Moon Tide (31 page)

Patrick steps out with Coles to take lunch at quarter past one. The wind has begun to freshen. A page of newspaper flutters up the street. It plasters around a lamppost, then rips loose. Patrick holds his hat to
his head and bends his face down. He will ring the house again, he decides, when they return to the office.

He and Coles are taking lunch at the club restaurant on Main Street when the bells at City Hall begin to ring, summoning the guards to the armory.

On their way back to the office, the church bells of St. Mary’s set in, clanging, a cacophonous hollering against the wind. A young uprooted beech tree sails into the rush of traffic and lands across the front end of a Buick Roadmaster. The car screeches to a halt, its wipers fouled with the branch roots. At the corner of Second, Patrick tells Coles to go on ahead, and he cuts into the Portuguese Market for a five-cent pack of cigarettes. As he is turning to leave, a wrenching sound wails in off the street. The shop window quivers for an instant, then gives way, sucked out by the wind, and Patrick is left, dumbstruck and exposed to the dark and massing sky, the window hole gaping in front of him with its transparent, jagged teeth.

Vera Marsh

I
was a beautiful woman once, Vera Marsh thinks to herself as she unclips a sheet off the clothesline. She gets one end untangled, and the other end snaps loose, tucked and whirled and twisted by the wind. She grasps after it, and it flaps away from her.

Two of her children have still not arrived home from school. The other two are at the far end of the lawn playing on the swings. Her husband is in the shed, boxing his peat trays and winter seedlings.

Beautiful eyes, they used to say. And the eyes were still the same. Deeper in their sockets perhaps. Not quite as bright. She remembers looking into her first hand mirror when she was a girl. The eyes flickered. Burst out of her face like twin green lights. She strips her husband’s flannels from the second line. One leg catches under the pin. She tugs harder, her mouth pruning at the corners. The clothespin pops up into the air, splashes for a bit on the wind, then lands in the grass.

The sky has begun to thicken. A few drops of rain nick her face. She cries out to Albert, her oldest, to bring Abigail, the baby, inside. Her husband, Elton, comes out of the shed, backward, dragging the bait barrel. He is a knobby man, lost a foot sorting brick for the WPA. He dumps the barrel over in the grass. Dead herring spill out, maggots writhing like small white shreds of chewing gum.

Vera looks away from him and pushes the hair back from her face. It has grown wiry over the years. She wears it up now, and she will pull a tendril or two loose when they go to the raccoon suppers at the Grange, and she will remember how, when she was a girl, the hair was a mane. Blond. Evenly trimmed. She had worn it long.

Elton disappears again into the shed, and Vera can hear him wrestling with the tin cans. He has collected them over the full fifteen years they’ve been married. A true hoard. He strips the labels, washes down the insides, and stores them in the back closet of the shed. They have grown so thick, he can barely crack the closet door without the hill of them flooding out.

“They’ll be worth something someday,” he has told her. “All that metal. You can’t think it won’t be worth something.”

She leaves his flannels and shirts in a small huddle on the porch and makes a second trip back to the clothesline. Her youngest, Abigail, runs over and buries her face into her mother’s skirt, frightened of the storm. Vera piles the sheets into her arms. They are still damp, bright with bleach. She will drape them inside on the kitchen table and hope that the heat from the stove will be enough to finish the drying by dinnertime.

With Abigail clinging to her leg, Vera walks back toward the house, trying to keep the sheets and pillow slips from being picked off by the wind. She can barely see over the heap of white linen in her arms.

“Look, Mama,” Abigail cries, pulling on her dress. “Look.”

And Vera looks up past the side porch to where her child is pointing, and there she sees her—the old Irish woman from the big house, wandering without any shoes down the road.

Maggie

W
hen Maggie goes up to Skirdagh, she finds Elizabeth’s bedroom door locked.

She sees the signs of the storm: the coarse air, the sky-color like a dull weed, the queer green smell. In her garden, the stones have begun to sweat. The clover has pulled into itself, small fists bottled up before the rain. The ants file in weary trains back toward their nests. The kitchen salt is stuck together in damp clumps.

The first floor of the house is empty except for Charles in his study. She hears him talking to himself. The words trickle through the closed door.

She takes the trays of garlic she has dried in the sun and braids the withered stalks to hang them. She goes out onto the back steps off the kitchen porch with the last of the beans. She sets the bucket between her legs, picks up a few at a time, flicks one between her fingers and draws her nail down to split open the jacket. She turns it inside out, empties it, then tosses the pod into a pile on the grass. She will not do the laundry today. The wind has already begun to pull the needles off the pines. Clusters of juniper leaf chase one another across the lawn. The rooster keeps close to her, scratching at the dirt. He picks the earthworms that have come out and guzzles them whole. She will finish the chores, wake the old woman, wash her, feed her, then go back
down to the root cellar. She can tell by the sky that the worst of the storm won’t strike until later in the afternoon.

Eve comes to her uncertain. Awkward. She comes to the back of the porch by the kitchen where Maggie sits with the bucket between her legs shelling beans. Eve sits down a few feet away on the other end of the steps. The wind stirs through the grass.

She studies Maggie quietly. Her age. The traces of gray hair. Her body is fuller now. Her face has softened its angles, and Eve wants to ask her if that softening is what it is to love. She wants to ask if love has the weight of a reflection on water. If it is perishable. Or indelible. If it is something she can measure, plant, cook, uproot, or cull. If it is like the inside meat of those discarded pods. Or if it is as ordinary, as overlooked, as the shell left over. She wants to ask if love is something that can rise up suddenly like a thirst or drought or flame, scorching paths through the half-lived day to day. She wants to ask if love is like a storm and has a soul; if it is the kind of thing one cannot strive for or seek out; if it is the kind of thing that is simply there, that has always been there, like a dream waiting to be dreamed.

She wants to ask Maggie if it is love that keeps her tending the man in the root cellar. If the tending is gentle, as essential as a garden or breath. Maggie tells them nothing. Eve has seen her put together careful plates of food. She will take extra blankets down in the fall, and when she brings them back the following spring, they are more worn. She has seen traces of what could be him on Maggie’s hands: darkened bits of stuff that resembles tree mold or root or dried pith.

“Where’s Nonna?” Eve asks.

“Sleeping.”

“This late? She’s still sleeping?”

“She’s locked the door. One foot in some days, she sleeps more than she’s awake.”

They move into the kitchen after one. As they are canning apples, Charles comes out of the study, gathers a few things, and tells them he
is going back in. He is glad they are safe. He wants them to be safe. He wants them to lock themselves inside and ride this thing out. It is that kind of day, he says. The kind of day one just needs to ride out. And then it will be done. He kisses Eve gently on the face, his puckered mouth, a soft chap against her skin. He almost stoops to Maggie as if he would kiss her as well, the gesture close, something possible, nearly born. Their hands have never exactly touched, and he comes just short of touching her now. His hand reaches toward her dark head, stops, then falls back by his side as if he can still after all these years not quite imagine what she is to him—if she is a woman or a child or something animal he has imagined—some extinct and unturned pocket recess of his mind—she is none of these things—she is all of these things—he does not know—he has never known—only that she makes him ill at ease in his own skin—she does this to him—so he imagines—and he cannot bring himself to touch her—to be too close to her. They move around each other—have always moved—with a careful, measured distance—and today, it seems, will be no different. His hand drops back to his side, and he asks her instead if she would happen to have lying about a small flask of the dandelion wine.

“None left,” she answers.

“Fennel then?”

Maggie shakes her head and goes on peeling the skin off an apple. The knife in one swift smooth motion pulls free the core, and Charles settles for a small bottle of apricot brandy he finds on the pantry shelf.

The wind has begun to dice the willow pods by the time Peter Eaton comes to the back door, looking for Jake.

“You check the boathouse?” Maggie asks.

“Not there.”

She shrugs. “Don’t know where else he’d be.”

Peter Eaton sits down at the table with them and pours himself some cider. He drinks it quickly, wiping the sweat and rain from his brow. He pours another glass and tells them what he has seen—every-where’s mad, he says, a wild scurrying like rabbit litters in the spring.
Pear trees down at the Tripp orchard. All dozen of them. Cornfields rolled over. Silage tipped onto the fields. He saw the outbuildings at Spud Mason’s farm dashed apart by one gust like a handful of shot.

Up at Hixbridge, he says, the water drove high into the gully of Cadman’s Neck and pulled a summer cottage down—the wind skinned off its second story and drove it upriver toward Hixbridge. The metal roof battered up against the piles and the granite piers, a slight knocking at first, and then stronger, more brutal as the current grew, until finally the second story of that small summer cottage had chewed a hole straight through the deck of the bridge, and that was the beginning of the end.

He pours a third cider and goes on telling how the river pulled and sucked and pushed and drew, widening the gap between the piles. The teahouse turned once and then fell in, pulled under almost right away. Even Remington’s pitched forward like it wanted to nod off. He pauses to drain the rest of his glass, and Eve knows it then. She knows it by the way the knife slips in her hand and she has to lay it down. She knows it by the way her mind keeps returning over and over to that image of the second story of the summer cottage and its knocking … slow at first, a soft rap, and then harder as the water level rose, the pilings pushing back against that piece of house … the resistance … the resistance … that bridge had stood intact, the same way, year after year, day after day … as the knocking continued, a dull persistent thought, growing sharper with the tide … and she can feel it now, the pilings as if they are inside her, how they begin to crack and split and give under the inevitable driving shoulders of the river until they cannot resist anymore … they draw up their roots from the marled bottom mud and let go.

Collapse. Solace. Surrender. And the bridge itself—trusses, planks, deck, struts—all of it gives up its holding and gives way.

Eve stands without a word, leaves the knife by the half-pared apple and walks outside into the blaring rain. Maggie watches her go. Peter Eaton too, cider on his lips and a dumb expression on his face.

“Where’s she going?”

“Out there.”

“She can’t go out there. You don’t know what’s out there.”

“I know,” Maggie says. “Now get yourself gone.” She shovels him out the front door.

She wraps some food in a small towel, herds the rooster and the hens into the kitchen with trays of water and feed, and closes both doors. Before she leaves the house for the root cellar, she goes back up to Elizabeth’s room. Still locked. Curious. She knocks. No answer. She takes the other entrance through the east wing of the house, through the unused maid’s quarters and the small dressing closet next to Elizabeth’s bedroom. She cracks open the dressing room door, and she can see the humped shape tucked under the blankets.