by Dawn Tripp
He will confess it some night in her sleep. Jane, he whispers. He can never tell her. Jane.
The boat slips against the dock. Swig throws the engine into neutral. And she has turned, just barely, her eyes following them, her eyes wash over the deck, over him, a softening, her mouth touched by a smile, looking at him, but at the same time, through him, past him. No, no. There is nothing past him. Empty river, empty sky, the sun a worn-out shrivel, nothing past him. No one. Only Carl. No.
Then he knows. In one shrinking moment, without turning around, he knows.
A candle guttered, his dream of her, sun-shivered-road-driving sunshine, snuffed. His heart is paper, in the sudden wrench of falling toward a future he has no place in, her beautiful face looking past him, looking into that future, the man behind him, her beautiful face, not meant for him. Ever. Without turning around, he knows.
BOY
JANE, SEVENTEEN
Summer 1962
She did not notice the Varick boy until he stepped off the boat onto the pier, sprang quick over the gunwale, practically leaping into her line of sight, forcing her eye to follow. He strikes toward the road, but his way there is suddenly blocked by a wave of summer kids swarming over the pier toward the boat just touching in. She sees him stop, caged, the slowly gelling crowd from every direction tightening in, and his uncle Swig in the wheelhouse is yelling after him to get the hell back, and the boy not hearing, or not minding, only looking fast around, bewildered, like looking for a way out, but every way is blocked except by going back, going past her, there’s a narrow channel open there, but for some reason he has not looked that way, has not seemed to notice; then his eyes catch hers for an instant, and she is taken aback, how astonishingly pale they are, the color so fierce, almost unnatural, unreal, and something in his face raw and undone.
He has realized the only way off the pier is past her. He does not want this—she can see it in his face as he starts toward her—a set in his jaw hardening, almost cruel, and she shrinks, that old fear in her startled up, his elbow like a whisper, fatal, brushing hers as he strikes past. Then he’s gone. She does not turn. She does not look toward the fold in the crowd where he melts in.
“Forget it, Swig,” someone says. Carl Dyer. His voice is starboard side now, the side nearest to her. He is tying off a line, looping its end around the cleat, pulling it back through to make the knot fast. He glances at her and smiles.
“How are you, Jane?” he says.
“Fine thanks,” she manages. “You?”
“Still at it.”
She laughs.
“That cat’s not, though,” he says.
“Yes, so I heard.”
He smiles at her once more, then turns back to the work at hand.
Two days later she hears Nate Wilkes tell her grandfather Gid about how Silas Varick, loaded to the gills, tried to get rid of a skunk that had been hanging around the farm, went and doused the thing in gasoline and set it afire, skunk ran straight into the henhouse, and the henhouse went up in flames, all the chickens in it, burnt flush to the ground.
“Would’ve been too easy to take a gun and shoot it,” Nate Wilkes remarks. “He’s a real beat-er-up. Not wrapped tight.”
Gid shrugs. “She drives him to it.”
It is overhearing the story that reminds Jane of the Varick boy, that evening on the pier, the son of the woman, Ada.
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings—
Through the parables
Of sun light
The lines stick with her, fractured, words like glue to the boy’s face. Strangely familiar. That boy with his pale eyes full of nothing. And she wonders. She mulls it over, the story of the skunk and the henhouse burned, that Varick boy and his mother. They are splinters of a thought rattling around in her, vaguely, as she picks through the tomatoes in the garden, lobbing the rotten ones over the stone wall, as she braids the garlic, as she adjusts the piece of looking glass set in the rows of corn to spook the crows.
Boy with his eyes full of nothing; under that nothing, a world.
She sees him once more that summer, the following Saturday, down at the wharf with a friend, bodies rising from the white dazzle of the river laid out behind them in the late afternoon. They are walking up the road from the Point as she heads down. On spotting her, the Varick boy stops, again that look, not quite as hard though. He stares a moment, then mumbles something to the other boy with him, ducks away.
And again she wonders, glancing toward the line of shed he disappeared around. She wonders if what she had seen in his face that evening on the pier, the half-lit contours of a truth, was not, in fact, what she had seen. It sticks with her, though. For a day or two, she wonders, then does not, anymore.
Birds flock away. The town empties. The air has begun to awaken, to find its way back to itself, the marsh on the turn; the light has shifted, toward that long sharper ache that comes in fall.
It is the end of September, still warm in the Indian summer, when the Andrews woman who owns the boardinghouse calls Jane and explains that she still has guests who were planning to leave at the end of the weekend, but she herself has to drive up to New Hampshire; her sister living there has had a stroke, is on the downhill. And would it be too much trouble for Jane to come around the next three mornings to set out the breakfast things, and then at the end of the weekend, when those guests have left, to pick up a bit, get the place back into some order? And Jane had said yes, of course, it would be no trouble at all.
Late in the day Sunday, she was just finishing up, cleaning the last traces of them from the rooms. They had gone, all of them, gone back to where it was they went back to, all that is, except that engineer, him staying on, still, she wondered how long he would stay. Soon enough, she expects, he’d be off, moving on, another job, another new piece of highway, another town. She stripped the rest of the beds, emptied the wastepaper baskets; found a woman’s scarf under a bureau, silk, teal-colored, a jagged streak of black run through—she put it around her neck and looked at herself, there, in the mirror. There was a perfume on it, faint, vanilla or some other crushed scent she could not name, and the girl in the mirror looking back at her was pretty, her eyes with an unfamiliar wayward to them, her hair straight. She took the scarf off and was herself again, folded the scarf into the pocket of her skirt, and went back to piling up the sheets and pillowslips and towels in the hall at the top of the back stairs, when she heard the knock at the front door.
It was coming up on evening, the sky a soft blue dust through the window, just lasting, as she went downstairs. The house was empty except for her, coming down the hall past the front table with the metal letter basket and the vase. The knock came again, sharper now, like someone annoyed. “Will you hold on a minute,” she murmured, cross that whoever it was couldn’t just wait, then she opened the door, and it was Carl Dyer standing there on the porch steps, behind him the sky on tender fire in the pale floating rush of the sun going down, his cap set back on his head like he wore it, his hands shoved into his trouser pockets, turning away like he had finally decided no one was going to answer, then he saw her, and went real still.
“How are you, Jane?” he said, that dark his voice got, like always, that she was never quite prepared for, that dark when he said her name, like he had said it a thousand times, already, her name.
And he was just standing there, the free and thoughtless beauty of him on the porch, his eyes with that raw light she recognized, moving over her that certain way. He smelled of wind, of work, he smelled of the sea, his shirt collar tugged open, she could see the hollow of his throat, the lighter sheen of sweat along the bone.
“So you want to come on then?” he said.
“Come where?”
“With me.”
He said it just like that, and that was all, like she would know just what he meant, his voice with that dark way in it she loved. And she did know. And she went.
WELL
>
LUCE
October 1957
He woke in a sweat. Dead man dreams. The room felt pinched, suddenly close. He lay back down—it was an old bed, springs creaked—he flicked the lamp on and just lay there, watching tree-branch shapes scuff and jab through the shut window. Silent. Lamplight thrown, rings within rings on the skin of the wall.
* * *
Scratch of dawn, and he’s thinking of her. Ada. Don’t it figure. Can’t think about her. Can’t not.
He gets up and shaves, the straight razor working slowly over his jaw, the face emerging from the lather and scruff, unfamiliar somehow. Once, the blade slips, blood wells in a lean fine line below his ear. With a towel, he blots it.
——
The wind has freshened overnight, a cold front come through. A gust catches in the door, rattling. He glances up. Nothing, no one, there.
As he fixes his coffee, it strikes him that tomorrow when he meets Ada down at the cranberry barn, assuming she shows, she’ll be asking for that book, the one wrapped in library plastic she left behind last week in his car. And he’ll have to tell her he doesn’t have it—conjure some lie or just tell her he gave it to Jane when she kicked it over on the floor of the passenger seat. Won’t Ada light into him for that, giving away a borrowed thing that wasn’t his to give.
He knew her. She’d be all over him for that small thing. It’d been touch and go between them for weeks, it seemed. She’d look for anything to scrap over, anything to wash her hands of him once and for all.
Silas had threatened her, she’d told him last week when they met. Got wind of something.
She has bobbed her hair. All one length now, a sweep to her shoulders, the color of lampblack. Her body has grown pale, tan lines gone. Last week when they were together, he’d noticed it. How the sun had fallen from her.
They had met down at the cranberry barn as always, but she was restless, cranked up, said she wanted to take a drive, and so they drove, took the Buick down through T’aintville, down those windy roads through Little Compton, out to Scunnet Point. He’d screwed her there, they were all smashed together in the backseat of the car, he got behind her, got her up on her knees, her back arched down, he gripped her hips and she pushed back against him. In the faint light shedding through the rear window, he could see the bones of her spine.
——
It was on the drive back that they fought. Those twisting roads. He had tried to explain to her, tried to put it into words, that apart from Jane, how he felt about her, Ada, might just be the one stake in the world he had that was good and honest and pure.
She was smoking, her feet up on the dash, bluish clouds on the exhale.
“Nothing honest and pure about what you’re doing with me,” she answered, then laughed. It was the laugh that incensed him. The penetrating scorn. She could do that. In an instant, diminish, spurn any effort he tried to make.
“How does it come to this?” he said bitterly. “That it’s my locked sealed fucking fate and destiny to be tormented by a snapper like you?”
Her head spun around. “What did you call me?”
“You snap at me, snap it on, snap it off.”
The anger melted from her face, a new expression, curious, amused. “That’s more out of you at once than I’ve ever gotten.”
But he was past it by then and retorted back, called her another name, not quite so catchy. That did it. She whipsawed, got ferocious. They fought for the rest of the ride back into town, her raging at him.
He was all done by the time they hit the bottom of Handy Hill. All done, he told her, and she quit then, just got cool. He stopped the car and let her out. But as he drove away, it flowed over him, regret, the pullback. This was what she could do. What he felt on her account: desire, lust maybe, but more than that, a sort of dizzying faith he once thought might be enough to save him.
He turned around, picked her up, and without a word drove her to her car. Before she slipped out, she leaned across the seat to kiss him, hard, she caught his lower lip between her teeth and bit down. He felt the sharp warm rush of her breath into his mouth. Then she let go. Neither of them, of course, giving a thought to that book she’d left behind on the floor of the passenger seat.
On the table near him is an old Bakelite radio. He never used it anymore. Wasn’t even sure it still worked.
He hits out a cigarette. Lights it. He should get that book back for her. Go to Jane and explain he needed it back. Jane would understand. It was never his to give.
Damn you, Ada.
* * *
And so he goes, that morning early, into the awakening sky. As he is driving down Main Road, a hawk flies out from the trees on the left, flies low across the road in front of his car. He goes to hit the brakes to swerve, but his foot, of its own will, pauses. The car coasts, the body of the bird close enough for him to see its chest, the spread of wings, feathers through the windshield. It swipes past him, just missing the glass. He glances in the rearview. No sign of it.
He parks down the road at the Methodist church—no reason to make a stir—and when he reaches the house, he slips around back, goes in through the old horse barn, and waits just inside the barn door, watching, until he sees Emily leave.
It’s Wednesday. Still half an hour before the bus will come around to bring Jane to school. He is about to go up to the kitchen screen and knock when his daughter steps out. In one hand, she carries that book, in the other an empty pail. She sets the book on the porch rail and crosses the yard to the well.
——
He goes to step toward her, but stops. Something in him stopped.
The barn is cold. The shadows stiff. He stands at the edge of them, a cobweb spun across the door, light nicking his boots.
She cannot see him. He knows this. Even if she were to look toward the door to the barn, the light would strike her eyes, blinding, she would not see him. The yard is filled with brightness, the wind blowing through the trees; leaves torn from the branches, dazzling, catch the light as they drive down. He breathes quietly in the chill dark hush while out there, in the yard, it is all movement and warmth, sunlight glinting off the seams between the well stones, the marl, the roofs on the laneway below, wind working with the sunlight through his daughter’s hair. She has pushed her sleeves up to the elbow, her hand on the pump handle, the smooth even motion of her arm, water rushing into the pail.
And as he watches her, as his eyes move over that familiar and perfect geography of her, he has the sense that he is seeing her more clearly. Nothing mistaken. No detail overlooked. He has never been so aware of what’s to come, has never felt it so keenly like it is a future already transpired. Years later, he thinks, he will circle back to this moment. His daughter already grafted into an older form, but engraved in his mind at this moment now, and that certain aspect of her, that curious expression in her eyes he knows is there although he cannot see it for how her head is turned, even so he knows, that look in her face, in her eyes—and the leaves falling everywhere. The light is ravishing, underfoot.
As a child, when she slept, her hands would reach out, float through space, touch nothing, her fingers moving like she was knitting the dark to the dark.
He would watch her do this, he remembers. In that nip of time when he was a tenant in her life. So commonplace, so mundane. A child sleeping.
The pail is filled. She carries it back across the yard and disappears inside. The screen door springs shut behind her.
She has left the book out on the porch rail. The glint of the library plastic.
Forget that book. Let her keep it. Let Ada fret and bitch—light into him—fine—she’d come to, get over it, eventually. Or not. And if she flung him off for good on that account, well, so be it. It’s just a book.
* * *
Late that afternoon, he parks at his mother’s house on Pine Hill Road. He takes a shotgun, a box of shells, a fishing pole, takes the skiff across the river to the creek just below the gravel pit on the Drift Road side
.
Bony light. True autumn. A thin coat of dusk. Sunlight, cold and unclaimed, leaking through the trees. Shadows skittish, thrown down on the dry leaf-litter. Goldenrod. Aster. Red scorch of the swamp maples, the banks of the river in flames.
He takes the loop he always takes to hunt—from that spot where the creek dumps into the river, up through the woods, to the edge of the cornfield. He’ll walk alongside it, then cut back down. He rarely goes out looking for anything particular. Rabbit. Pheasant. Squirrel. He’ll take what comes his way.
As he walks, he thinks, as he often does, of Ada. He thinks of how when he lies down with her, it’s like lying against the ribs of the earth. Both sense and senseless. Beautiful and treacherous. Honest and there. He thinks of her, his hands on the shotgun, tight. He smiles to himself. It won’t last forever. He knows this. She’ll get bored, leave him. Eventually. She’s no stick-around.
Sometimes when he is with her, her legs wrapped around him, he feels his life burn away, the strange terrible wealth of it, burning.
A twitch in the brush. He stops. Listens. The sound again. A light rustle. He looks through the trees, toward the blurred gold edge of a clearing. A slash of movement. Deer.
He slips between the trees, noiseless, until he is in range. Their bodies sleek and brown, three doe together, nibbling brush. He marks the one he wants, raises the gun to his shoulder; the gun stock smooth, wood like flesh against his cheek. He can feel sweat cooling on his skin.