Moon Tide (29 page)

Russ Barre stubs out his butt and remarks how last year’s muckraker
tore up so much bottom, Gooseberry was left a carpet of dead lobster with smashed backs.

“Might be a chance to make a beer on the skukes,” he goes on. “Five bills here and there boarding up windows. You’re in tight with them, Jake, you think that’d fly?”

“She’ll shift course,” says North Kelly. “Bounce the coast at Hatteras and head east. She’ll be mid-Atlantic by Wednesday. Burn herself out there somewhere.” He packs in a wad of chew against his gum.

“Might see a breeze though,” Swampy says. He whittles the tip of his pocketknife into the shadow of an eye in the wood. “Might see some surf worth watching.”

Jake glances toward the river. The sky is mild, hazy, restless.

“Still making those decoys, Jake?”

“Yeah.”

“Any pintail hens?”

“Sure.”

Down the road, a touring car comes toward them, full of leftover summer people heading across the bridge for a last splash at the beach.

They watch the car pass by. A woman laughs. The man driving tips his hat and waves at them.

They don’t wave back.

Jake drops the bucket of plugs down in front of North Kelly, flicks his cap and leaves.

Maggie

O
n the nineteenth of September, the mute swan moves her roost to the whiskey barrel near the vegetable garden. Maggie mentions the swan to Jake that afternoon when she sees him on his way back from the beach, and he tells her that for the last few weeks, he has seen a pair down by the boathouse, squatting in an overturned dinghy that had been left to rot under the dock. The wood of the hull had begun to decompose into the marsh. He had no idea, he said, how long they had been living there. He had seen them by chance one morning when he went down to the river to clean out a bucket of wood ash and the female flew at him, her tough beak stabbing toward his arm, before she retreated back to the heather and dried corn husks she had built into a pile on the sweet-smelling rotten wood.

When Maggie goes up to the main house the next morning, she finds the sheets soiled and Elizabeth walking circles in her bedroom, her hair uncombed from its braid, the tie of her dressing gown trailing on the floor.

“Holy fear in the well,” the old woman says, shifting her fingers back and forth. “Holy fear in the well.”

Her spine has grown hooked, folded over itself, a sudden humped rise between her shoulder blades.

Maggie draws her to the water closet, pulls up the dress, and sits her down on the toilet.

“Peeee,” says Elizabeth, her face puckering with the effort. “Peee. Peeeee.”

Maggie stands next to her and strokes the back of her head—the clear spot where the hair has fallen out and now refuses to grow.

“Peeeee.” Elizabeth clutches Maggie’s sleeve. Her hands are completely gnarled, the fourth finger triggered down, the tendon failed, frozen in place. Her skin bruises easily now, as easily as ginger.

On the toilet she pushes, the vein straining from her temple, deep blue and crooked like a lightning.

A burst of hard air comes out of her, a slow wheeze, and finally the water. It squirts, then runs in a trickle. Soft music.

“Peee,” she says. “Peeeee.”

Maggie wipes her with the cloth towel, dips the sponge in the sink, and cleans the dried shit stains from her legs. She leads Elizabeth back into the bedroom, sits her down at the dressing table, and unties the rest of the braid. She will use only the soft brush now, a baby’s brush. Even then, if the bristles scratch, the skin won’t heal for days.

Since the stroke, the old woman’s mind has been a slow swerve away from order. There is still a predictable geometry of surface fears: has the telephone bill been paid? Seventy-five cents? How can they charge so much? Has the milk soured? Sean? Have we had any news from Sean?

During the day, she will rarely spend time in the library. For several hours she will barely sit still. She devours her breakfast, then walks through the hallway, in and out of every unlocked room, shifting her crippled fingers back and forth as if she were trying to reopen her palm. Even as she eats, her body thins.

When Elizabeth’s hair is combed and tied up into a loose knot at the base of her neck, Maggie picks up a jar. She unscrews the lid and rubs cream along the old woman’s jaw.

Once in a while through the coolness of the cream, Maggie will feel a tremor pass through Elizabeth’s face—a deeper fear—cloaked and
nameless. She will press her fingertips into the dent between the eyes until they close and the face drops its tension. She works gently into the frail skin around each lid.

Elizabeth mumbles something about the warrior who built a stone table as a shelter for his love.

“Yes, tell me,” Maggie says.

“A butterfly burnt to nothing.”

“No,” says Maggie, bending down close to her ear, “it is so much more.”

The old woman’s eyes snap open, smoky, unnerved. She looks through herself, through Maggie in the mirror, to the antique vial lying on the bureau behind them that was once filled with holy water from the well of a saint. The cork is still intact. It has never been removed, but the vial is empty except for a slight film of dusty sunlight that clings to its insides.

Late that afternoon when Maggie finishes the chores, she returns to the root cellar. Wes is outside sleeping in a chair under the overhang, a small pail of whale teeth on the ground next to him and one unfinished piece in his lap. His left leg is a butt and withered. It droops off the edge of the chair. He keeps his right leg stretched out in front of him. In the months after the fire, the flesh of his body shrank as it healed. It grew tight around the joints, so tight that now his knee is unable to bend. Every day, he drags himself out of the root cellar to sit in the shade underneath the overhang. He waits until the midday glare is gone and the sun has softened through the trees.

Maggie sits on the ground next to him, watching him sleep. His lids, seared by the fire, won’t quite close. As he sleeps, his eyes roll up under them—a quickening white—and she remembers back to that first day she drove with him in the wagon north up Horseneck Road, how she sat on the rough plank seat with the rooster in her arms and looked past the hard angles of his face to the rows of corn kneeling down under the wind.

Six years since then. The icehouses have died, replaced by refrigeration.

The North Side trolley has taken its last ride to the scrap heap. North Kelly and the other men Wes ran with still spend their days on the bench down at the dock house. A few have already burned through the bulk of their cash. Others, more thrifty, whittle it out carefully, investing small bits in the stock market or siphoning off portions year by year into out-of-state accounts. They take glib bursts of work with the WPA: building cemeteries and drain gutters along the new roads. They dig mosquito ditches in the low-lying areas to keep the water moving.

Maggie touches Wes’s arm. His head curls toward her. The whites of his eyes unroll, the irises drop, and he stares.

“What?” “Nothing.”

“You hungry?”

“Soon.”

She runs her finger across the warp of his left eye. It will not open as wide as the right. The skin of his face has hardened, almost labyrinthine, like the maps on turtle shells she used to trace when she was young.

When it grows dark, they move inside. He leans on her, dragging his left foot behind him down the steps.

He sits on a chair, and she takes off his boots. She hands him the whale’s tooth he was working and sets the bottle of ink with the scrimping needle on the table next to him.

“You see the swan out by the garden?” she asks, peeling strips of bacon out of a tin.

“Nope.”

“She came up from the boathouse. Set a new roost in the whiskey barrel by the tomatoes.”

“No bird moves unless there’s something to move for.”

“Two girls from the town—I hear today—both due three weeks from now—already started their pains.”

“A line storm, you think?”

“Jake says there’s talk of it.”

“Soon?”

Maggie shrugs. “Few days from now, I’d guess.”

She leaves the bacon outstretched in the iron pan on the stove. She takes lean cuts of oak and kindling and sets them for the fire. She stuffs dried sea moss inside the cracks. She peels a potato, a white turnip, three carrots, and what’s left of an onion. She boils them until they are soft. She shreds the bacon into the pot. The woodsmoke swirls in clouds above the stove, dropping bits of ash.

That night as they eat, Wes remembers the money. He remembers how much of it there was and where he buried it.

“Under the stone wall,” he says abruptly. “Seventh stone in from the east side behind Mason’s icehouse.”

“I know,” Maggie answers, dipping her spoon into the soup.

“How’d you know?”

“You sent me for it.”

“I didn’t.”

“One night early on, you did.”

“How many days back?”

“Two years.”

“Haven’t been here two years.”

“You been here over three.”

“Been less than a season. Not even a winter yet.”

“Four winters now.”

He stares at her dumbly as she goes on eating her soup. She breaks a piece of bread off the loaf and sets it on the table near him.

“I sent you for it?”

She nods and breaks off another piece of the bread for herself.

“So where’s it now?”

She points to the wall. “Behind one of those stones.”

“How much left?”

“Most all of it, I’d guess.”

“You sure?”

She smiles at him. “Unless you eat it when I’m not around.”

Wes leans his arm against the table and rests his head on his hand. His eyes are sad.

Sometimes it seems to her now that he has softened. Perhaps it was the burning that softened him. His brain half-poached in the fire, he does not have a normal sense of time. His mind will thicken like a summer fog and then it will clear. He slips in and out of what he remembers, what he forgets. He will argue with her harshly, then all at once he will give way and fall into the sudden realization that the edge of who he was has been lost.

At night when they are lying in bed, he empties himself to her. He talks in circles, in abstract, wandering lines. He tells her stories of blue-water ships that were built at the Head and floated downriver on empty oil casks.

“Whose ships?” she asks, and he does not remember, but he goes on to tell her about a blacksmith shop at the Point, smudged between the tailor and the sail loft. How as a child he would sit inside that shop to be near the holler of the anvil, the soot smell and the ash. He would make small hills of the shavings off the hooves.

She listens as he tells her these things. She follows him down the switchback turnings of his mind, and when he grows quiet and she can feel him still awake lying in the dark beside her, she will ask a question, and he will answer her with yet another story that has nothing to do with what she has asked. And she listens. She knows that this is how they walk now. This is how they move. In the bed, she spoons herself around him, she drapes her arm across his ribs. She does this gently, and the arm covers him like lawn.

She wakes early. He is still asleep, his fingers closed around her hand. She does not remember what day it is. How many days she has been lying here. Three? Four? Has it been only one? She thinks of the milk, sitting at the end of the lane by the stone wall in its aluminum cans.
She thinks of Skirdagh, and the inside of the house comes to her like the residue of a dream: the massive oak sideboard, the isinglass stove, the unwatered flats of her potted herbs above the kitchen sink. Basil. Coriander. Chives. Through the small beveled window, the sky is heavy, a sulfur-colored light.

Elizabeth

T
he National Geographic calendar pinned on the wall next to her dressing table mirror reads September 21. Every box before that date has been crossed with a red pen. Every box before. She had done that for years. She had made those X’s through the wide open space of a day. And when her hands failed and she could not hold a pen, Maggie had crossed out the days for her.