than never hold him, or hear his scratchy voice, or smell his neck again.

  “I left him a letter just like we said. Under his pillow. Wrote that if he gives me a divorce, he can visit Frank anytime he wants, that I’m going back to my people because a baby’s coming and I don’t want to shame him. His mother’ll say he’s well shed of us both, you’ll see.”

  Ray seemed to be thinking it over. After a while, he said, “Another mouth to feed. You know what it’s like on a farm.”

  Stella nodded even though, having grown up in town, she didn’t know, not really. She’d visited her cousin’s farm in Wellbridge just a few times, had never done much beyond collecting eggs from the henhouse, but she knew she’d be good at it, that she’d be happy out in the country with her new husband and lots more babies to love.

  “Hey,” Frank called, “want to see me throw a rock?”

  Ray nodded, so the boy walked to the shore and picked up a pebble, then sent it sailing to the other side of the pond just like his father had taught him. When it broke the surface of the water, Frank turned to the grown-ups, but they weren’t paying attention.

  Stella was gazing past her boy and the pond at the boulders and the blueberry scrub, just starting t
o go red in the October sun. Beyond it, squeezed somewhere between the belching smokestacks and dirty brick warehouses of Bangor, stood her husband’s printing company. She was glad it, and the house where they lived, and the gray river that ran through the city, were all too far away to see. That was their old life, even if Frank didn’t know it yet. She supposed he’d get over missing his father eventually. Though life with her husband’s family suffocated her, it was all her son had ever known. Stella’s eyes watered, and she clenched her teeth against the tears.

  Ray couldn’t back out now. She’d thrown away her good name for a new start with him, risked everything: her future, Frank’s, the baby’s.

  “Pretty good, huh?” Frank shouted.

  “Never met a boy who didn’t love throwing rocks,” Stella said.

  “Nope,” said Ray.

  “He’ll be a good big brother.”

  Ray sighed.

  Stella watched Ray walk down the hill toward the pond and motion Frank to join him. He picked up a stone, showed it to the boy, then skipped it across the water in a series of low arcs. Stella counted six bounces. Each produced a perfect ring of ripples, concentric circles moving steadily outward and crossing one another in endless, undulating webs.

  “Golly,” Frank said. “Can you teach me that?”

  “There’s a pond out to the farm,” Ray said, then led them both up the hill to the wagon.

  FRANK, 1914

  His real father was a printer, a businessman, that much he knew. And his name, of course: Wesley Francis Lawson. He’d been given his father’s middle name but was always called Frank. As he walked across the bridge to Bangor, Frank chanted the name over and over, quietly to himself. Wesley Francis Lawson. Wesley Francis Lawson. He liked the rhythm of it, the symmetry. He took a step for each word, adding a single count between repeats, keeping his pace steady and regular. In this way, he would be like his father, steady and regular. Respectable.