Moon Tide (15 page)

Finally, before she goes back into the house to start the wash, she glances over to the spot where Wes was lying an hour before. The grass is empty, but she can still make out the slight bent pocket where he slept.

For the rest of that day, she pours herself into her chores. In the afternoon, when the linen has been bleached and strung up on the line, she goes out into the hen shed. She sweeps the floor, straightens the banana crates she has set for laying along each wall, and fills them with new straw. She herds in the hens. The rooster flaps away from the rest of them and flies to the highest perch crossed along the back wall just below the ceiling beams. She leaves feed for them on the floor and latches the door behind her.

It is not until early evening when she is chopping wood that thoughts of Wes begin to wind again inside her brain. The wood yard is out behind the garden shed: a square of clear ground softly padded by chips and dead leaves with a heap of undivided logs piled on one side. Maggie works until dark, the ax blade slicing bluish silver through the dusky fog. Sundered pieces fleck out, surrounding her, as the pile of raw wood shrinks. Her palms grow wet on the handle of the ax, slipping back and forth between her ungloved hands. She divides the larger cuts of wood in half and then in half again, so they will be small enough, contained enough, to burn inside the stove. And it occurs to her as she works the branches off a pine that until now, her longing has been an impersonal thing. Pure and unattached and undefined. It has been a vague reaching toward some abstract beyond. Her longing was something she had walked with since she was a child.
It had carved her, formed her substance, her awareness. It was a thing in and of itself and had no object. A region of emptiness she had defined herself against. Until now. As her shoulders grow sore under the rhythmic swinging of the ax, she begins to realize that her longing has become quite suddenly specific. It has a face attached to it. A figure. A name.

She leans the ax against the chopping stump. She gathers up the split logs from the new mat of pine chips and shavings. She stacks the logs into a second pile closer to the house. She leaves a nook for herself built into the cords and, when the last log is placed, she climbs into it to rest in the stark smell of wood, freshly hewn.

That night, she goes, as she has always gone, to Blackwood. She finds him asleep, bent over the ledger on the desk, the damp ink figures imprinted into the side of his cheek. She pulls him back onto the bed, unties his shoes and eases the shirt from his shoulders. She finds the bruise on his ribs—small, a deep black, and in the shape of an eye. She puts her fingers into the palm of one of his tremendous crippled hands. It closes around her in his sleep. He has grown into her over time, mixed in her thoughts, in her blood. As he moves his aging body over hers, she can sense her own death in him.

She loves Blackwood. She knows this. She loves his swarthy age. The disfigured strangeness of his hands. His chapped and all-consuming way of loving her. But tonight as he wakes up and takes her, she is aware that something has shifted. Tonight, this night, is different from the nights that came before. The outside darkness pressing in against the window has a texture, a presence that is new. She looks past Blackwood’s shoulder toward the ceiling and the sullied patterns of orange light. The kerosene pools in gassy shadows through the beams and, as she watches them, she is aware that she is waiting. Even as her body moves under Blackwood’s weight, another part of her is lying separate, half-dormant and waiting for the sensation she had with Wes—in that moment when he touched her by the shed at the Tripp Farm—that lightning in the chest.

Blackwood falls away from her onto his back, his breathing ragged. Maggie runs her hand over his heart and finds the broken rib. She touches it gently, tracing the jut where the break stubs the skin, and she senses, without knowing for sure, how it happened. She puts her head against his chest and listens—the slender fracture has a sound that is not unlike the sound wind makes through a halyard—a slight persistent ticking in the bone—as the blood pushes through—a slow leak widening inside.

Over the next few months, Maggie passes Wes four times on John Reed Road. She sees him on North Kelly’s boat tied up at the dock house unloading his catch into the floating pots. She sees him on his way up to Caleb Mason’s icehouse, the wagon stacked with pots and weed. She sees him once at the end of the causeway. He stands on the rocks with a gaff hook balanced on his shoulder looking out across the bay and, as she watches, his head bends back slightly, as if the movement is unconscious and against his will. The sun pours across his face.

He catches her watching him. His eyes harden, and the light breaks away from him.

He follows her back toward the bridge. He cuts through the deer path that parallels the macadam road. When they take the bend and the river drops through the trees into view, he pulls her into the oak scrub.

For an instant, she imagines fighting him off. She imagines the ways of defiance—how she will slip, filch, scrap herself away from his swift hands. His mouth is wet on her ear.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she says.

“You did.”

As he comes inside her, she grips her fingers into his shoulder, gathering him into her like a dream out of the wheelbarrow that has stood for days at the edge of her garden, its wooden belly full of sea muck, a compost of sod, wildflowers, and shells that she will grind to ash and lay across the tomato seeds. She feels through the muscle of his shoulder toward the bone. She feels for the nakedness of the man she saw
less than an hour before standing on the causeway rocks. She digs toward the vulnerable in him, and he runs through the cracks in her hands.

“I need you,” he says. Her body opens under him like earth.

They walk back to town separately. He is ten yards ahead, then twenty, and by the time she has reached the bridge, she can see him at the top of Thanksgiving Lane past the church. He turns onto the wagon drive that leads down to her root cellar.

There is a dead swan in the marsh. She takes the path by the old ferry dock along the small beach and crosses the mat of salt marsh cordgrass. The bird lies on its back, its legs hooked underneath, its heart pulled out by the crows. Farther off, by the dock, she can see the mate, peddling its tireless moored route back and forth along the shallows.

Maggie stands in the dry grass and looks across the river. From here, she can see the room where Wes lives on the top floor above the Shuckers Club. For months, she has crossed the bridge at dawn and felt him there, watching her through the blinds. This morning, she sees, as she has seen many mornings, a shadow bend across the glass and, for the first time, she recognizes that shadow for the trick of light it is.

He is waiting for her in the root cellar. He catches her wrist as she comes down the stairs. He makes love to her on the dirt floor strewn with geranium petals and ginger stems. He comes into her from behind and pulls her hips back into him.

Later as she sleeps, he runs his hand lightly down the midline of her chest, then back up over her breast. His fingers pause for a moment at the dent in her throat and then his hand begins to move again, in long ovals, circling her ribs. She doesn’t stir.

He digs a whale tooth from his hunting coat pocket, a small paintbrush, and a four-ounce corked bottle of india ink. On one of the wooden shelves by the stove, he finds a sewing needle stuck into a pincushion.
He sits back down on the spring cot next to her long body lying still under the sheet. He uncorks the bottle and spills a few drops of ink onto the flat edge of the brush, and he coats the bone until it is a blackness in the palm of his hand. Then, slowly, he begins to cut the lines: a ship, the slight boats, the sullen thrash of a tail. He etches the harpoons the way he has etched them before—as thin as the needle he uses to cut them. They sprout from the whale’s curved flank like misplaced bones. Once in a while, he will lose the image. Even squinting, he will not be able to differentiate sea, spear, man, whale. Each one is a simple scratch of whiteness in black ink.

He knows what happens next: one boat will be hit by the tail and capsized; a spear will be thrown to strike the beast in the head; the whale will run for two miles on a length of rope unwinding in the bow until it tires. Then, its tremendous body will be dragged back to the ship and hoisted halfway up the port side. The blubber will be stripped into blanket pieces, which will be cut again into smaller horse pieces, and then again into bible leaves until its massiveness has been distilled into oil casks, an acre of baleen, and three stave barrels of bone.

But for now, it is only the moment before—before the tipping of the first boat—before the harpoon strikes the head. Ben Soule has taught him this art. He has taught him this moment, and Wes has sketched it over and over. He has held it still and learned it by heart. No matter how many times he cuts the same scene, he will never exhaust it, because what he is looking for is something already written, already lost.

He glances up. As if she can feel him watching her, Maggie turns over on the spring cot, her body long in the deathly yellow light. Her eyes are closed, and yet he has the eerie unsettled sense that she is watching him. Her eyelids shift as if she tracks him in her sleep.

He goes on working the tooth: he cuts lines that are delicate, precise. He carves the scene until it is done. Then he coats the tooth again with ink and takes a piece of cardboard that he bends back and forth in his hands until it grows as soft as cloth. Slowly, carefully, he sifts the ink away from the bone.

He buries the finished tooth in the mattress close to the springs. She is still asleep. He touches her face, gently, the closed eyes, her mouth slightly ajar, and he sees his father’s rough hands as they moved across his mother’s face when she was lost inside the fever. He remembers how futile it was—that unwieldy tender gesture of him loving her. Now, he opens his hand and holds it just above Maggie’s skin. He will not touch her. He will not come that close. He cups his fingers around the wide plane of her cheek, an almost imperceptible pressure, hovering there, the heel of his palm close to her mouth as if he could capture her breath in his hand.

The next morning, he watches her dress. He lies propped on his side. His shoulder takes the light, pushing out from the sheet. She pulls on her boots, straps the laces once around, and ties them.

“Come back,” he says.

She shakes her head. Straightening, she tightens her skirt at the waist.

“Come back.”

“No.”

“How come?”

“I’ve got things to do.”

He scowls for a moment, and she can see in his expression that he has assumed, the way it is easy for some men to assume, that by his need he has marked her.

She considers it now—what stirs in her for him—not love exactly. No. It is an unpolished hunger. It thrills her, stings her, frightens her. He is the kind of man she could lose herself to.

“Come back,” he says again, his face softening. The gentleness takes her off guard. “Come back,” as if those are the only words that he remembers how to say. Maggie lets herself be drawn. She reaches the edge of the spring cot, and he pulls her down, removes her dress. He unties the laces of her boots and slips them off her feet. His arms wrap like deep sea roots around her.

“I won’t choose,” she says quietly as his mouth moves over her breasts. “You can’t own me, and I won’t let you make me choose.” She holds his head in her hands, twists her fingers through his hair as he makes love to her, and when she comes, she grips him tightly, even violently, trying to hold this moment between them for as long as she can.

She leaves him lying on the bed, picks up her clothes from the floor and backs away, slow steps backward away from him across the room.

“Where are you going?” He laughs at her. “Why are you walking backward like that?”

She doesn’t answer. As she retreats, her vision clarifies again, and she can see his face change through different skins—wanting, pulling, needing her, cutting her off, pushing her away, because his desire—she can see it now—it is like her own, unlivable, it heaves like clouds across his face—a desire too big, it leaves him ashamed, desperate, angry—with a need to leash, possess, own because he thinks, mistakenly, that she has done this to him.

She continues walking backward, watching him, his shoulder knobbed with yellow light, the damp earth walls of the root cellar behind him. She will see these walls a thousand times. She will see them every night after he is gone.

She does not tell him this. She does not tell him that he will forget her. He will resent her for his wanting. He will keep a distance from her the way the rooster hefts a distance from the hens to keep them contained. Over the next several weeks, he will cut her to pieces and put her away. Piece by piece: into the back of a bottom drawer; wrapped in burlap into one of those crates of stolen whiskey; sealed under a trapdoor in Mason’s icehouse under a mountain of soaked hay. He will take his runs in the skiff. He will drive his rum load to the city at dawn in the back of Kelly’s cart packed under lobster catch and rockweed. He will drink and fish and hunt, he will push deep into his life—she does not know how far—and someday perhaps—someday—No.

She walks up to Skirdagh, lets out the chicks, and climbs the stairs to Elizabeth’s bedroom on the second floor. She empties the thunder jug, pours fresh water into the washbasin, and lifts the shade. The light pours across the old woman’s face. Elizabeth reaches out, her eyes weakened by the brightness. As Maggie turns to draw back the covers, through the open window she sees Wes leave the root cellar. The rooster is out in the corner of the yard closest to the garden. Wes leans down, picks up a small stone, and throws it in a cutthroat path angled toward the rooster’s leg. The chicken jumps, and the stone whistles past it, just missing the edge of its wing.

Maggie will think of this for days afterward. In the mornings, while she is breaking eggs into the fry pan, in the afternoons, as she gathers kindling for the fire. At night, lying with Blackwood in the yellow-lit room above the wharf, she will think of the rooster—that other one she buried years ago—its gangrene leg. She will remember the inexplicable wound—how it would not heal—and over and over again she will see Wes throw the stone. She will hear the mindless cruelty in the shrill cry of that pebble through the air.