Moon Tide (26 page)

He lives through the summers in the boathouse. Other than to do the work he has been asked to do, he does not go up to Skirdagh, not to the library, not even to Maggie’s garden. He tracks the seasons by the migration of the birds. When the sanderlings disappear, he knows it is mid-June, and they have begun their journey to the Arctic. He dreams them as they mate among the ice floes and a sun that barely moves. When the osprey nestlings spill out of the dead tree in the marsh by Split Rock, he knows it is the end of July. The sun has begun to pull south again, hand over hand, along the prone shadow of the
harbor. The moon jellies flood in with the red tide, and he can smell the dank weight of weed trapped between the causeway rocks and under sand.

When the first storms come in late August, he sits on the wooden floor of the boathouse and consumes the pages of the books he reads. He finds lines about sea wolves, blue mountains, and the blood of whales. He cuts them out of the book with his knife. Carefully. He takes only what he needs.

He hears from Maggie that Patrick Gerow wants a child. Maggie gives Eve warming teas and quarter cups of apple cider vinegar to stir the blood. She makes her egg yolks fried in an iron skillet to thicken her flesh. She gives her maple sap with nettle to get the seed to stick and tonics made of raspberry leaf and red clover flowers.

“She’s grown too cold for a child,” Maggie remarks to Jake one spring when they are out in the garden pulling asparagus. “These last few years, she’s grown so cold.”

Maggie plants asparagus with great distances between them, so they grow up, thin and solitary pillars through the earth. She moves through the rows and breaks the stalks low, close to the ground. She lays them down into her basket, braided heart to braided heart.

In the winter of 1937, the buffleheads and snow buntings arrive early. By late November, there is already a scab of young ice on the ocean surface, and the frost is a harsh-glistening skin on the grass. By January, the river and ponds are solid. The men and boys sweep the ice of snow. They build sledding chutes on the downhills and fly off the bank across the East Branch from the Drift Road to the Pine Hill side. Even the old rumrunners from the Shuckers Club come to skate. They start at Hixbridge, open their winter coats like sails, and let the northeast wind blow them all the way down to Gunning Island. The ice grows three inches thick on the telephone poles, and the wires sling down, overwhelmed by the weight.

That winter, Jake dreams of the house. Week after week, through that cold rare light, the same dream. He dreams it all the way into the spring of 1938. The mullein leafs, green shoots poke up through the cattails, and the swallows return, their boomerang wings wheel dark circles through his sleep.

He sees the dream sometimes even while he is awake, crossing the bridge on his way down John Reed Road to begin work on the summer homes. He will go down after the thaw to unboard the windows and take stock of leaks and damage, what needs to be repaired. In the dream, he is walking up the hill toward Skirdagh. He walks through Maggie’s garden past the hand plow and the flat-throat shank spade that she uses to turn the manure. He walks past the herring bones soaking with the shell marl in the barrel behind the woodshed, past the root cellar where his brother sits smoking on a stool underneath the overhang. He walks past Maggie’s wheelbarrow and a tremendous basket of eggs. They are unhatched—pale blue—with light brown hunks of land etched into their shells. He walks past thickets of wild rose, iris, and daffodil. Up ahead, the main house of Skirdagh shimmers. The roof, the walls, even the wraparound porch are elastic, rippling as if they move in a surreal, unstable heat. He can hear a sound coming toward him from a distance, a wind sound, rising like the hiss of lightning along electric wires. He looks up. Eve is standing in the middle window of the second floor, her hands mapping the pane from the inside as if she could dig through, and he remembers suddenly in his dream that he saw her this way once as a child, her hands routing the same slow and curious pattern through a window over and over again. He has almost reached the top of the hill when the water breaks through the glass where she stands. She falls toward him, her body thrown like a wild bird to flight as the house sheds out of itself, crumbles, and runs into a river down the hill.

PART III
SUMMER
1938

Ben Soule

A
ugust. They have garden parties every weekend at the stone house, children dressed in jelly bean colors running through the box-hedge maze. The old man naps during the day, and the laughter of the children clatters down the dark halls of his sleep.

To escape them, he dons the wings. They are nearly finished. He adds one or two feathers each week. Crow for seeing. Swan for grace. The frame fits easily across his back, the elastic band around each shoulder slightly loose from where he has shed some weight. He changes the bands. He cuts three slits in each and makes a buckle, so he can belt them more tightly depending on the barometer read of the day. He hops first. Hops and flaps and hops again to master the art of the takeoff. As he practices, he learns that a slight flap, then a hop, followed by a strong push of his arms toward the ground will give him that initial height he needs to catch the lowest current of wind.

At the stone house, they often have music. A swing band. A quartet. The shallow pluck of the stringed instruments grates on him. The family spends two full weeks at the house in mid-August, and the voices of the children build with the relentless heat, voices smearing like a rash across his skin. He prays for a storm. For sudden claps of
thunder that will send the children squealing back indoors. He prays for gray days and black clouds piling out of the fog. He prays for wind. For a roar that will pull out the maze by its roots. That will shatter the blinding reds, yellows, purples, blues of the imported perennial gardens. The floral stench is overwhelming. A perfume that coats his food. Even the hardtack crackers taste like flowers.

At night, he vaults himself over the hedgerow into the stone house gardens. He crouches in the new mulch, opens a pouch full of slugs and drops them under the leaves. He wades through thick colonies of spiderwort, hyacinth, Italian bugloss, false dragonheads, and meadow rue. He keeps a wreath of sea muck wrapped around his withered neck to knock out the smell. He uncorks a small bottle of lime and trails it through the beds. He waters it thick and close to the base of each stem, and he watches the lime disappear into the soil. By morning, it will have bored to the root. Within several days, the blooms will sag, and the leaves will turn the color of weak tea. As Ben pulls his wheelbarrow full of sea muck up the knoll, he will hear someone yelling at the gardener.

“The dragonheads!” The voice is female and shrill. “What has happened to the dragonheads?”

He listens to the sullen and ashamed reply of the gardener who explains that it is not only the dragonheads. It is the English roses and the spiderwort as well. They will all have to be uprooted and replaced.

Ben sits out on his doorstone and watches the trucks from the nursery pull in. He watches the unloading of new plants, new flowers. There is more yelling, and the children drag in from the beach. Their nurse herds them into the outdoor shower, bathing knickers peeled off, and they are screaming, running out bare-assed through the yard. Ben stares up at the slate roof of that tremendous house. He dreams of hopping over it. Catching the first wave of wind, and then the second. Higher this time. The flush of the wings fills his ears. They push upward—the old man and the feathers—working current to current. He aches to stand on the solid upper ground of the clouds above his
head. His shoulders strain. A great whoosh, and his feet skim the highest chimney. The voices of the children chase him, screeching, high-pitched, they rope his feet and the shrillness of the sound melts the wings. The wind drops out from under him. He plummets. Icarus dreams.

Elizabeth

S
he knows that her mind has grown sloped, that everything passing into it rolls on a slight downhill, cannot find grip, and is lost.

Und die Angst, daß ich nichts sagen könnte, weil alles unsagbar ist
.

the fear of everything unsayable

Her granddaughter brings her the German like food, her pale granddaughter Eve, who has grown brittle. She sits in the untrimmed light across the room from the isinglass stove, the flames stripe her face like blue lace, and she reads aloud to Elizabeth from a book of Rilke’s poetry, she reads the words at first in German, the syllables tumbling from her mouth like small discreet stones she circles back to distill into English. She leaves out sentences, whole paragraphs in translation. She torques the meaning through her.

ich lerne sehen. Ja, ich fange an
.
But the woman. The woman had completely fallen into herself. She sat up,
erschrak
, frightened, pulled out of herself,
zu schnell
, violently, so that her face was left in her two hands.

On the floor of the isinglass stove, the nut coals cluster in an uneven mass of terrain. Their edges glow orange as they eat themselves away. The deafness has thickened like a wax in Elizabeth’s ears, but here, in this quiet room where there are no other sounds to distract her, she hears enough to sense the widening gap between the solidity of the language and the dissolution of her mind. Her granddaughter, the pale one reading, floats in undigested pieces near her. She reads of Eurydice, a woman who is already root,

Wer?

    
fern aber
, far away, far away,

groping, she is,
dark before the shining exit-gates
, already walking back, moors, cliffs, the Owenglen at dusk, the castle and the blackthorn trees tumbling, all of it will tumble into yellow water. She will unravel to heather. She will press the ocean through her, its crossing through the eye of a needle, and her body will rise up again, young and unscathed. Innisfree. Elizabeth wonders what it means. Has been asking herself always, What does it all mean? Innisfree.