Moon Tide (17 page)

I
t was not until the last month of 1932, when the humpback whale washed up on Noman’s Land and the carcass was dragged across the bay and buried in the Horseneck dunes, that Elizabeth began to write the names into her book of lists.

The whale was a young bull, Maggie told her. It would be cleaned of its meat and blubber, and what was left would be buried in the dunes by Cherry’s Point. Small bugs living in the sand would strip the rest, and in a year the bones would be exhumed.

Elizabeth began with the names she knew for sure. She began them in the order that they happened. She started with the ones she was told, the ones who died before she was born. She moved on to the ones she remembered, the young boy who drowned in the bog, those who died in the famine times: Robert Jennings, the two Leary brothers, Megan O’Shea. There was one family who were already poor and so hungry that they ate the blighted crop. There were seven altogether, but the father’s name escaped her. She left a space for them blank and moved on to the crossing: Liam O’Donnell. Sally Quinn. Malachi and Katherine O’Bairn. The youngest sister who coughed up blood into her hand. As she wrote them down, others came to her as if there were a backside to her remembering. A crowded room inside her where their names had collected like old books over time. They
came to her sometimes on the crack of the wind against the sill at night or in the light across the river in the late afternoon.

She had just reached the turn of the century when she ran out of pages in the small black book. She sent Maggie by trolley to the bookstore in New Bedford for another. The same size book, she told her, so it would fit into the pockets of her skirts. But a different color this time. Not black. Something with more kick. And then she smiled, pushing a five-dollar bill into Maggie’s hand. Surprise me.

She did not know where to put her brother Sean in relation to the rest. She did not know when he died. Even if he died. For all she knew, he could still be pushing his way farther west. And so she held his name separate from the book. She kept him apart, tucked on a small mantelshelf in a different room inside her that was empty, windowed, full of light. She could not quite bear to enter his name into one of the lists without knowing for sure. But he would be close to ninety—five years ahead of her—and Sean had been a little too alive in his life to last so long.

In the summer of 1933, Arthur Coles and George Baker, acting on behalf of the Westport Real Estate Trust, bought the rest of the land between Main Road and Salter’s Hill. They had the trees cleared, the brush leveled. They cut up the tract into fifteen lots. They hired a young architect from Higginson and Briggs of Boston to design a house on one of the parcels to encourage buyers.

On the August afternoon of the clambake, Elizabeth drives with Charles to the Coles house next door. She sits on the lower patio and watches the sharp black painted wings of a pair of laughing gulls. The gulls circle over the lawn that rolls down to the river. They sweep toward the sandflat at the tip of Cape Bial to steal the wrapped brown bread that has been laid out on the long table. Elizabeth looks out across the harbor, past the long arm of the barrier beach. As she strains her eyes against the sun’s glare, she wonders if this is how one begins to die: with the stealth awareness that forever might be tomorrow. It might have been yesterday.

Verweile doch, du bist so schön
.

Who was it—Faust? A fool to swear he would not beg the moment to stay.

She knows that in every shaft of light there are points of rest, shoals and caves. There are undershadows where the light grows weak and timid and afraid.

But she has not been. She has never been afraid.

Where does the light go when the candle is blown out?

Someone told her once—it must have been Henry—that it was no brief candle.

“A torch,” he had said, “a brave and magnificent thing.”

“It might be less than a candle,” she had answered him. It might be a match. One sudden, catapulted star.

Mary Jennings. Joseph McGrath. Lucy McNay.

They go differently, she knows. Some kicking and screaming. Some huddled into themselves with fear. Some walk into it with courage squared in the shoulders. Some put their things in order and let go in their sleep. A gentle turning into that unknown.

Down by the river, they are heating the stones. The smoke has begun to curl off the sandflat. Jake, Billy Ash, and two of the younger Mason sons have been hired to set the bake. They unload four plank benches off the wagon cart, hoist them onto their shoulders, and wade through the shallows to the sandflat. They set the benches down on either side of the long table next to the fire pit. It is an hour off dead low. They unload five bushels of soft-shell clams, ten dozen ears of corn, tripe, sausage, yellow onions, codfish, and an eel stuffing that will roast on the top of the bake. They unload two pecks of sweet potato and one of white. They pile the rockweed to a depth of one foot over the rocks, and they begin to spread the clams. Elizabeth looks past them, past the sandflat and the marsh toward the Lion’s Tongue and the Nubble rock that marks the mouth. The light shovels in across the river.

Verweile doch
,

Stay awhile.

Her death had always been a companion. A tender lurk behind her. Slightly off to the side. Trailing, like a distant Eurydice.

Simple and inevitable. She knew that. It had always been inevitable.

They had gathered around her father when he died. Her mother left him set out for days so he would have the chance to linger for a while. His smell began to fill the house. She crowded them all into that small and ill-lit parlor—the stench was almost unbearable—but they were her children and they had waited there with her, their heads bent over the sheath where he once lived.

Awhile longer. You are so beautiful
.

What if she did go back? What if she stepped off the boat in Galway and arrived at Cleggan Head in the late afternoon, the Twelve Bens already chewed to layers of blue?

She had wondered once, now was wondering again, if there might have been something she had missed.

The lawn unrolls away from her down to the river. On the pier, slightly to the west, she can see her granddaughter, Eve, standing with the young architect.

A woman can be a measure of distance, Henry told her once. And Elizabeth can see that distance in her granddaughter. Her elsewhere-ness, Maggie calls it. Her way of slipping out of herself midconversation. Her eyes would dilate and she’d be suddenly, as if unintentionally, gone.

One dawn on the crossing, Sean woke her.

“Lizzie,” he whispered, shaking her out of the pallet bunk. They snuck together out of steerage up to the first-class deck. They leaned into the bow rail to watch the light hatch strange billowing cliffs at the horizon.

“It is TirNaNog,” her brother told her.

And Elizabeth had wanted to believe him. She had wanted to believe that they were heading into a world that was more beautiful than the one they had left, and perhaps, even then, she understood that it was the wanting more than the belief that mattered.

“Do you see it, Lizzie? Those cliffs there, they’re real, you know. Might not look real, but that’s the TirNaNog.”

“Will it be finer than Omey?” she had asked him, and his face had lapsed for a moment—she had seen it—before he regathered himself again. For her. He had always done that gathering of strength for her.

“Sure it will,” he said. “It’s TirNaNog. No place finer. No one grows old there. No one’s poor. And that’s where we are going.”

The soul does not peel away from the body easily. Its departure is slow. It has always been slow. The body is a turf. Smoored with ashes, it clings in the heart to its burn.

Elizabeth looks down the hill to the girl standing on the pier and the young stranger standing with her, and then at Jake, fifty feet away on the sandflat. He is turning the stones in the fire pit. They have grown hot on one side, and he lays the rockweed down across them. The steam seizes up around him.

Elizabeth rarely sees him now. Maggie has told her that he is thick with work. He is building the front terrace on the Wheeler house down on West Beach. She watches him now as he lays down the food on the layers of rockweed. His actions hold a gentleness, a care, as if he knows he has been entrusted with the moment.

It’s their names that matter, Elizabeth told Maggie once. Their names that were like the names in this town. Names lined up in shifts in the sodium light of the stonebreakers’ yard. Names wrapped in sheets of burning lime and buried in the grounds of Arbor Hill. And now, as she sits in the dingy August heat, it is their names that come back to her. They smash like white cuffs of surf against the cliffs of Inishshark.

You’re a bit of a gambler, my Lizzie
, Henry had told her once.

No, she was not a gambler. Her faith had nothing to do with risk. It was not something she questioned. She saw God in the deep throat of foxglove, in the huddling of wildflowers, in the tribe of rocks on the far side of the river. She can see them now, their hunched black spines creeping toward the sand in the lower tide.

She twists her neck around to look for Charles, her body twisting
against itself in the wicker chair that is too small for her—she feels a slight burst of light in her chest—a trickle of water down her throat. She is thirsty. Where is Charles? Why can’t she seem to find him?

As Jake is drawing down one corner of the tarp, he looks up across the shallows to the dock where Eve is standing, faced slightly away from the young architect, whose hands continue gesturing across the river in timid, and then broader swoops, as if he has grown progressively aware that something is missing, that she has escaped him somehow, and he is trying to reclaim her, to draw her back into the hollowed shape that is still standing there.

Jake watches her for a moment, then follows her line of sight toward the barrier beach and the silver line of Buzzards Bay settled between the curves of the dunes. He shakes his head as if he could shake the thought of her from him. He hooks the corner of the tarp into the stake and with a mallet drives the stake into the ground.

Elizabeth senses her body forming to the contour of the wicker. The crowd of guests on the patio has thickened now—strangers, they seem—although she might have known them all. They pass around her—they are all passing—like leaves. Down below, at the bottom of the hill, the river is silver, its surface hammered in the light.

“TirNaNog,” Sean had told her. But it was Omey that she wanted. That desolate island that held the legend of a church interred in sand. A fragile place. At the end of a tidal spit. Cliffs in the west and the Navigator’s Graveyard in the east. The burial sockets were filled with pebbles. White quartz. For hope and innocence and death. Her mother called them diamonds. But the buried church—they could not seem to find it. She and Sean had tracked every inch of the island. They had crawled on their hands and knees through the heather and the sod, the sea holly and the tiny pinks, looking for its steeple to poke out of the sand. When the herd of wild ponies ran loose along the spit, they would lie down together and put their faces to the ground to hear the thunder of the hooves. They shook the earth.

She would stay with Sean all day on that island as the tide cut them off. When they grew hungry, they peeled limpets off the sides of the rocks and ate them raw. Limpets were forbidden. They were the food of the poor.

Verweile doch. Stay awhile
.

“Bury one for me next year, Lizzie,” Sean had said that last time she saw him. In a different land, a foreign land, they all became strangers from themselves. He had pressed the apple half into her hand, kissed her cheek and slipped away. She remembers now—how the dark had pulled him from her. He had waded off into it as if he were wading out into the bay. It had swallowed him.

So much left undone. The list of names. She has not found a place for him.

They used to take their time with the dead. They used to cut the sod on three sides and roll back the top layer, lay a man down inside it, then roll the earth back over him again.

So much left—

The door. Flat-paneled and narrow. The kind of door a man would cut under a case of stairs. It had been moving closer. She’d back away and it would advance. And they would move together that way—the old woman and the door—in that delicate and shifting dance she did not know the terms of.

But she was not afraid. She had never been afraid. No.

Haw, bog asphodel, the rowan leaves. She will add them to her book of lists. The rows of tubers. The names of the fields. She can barely remember the towns—but the fields, she can remember the names of the fields. Field of Cliodhna. Field of CúChulainn. The cows at old Mr. Dugan’s farm, grass leaking from their stumbling lips, that gentle grazing sound.

There is a man coming toward her now up the hill. He wears an un-collared blue shirt, suspenders, and a pair of cotton trousers. He has walked out of the river, and he carries it behind him on his back.

“Do I know you?” she asks him when he reaches her.

“It’s just me—Jake.”

He has brought her a plate of the shellfish, peeled from their lids.

“Are they limpets?” she asks.

“Clams.”

She puts one in her mouth. It
is
a limpet. She recognizes the tough and briny taste.

She looks up at the young man standing near her, spray caught in his hair.

“It was a fragile place,” she tells him.

“You want some potatoes?”

No. None of those. Reaching out, she takes another limpet from the plate.

“Oisin,” she says. “He was in love, you know, and the time had seemed so short to him.”

He smiles down at her. “You like the clams?” he asks.

Verweile doch
.

“Will you stay for a while?” she asks him.

He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“Do you think sometimes that we would rather die than feel?”

He looks at her for a moment, his eyes shielded by the rim of his cap. Then he glances down toward the river and the girl standing at the edge of the pier—her body outlined by the silver light.