Moon Tide (9 page)

He does not wake her. He waits for a quarter of an hour, then unwraps the feathers from his coat and leaves them on the stump beside the woodpile.

Back at the house, he finds his mother alone in the kitchen. The smells of woodsmoke and spices spill with the orange light through the back door. He stands by the shed watching her scrub the iron stewpot with an ox-hair brush in the sink. She is black-haired, high-boned, her forehead strung with walking lines. Her husband’s rage has worn her to a hollow silence, but she is warm the way wool is warm, spun light with a thin weave. When Jake was young and his father took Wes shrimping in the East Branch, Jake would stay close to her as she swept the house and walked down to the Point to trade at Blackwood’s store. Sometimes in the afternoons, they would lie in the field at the bottom of the hill near the creek, and she would read the clouds to him and tell him stories of her grandfather, Beans, who had built the warehouses
for the cranberry bogs behind the dunes. He built the ferry wharf on the Horseneck side of the river and then built his own house beside it. Twenty-five years later, when she was still a child, the land was bought and he floated that house with her inside it across the narrow channel to the Point, where it was set on a new shallow foundation in the middle of a peach orchard at the northeast end of the Pacquachuck Hill.

Now, leaning against the shed with his wet coat folded in his arms, Jake watches her pass back and forth through the kitchen. She cuts up the goose and empties the pieces into the iron pot. She adds stewed onions and carrots she has brought up from the cold cellar. She stirs in a half cup of milk and chips of dried basil. She covers the pot and leaves it to simmer on the woodstove. She kneels on the doorstone off the south porch with a pail of rabbits Wes brought home that afternoon. She gutted them earlier, when they were still warm and the skin peeled easily. Now, she tests the sinews close to the haunch to sense the age. If it is a young rabbit, the flesh will be nut-sweet and come without trouble from the bone. If it is older, she will sharpen the knife against the doorstone and then cut the animal, always the same way, into five pieces, four legs and a lower back section. She puts the meat in a washtub of fresh water with a teaspoonful of baking soda to soak out the rest of the blood and the gamy taste.

Jake watches his mother until she is done. It is the residue of the act he loves, the rose-colored water left over and the fresh metallic smell of white soda on her fingertips.

Later, when the white goose is fricasseed and they eat, Jake will not taste the long journeys stored in the bird’s flesh, the meadows of arctic ice it came from. He will taste the grief of its mate. He will taste the aborted flight and swallow it whole.

After dinner, Jake helps his mother wash up the plates. His father and Wes have moved into the front room for a smoke and a game of dominoes. When the pots are scoured and put away, Jake pulls on his boots and walks outside. He crosses Thanksgiving Lane and walks down to
the river on the wagon path through the juniper woods that divide the Coles property from Skirdagh. The nightjars roost on the roof of the house. The library window is lit, and he can see the old Irish woman, Elizabeth, hunched in the beveled light. She nods slowly like the shadow of a fish through the glass.

He walks down to the Point Meadows that jut into the west branch of the river. The wet earth sucks at his ankles, and he keeps to the wheel ruts made by the wagons that come down twice a year to harvest the meadows for salt hay. He crosses the stone bridge to the marshes and walks along the narrow stream until he reaches the beginning of the muskrat runs. At the edge of the creek, he can see the steel glint of the mink trap Wes has set on the east end, by the tidal mouth. It pulls him, a gentle tug that he imagines is magnetic and not unlike the way a spawning trout is drawn back into its natal stream. He finds two minks in the trap. A thick female and her slender child. Their black pelts are unscarred. She will bring thirty dollars at least, the little one maybe fifteen. The moon coats their fur like oil. Wes has set the trap close to the burrows that run under the marsh and baited it with duck skin and rat grease. He will not trap on dry land. A land trap will bring only feet. They will chew off their own legs to get free.

The tide is on the flood, and the water has already risen to their chests. The mother nibbles at the rawhide binding, and Jake hears the crack as she breaks a tooth on the steel. He does not touch the trap. He waits with them, crouched on a flat rock as the tide soaks around his knees. The cold draws the blood from his legs until his flesh is taut and has the hardness of bone. He waits with them, keeping three feet between himself and the trap so when they cry, their voices strained against the dark, he will be too far away to reach out.

He offers words, soothing passages he remembers from the books he has read, bits of stories about men who have perished under waves by the thousands, whole cities that have fallen into the ocean, nameless continents drowned in ancient seas. He tells them about the girl he saw rolling down the hill with the sun tangled in her hair; how she was a wheat field, a bale of hay, ivory-skinned.

He does not meet their eyes. He does not watch how their mouths wrangle to chew themselves from the trap. He waits with them until the tide has covered the steel and the black surface of the water has grown still. Then he walks along the river to the gravel beach at the end of Cape Bial and sits down on the high-water marsh, his clothes soaked in the cold. He looks up into the sky. He listens as the ebb tide pulls through the stones, and he floats there, on that extended margin, his body hovering between the dream of the gravel and the cries of the minks that seem everywhere. Their coal eyes fill the dark around him.

Maggie

S
he wakes in pasted early light, fog stuck between the cords of wood. She finds the white feathers on the stump. The blood has begun to crust and dry brown. She carries the feathers to her garden, where she digs a flat grave. She lays them down into the shape of the goose they were.

By midmorning, the rooster’s foot has yellowed, the skin puckered around the wound. Maggie wraps it in a strip of cheesecloth soaked in rosemary and marjoram, but by midafternoon he has pecked the cloth off, and it trails in tatters behind him through the dirt.

“Who did this to you?” she asks him softly, watching from the doorstone of the root cellar as he stumbles his proud route through the yard.

That night when she goes out to draw water from the well, the leg has turned the color of camouflage. The rooster hobbles back and forth along the length of the pen, his feathers drooped and the red comb turning dull. He follows Maggie back toward the house, hefting a distance from the hens. They have noticed his limp. Curious, they dart in at him, one at a time. His beak flails to keep them away. By the next morning the foot has swollen to a marbled green. Maggie takes rose-hip paste from a glazed pot in the shed and, holding the bird firmly, she coats the wound to stifle the gangrene. She pries open his
beak and feeds him handfuls of corn and oats she has soaked in the drinking water from the well. He spits it up. Squirming away, he drags across the yard. She lets him go. That evening she watches the reds tighten into a pack around him. They fly in one at a time and peck until his feathers tuft out in small explosions. Maggie leans against the door of the henhouse, her eyes wet. She watches him until he cannot stand and the sun has thinned to a pit. She watches him as he sits, the proud waxy comb outlined in the moon, his feathers plucked out by the other chickens. As the dark mixes into the fog, he rises up, floating for a moment in midair.

She wraps the body in a scarf and lays it down in a wicker basket with the four corners of the cloth hanging over the outside edge. She rakes juniper twigs, wood chips and dry leaves into a pile. She lays the basket on top with a branch of holly, takes a lucifer match, strikes it, and sets fire to one corner of the silk.

Past midnight, Maggie leaves Blackwood asleep in the yellow-lit room above the store, the oil lamp turned down to an unkempt glow that washes his naked shape into hard, uneven bones. She pushes away from his chest, dresses behind the closet door, and slips down the stairs. In the dark, she can see the harpoons suspended from the ceiling, the narwhal tusk and the deer head breaking through the wall behind the counter, the empty aisles of Nabisco tins and Campbell’s soup, cans of peach syrup, molasses, and blackberry jam, the nail kegs stacked into one corner, rows of hammers, paint, and window glass, tackle, cigars, rubber boots, chewing tobacco, oarlocks, cleats and lines, wire baskets, tar paper, and galvanized pipes; the sail chest against the far wall piled with oilskins, foul weather gear, and halfgallon tins of kerosene. She can see the knives through the glass case and, next to the cashbox, the mason jar with the massive spider skewered by a lady’s hatpin inside it.

She slips out into the road and walks past the dock house. She can hear voices through the slit in the barn-size door and the chatter of dice. She walks along the piers, past skiffs tied between the piles. It is
a new moon tide, and the river has swelled. It presses up against the boards, the water soaking into the pores of the wood until the pier grows supple. She can sense the pull of the current through the soles of her feet.

She lies down at the end of the west dock and rests her head in a coil of line. She listens for the wandering of soft-shell clams, the packs of mussels drifting in the shelter of the bottom that is mud and rock and unscaled. She unwinds herself into the light that flays off the end of the wharf and dices the river on the flood.

She dreams of crows. She dreams of her mother’s hands sifting through long wooden trays of coffee beans, turning them for an even dryness. She dreams of the highlands, the rainforest and the devastating vertical ascent of trees. The strangler figs that had bewitched her as a child; how they would hatch from the throats of other trees and eventually devour the host with their roots. She dreams of the shampoo her mother ground from fern and the low unraveling of mangroves. When Maggie was young, they lived by the coast, palm-thatched roofs and adobe walls, skirts made from the inner bark of a breadfruit tree. Her mother taught her to strip off the bast, soak it, and pound it with a stone so the fibers meshed together and it grew thin enough, soft enough to wear against the skin. They would split the hearts from palms and gather shellfish on a black sand beach at low tide. They dove from a bark canoe with blades in their teeth. By the time Maggie was ten, she had harpooned a baby seal.

Half a mile offshore was an island where the dead were buried in a small vale hollowed between the locust trees. Alone, Maggie would take the canoe across the reef that divided the home of the dead from the cluster of rush huts on the mainland where they lived. She would go at night and walk the grid of footpaths chewed through the forest as the smell of orchids descended from their aerial garden above her head. She would seek out the dents where the brush gave way until she came to the unmarked vale. She would lie down there in the absence of stones, and she could feel the dead moving like a river underneath her.

When Maggie was twelve, she and her mother moved inland. They packed into a boxcar with two hundred crates of bananas on a railway train owned by Minor Keith, the founder of the United Fruit Company, who had built the line between Cartago and Limón. They took the train into the cloud forest and picked coffee fruit on a highland plantation. From that elevation, Maggie first became aware that the land she was born into was a country of margins, barely a strip swallowed between two coasts. They slept with forty other workers in a long factory house that had no walls. She watched how her mother’s back began to bend. They would sit in the shade to eat their lunch at the edge of the plowed field, and sometimes, early in the morning, Maggie would walk up into the cloud forest, the maze of spider monkeys, scarlet macaws, poison dart frogs, and bushmaster vipers. The roar of the howler moved through her sleep. Years later she would remember the awesome reverberation of the sound. She would remember that she had grown attuned to it, the way one grows attuned to the sound of the ocean, and it pushes like blood under the skin.

She witnessed the death of the sun in the still wings of a hummingbird feeding on a heliconia flower, in the yellow explosion of the gallinazo trees at the end of the rains and, when her mother died, she cut one of her braids and painted her own face black and fasted next to the body on a mountain near the coffee fields until the rains washed the body into the mud slide. Then Maggie, fourteen years old, began walking with a small steel box that had once been torn from the cabin of a ship. She carried that box wrapped in a blue scarf on her back and walked until she fell in behind a stream of oxcarts. She rode with them in the last cart from the highlands to the coast, her light weight bouncing against the walls that had grown brittle and soaked with the dust and endless heat.

She dreams her past until it dies out of her, until she has lived it so many times it is threadbare. She leaves the pier before the sun breaks, before the catboats begin their daily trek across the harbor toward the point of rocks. On her way back to the root cellar, she passes Wes Wilkes on his way down to the wharf. He has a scowled face with pale
eyes that bite out at her from under the cap pulled low across his brow. He has come from skinning. She can smell the fresh-cut hide and powder on his hands.