“I’m waiting for you to give me the eleven stages of fearfulness. You have this wonderful habit—”
“Yeah. I know. I break everything down into sequences. I could number the stages of bleeding to death while I was bleeding to death. I’m a comedienne, of course, right?” She drank off her rosé and licked her lips. “Pure amateur.”
He said, around the chicken salad, “I find it a little exciting, to tell you the truth.”
She moved her head slowly while elongating her neck, and it was as if she were peering down at him from a significant height. “Why would that be?”
“I’ve always wished I could be chipper and bitter and tough like that, maybe. I don’t know. It attracts me.”
“I attract you?”
“Yes. It does, and you do.”
She nibbled at a piece of chicken protruding from the edge of her sandwich. She poured them more wine. She shook her head. “Well,” she said. “And I’m sitting here, telling you how compelling I find your being so scared. Aren’t we just a meant-to-be couple? As in, who needs sex when you can have failure?”
He thought that if he said something about sex and failure, they might end up in bed. But he was afraid to talk about failure and sex, because then—he was certain—the sex would fail. He wished he could tell her, because it would be a fine joke about his fear, which she seemed to find so valuable.
“Well, well,” she said, feeding a piece of sandwich to the dog. She learned back, removed the barrette, leaned forward to gather her hair, then fastened the clip again. Mason pretended not to watch. “I’m running errands, in town,” she said, “mail, and dental floss at the IGA. You take a nap so we can do a session of work before low tide. All right?”
“Why low tide?”
“Because of your pleasure in mussels,” she told him. Then she and Murphy left.
Obediently, he took off his shoes and socks, he opened his bedroom window, and he lay under the powerful light off the sea and the winds that waxed and waned as if they were a tide. He sensed a giant shadow passing, but opened his eyes to see nothing except fir trees and the ocean off the rocks below the house. He wondered if a condor or an eagle had flown over. After a while, when he’d closed his eyes again, he saw different structures of rock and in different colors. He knew at once: the strand off the bay in County Sligo. He and Marianne Neal were walking on the coarse tan sand after their time in Galway, where they’d seemed to him so easy with each other. Outside of Sligo town, in Marianne’s little stucco house that was several miles northeast of the crowded road to Donegal, he’d felt her grow watchful, as if she had begun to worry about his fragility. And her care made him know that he ought to expect misfortune.
She had driven them in her small, apple-green, misfiring secondhand Ford to a little sandy track that went down to the beach. She pulled up the hand brake and sat, looking out the windshield at other parked cars and the gleam of water farther down. Her lips looked tattered, and he had seen her biting them. When she worried, she nibbled at herself—edges of her lips, her cuticles, a wisp of her frizzy, light hair. His stomach bucked, and he was certain now of unhappiness ahead. There were few people about, perhaps because cool winds had come up. He and Marianne had walked, saying little, along the curve of the bay. A small, white-hulled boat with an orange sail was turning into the wind.
“Can you see her?” Marianne asked.
He shook his head.
“She’s got ahold of a rope, she’s standing at the mast there.”
“Is it a nun?”
“It is, Martin. A nun in her blue robe on a sailboat. She’s grand, I think. Martin, there’s a man I’m going to see again that I wanted you to know about?”
“Ah.”
“Ah. Poor man. What else could you say, then? I’m so sorry. He’s the father of my dead child. The infant boy born dead. He’s asked to return again to my life. I don’t know. I don’t. But I don’t think I can sustain the two sets of emotions at once. And here you are, off to the deserts over there, and I’m giving you something like the shove.”
“This is the shove?”
“I wouldn’t feel it inappropriate if you gave expression to some anger, Martin.”
He knew her powerful poems about the baby. He wanted to say that he would rather cry, just then.
He remembered that he gave her no reply. He looked away from her, at the nun standing against the background of the orange sail on Sligo Bay, and he put his arm around her. She tensed. Then she very slowly relaxed against him for the space of a breath or two. All this time, he thought, and what you carry out of it for certain is how she fought an embrace and then gave in. She would probably write something about that instant of fighting, he thought. Marianne was a revelation about inventing ways to use words, unlike him with his timid notations on how others behaved. He remembered the citrus scent that she wore, and the smell, like crushed ferns, of the Sligo sand that the afternoon’s sunlight had warmed before the winds came up—the smell so different from the animal rankness of the tawny sand patrolled by Alpha in its reconnaissance vehicles—and he remembered that her skin was cool to the touch, at the strand at Sligo and in their bed at the Galway Great Southern, or anyplace else. His skin cooked while hers grew cold, and she produced sorrowful poems, and he grew sentimental over mussels steamed with shallots in white wine.
When Ada woke him, she seemed to be wearing sneakers and a long denim shirt and nothing else.
“You slept all afternoon,” she said.
“I was running away from work. It’s a great tradition of the trade.”
“We can work tonight,” she said, “or tomorrow. We’re doing all right. Listen. Wear some shorts, or a bathing suit if you brought it. I can’t lend you one, I’m afraid, unless you’re comfortable in a red maillot. And you’d best wear something on your feet.”
Ada left, but Murphy stayed, to pant and fart and wink as Mason put on a pair of shorts he wore when he played basketball with his friends, and then tennis shoes and a T-shirt. Murphy went to stand before the back door, his blunt, spade-shaped head leaning on the jamb. Mason let him out and then walked down the narrow path of dark, mossy soil along which Murphy had already run out of sight, past wind-stunted evergreens, then driftwood crushed against the huge rocks lying on top of the great stone sheets that radiated black and pink-gray layers into the sea. Ada was there, halfway down to the turning of the cove. She carried two plastic buckets, one of which she handed him.
“Your hands will probably get sore,” she said. “The more you try and hang on to the rocks, the more you’ll get those very pale knees and shins chopped up on the barnacles and all. But it’s worth it, because they’re so sweet here. It’s pretty much a secret place, so far.”
“What’s the secret about? Did you say?”
“Mussels, for goodness’ sakes. That’s what I’ve been telling you. This place, when the tide is low, is a gorgeous mussel bed.”
She and Murphy went farther out, climbing over or around immense glacial rocks that lay on top of the pink and gray stone sheets. At low tide, which was now, he imagined, you must be able to reach ten feet or more below the level of the high tide of six hours before. She had disappeared over the edge, and so had Murphy, and he went to find her. She was in ocean to her waist and thighs, and Murphy was swimming away from her, threading his slow, powerful way through the bright plastic buoys of the lobster traps, his head low on the water, breathing in groans that were carried back on the wind.
The rocks seemed steep to Mason, and slippery, and he sensed that, trying to climb down, he would slide along them into the sea, striking his head and shoulders and spine against the sharp white barnacles and—he watched her pry one loose—the hundreds of long black mussels that she faced. The water had painted her shirt against her stomach and groin, and he could see the shadow of a bathing suit beneath the shirt and the movement of her stomach muscles under the suit as she pulled and twisted until a mussel she was harvesting came loose, to be dropped into th
e white plastic bucket that she held in her other hand.
She looked up with a concentration that struck him as ferocious. Then a pleasure seemed to come over her, and she said, “Come on, all right? Come here.”
He held a finger up. It was supposed to say that he would be there soon, though from a different direction. She looked away, as if disappointed, and then she returned to plucking. Mason headed back twenty yards or more, then climbed down a more gradual decline of rocks nearer the house. He made his way along low stone outcroppings that gradually circled toward the curve of the point, where he thought she would be.
He couldn’t hear Murphy now. Mason held on to the rock, chopping his fingers on bright white little shells that adhered to it, prodding for the beard hairs of mussels. The pail he held was floating on the tide, and the icy water was soon above his knees as he foraged where the rocks declined. He had worked two small mussels loose, with great effort, and tossed them into the bucket. Now the freezing sea was at his waist. He came around the point to see Ada, tall, spread-legged, and at her ease, with one hand through the wire handle of her pail to hold the rock face, and the other hand working to her right, tearing mussels loose and dumping them. When she saw him, she gave him a look of inspection and then smiled as if all at once, after a time of confusion, she understood him.
He held on to the rock against the bucking of the sea. He was watching the small Labrador attack one of the foamed plastic buoys painted white on top and red on the bottom and fastened to a lobster trap that held to the floor of the sea.
Ada cocked her head as dogs do when they’re puzzled. “Murphy!” she called. “Murph! Come here!”
The dog made as if to swim to her, but then he stayed where he was, with his jaws clamped around the buoy. He made paddling motions but didn’t come away.
“Get his ass shot up by a pissed-off lobsterman or the conservation patrol,” she said, “and nobody would question it. Murphy, damn it!”
“Ada,” Mason said.
“Murph!”
“Ada, he’s stuck. Isn’t he? He can’t get his teeth out of it.”
“He can’t? Oh, he can’t. Murphy!”
They started at the same time. Ada let go of her bucket and pushed off from the rock face to swim a long-stroked crawl. Mason tried to think of himself as doing the same, though he knew that what he really did was make a little yipping noise, push his head down into the water, and, spitting ocean out, set forward with the only stroke he could swim—if, he thought, you could really call this swimming—a despairing sidestroke that sent him in slants not quite straight at what he alleged to be heading for. He stroked, looked about, corrected his direction, then stroked some more. He had no real breathing rhythm, but he did have strong arms and legs, so he swam in the sea the way a crab scuttles on sand, and he made a little headway. Ada, meanwhile, was almost there. Mason found himself thinking about the great distance that lay between the dark green surface, chopped into patches of white by the wind, and the slithery, teeming ocean floor.
She was trying to support the dog’s belly, it appeared, when Mason reached them. The whites of Murphy’s eyes seemed enormous. As if to demonstrate his situation, his lips were drawn back so that the pink and black gums and yellow-white teeth were visible, the fangs clamped deep into the soft plastic of the buoy. Murphy twisted his head to release himself, but the teeth were firmly stuck.
“I’ve got you, little Murph,” Ada said, breathing harshly. “I’ve got his tail and his gut, a little bit,” she told Mason. “Can you—”
He tried to say, “Piece of cake.” It came out as a wet warble. He did what he considered the treading of water, really a flailing kick—the bottom seemed so far below—that shook his torso and head. He didn’t try to speak again. He worked his fingers into Murphy’s mouth and made the noises, though not the shaped words themselves, of Here we go, boy. Here we go, boy. Here we go. His own head slid beneath the surface several times, but he worked at the teeth and then had them unfastened. He surfaced just as Murphy, in the jaws of panic, clamped his own jaws down again, this time on Mason’s left hand. Mason howled shrilly and Murphy, with Mason’s fingers in his mouth, turned with great interest toward the noise. Using his right hand, he persuaded the muzzle open and removed his fingers. Ada pushed Murphy off toward shore, and the dog swam eagerly. Mason tried to shift from his flailing into his crooked sidestroke, but he was down to the single hand that would cup against water and he merely rolled a little before his head went under.
He felt her hand in his hair, tugging, and then he was on his back. He tried to protest, but water poured into his mouth, and he could only gurgle. Her hand cupped his chin, pulling back, so that now the ocean stayed out of his mouth and he could breathe whenever he wished. What gifts to give a man, he thought: the fruits of her watchfulness, as well as a choice of when to breathe. She towed him as if he were a blunt, unseaworthy barge and she a gallant tug. She swam what he knew was an actual and very effective sidestroke that resembled his sideways jerk only in the way you said its name.
Although he was kept the length of a bent arm away from her, he was intimately aware of her body. He heard her breath go out on the water. He felt the strength of her fingers as they held his throat and chin. Sometimes her legs, when they scissored, brushed his buttock or the small of his back. His arms trailed, and he sensed that if he moved them up a little he might touch her, and he wanted to, though he kept them at his sides. His eyes were closed. The day had begun that way, he remembered: him on his back with his eyes forced shut. She surged, then relaxed, surged and then relaxed, and he could feel her purpose, the power of her long muscles, and none of the sorrow that bowed her shoulders when she stood on the shore.
Something brushed his trailing forearm, and he squinted to his right to see one of the mussel buckets, right-side up and slowly spinning out toward open sea. He shut his eyes again and thought it possible that, half drowning, his mangled hand a pulse that beat in syncopation to the rhythm of the progress of her stroke, he might actually fall asleep in the waters of this cold Atlantic cove. But she halted them. He could feel her tread water with a different kind of strength from that of her sidestroke. Then she swam him a little farther, paused again, and then began to walk with him still floating on his back, towing him through the shallows. Murphy had made it back, and he lay on a tilted, vast, refrigerator-shaped stone, looking down toward them while he panted at a ferocious pace, his tongue exhaustedly stiffened and stuck straight out. It was time to stand up, Mason knew, and he reluctantly climbed to his feet by holding with his unbitten hand on to Ada, who stood above him with the ocean pouring between her thighs.
“You’re all right,” she said, “aren’t you?” She’d begun to shake.
He let go of her hand and stood before her on his own. He trembled, partly because of the cold. “Thank you,” he said.
“No, that was a great rescue,” she said. “Thank you from Murphy and thank you from me.”
“And you,” he said, breathing as fast as if he had pulled someone large through the ocean against currents, gravity, dog bite, and fear. “You saved my life, Ada.”
“But we won’t have mussels for dinner tonight. And I’m sorry. It would have been fun to give you that.” He watched her head droop a little as her shoulders bent toward the sea.
Murphy shifted his demented glare from one of them to the other as he panted from above. Mason wanted to examine his hand to see whether the dog had only torn his fingers apart or had also broken a few, but he held it at his side with what he hoped was nonchalance.
“Another night,” he said, “please.”
“All right,” she said. “Yes. But we’re freezing here.”
“We are,” he said. But he was thinking of the nighttime heat in which they gathered at Checkpoint Eight One, the smell of the driver rising through the chemical stink of the rubber and plastic of the burning truck. His legs and loins cooked in the cab while the upper segment lay before them. The driver’s remainin
g eye was wide as if in speculation about these Americans who shuffled closer and closer to the torn torso and its wrecked head.
Ada bent forward, suddenly, and she gathered her hair in a fist, reaching for a barrette that had been torn away by the sea. She stayed bent over, then looked up to see him watch her hair whip backward as she straightened and said, “I’m going up, I’m building a fire in the fireplace, and I’m making tea to pour brandy in. We’ll deal with your hand, which looks a little lousy, I’m afraid. And I’m smoking plenty of cigarettes.”
She turned from Mason to get herself past pitted, bleached-out boards and hanks of snapped rope that lay among the stones she climbed toward the house. Murphy went slowly ahead of her. Holding his beating right hand in his left, and knowing that he risked a fall on the slippery, yellow-green rockweed and the slimy bottoms of tidal pools, Mason followed them up.
ALSO BY FREDERICK BUSCH
Rescue Missions
North
A Memory of War
Don’t Tell Anyone
The Night Inspector
A Dangerous Profession
Girls
Children in the Woods
Long Way from Home
Harry and Catherine
Absent Friends
War Babies
Closing Arguments
Sometimes I Live in the Country
Too Late American Boyhood Blues
Invisible Mending
Take This Man
Rounds
Hardwater Country
The Mutual Friend
Breathing Trouble
Manual Labor
I Wanted a Year Without Fall
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Strout
Copyright © 1979, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1994, 2000 by Frederick Busch
Copyright © 2006 by the Estate of Frederick Busch
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 49