Moon Tide (12 page)

As Wes works the blade along the spine of the blue to cut down the meat, Jake cups his hand underneath the minnow. He closes his fingers around it. He can feel its nose flutter in his hand, the working of the dorsal fin—a frantic, beating pressure—almost a heartbeat against his palm. He holds his fist over the side of the boat in the water until the motion settles and the small fish stills. Slowly, he cracks his fist and lets the fish drain through his fingers. He watches it, a limp silver that could almost be mistaken for a trick of light. It lies motionless, several inches below the surface, falling away from them on the current. Then
its tail flips and it rights itself. It wriggles off. Jake scoops the rest of the guts off the floor of the boat and dumps them over the side. The fish oil streaks like living threads off his hands.

Wes has stripped one side of the blue down to the ribs. The blood runs out and lodges in the planking cracks. He cuts the meat free from the bone and slaps the fillet on the thwart.

“Clean it,” he says and, turning the fish, he begins to work down the other side.

Jake holds the fillet in the water over the side of the boat to wash it down. The blood and oil pool around his hand. The sun fractures off the surface—a sudden white flash that seems to sear up from the depths as the boat pitches forward through the middle of the rip—and he is blinded for a moment, as if it is his life that has cracked open underneath him and he is falling toward it.

“What the hell—”

He can hear his brother’s voice behind him. It is there and not there. Close and not close. But Jake does not turn around. His mind is smashed with that sudden brilliant whiteness of the sun, and he is aware that his hand is empty, that he has let go. The flesh of the bluefish floats underneath them. It arches down through the shadow of the hull as if it is a new and separate thing, alive.

PART II
THE
SANDFLAT

I
n 1920, the year after the Eighteenth Amendment is passed, women win the right to vote and the Hotel Westport burns to the ground. The Acoaxet Club opens in the harbor, boasting two tennis courts, a banquet hall, and a nine-hole green. More often than not, Blackwood spends his nights at the store waiting for Maggie, and eventually he does not bother to go home to his wife at all. Jake and Wes sell their father’s half acre to Arthur Coles and the Westport Real Estate Trust that has begun to gather up tracts of land between the Methodist church and Salter’s Hill. Wes moves down to the wharf and rents a room above the workshop that belongs to Swampy Davoll. Jake moves into the boathouse at Skirdagh. He rebuilds the west-facing wall that has rotted from lack of use. He hacks long boards out of young pine still beaded with sap. He pries the drops of resin free and keeps them in a blue enamel cup. In the evenings, he will chew on them quietly as he reads.

In 1924, the stone causeway is built between the mainland and Gooseberry Neck, Mallory disappears on Everest, and R. A. Nicholson begins to publish the collected works of the thirteenth-century Sufi dervish Mevlana. Charles devours the volumes as they are released. He hauls crates of books down for the month he spends at Skirdagh in the
summer, and when he returns with his daughter to the city, he leaves them, their covers slightly beaten, on the shelves.

By the time Lindbergh takes his cross-Atlantic flight in 1927, the cottages on the west end of Horseneck Beach have spread through the dunes and the wetlands like a greenbrier. At East Beach, there are three new restaurants, a post office, a church, and a bowling lane. The fishermen’s shacks are torn down. Rake McIleer’s market falls under, beat out of business by the new A & P. The price for renting a bathhouse jumps from two cents to ten. Burt Allen’s boardinghouse for duck hunters is leveled and replaced by the Red Parrot Hotel.

Jake is hired to build the stone house directly west of Ben Soule’s. It will be the summer residence of Whitney Bowles, a mill owner from New Bedford. There will be three toilets, running water, four marble fireplaces, a stone terrace, and two gardens divided by a box-hedge English maze.

The old man shakes his head as he and Maggie sit together on his doorstone and look out across the tremendous squared-off hole that has been dug in the sand for the foundation of the stone house.

“It’ll sink,” he tells her, “right up to its knees.” He lights a rolled cigarette and tosses the match into the corner of the door.

Over nine months, they watch the house rise, stone by stone, until it is four thousand square feet and three stories, casting a seasonal shadow over one half of the old man’s vegetable garden.

Every day, Ben drags his chair outside to watch them set the slates into the roof and a second chair too for Maggie in case she arrives. As the sun turns through the day, he moves the chairs, several feet at a time, to escape the encroaching shade.

Jake

H
e is awake before dawn. Fibrous light. He rises from the spring cot, sets the lamp, and puts a pot of water to boil on the woodstove. He boils two eggs for four minutes each, until the insides are slightly less than soft and the yolks are orange, the color deep and still wet. He will let them congeal in the cooling. He wraps the eggs in a cloth and tucks them carefully into the pocket of his shirt. He leaves the boathouse, walks up the drive, and turns down Thanksgiving Lane. In the fog, the bridge at the end of the Point is insubstantial—a thread across the river ahead of him. As he nears the wharf, the fog thickens around the houses until they disappear and he is walking alone—a slow-moving fingerprint along a disembodied road.

He crosses the bridge. The warmth of the eggs still bleeds through the cotton into his chest. It fades as he walks the three miles down John Reed Road to his work at East Beach. In the afternoons, when he returns to Skirdagh, he helps Maggie with the planting. She will sow only on a waxing moon. In the last two weeks of March, if the ground is soft, she will plant carrots, potatoes, and rutabaga; in April, sugar snap peas. She uses rotted manure around the dahlias she plants in the front garden for Elizabeth and, when the dogwood comes into bloom, she sets two rows of corn.

In midspring, when the mourning cloak emerges from its overwinter
sleep under the bark, the pitch pine branches begin to cocoon at their ends. Their white tongues push out of the green needle clumps. As the weeks pass, they lengthen, leaving clusters of baby cones in their wake.

In July, as the days grow long, Jake begins to look for Eve and her father. One morning, toward the middle of the month as he is walking up the lane, he will see the Model T parked in the driveway. He leaves work early that afternoon and heads toward West Beach. He detours through the cranberry bogs onto the paths through the high marsh and the salt meadow grass. He cuts around the Howe cottage at Cherry’s Point—its mosquito torches blazing. He climbs the dunes toward the pitch pine ridge.

He can recognize Eve’s walk from a distance, the weave she makes along the tidal edge. The ocean pulls into a taut sheet behind her, tucked in along the lower edges of the sky, and as she trails behind her father down the beach on their evening walk to the breakwater, Jake walks with them, half a mile away, along the pine ridge. Year after year, he will watch them. He will note how the man’s shoulders begin to slope and the waists of the girl’s dresses loosen with the changing style. Her body softens under the straight linen lines. One year, she appears with her hair suddenly short—bobbed—and he can feel the imprint of the wind against her neck.

She leaves at the beginning of every September. Through the fall, Jake’s work on the beach grows slow. As the storms move up the coast, he sets boards onto the windows of the summer houses he has been hired to caretake through the winter. He spends the afternoons at Skirdagh with Maggie. They pull the cabbages up by the roots, shake off the dirt, tie and hang them from a row of nails on the floor joist in her root cellar. They top-dress the fish with salt for the winter. They put down pollock, cod, and tautog. Maggie keeps the coal and stored vegetables in the back cellar below the kitchen at Skirdagh. She puts up the jams on the shelves in narrow-mouthed mason jars. She stores the potatoes in aerated fish cans, and once a week she turns them so they don’t set for too long on one side.

In November, the rum-running trade picks up. The houses closest to the road pull their shades as the rum trucks pass, sometimes in broad daylight, stuffed with sacks of whiskey and bottles of bourbon packed in seaweed to muffle the sound. At night, Jake sits alone on the dock by the boathouse, watching the signal lights flash from a rum ship at sea to someone in a windmill lookout on land. He hears from Maggie that they are all a mess in it: Swampy Davoll, the Mason brothers, North Kelly, and Luce Weld. Even Blackwood and Jewel Penny, the draw tender of the Point Bridge, are paid well for sleeping soundly through the night. His brother, Wes, is up to his hips. He was there the night of the ambush on Little Beach, when the
Star
was riddled with machine gun fire off the shore, her fuel line ruptured when the bullets hit her engine room, and she exploded in a sudden rash of flame. He was there four months later, the night the
Yvette June
was chased up the river to the Point Bridge and Arthur Cornell was found cowering and drunk along with eighteen hundred cases of champagne and ale under a pile of sacks in the hold.

Maggie tells Jake how they set small fires in the north part of town and call it in to the police when a load is coming in on the south. They will dump cases of whiskey at thirty dollars apiece overboard off Gooseberry and then come back to salvage the drop on the next dark night in small boats. They wrap their oars in flannel cloth and drag for the sacks with corkscrew poles. She tells him about Dirk Lynn’s wife, who hides the bottles her husband brings home in the pink-and-white-painted wardrobe in their six-year-old daughter’s room. She tells him how Russ Barre was caught in a shoot-out with the Feds on Barney’s Joy, and a bullet drove a hole straight through his hair. She tells him how Thin Gin Tripp cuts cases of whiskey with rubbing alcohol, fresh rainwater, and tea.

Jake splits the wood for her and fills the wood box. He teaches her dominoes, and they play whist on the table in the kitchen. She brews cider on the stove with nutmeg and cloves and a liquor she has distilled from anise.

From the time the ground is frozen to the time the ice is cut, his life
grows still. He does not go down to the wharf or to the card games at the dock house. He wraps himself into the sullen orange light of the boathouse. Once in a while, he walks with Maggie to Horseneck. The dunes have hardened to solid hills with the still-life creep of dusty miller through the bowls. The wind has shaved the beach flat, and there is no give of sand under their feet. Surf clams washed up on the beach are encased in ice like small glistening footballs. Even the tidal edge is frozen. The salt forms a shield over the sand that cracks when they step on it. They walk down to Gooseberry. The causeway has trapped packs of ice in the bay, and a darker skin forms on the surface of the ocean where the waves still move underneath.