Moon Tide (28 page)

She tries to feel the weight of her body on the sheet. She runs her hand down her neck between her breasts into the flat plain of her belly, tight-lipped between her hipbones and her ribs. She feels for the leak in her heart. The space has grown open and so ash, she cannot locate even an edge of the tear.

She remembers the nights she would lie, just this same way, awake and alone in the smaller bedroom down the hall with her mother’s voice creeping out of the handfuls of food Eve had left for her in piles on the floor—the jellied eyes of halibut glistening on the windowsill.

—I grew up in a place where blood had a sound
,

Eucalyptus scrub, spine grass, walkabout. A dry heat that leaves the aftertaste of metal in the mouth. No beginning. No end. An implacable middle.

We would watch the tribes pass on their way to the Kimberley ritual grounds. In the morning, it was the same sky, the same desert. But the space was somehow different from their having passed through
.

Eve wakes in the dead of night to her husband snoring. She lies still with the lull of him next to her, her body cold and unfilled, as the sound grows vast inside her. She holds her breath counting to ten in German, then in French. The solace of numbers, as the sound of him runs foreign in her blood. She lies there, half-listening, half-misplaced in a grid of language until he rolls off his back onto his side and into silence.

She gets out of bed and goes downstairs into the library. She takes a match and holds it to the coals until they light. She lays the soapstone to heat on the stove, wraps herself in a thin wool blanket and sits in the rocking chair. She tries to untangle the design of willow buds through the window, her body pressed thin, rocking. Her feet grow numb, hooked onto the lowest rung. She has never sat in this chair, her grandmother’s chair. She listens to the stillness of the library around her, the winding paths of books. Some of those books, she knows, will never be opened again. The soapstone eyes her from the top of the isinglass stove, an orange heat held into its underside. She wraps it in cloth and takes it upstairs. She slips back into bed beside Patrick. She keeps her back turned toward him and curls herself around the stone.

She knows that it can burn the way ice burns, placed directly against the skin. Carefully, she winds two of her fingers through a break in the folds of the cloth and presses them against the rock. At first there is nothing, then the scald hits, and she can feel her heart moving through her hand. She takes her fingers off the rock and wraps it closed again. Her hand throbs. The pain is sharp, the skin swollen with quick blisters from the heat. She places the stone on the floor and rolls toward Patrick, feeling for his arm. She buries into his shoulder, looking for a place she can lose herself.

“Do you love me?” she whispers.

“What did you say?” His voice is heavy with sleep.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course.”

“Are you sure?”

“I have a busy day tomorrow.”

“I’ve burnt my hand,” she says. “On the stone.”

“You should be more careful.”

“It hurts. I didn’t imagine it would hurt this much to feel.”

“I have a busy day tomorrow.”

“Are you sure you love me?”

“Of course, I love you,” he says and his body settles back into its sleep.

She touches the burnt places on her hand. She bends her fingers, then straightens them to make the blood run smooth again. She wraps them tightly in her other hand, and in the dark, with the vague shape of Patrick lying next to her, she realizes that she does not love him. She has never loved him. It is not a cruel realization. It is stark and simple and complete.

At breakfast the next morning, she peels the rind from an orange and listens to the sound the yellow birch leaves make as they are falling. They have turned early. She counts the ones that are left, pinned like aberrant wings to their lean branches. The wind shivers through them, and they tinkle up against one another like glass. With her nails, she cuts away the white connective tissue around each piece of the orange. Piece by piece. The wind picks the yellow leaves off the branches, one by one, each shred caught in its own spiral that is sacred by the fact of being final, a source of joy, freedom, grief. She peels the rest of the white membrane off the orange until it is gone. By now, she knows that what will be left is something that to her is inedible. She leaves the pulp on the table in a small bowl.

She walks away from the house into the woods toward the river and finds herself looking back across her life. She can see its twists, the breaks in the coastline, the sudden, abrupt shifts where she stepped away from herself, and now the slow, almost painful emerging into clearer air.

She crosses the lower meadow and takes the path through the woods down to the river. She finds the boathouse door unlatched and the room cold. Jake has left a potato on the woodstove, its skin a thick crust holding the heat of the flesh inside. She walks through the room: a small table, a blue enamel cup, a tin bowl, the sunken frame of the bed. Her fingers hover above the blanket as if she could sense the weight of his body from the wool. She moves along the stacks of
books against the wall. A half-mended lobster net with the massive needle at mid-stitch around the ring lies folded in a corner next to his rod and line, bait pail, eel spear, a double-barreled shotgun. She does not touch anything, not even the book that he has left face down in the lap of the chair, until she finds the heart carved out of pine on the nail keg behind the stove. She picks it up and turns it over in her hand. She presses her fingernail into the eye just off its midline and dents the groove deeper in. She closes her hand around it, opens it, then closes it again. The heart drifts without a sail in her palm.

Heading back toward the house, she sees Maggie by the garden.

Eve tries to avoid her, keeping close to the woods, but Maggie has already seen her. She waves. Eve cuts across the garden, stepping carefully around the small mounds of squash. Maggie’s apron is full of lettuce heads.

“Do you need help carrying those?” Eve asks her.

Maggie grins. “They’ll dirty you.”

“I don’t mind.”

Maggie hands her two of the heads, and they start back up the hill. “Where you coming from?”

“Just down there.” Eve nods back toward the woods.

“What for down there?”

“I just went for a walk.”

Maggie looks at her sideways.

“It was just a walk,” Eve says. “Nowhere in particular.”

Maggie doesn’t answer. She glances down at Eve’s neck and the slight claws of red flush that have begun to spread around the collar of her dress.

“All right then. We’ll call it a walk.”

And they continue without words up the hill, Eve gripping the rough feathered heads of the lettuce, one in either hand.

She finds Patrick upstairs. On one corner of his desk is a breakfast plate with thin johnnycakes and two slices of bacon he has not touched.

She watches him from the shadow of the hallway. He is bent over his desk—shirt collar undone—with the unrolled blueprint of the hotel he has designed for Arthur Coles. They will break ground the following April, and it will be built on the spot where Blackwood’s store used to be. He does not notice her standing there. He does not notice when she leaves. She takes the narrow stairs into the attic. She climbs over the steamer trunks and the crates of books to the oval window. Below the trees, she can see the switchback turns of blue water at the bottom of the hill.

Jake is out on the river. He keeps the boat on a slow drift in the margin between the flats and the deeper channel. He stands balanced on the stern as the tide draws him toward the bridge. Above his head, gulls whittle the sky.

The river light cuts him into angles—his body is black, solid, against the silver, wrinkled surface. As the channel narrows, the marsh drops suddenly, and the boat pulls away from the flats into the current, toward the run where the water is deepest and goes still.

The Storm

I
t was before they had names.

She was born in the warm shallows off the coast of Africa. A slender, wily shape, she began her journey west, her backside pushed by the prevailing pressure flow.

On the crossing, she stripped currents of moist air from the surface of the ocean, and as the earth turned under her, she spiraled slowly toward herself, hugging the warm jet stream.

She continued west until she had reached the southern ridge of the Azores-Bermuda high. She ascended its steep face, moved along its backbone ridge, then dropped down into a trough. For a while there, she paused, in that elongated, lower zone. Then she shifted her direction and began to head north, gradually gaining speed.

She extended her arms and wrapped the power in her body. She grew broader, more twisted. She gathered mass. She pulled smaller storms into cycling bands around her eye. She absorbed squalls and winds and heavy rains and built them up into shuddering, unfixed towers. Walls of clouds heaved and fell around her.

She struck hard into an island chain and then broke free back out to open water. She moved north up the coast, the waves along her front edge chewing up the ocean in her path.

Jake

W
hen Jake stops by the Shuckers Club on Sunday morning, the eighteenth of September, to return a bucket of plugs he had borrowed from North Kelly the Thursday before, they are sitting out on the bench debating what kind of storm it will be.

The broadcast had come through earlier that morning on the new radio—the same radio they have been listening to all summer—three steps above the old crystal set with the homemade sound. They keep it on from six A.M. until ten at night. They place bets on every Sox game. They take in
Amos ’n’ Andy
and vague reports of Hitler’s continued march across Europe. They argue about whether or not there will be another war.

They meet at the dock house now. A year ago, Swampy Davoll sold his workshop and the room above it to Arthur Coles when Coles made him an offer he couldn’t resist. They had kept the pool table. They had carried it across the street—six men bearing that huge slate table on their shoulders as if it were a coffin. Spud Mason and North Kelly had busted Swampy’s chops once or twice for selling out—but cash was cash, and they stopped their grumbling when he used some of the extra to buy the radio and a rack of new balls for the table. On the day the deal closed and Coles took possession, North Kelly pried
off the old quarter-board sign from above the workshop door. He carried it across the street to the dock house and hammered it into the outside wall above the bench. He repainted
THE SHUCKERS CLUB
in black tar and drew an arrow pointing down.

When Jake stops by on the morning of the eighteenth, there are four of them sitting on the bench—Swampy, Thin Gin, North Kelly, and Russ Barre. They crowd together on the seat, each one jabbing an elbow into someone else’s ribs from time to time.

The broadcast had come through at seven
A.M
.—the U.S. Weather Bureau announced that ships in the South Atlantic were flashing warnings of a storm center zigzagging northwest at seventeen miles per hour, headed for Florida and the Keys. Swampy scoffed, said it would be nothing more than a line storm—that every-year three-day blow that passed through mid-September when the sun crossed over the equator line.

When Jake stops by, it is just past eight. They have been bickering over it for nearly an hour.

“How be ya, Jake?” Thin Gin waves. “On the radio, they be saying we could see a hurricane.” He is a slight man, eel-like with a shrunken face. His bottom lip was torn fifteen years ago when a codfish hook caught him in the mouth.

“You’re a puddler, Thin Gin,” Swampy says curtly. “No hurricane in these parts.” He whittles down a piece of cedarwood.

“On the radio—”

“Cuts no ice with me. Hurricane down there maybe. Up here, we’re due for a line storm. Won’t be nothing but that.”

They debate whether there will be a shift in wind. If it pulls into the northwest, it will spit the sea clams up onto the beach. Someone asks if Davy Santos has his corn cut yet—there might be enough of a blow this time of year to flatten the crop. It is close in on a full moon, an equinox tide, and they wonder if the wind will kick up the surf and whether or not they should pull their gear.