Moon Tide (37 page)

At the Point, mud a foot thick coated the dock house and had to be scraped off with a spade before a hose could wash the bulk of it away. Survivors from the Shuckers Club including North Kelly took work with the Hurricane Emergency Project, trimming trees along the roads and combing the let for the dead. The town leased skiffs from the fishermen who still had them, and the searchers went out, two at a time, with grappling hooks, to dredge. They’d catch the hook on a shirt, a pair of trousers, or a neck and pull the body to the surface the way they used to pull the whiskey loads.

There was one body they could not find. It was under a house, half in the river and half on marsh. They could smell it, but they couldn’t find it. They brought down the dogs and pulled off the first and second floors to get that body out. It was a cook from West Beach. A black woman. She was facedown with a crushed skull, and unrecognizable except for her blackness. Eyes gone. Fish-gutted, one man said. He wedged his boot under the body and flipped it back facedown.

They brought the bodies in to shore, left them in ruined skiffs near the docks. They left them uncovered and went back out to search. In the afternoons, they’d load the collected dead into a truck and drive them up to Potter’s Funeral Home. After a day, Potter’s ran out of room, and twelve or thirteen bodies lay wrapped in blankets on the back lawn.

The gorgeous weather continued. Day after day of impeccable blue sky. Light dazzling. Feverish. Inexhaustible.

In the afterweeks, they got to talking about the barrier beach—how there was no way off it when the water came. How it was a precarious, even dangerous, place. Just a spit of land really. Too thin. Too exposed. Slung like a crooked finger off the mainland. Not a place to live. They wondered if the summer people would think the same way or if they would come back with their money and rebuild.

They argued over the height of the tidal wave. The ones who were there, trapped on East Beach when it struck, contended that it was at least fifty feet. Born suddenly, they said, out of nothing. A rogue wave.

There were others who saw it. They had abandoned houses on West Beach and spent the night in the dunes. They claimed there were three waves, of the rolling type which came across the bay. The third, they said, was the tallest, but no more than twenty feet from base to crest.

There were certain stories they would tell:

Of the two old sisters, Becky and Muriel White, whose hayloft was full of Tiffany china, and how they chose to save the sheep instead.

The story of Clemmie Nette Weld, twelve years old, who saw her father drown and saved herself by stripping her overclothes and shoes and floating away on a washbasin, as the current stole her like a piece of foam up into the East Branch.

They would tell the story of the last bus carrying children from the factory school as it came down the hill from Smith’s Hollow, past the Boan Farm, its windshield flushed with sheets of rain, wipers frantic, a barreling yellow, long and unstable, it crossed where there was no bridge left. The wheels skimmed over the water that had washed out the deck and groped for the opposite side.

They asked the driver afterward how he had done it, how he had saved those children by such an act of faith.

“Never thought about the bridge being missing, I guess,” he said.

It was Maggie who found Patrick the next morning drowned in his shaving water—the oily cream had collected into a halo around his
scalp and his hair was strung through with plaster. Charles woke up midafternoon, with a slight hangover from the kerosene that slurred his speech. He would have a permanent paralysis in his left hand so he couldn’t butter his own toast without fumbling the knife and, after that, he let Maggie butter it for him.

Eve found the poem her father had written with his mind drunk on fumes. She typed it up and sent it in to the
North American Review
, where it appeared six months later. She showed him the copy with his name attached to it. He said it was not something he recognized. But he cut it out anyway, folded it carefully, and placed it somewhere safe. He kept the issue of the
Review
on his desk, turned open to the excised page. He didn’t mention writing again. For the most part, it seemed he had forgotten the passion. Once in a while, however, it would sidle up behind him. Close. Like a shadow. Real and not real. He would reach for his pen, but then the light would shift, and the desire would be gone. He spent most of his time in the study, and Jake cut a window into the outside wall. They moved the desk so he could look out across the lawn. In the winter, when the leaves were stripped, he watched the top edge of the river in milky, rose-hued flashes through the trees.

The outbuildings behind Skirdagh were gone, torn off their shallow foundations. The shed landed in the cherry grove at the bottom of Salter’s Hill, and the outhouse was found half a mile north, impaled on the iron gate of the Tripp Cemetery off Temperance Lane. Only the boathouse remained. The water had shelled the inside, the windows were blown out, the door broken off its hinges, but the structure of it had somehow stayed intact.

They did not find the old woman. Eve knew where to look for her, and the following spring, when a new pier was built off the end of Cape Bial, she walked out one afternoon on a high tide and sat down at the end. She leaned over her swelled belly and looked down through the water toward the unwrinkled face shimmering, staring back at her out of those green depths.

The child is born in June. Throughout that summer of 1939, carrying the baby in her arms and a small bag on her back, Eve walks down John Reed Road to East Beach. The macadam is still torn, un-patched since the storm. But the summer houses have begun to rise again, slowly, one by one. Jake is building a stone terrace on a new house at the end of East Beach Road. Eve arrives early. She unpacks the lunch from the bag and sits on a pile of raw stones to wait for him with the baby in her arms, pink fists crying to the sky.

In a perfect world, I would have traveled through every place I have written about in this book. But I live on a barrier beach, and I rarely drive over the bridge to leave it. I am a most imperfect traveler. This is a work of fiction, and there are points in the book where I have bent geographic and historical detail to fit my story. I wrote this novel out of my passion for the landscape of the town where I live. I have tried to be true to that landscape—its beauty and its quirks, the rhythms of its seasons and its tides. However, I did not even begin to try to capture the lives and characters of its inhabitants. I did recount the actual adventures of a few Westporters, no longer alive, to give the novel context. Apart from that, with the exception of several historical figures, the people in this book are not based on any real persons, living or dead. The stories in this book are not based on any actual events, with the exception of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which ravaged this section of the coast.

With regard to local history and descriptions of the Hurricane of 1938 and its impact on Westport, the following works were invaluable as I was researching and writing this book
.

I am particularly indebted to Carmen Maiocco’s books on Westport, and his efforts to preserve not only the history of the town, but the lives, traditions, and experiences of its inhabitants; to Janet Gillespie’s memoirs of her girlhood at Westport Point, luminous and vivid in their detail; to Carlton T. Manchester Sr.’s memoir,
Pa and I
, and his descriptions of eeling, trapping, hunting, skinning; and to my husband, Steven Tripp, for the stories he has told me of his boyhood in Westport, which inspired the character of Jake.

A special thank-you to Carlton Lees for several conversations we had as I was beginning this book, when he described for me how stories down at the wharf used to be told.

Other texts that were inspirational as I was writing this book include
Arctic Dreams
, by Barry Lopez;
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell;
News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
, chosen and introduced by Robert Bly;
The Essential Rumi
and
Birdsong
, both by Rumi and edited by Coleman Barks;
The Haw Lantern
and
North
, two collections of poetry by Seamus Heaney;
Faust
, by Goethe, edited and translated by Walter Kaufman;
Blues
, by John Hersey;
Indian Herbology of North America
, by Alma R. Hutchens;
A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants
, by
Steven Foster and James A. Duke;
Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America
, by Paul Wagner and Kerby A. Miller;
Ireland, Its Myths and Legends
, by Kay Retzlaff.

I am indebted to the work of John O’Donohue, for his lyrical weaving of Celtic traditions and philosophy with the work of poets I have always loved, for his book
Anam Cara
, and for his exploration of the elemental fears and longings that inspire the true work of our lives.

I am grateful to my mentors, who shaped me as a writer by their attention, their criticism, their faith in my work. I would particularly like to thank Seamus Heaney, Alan Rossiter, Robert Morgan, Connie D. Griffin, and Fred Leebron. A special thank-you to Katrina Kenison Lewers.

I would like to thank my friends and family, and in particular, my mother, Anne Clifton, who first set the fire for words in me and who spent hours reading me myths from every pocket of the world. I would also like to thank Dorette Snover, Laura Gschwandtner, Priscilla Echavarria, and my trusted reader, Kim Wiley; Carlin Tripp, Sophie Clifton, and my in-laws, Patricia and Arnold Tripp, for their support, their stories and anecdotes, their knowing and their inspiration; I would like to thank Jack Empey for a few unforgettable turns of phrase; and my dear friend and sister-in-law, Rebecca Cushing, for telling me that it was okay to stay for a while praying in a dark room.

A very special thank-you to Jenny Lyn Bader, for her friendship and her brilliance and her most beautiful wit.

At Random House, I would like to thank my editor, Kate Medina, and her assistant, Jessica Kirshner, for loving this book, for sensing the story that needed to be told, and for helping me to see my words with a cooler, more ruthless eye. I would also like to thank Amelia Zalcman, and especially Vincent La Scala, for answering every question about copyediting that a girl could ask.

My deepest gratitude to Bill Clegg, my agent and friend, for his vision and his insight, his commitment to my work, his unthinkable calm
in any shape of crisis, and for calling me for the first time on a Sunday at 5:11 in the afternoon to say, “I have just finished reading your novel and I adore it,” which has made everything since then possible.

I would not have been able to write this book without the support of my father, Roger Clifton—a most perfect father—who told me years ago that I should consider my life a bow worth breaking and suggested (always gently) that I spend a little more time watching the sky.