Moon Tide (16 page)

That morning when he leaves the root cellar, Wes stops in at the dock house. Russ Barre is alone in the back room overhauling his gear. As he fixes a new hook to the trawl, he tells Wes about the ship due in from the north that night around the Sow and Pigs.

After dark, the wind picks up, and a crescent moon rises over the bridge. Caleb Mason meets Wes at the dock and they push off just shy of ten. They reach the mother ship by quarter past eleven. They bring the first load to the tip of Gooseberry, tie a cork mooring to one end, and dump the crates overboard into the shallows. They take a second trip out for another load, storing the unmarked wooden crates under tarps and lobster pots. They come back into the harbor, silently. They slip through the black water with their engines cut, on a rising tide. As they pass the wharf and Jewel Penny raises the draw of the Point
Bridge, Wes glances over his shoulder to the room above Blackwood’s store and thinks of her.

Three trucks, six pleasure cars, and fifteen men are waiting in the turnout north of Haskell’s barn to help them unload. As Wes is lifting the last crate from the deck, he decides that he will go to her. He will find her in the root cellar asleep in the thin light from the woodstove. She will be waiting for him. He loses his grip on the crate. One bottle slips out. He reaches down and arrests it, just barely, above the ground. He bites hard into his lower lip.

That night when the work is done and the new roll of cash digs hard into his thigh, Wes goes back with North Kelly, Thin Gin Tripp, and Caleb Mason to the dock house, where they drink three bottles of Indian Hill bourbon and lose to one another at cards until dawn.

On the next full moon, from the window of his room above the Shuckers Club, he sees Maggie cross the lane and slip through the back door of the wharf. He sees her shadow climb the inside stairs toward the yellow kerosene light above Blackwood’s store.

He watches the door. The moon washes over it, striking a slow, lean path across the wood, before it continues on its route west down the street and toward the river. He watches that door all night. Shadows climb around the frame. Close to dawn, she slips out. He moves quickly down the stairs and follows fifteen yards behind her up the road toward Skirdagh. He keeps himself off the sidewalk, walking at the edges of the lawns. She looks back once, and he thins himself behind an elm. She stands still. Her eyes play the street from one side to the other, down the lane toward the wharf. She scans every inch of what is behind her with the exception of the spot where he is. Then she turns and continues walking.

Patrick

W
hen Patrick Gerow first comes to the Point, he sees only water—the wharf, the boathouses, the docks, the marsh islands, and even the bridge tremble as if they are rinsed in uncertain light.

A silver day, she calls it. The pale-haired young woman in the white dress. Eve. They are standing on the small pier at the bottom of the hill. The pilings are awkward—rough-hewn, young cedar posts—with pine slats lined between them.

Patrick had arrived in the town that morning. Drove to the end of Main Road and then realized when he reached the bridge that he must have missed the turn. Two men sat outside a beaten-down building with a crude sign that read
THE SHUCKERS CLUB
strung above the door. One of the men sat on an overturned crate shelling a pail of oysters. The other was red-faced, older. He sat in the shade on a straw-backed rocker with a corncob pipe and a felt hat pulled across his brow, eyes closed under the brim.

“Excuse me,” Patrick addressed the younger man. He did not look up from the oyster in his hand. A tremendous shell, eight inches long. He had his left palm wrapped carefully around it.

“Excuse me,” Patrick said again. “But can you tell me how to get to
Arthur Coles’s residence? Eighteen-fifty Main Road. This is Main Road, isn’t it?”

The older man in the rocker tilted forward, pushed the hat out of his eyes, and shook his head. “No, this here is Thanksgiving Lane. You got to go back that way.”

“Right,” said Patrick. “How far would you say it was?”

“Well, for you, it’d be quite far. Keep going back. You’ll find it, and if you don’t, you can just keep on going back.” He tilted the hat forward again and leaned his head back against the chair, shifting the cob pipe to the opposite side of his mouth. He ground the stem of it gently between his teeth.

Patrick looked down at the other man, still shucking oysters. He had wedged the blade of his knife into the hinge between the closed shells and now he pried the two halves apart. The beige slimed meat slid out into his hand. He dropped the meat into a second pail and tossed the shell into a pile on the ground.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Patrick.

“No bother.” The man didn’t look up.

“Could you tell me how to get to Main Road?”

“Think so.” The man fished another oyster from the bucket and wedged the tip of the knife between the two halves.

“Is it a great distance from here?”

“Not far.”

“Well, could you tell me then how I might reach it?”

The man stopped his work and looked up at him. His eyes were light, the color of sand.

“I’ll pay you,” said Patrick. “If that’s what you want.”

The man’s head dropped again to the shell in his hand. He slid out the meat and tossed the empty halves into the pile. He was barefoot, his toenails untrimmed.

The older man’s head had cocked up from the chair. “For two dollars, I can tell you,” he said, this time without raising his hat.

Patrick reached into his pocket and peeled two singles from his wallet.

The oyster shucker looked up at him and grinned. “Don’t give it to him. He’s a bad sort with strangers. Send you to Rhode Island and keep your money. I’ll tell you how to get where you’re going. Take this road here, take it north, back the way you came. Pass a lady selling vegetables on a board across two stones. That’s Mary Perry. Take the next right past her, follow that down the hill until you come to the pavilion. Take a right before the bridge. Drive that road to the end. At the top of the hill, take a left. That’s Main Road. Can’t miss it.”

“So a right, and then a right, and then a left.”

“Yeah.”

Patrick held out the two dollars, but the man shrugged away his hand, picked up another oyster, and wedged the knife into the shell.

Patrick drove north for five miles, and when he passed the woman with corn and snap beans set out on a board laid across two stones, he took the next right down the hill, and when he came to Remington’s Clambake Pavilion, he took a right onto Drift Road. The river ran on the left, parallel to the road, its blueness slashed between the trees. The day was humid, and flies died thick across the windshield of his car. When he reached the top of the hill, he took the left turn and kept going until he arrived at the spot outside the restaurant where he had stopped three quarters of an hour before.

The oyster shucking man was gone. The older man still sat on the chair, the pipe sticking out from under the lid of the felt hat.

Patrick drove another twenty yards to the end of the road, where a Sinclair gasoline sign was set outside a two-story building hung with a sign that read
BLACKWOOD’S STORE
. He went in. There was an older man behind the butcher counter with a thick block of beef he was cutting into thirds. Unruly jet hair. A scar folded through the left half of his face, and his right hand was gapped two of its fingers.

“I’m looking for Main Road,” Patrick stammered. “I just need someone to get me to Main Road.”

“This is it,” the man said, setting down the knife. “Half a mile north, Thanksgiving Lane turns into Main Road.”

Patrick nodded. He was perspiring, his face soaked around the scalp line.

“Someone send you around the block?”

Patrick nodded again, reached into his jacket pocket for his handkerchief and mopped his brow.

“Long block,” said the man.

“Yes it was actually. Quite.”

“They’ll do that with strangers. You looking for the Coles place?”

“Yes.”

“Half a mile up on your left. Driveway after Cape Bial.”

He is a peculiar man, Eve thinks, when she first meets him on the terrace by the cheese. His face is flushed. Inverted pink triangles spot his cheeks like windburn. He spreads a bit of softened Brie onto a water cracker. He does this carefully, covering each edge. He is blond. Thin-haired. The jacket does not fit him easily—his shoulders are too broad—his neck slightly thick. She notices his hands. They are small. Manicured. Beautiful hands.

It is his first time in the town, he tells her, and the house is his design. He says this rather proudly and at the same time rather ashamed of the pride.

What house? she asks. The innocence of the question flusters him.

He points. In the middle of silver oblong platters with scalloped edges, heaps of crudités, sliced melon, and smoked fish is a cardboard model of the house that Arthur Coles has hired him to build. They will break ground the following spring, he tells her, along the ridge of Salter’s Hill.

He does not tell her that the model took him days. Small cutting. Folding the hard edges and gluing them with an epoxy sealed light so it would not mar the angles or the lines. He had designed it to be built directly into the ridge as if it were a cliff dwelling, its western decks extending out into midair. It was the first time he had been given such free artistic rein, and he knew it would springboard his career. At least, it could. When the model was finished, Coles had ordered
it transported from Boston. He hired one man to drive and another to sit in the back with the cardboard structure on his lap, lifting it every so often to avoid any potential dismantling by the bumps of the potholed road.

The man named Patrick walks with her down to the pier. She looks out across the river toward the barrier beach where the dunes rise in strange, dismembered curves. The light ripples off the surface of the water. Even the sky is silver, wrinkled like the gelatin of undeveloped film.

She looks back up to the house behind them on the hill. Her father has walked out of the double French doors onto the upper patio. He is dressed in a single-breasted jacket, ivory trousers with an immaculate crease down the front and a bow tie. He carries a cane. He puts his other hand across his eyes and scans the lawn that slopes down to the river. He is looking for her. The wrought-iron balcony bisects him at the waist. He is a man cut in half.

“Will you be staying then?” Patrick Gerow is asking her now. The silver light washes over his face, and it fractures, almost cubist, drawn in aluminum tones.

She looks at him blankly.

“For the clambake,” he says.

“The clambake,” she repeats, patiently. His voice is gentle, his eyes a lukewarm blue, and she can feel the pull to curl herself to sleep inside them.

She turns away from him again toward the river, and he can feel her slip out of herself, so what stands in front of him is not quite her, but rather the imprint of a woman. Transparent.

She is blank, unmapped, and in her, he can sense the potential of the town. He can feel the push of houses like small crops out of the ground. He can see huge tracts of open farms divided, drawn and quartered; the surge of blank land into a bustling summer resort; the smells of new construction: sawdust, resin, cement, cedar, lime.

He knows that a city is not unlike a woman. It is a living and sensual
thing. Like water. Like light. Once it is set loose, its sprawl has a life of its own.

Patrick glances up toward the house and the table set on the stone terrace. From here, he can just make out the cardboard roof of the model, the twin chimneypiece. It took him hours to meld that piece into the hole. He had cut a thin strip of flattened copper for the flashing. He had embedded it into the mortar between the painted-on bricks and woven it through the cardboard shingles. It had to be real copper, he decided. It could not be colored in. He wanted the model, like the house it would become, to reflect the sun.

He turns back to the young woman standing several feet away from him at the edge of the pier, and he can sense the way she moves standing still, how she recedes at the point of contact. He is overwhelmed by a desire to take her inside him, to surround her so that her receding will take place within his borders and heave up like an urban landscape contained within a network of roads.

The silver light floods through her, and in the trembling, the uncertainty, Patrick can see girders, scaffolding, new trussed bridges and stepped roofs. He watches her, drawing blueprint lines out of her curves, turning the potential of the land, turning her, the way he might turn a glass in his hand in an effort to hold the sunlight that fills it.

Elizabeth