Anxious Hearts

by Tucker Shaw

  “Evangeline,” Gabriel said, falling into step behind her. “Where are we going? Our fathers …”

  “Hush, Gabriel,” Evangeline said. “Come.” She wrapped her voluminous cloak around her shoulders, hoisting its hood up over her head.

  Evangeline led Gabriel to the gate, and around along the wall to the orchard. The fog had lifted and the air was now clear. A low, golden harvest moon poured muted light over the meadow, giving the landscape a magical, restless glow. The earth was warm underfoot.

  Fourteen apple trees stood in three neat rows that each should have held five trees. As in most Cadian orchards, the ground beneath the trees was groomed and well kept, a close cropping of soft grass and moss inside a protective barrier of scarlet blueberry bushes. Evangeline stepped confidently in the dark—her feet knew where the ground was soft—and Gabriel followed her.

  Poc appeared before them, leaping up to lick Evangeline’s hand. Gabriel held out his own hand to Poc, but Poc met it with a growl. “Poc!” Evangeline said. “Quiet.”

  At the head of the orchard was a stone bench, a flat-topped boulder rising out of the ground, its surface polished smooth. Evangeline often sat there, to brush Poc, or to read to Benedict, or simply to sun herself. Gabriel knew, because he’d seen her do all of those things. He’d even spent the night on that bench, keeping silent watch over his beloved, knowing that she’d napped there earlier in the day.

  Tomorrow, this rock would be transformed into an altar where they would kneel together before the priest and all the gathered citizens of Pré-du-sel and be married, their adoration for each other finally consecrated.

  Tomorrow.

  Evangeline leaped up onto the bench and held out her hand for Gabriel. A gust caught her cloak, sending it skyward like a sail. She lost her balance and stumbled a step, nearly falling off the rock. Gabriel scrambled onto the bench behind her, catching her shoulders. He steadied her from the back.

  “My beloved.” He encircled her with his arms, drew her head back into the cove of his shoulder, and locked his brown hands together across her chest. The wind was persistent and chilly, but they were warm together, and Gabriel was glad that, from this vantage, they could not see the ships that he knew were in the harbor. They stood in silence for several minutes, hearts beating apace.

  “Gabriel,” Evangeline said, her voice breaking in the wind. “Oh, Gabriel. What about the ships?” Evangeline spun around, her braid blowing wistfully in the evening breeze. “What will we do? Where will we go?”

  “I do not know, Evangeline. I do not know.” He grasped her more tightly, pulling her into his chest. “But we are stronger together. Do not be afraid.”

  But Gabriel was himself afraid.

  Together they stood on the bench, solid and steady, facing the seaborne wind. Their hearts were uncertain together, impatient together, afraid and aware together, together, as they watched infinity over the edge of the bec, the boundless comingling of black sky and black sea and never-ending time, so unforgivably short.

  eva

  Why are you limping?” I ask Gabe. I wince every time he comes down on his left foot, watching his shoulders tense with every labored, uneven step. “Are you in pain?”

  Gabe, who hasn’t said a word since this morning, since “I’m going away,” doesn’t answer. He just keeps walking. Limping.

  Where we are, exactly, I’m not sure, because there were a few turns I lost track of. But we walk all day. For the first part of the journey we stick to the shoulder of the road, but after a couple hours, Gabe turns abruptly into the forest, disappearing behind a No Trespassing sign.

  Da’ has always told me that trespassing on someone else’s land is one of the worst things you can do. “Land is as close to sacred as I know,” he says. I remember him telling me that if you trespass onto private property, the owners could kill you and pay no price for it. You don’t even have to be doing anything wrong. He says that one landowner in Aroostook County even tied up a trespasser and left him for the bears just for taking a pee on the side of the road near a No Trespassing sign.

  But today, for the first time in my life, I ignore a No Trespassing sign. I disobey. I duck into the woods behind Gabe.

  I will follow him anywhere.

  We walk for several more hours, him limping ahead of me and me trying not to think about it, following a succession of trails through a dense forest of maple and tamarack, its soft floor padded with unknowable years of fallen needles and leaves. I know we are near the ocean because I can hear the surf off to the left, sometimes close, sometimes farther away. Through the shadows of the forest, I glimpse the ocean once or twice, brilliant blue and choppy white under the sun.

  Twice we stop to rest. Gabe cuts chunks of salami with his pocketknife and hands them to me. He gives me his canteen and I drink.

  Twilight falls earlier than I expect, but maybe I’ve lost track of time. It’s kind of been like twilight all day, ever since Gabe appeared outside my window—not really daytime, not really nighttime. The light transformed with the hours, from golden to red to gray.

  When Gabe stops, I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe he is just tired.

  This spot looks like any other in this seaside forest. There are a few rocks and boulders tumbled around a tiny clearing in the pines. The trees are tall, some standing upright and some growing at an angle over the seabed, rooted in the outcrop that falls away just below the clearing. Looking at the watermarks, I guess that at high tide the water licks the rocks surrounding this clearing, but the tide is so far out right now that all I can see beyond the trees is mud and seaweed. A gull pecks at a crab in the muck. A few hundred feet across this shallow bay, I see more forest, perhaps an island or another peninsula, it’s impossible to tell. Da’ says there are thousands of miles of coastline around here, thousands of islands, thousands of ways to get lost. He says you could explore them forever and never really know your way around them.

  Gabe drops his tent and pack and looks around the site. I watch him concentrate, and see the soft pulse of blood against his temples. He finds a patch of moss twenty feet in from the watermark. He touches it, wipes his finger against his jeans, and nods to himself. I follow his eyes, which follow a faint stripe of moss and sticks that winds up a steep embankment. Gabe follows the moss-trail up the hill, maybe twenty feet, then stops. “Here,” he says out loud. I am surprised and relieved to hear his voice after his daylong silence. “A spring.”

  I climb up to him. Gabe fills his cupped hands with the bubbling springwater. I sip from them, holding his wrists to steady them. I sit, melting into the moss, and Gabe trots back down the hill.

  In fifteen minutes, Gabe has transformed the clearing—pitching a tent, building a fire pit, starting a woodpile. He makes it look like someone lives here.

  “There’s a radio in my backpack,” he says. “I wonder if we get reception.”

  I fish around in Gabe’s backpack, feeling with my fingers for the radio. I feel his notebook in there. My hand closes around it. I wish I could read with my fingers.

  I find the radio and hand it to Gabe.

  “No, you try,” he says.

  I fiddle with the dials, but the only station I can get is a French-language pop music station from New Brunswick, Canada.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Why?” he says. “This is perfect.” He turns it up and we listen to staticky songs we can’t understand. I wonder what the staticky singers are singing about. I wonder if they’re singing about love.

  Gabe is quiet. Silent, actually, but I don’t doubt he wants me here. He lights a fire with dried driftwood, and we sit by it, near each other but not touching, and we eat more salami, and an apple, which Gabe cuts up with his pocketknife and hands to me in pieces. When there’s only one piece left, Gabe gives it to me. And then he moves next to me, brushes his bangs out of his face, reaches out and puts one hand around the base of my skull, my hair combed between his fingers. He pulls my face up and over to his and kisses me, solidly
, insistently, unambiguously, completely—on the first try. I disappear into his kiss, close my eyes, and relax, letting him pull me in.

  The kiss doesn’t end for a long time. And then there is another kiss. And another.

  “Are you in pain?” I ask. “Your leg, I mean.”

  “Nah,” Gabe says. “Just twisted it I guess.”

  Later, Gabe climbs into the tent, which he’s pitched on a level patch of ground near the high-tide line. I climb into the tent with him. Gabe smoothes out his down-filled sleeping bag and gestures me toward it. “Here, Evangeline. You sleep here.”

  I climb into the sleeping bag. He zips it up around me.

  “But where will you sleep?” I ask.

  “Outside,” he says. “Under the stars.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s going to rain.” I unzip the sleeping bag and hold it open.

  Gabe looks at me, tilting his head, confused.

  “Stay here,” I say. “With me.”

  Gabe takes off his jeans and climbs into the sleeping bag. With me.

  That night I sleep, I think, or maybe I don’t sleep, to the dual rhythms of Gabe’s slow, pulsing heart, so deliberate and clear, and the unmistakable creep of the tide, tossing tiny splashes closer and closer to the tent, slowly encroaching, eroding, rinsing away anything that came before. Feeding whatever is next.

  Gabriel

  “IT MATTERS NOT WHEN THE SHIPS ACT, OR whether they do,” Gabriel said. He stood up straight, square, and confident on the rock-bench in the orchard under the stars overlooking the sea. He spoke in the old tongue, the one only the elders still used, and even then only at important ceremonies and sometimes in church.

  “It matters not to us, my love. We are bound. Tonight, I know that I love thee, and that I wed thee, that as husband to wife I take thee, whatever chances or mischances befall us. With the infinite mine eternal witness, I swear to love and protect thee until death parts us.”

  Neither spoke for minutes, long minutes, until Evangeline whispered, almost inaudibly. “Not even death will part us, Gabriel. We will be together forever,” she said, touching her forefinger to Gabriel’s lips. “Forever.”

  She descended the altar and settled at the far end of the orchard, protected from the wind. He followed her, and lay beside her in the moss. She curled next to him.

  Evangeline’s hands moved down Gabriel’s shivering body. She caressed his chest, feeling his fevered, anxious heartbeat in her fingers. She grabbed at his midsection, his forearms, drawing his hands to her kirtle-laces. He felt her open his trousers, and with a single, eternal motion, she bent into and around him, encircling him with a slow, resolute strength, guiding him into her.

  Gabriel lay, enraptured and unmoving on his back, staring longingly and needfully into Evangeline’s dark eyes as she enveloped him. He lost his breath watching her movements and pulled her closer to him, deeper, moving together, until both he and she inhabited each other, until they both lay naked and silent under the stars and apple trees, kissing beads of sweat from each other’s lips, folded together into Evangeline’s cornflower cloak with Gabriel, softer now, still inside.

  Together, they listened to the tide below, approaching, approaching.

  eva

  Gabe and I stay in the sleeping bag all night, sleeping and waking and sleeping again. Touching. Breathing. Feeling. Like the drive out to the lighthouse listening to Led Zeppelin, I never want it to end.

  Morning is near. Gabe crawls out of the sleeping bag, pulls on his jeans, and steps outside the tent. I have been awake for a long time, listening to him breathe, and as soon as he’s out of the tent I pull on my own jeans and follow him.

  He turns toward me, buttoning his plaid flannel shirt. He runs his hands through his hair.

  “Good morning,” I say.

  Gabe grabs my shoulders and presses me up against a birch tree. He kisses me, and I taste sleep on his tongue.

  He is a part of my history now, after the way we held each other during the night, the way we moved together, the way he pressed into me, eyes and arms and hips. I’d wondered about that moment all my life, wondering when it would happen. I always worried that I’d be embarrassed, that I’d do something wrong, that it would hurt, that I would regret it.

  But I wasn’t worried last night. I was just there. And Gabe was there with me. And now, we are together, leaning against the birch tree on the morning after, and I have no regrets.

  “See you,” he says, and steps away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be back, angel,” he says, and I believe him. He won’t disappear. He can’t. Not anymore. He turns and walks into the woods, limping like yesterday.

  I stand against the birch tree and watch him go, listening to each fading footstep, each crack of a distant branch, straining my ears until every last sound of him has faded, until he is gone. The first rays of morning begin to stream into the clearing, but I don’t move.

  Later, I turn on Gabe’s radio and set about straightening up the campsite, humming along to pop songs I can’t understand. I air out the tent and rinse the dishes in the spring, then start to gather firewood to add to Gabe’s pile. I don’t know how long we’ll be here, but you always need wood. Da’ taught me that. I stay close to the campsite in case Gabe comes back.

  I am a million miles from Franktown, a distance that blocks out the guilt I feel about running away in the first place. I know Da’ must be frantic. I see him, still in his chair in the kitchen, watching the phone, as if staring at it would make it ring, afraid to call anyone to ask if they’ve seen me because he’s afraid that the line will be busy when I call him. I see the dried tears, caking the corners of his eyes, and I want to reach out and wipe them clean.

  But I am with Gabe now. Nothing else matters. Ada knows this to be true. She’ll explain it to Da’.

  I spend all morning and afternoon gathering firewood from the fallen trees in this part of the forest. I stack them precisely, twigs on one side, logs on the other. When I am finished and scoop water from the spring to drink, the pile of tinder is taller than I am.

  At dusk I light a fire so Gabe can find his way back in the dark. I lay beside it to watch the flames and wait.

  Gabriel

  GABRIEL AND BASIL RODE WITH A MAJESTIC AIR, straight-backed in saddles and dressed in embroidered wedding coats crafted by Mademoiselle Gallan, the seamstress. Basil, father of the groom, wore a green coat with buttons carved from halibut bone. Gabriel wore black. Deep, pitch-black. The choice reflected the importance of the ceremony—true black was the most expensive color to produce, reserved only for high occasions. The coat was a gift from Basil, who’d been saving for it for years.

  Gabriel averted his gaze from the harbor as they rode, lest he catch sight of the ships whose existence he so vigorously wished to deny. He felt for his birchbark in his foresleeve, lashed tightly against his veins. Its presence soothed him.

  At the entrance to the Bellefontaine orchard, bathed in the cloudless, late-morning light, the assembled population of Pré-du-sel and the surrounding hills, every Cadian that Gabriel and Evangeline knew and many they did not, awaited the arrival of the groom and his father. Women wore wood lilies in their hair, brushing lint from their husbands’ felt tunics. Children in knickers and sundresses wriggled through the crowd, hiding-and-seeking among the skirts and pantaloons of their elders. The older women tended the feast, baskets of bread and apples and pears and cheese laid out carefully on sheets of linen, and buckets of cider for after the vows were exchanged. Noisy groups of neighbors and relatives chattered and gossiped and laughed. None spoke outwardly of the ships, though all knew of them. All knew that this could be the last wedding in Pré-du-sel, but none said so.

  Michael the fiddler, with a long shock of white hair and elastic legs and arms, struck a merry tune on his strings, a lively, vibrant melody that complemented the birdcalls from the woods and the squeals of laughter from the children. Garlands of autumn flowers were wrapped aro
und the apple trees like ribbons on maypoles, and petals were scattered around the grass. At the sound of Michael’s song, the guests scurried to the orchard, dancing in circles.

  Père Felician looked up from the crowd to see Gabriel and Basil approaching. He beseeched the crowd to part, to open a path in the middle of the apple orchard, a path to the stone altar where awaited Gabriel’s intended. Abruptly, Michael stopped his jovial tune. The crowd answered with a rustle as they moved aside. Gabriel drew a sharp, strengthening breath and steadied himself on his horse.

  The crowd parted to reveal the stone altar. There was Père Felician, who would preside over the exchange, his high-collared parson’s cloak stiff and severe beneath his youthful face, his expression brimming with vitality and conviction, with delight in the moment and faith in the future. Benedict was there, too, balanced on his cane and draped in the embroidered stole worn by him, and his own father, and his father’s father, on their wedding days, and which he would pass to Gabriel today.

  And there, between the priest and her father, stood Evangeline, enrobed in layers of airy white silk and lace that flowed weightlessly from her veil to the graceful fluid sleeves that swayed below her hands to the richly embroidered overlay atop the skirt caressing the grassy ground at her feet.

  Even through her veil, Evangeline’s eyes of midnight sapphire, reflecting every color the sun showered on them, commanded Gabriel’s notice.

  Spellbound, Gabriel could do no more than stare, in passion and thankfulness, astonished at the indescribable hues of her eyes, the eyes into which she, today, would grant him indefinite allowance to stare, endlessly, forever. Could it truly be? Gabriel willed this image of Evangeline into his memory, determined never to forget this moment.