Moon Tide (30 page)

On that morning of the twenty-first, Elizabeth pulls herself up and ties her own hair. The pins are not quite right. She can’t get them to stay. The birds will come for her, she knows. They will dive at her, swoop down with their sharp beaks, and prod her, pick at her, digging in the pins so they will stick, a prickling in her scalp.

Early. The sun barely up over the river. A strange thinness to the day as if the air has been stripped overnight. It comes to her lightly, without definite smell, taut like an ironed silk.

By evening, you will come … By evening …

and she wonders why it is this she remembers. Sourceless words. They must have come from somewhere once. They must have had roots or a meaning that was traceable. She puts the pillows back into the bed,
fluffs them gently, and pulls the red chenille blanket up over their heads. They will be warm. They will keep sleeping. She takes the key from the inside of the door, locks it from the outside, then putters down the hall. She passes her granddaughter’s room. She drops a bit of herself in front of the closed door, then another bit on the lacquered table by the railing. She sheds her imprint into the ether of the house. She drops it in small handfuls. Like seed. She checks her face in the mirror at the top of the stairs. Not her face, of course. Too old to be her face. A thin net of lines holds the cheeks secure. She descends.

By evening, you will come on the moon tide
.

Let ye not be crying, m’Lizzie.
Nà ag …
my Lizzie
 … nà ag …

what was the last of it? The word, the thing, the rest she cannot grasp. Why is it always that last essential bit, the crux, why is it the crux that escapes her?

Charles is already awake. Or no, not Charles. A man like him. But not quite. Almost a Henry, he seems. They have all grown up. They have grown old. She can barely tell one from another. The same rotten apples in the fields. Pocked faces. Stalks licorice black. Shaved thin. Body, hair, soul, ribbons turning, dancing, flailed about by the wind in those foul fields.

Once they had names. Every field had had its name.

The sky has grown swollen. Gulls wheel up off the river in droves, their wings singed by that strange and murky pressure she can feel. He is reading the newspaper. This man who is not Charles. A stranger in her house. The uninvited. He snaps the paper out away from him to break the fold. One hand reaches for his cup. Black coffee. An absentminded sip. Noiseless. The world to her now is almost entirely noiseless.

Old body, wild soul.

A shiver in her heart. This. A fluttering life. Is this what Oisin felt when he first saw her? When he gave up his earth and let himself be led?

She remembers a man who once came to the back pantry door selling bouquets of wild violets, scrimshaw, and salted herring on a stick. Is this that man? Did she let him in that day, and has he lived here since? Has he taken coffee with his paper every morning in her house?

There is no sign of Maggie in the kitchen. Through the window above the sink, the sky is a deepening yellow. Fleabane. Wild dog rose. Asphodel. The sky is the color of kerosene.

He had blue eyes—that peddler with his scrimshaw and salted fish—searing eyes she recognized from years before. He was one of the workmen who had helped raise the house when it was still young. She had asked him to stay late one afternoon to hang the whalebone sled. He had slammed his hand with the hammer—she remembers it even now, that delirious crushing sound of metal into flesh—and she had touched him, she had wanted to touch him, and he had glanced up—his beauty so rough it took her off guard. Then, for no reason she could see or explain, he had jerked his hand away.

The house was young back then. A new pine shell. They were all young. Most of them unborn. The wood was not yet weathered. The salt had barely kissed it. Blond wood. Moist with sap.

In her book of lists, Elizabeth has written their deaths: lips black from having eaten the poisonous stuff. Their bodies falling back to seed. The book of lists held the eyes of that workman who came as a peddler years later to her door. He came once and never came again, but
she was certain on that day, she was certain, as she swung back the screen and met him standing on the pantry stone, with his black ink and bone carvings, his salted herring and a basket of red hen eggs, in that moment, she knew that he had come for her.

Why now? she asks herself, standing in the doorway on the porch. Why this burst of springtime in her chest? A godless springtime.

The willow tree—slim branches quivering. The absence of sound frightens her. She strains, her eyes squinting into that murky yellow oil of the sky. It is burning. Not even noon, and already the sky is in flames. She strains for the sound of the willow tree—she knows it is there—she can feel its shaking—the tremulous cry. She puts her fingers in her ears to pry the deafness out of them.

To the west over the arm of the barrier beach, she can see one spot still clear: a brutal patch of blue. The clouds rush toward it out of the east. She hears nothing.

Jake

F
or two or three days, the breakers down at Horseneck were huge. Massive surf straight out of a clear sky. No wind. Flat calm. Long crested swells building to inexplicable heights. On the flood tide, they broke fifty yards up the beach and washed over the front porches of the cottages at the foot of the dunes.

On the morning of the twenty-first, the sky changed: mare’s tails and a musty yellow light lying offshore, belted underneath by the horizon. Jake goes out to dig an hour before low. The tide is running a good two feet over normal, and he has to ground the boat higher up on the flats off Split Rock. He takes the rake and pail and leaves his lunch wrapped in wax paper with a battered copy of Hemingway’s stories in the bow.

When the wind shifts at noon, he looks up and notices that the clouds have begun to rummage into packs. They are strange clouds: thin spirals between darker silty bands, shredding off the top. They move in, bearing toward the Nubble and the Lion’s Tongue, chasing huge flocks of seafowl toward the safety of the harbor.

Jake leans against his rake and looks up the hill toward Skirdagh. He can see the two women, one dark, one light, their heads bent close together, sitting on the steps of the back porch.

He goes on digging until the water has eaten the edges of the flats. He goes back to the boat, loads the two pecks of clams into the stern, and heads in.

Ben Soule

T
he old man can smell it: a green smell, pungent, deep. It easily drowns out the reek of the stone house gardens next door. The smell creeps through the shade and blankets the marsh. It levels the surface of the let to an ominous still. For the past few days, he has watched his barometer kicking back and forth, rising a bit, then getting fidgety, the gauge pumps up and down, and then begins to drop in slow erratic plunges. He readies himself.

On a day in September 1892, from a farmer’s front porch in the middle of Kansas, he had watched a dust bowl tornado move across the flat-cake plains. It filled the sky with a funnel of black dust, sweeping haystacks and small privies up into its shaft. It was headed for the house, but five hundred yards away, it took an abrupt turn toward the barn, sucked up the plow and the henhouse, then continued on its way. The farmer roped his fastest horse from its stall and set out after it, his spurs digging into the flanks of the terrified horse, drawing blood to chase down that tornado demon thief. The plow was lost, but he found the henhouse, two miles west. The tornado had spit the thing from its spout, and it landed right side up next to a decimated barn. When the farmer opened the latched door, the hens glared at him calmly from their nests, eggs still underneath them, unbroken and warm.

Ben washes the dirty dishes in the sink, wipes them dry, and puts them away into the cupboard above the ice chest. He stuffs rags into the open spaces around them so they will not break up against one another. He tacks shingles across the cupboard doors to keep them shut. He nails boards over the outside windows and caulks the frames to seal the cracks from the rain. He places everything else that is loose—chairs, guns, broom, bottles of whiskey and gin—into the stove or on the bed. Then he removes the wings from their burlap sack and goes outside.

He will wait for the eye. The dead center. The vortex. The calm in the heart. The deep core. The abyss. The blackness. He will wait until it comes close, and then he will launch himself from the roof and fly toward it.

The wind moves out of the southeast just before noon. By one it has begun to shake through the weeping cherry trees set along the drive of the stone house. Small branches snapped loose whiz around him. One plucks the cap from his head. He sits in his chair on the knoll, oiling the feathers to keep them from taking on rain as the last birds hammer in off the sea—geese, duck, heron, osprey, gulls, even the land-hating storm petrels—they fly in rafts over East Beach through the warm gray mist: fugitive, harrowing tribes.

Patrick

A
s he left for the city that morning, Patrick noticed that the barometer appeared to be broken—its bottom dropped out. He looked for Maggie to tell her to pick up a new one, but she was nowhere around the kitchen, nowhere in the yard. He made a mental note to buy one himself and then forgot about it by the time the car had taken the right-hand turn onto Stafford Road.

He was at Arthur Coles’s office when the eleven o’clock broadcast came over WJAR. The Weather Bureau reporter was forecasting a storm—the remnant of a tropical cyclone—moving up the coast from Cape Hatteras. There would be strong winds, possibly reaching gale force, with heavy rains likely along the northeast seaboard that night. He rang Skirdagh, and Charles answered the phone. Yes, he said, something of a wind, a few rocky clouds, nothing that wouldn’t blow over. Eve? No. She wasn’t in the house. He could check the porch or the yard. Was it urgent? No. Well then, when he saw her, he would tell her that Patrick had called.