Moon Tide (4 page)

Elizabeth nods—a wrinkle in her thoughts—she bites her tongue and says nothing. But in the weeks after they have left to return to their home in the city, she is troubled.

“It isn’t natural,” she remarks to Maggie one morning as they sit together in the dining room, “to be so serious, so young.” Elizabeth shakes her head. The sun fills the east window, spills across the side table and sets the tiger maple into flame.

Later that same morning, still thinking of Eve, Elizabeth considers that a woman ages not so much by years as by what her soul has seen. She herself is deep into her sixties, and she decides then that it is time to gather the books of her life in one place.

She chooses the sitting room at Skirdagh, the second largest room on the first floor, next to the dining room, with its own entry through a pantry on the north side of the house. She has books shipped overland from the attic of her son Charles’s town house on Beacon Hill. She unpacks trunks from the Concord cottage that have not been opened since her own mother’s death eight years before. She finds two crates in the shed full of books, their covers slightly warped, about ice floes and the reproductive habits of obsolete fish. They were books that her husband, Henry, brought home in the late 1870s from a Harvard library, books that no one had bothered to return.

That winter, Elizabeth hires Spud Mason’s brother and Carlton Wilkes to construct shelves out of hewn oak from floor to ceiling along every wall in the sitting room. The night they are finished, she takes out the ostrich duster Charles brought back from North Africa wrapped in an indigo Tuareg scarf, and she dusts off the thin film of plaster that hugs the shelves like sand. She works deep into the night, with the isinglass stove eating the nut coal. The flames lie down in thin ghosts along the upper shelves she cannot reach.

Elizabeth reserves the middle shelf closest to the door for Yeats, who is the only poet who can crumble off bits of her heart. Next to him, she insists on her rather elliptical collection of Blake, because her father read to them from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” when she was young, and she knows that Blake’s spare mysticism has plowed fields through the common mind of Ireland. She places the black cloth book of his illuminated prints next to
The Green Helmet and Other Poems
. Years later, she will discover “The Mental Traveler,” almost by accident, and it will enter her dreams with “The Madness of King Goll” and her granddaughter Eve’s low voice as she reads aloud by the isinglass stove. By that time, Elizabeth will be close to ninety, blind in one eye, her mind beginning to separate into dissolute and unkempt strands.

On the longest shelf that runs along the east wall, she lines the bulk of literature. Robert Burns, John Donne, Homer, Herodotus, Swedenborg. She organizes them by language, and within language by philosophy, ranging from a blind struggle with God to an equally unscientific faith in chance. She includes Wordsworth although she has little tolerance for his long-windedness. She includes Thoreau because she spent most of her young life in Concord, although she thinks his prose as unhackable as the greenbrier thickets that stifle the edge of the lower meadow. She cuts out a small corner on the lowest shelf for the self-indulgence of Coleridge and Byron and Keats. Once in a while, she has admitted to herself that the things she most despises in the English Romantics could be claimed by “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Adam’s Curse.” But she herself has often looked at the moon and seen a rinsed shell. She forgives Yeats. She will always forgive Yeats.

When the fire has burned the nut coal to ash, she lights the paraffin in the green ceramic candlesticks and works on by candlelight. She places her husband’s books next to the German poets: Novalis, Goethe, Hölderlin. At times, earlier in her life, she wrestled with the ruggedness of their language. Now, although she will not read them anymore, she likes them to be close, to remind her of the ways that they pressed farther, deeper, toward that overlapping of the night where she is still afraid to go.

Last, the American novels. She devours Jack London on the sly, slightly in love with the man who stole oysters and failed in the Gold Rush. Although she is the kind of woman who folds and unfolds her own dreams the way some women fold the laundry, Elizabeth Gonne Lowe has always had a weakness for the reaching of others: her husband’s tortured and glorious stretch; gestures that are arctic, bold, futile. She has read
The Sea Wolf
every year since it was published in 1904. She waits for September, when the town has emptied itself, the light is parched, and the sea wheat has begun to fall to seed. When Charles and Eve return to the city, Elizabeth will sit alone in the mahogany
chair by the lean orange eye of the gooseneck lamp, and she will read the novel without interruption. She will unravel the man through the flaws in the writing, the points where the yarn is torn. His failure will mix in her mouth with the smells of late fall, honeysuckle, bayberry, and pine. She will read him through the rage of Canada geese as they return from the ocean on the Horseneck side and the men gather on the docks at sundown to take them on the wing.

Once, somewhere in the sorting and arranging of these books onto the shelves, it strikes her that she is building this library the way one might build a garden. For a child. She has imagined her granddaughter’s small head surrounded by these towers, adrift, and lost in words.

The next morning swings open blind. Pouring water into the washbasin, Elizabeth can hear the slam of the back door as Maggie lets the baby chicks spill out to feed on the lawn, then the clash of the milk jugs on the steps and the coursed swift rhythm of the pump.

One of the Wilkes boys, Jake, the quiet one, comes while Elizabeth is halfway through breakfast: boiled oats, one egg, three slices of bacon. The boy has come to collect his father’s pay for building the shelves in the library. Carl Wilkes is out lobstering with his older son, Wes, and they will likely be gone all day. The boy Jake stands in the door that leads in from the kitchen. Maggie leans against the frame, a tall shadow behind him. He is thirteen, but small for his age, his hair dark and cowlicked at odd angles from the cap he holds in his hands.

Elizabeth nods at Maggie. “Bring the chicks in off the wet grass before they chill. You, boy, come with me.” She leads him down the hall into the library, takes the key to the desk off the long chain she wears around her neck, unlocks it, and draws the flat china box out of the top drawer. He stands in the room, looking at the rows of books. Slowly, she counts out the coins, watching him, as his head tilts sideways to read this title, that one.

“Go on,” she says. “They won’t be biting you.”

Jake doesn’t look at her; he reaches out and removes one of her
books. He peels it apart in his hand, holding it so the two halves float like splayed, dismembered wings. Elizabeth remarks, carelessly, as if she might be speaking to the willow branches the wind has struck against the glass, that she has decided to build a lending library, that anyone he knows who might live within walking distance, who might want to borrow books, could come, take them home, or sit for a while and read in the sitting room, on any chair but the mahogany rocker by the window. That chair is hers, but any of the other chairs would be fine. She says all of this at once, watching the boy to mark any clue in his face as she counts out the loose coins for his father.

“What is your name?” she says.

His eyes swing toward her. “Jake,” he answers, and his voice is steady, clear.

She knows that he comes from the town. There are at least five strands of Wilkeses, and they are linked by marriage to the Masons and the Howlands and the Tripps. She knows that names in Westport are like names in Ireland. Bread, fire, marsh. They belong to families who have worked the river since before the whalers came. They grew out of the land with the pitch pine and loaves of stone.

She asks after his mother: has she been looking after Blackwood’s wife, six months with a child? She asks if he has been to fish the run of winter cod that she has heard have come back to the shoal off Gooseberry Island. She notes the broken laces on his boots, the cuffs of the gray trousers unhemmed. He swims in the flannel of the pants, they dwarf him, held up only by the cinched belt at his waist. His eyes are deep green. He listens, answers her questions quietly and with patience as his eyes walk along the pale city of books stacked on the shelves.

He takes in what she says, although the words themselves don’t strike him so much as her brogue. It holds the thickness of pine sap that he has taken with his solitude between his fingers, rubbed back and forth until the pitch sinks in and leaves the callused tips of his fingers soft, with a slightly darker stain.

For the rest of that winter, Jake walks the four houses up Main Road to the sitting room at Skirdagh. He goes early, at dawn, before the fog starts to lift through the juniper woods, when the light has the color of stones. He lowers himself into the novels of Hawthorne and Conrad and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. He staggers through Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, and Plato’s allegory of the cave. He reads her husband’s books of expeditions to the lower Americas, farther south than the birth of eels. He saws through river jungles: trees ten meters wide, insects the size of small frogs.

Sometimes Elizabeth comes downstairs to sit with him, her hair unwrapped and in one long braid. She sits in the mahogany rocker, nibbling a piece of sugar bread, and the boy sits across the room from her. Above his head, a whalebone sled hangs on the wall. She watches his face twist over a passage of Melville, and her own youth comes back to her in reckless shards that hurl like the gannets off the cliffs of Inishshark, with patches of distinct recollection as if the light were selective, choosing to play on only a few and apparently haphazard moments. She remembers her older brother, Sean, how he would skate the frozen edge of Walden Pond on knives he had tied to his boots. She remembers waiting for him on the bank, her hands buried in a timber muff, too cold to stay, too stubborn to leave, his face red with wind, her eyes following the white ridges he made in the ice with the blades.

She looks up across the room to the boy, Jake, pouring himself into the fragile outpost of a page. He is a small dent in her library, a misplaced nick against the rosewood chairs, the whalebone buggy whips crossed above the mantle, and the ivory jagging wheel pie crimpers with their serpentine designs. She knows that he was born in 1905, the year the Sinn Fein party formed; the year Einstein published his theory of relativity to overthrow assumptions of absolute space; the year Harry Rhodes from Westport Harbor drowned in a back eddy off the Nubble rock and washed up at the breakwater in his seersucker suit.

She studies the boy’s dark and roughened face, the dirt that has set into his fingertips. His hands are small, warped by the salt and long hours of digging quahogs on the flats.

She asks him about the work he does with his father, the work of clearing fields and building walls. She tells him about a colleague of her husband, a famous paleontologist who went to live in a small hut in the Alps to study the behavior of ice. For five years, he tracked the path of a glacier. He learned its flood across young mountains: how in its river state, it would cover the outcrops of rock and tear them loose, and as it continued on its journey south, it would use those bits of moraine lodged into its underside like small abrasive tools to scratch and smooth the landscape it was passing through.

In exchange, the boy begins to confide in her. He tells her that he has seen stones sprout from the earth like carrots, rutabagas, dandelions. They are a kind of weed, he explains. Every year there are fields that he and his father clear. They pile boulders onto a stone boat hitched to a team of Spud Mason’s mares. They draw those rocks to some other point in the village and lay them down into a new double-tiered wall. Every spring, he tells her, they will be hired to go back to clear the stones that have hatched again in the same fields they left empty the year before.

He falls silent and looks away from her back to the book in his lap, and she remembers a three-faced stone head, Celtic and crude, that her mother had kept on the kitchen windowsill of the house in Connemara to bless the demons out of food. She remembers how the campion grew on the sea shingle banks and the corncrakes staggered like ghosts through the hayfields. She remembers a story her father told her once about a blackbird who laid an egg in the hand of a saint. She watches the boy across the room as he squeezes the sap from the words. He pushes deep into the white regions outside of syntax and past language, peeling slowly through the pages, a traveler crossing snow.

Jake