Moon Tide (19 page)

He has heard what happened to Icarus and he will not use wax. He nicks small holes with the sewing needle into the lower barrel of each feather and threads them with a leader wire. As he weaves the needle through the cloth, then through the quill and back again through the cloth, he thinks about a luna moth he trapped once in his hands years ago as he was setting joists in the attic of a house near the Point off
Main Road. The moth’s wings were pale green. Velvet. Antennae like fern. He could feel the creature fluttering inside his palms. Its body covered with a silky fur.

It was a house raised in one summer out of a turnip field. The first house of that size to be built on the Point side of the river. It seemed gangly, ostentatious, overhuge. It would be the summer home of a young couple from Boston—a Henry and Elizabeth Lowe. Bill Hawkins had the contract. They broke ground in early June. Land graded, cleared. The cistern marked. Well dug. Each window ordered custom-framed. A heavy oak front door. Sixty-nine crates of furnishings shipped overland from the New Bedford piers. It took eight trips on Brick Gallows’s wagon with a sixteen-foot bed.

The wife was about Ben’s age—maybe a year or two older—still childless. She set bowls of everlastings, bittersweet, snapdragons on the floors of the empty rooms. She set vases of hawkweed to mark where she wanted a bed, a sofa, a hutch, a chest of drawers. She was a particular woman. She wanted her things to go where she meant her things to go. Just so.

She wore a pale yellow dress on that last day. Sleeves rolled up past the elbow. A white lace ruff. Ben had come down the stairs from his work in the attic in the late afternoon. She was in the dining room, surrounded by unpacked crates. Piles of damask napkins on the table, bone china, Waterford crystal, a butter dish. Her husband had left earlier that day for Boston. Ben had heard them arguing. Their voices carried through the hollowed rooms. The wife had insisted on being left behind alone.

There was a slim-waisted pewter oilcan on the dining table next to her, scissor snuffers, and a pewter cone. On the floor by her feet was a child’s sled made of whalebone with a wicker seat and, next to that, a baleen fishing pole. She was polishing her silver.

“You’re done then for the day?” she asked him without looking up.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered.

She did not seem to be the kind of woman who would choose to live on this side of the river, but Ben had heard from Hawkins that she
had begged her husband for the craggy sprawl of land. He could tell by her talk she was a foreigner. Not Cape Verdean or Port-a-gese. A different kind. Rich with a pale face.

There was a pile of books in German on the end of the dining table closest to him.

“These yours?” he asked her.

Elizabeth glanced up. “Yes.”

“You read them?”

The corners of her mouth curled slightly. “That is what one does with books.”

He flushed. She was laughing at him. Her eyes were sharp. Dark blue. She studied his face for a moment, then looked down at the polish rag in her hand. She had a proud neck, her cheek cut high in that dusky light, and he wanted to touch her. He wanted to sand the angles of her face the way he knew how to sand oak until the grain had the texture of silk.

She asked if he would help her hang the whalebone sled.

He nodded, and she led him down the hall into the sitting room by the north side entrance of the house.

“There”—she pointed—“by the long window.”

He drove two nails into the wall. As he was setting a third, he slammed the hammer hard into his thumb. Elizabeth cried out, her hand reaching, and she touched him. Briefly. Suddenly. Her fingers brushed his wrist. His eyes flew to her face, and he could see a slight electric hunger passing through. She stared back at him.

He looked down at their hands, still touching, hers slight, long-fingered and white, his dashed with paint, sawdust, dirt, the thumb dented, blood rushing into a black pool under the nail.

He jerked his hand away, confused, and ashamed of his own confusion. His hand throbbed. He fumbled with the third nail, settled it, and slammed it once hard, this time on the head.

She stepped back as the nail drove into the wall. Ben lifted the sled and laid its gentle spine across the nails and, without a word, strode out of the house.

He returned to his father’s farm, ate, and went to bed as he did every night by seven. He woke at midnight and left at one
A.M
. with the fifteen ten-gallon milk pails covered in horse blankets on the wagon. He reached New Bedford by three, wrapped the horses’ hooves in cloth, and they made the rounds through the cobbled streets of the South End.

Before the sun broke, Ben started back as he did every morning toward his father’s farm. He passed through Old Dartmouth and Smith Mills. It was August 1880, and he was two days shy of twenty-six years old. He came to the turn onto Pine Hill Road that would lead him home, but when the horses went to pull left, he jerked the reins right and kept them driving straight down Rhode Island Way. He drove through the Head of Westport, across the uppermost reach of the Noquochoke, past river scows beached in marsh canals and the Macomber Store. He passed out of the village and continued through stands of inland oak and pine until he came to the stone marker at Sodom Road with its three carved hands. One pointing eight miles south to the Point, another eight miles west to Howland’s Ferry, and the third, eleven miles back toward the city from where he came.

He stopped there and considered taking that south turn, the wagon careening toward the Point, toward that new pine shell of a house still fresh with the smell of mason’s glue. He would park in the drive and slip in through the kitchen door. He would climb the back stairs toward the room floating at the end of an upstairs hall where a woman slept alone while early light poured in across her face through a window frame that had no glass.

He looked down at his hands holding the reins. The nail of his left thumb was fully black, fractured by the flat face of the hammer. He stayed there, at that crossroads, for a quarter of an hour, and his young life grew as ancient and worn as the road that stretched in three directions under him. Once an Indian path, the Way had been the route of the earliest settlers, the Sissons and the Tripps. It had been crossed by soldiers during the Revolutionary War and ground hard by wagons heavy with sawed wood, cotton, leather goods, barrels of sperm oil
and grain. It was the main route of the stage that carried sacks of mail and the summer people as they spilled in from New York City off the Fall River Line.

The horses grew anxious, pawing at the soft dirt. The fingers on the carved stone marker pointed east and west and south, and Ben could feel that whatever choice he made would change his life forever. He thought of the woman. She might be awake now, moving through that unfinished house. He imagined the whalebone sled, fragile and waiting on the wall of the sitting room. He looked down again at the thumb of his left hand. The blackened nail, split in half. The skin had begun to wither around it, and he realized then that his life was already changed. He whipped the horses once and drove straight. At Howland’s Ferry, he hired a boy to drive the wagon back to his father’s farm with half of the milk money stashed in one of the empty cans. With the rest of it, he bought himself a rail ticket on the line bending west across Connecticut toward the Appalachian Range.

The wind has shifted out of the north. The rain drives toward the open door where he sits with the wings on his lap. It coats his bare toes. He can smell rotted grass, fish innards, the faint reek of the town dump two miles up John Reed Road.

He weaves the owl feathers in with the deep-barreled goose quills to find a balance in their length. Owl for stealth. Osprey for height. He knits the younger gull feathers thick into a flexible elastic on each end of the shoulder strap to socket the joint.

Aloneness, he knows, is a kind of stairwell one descends with age. He goes down more slowly now, one stair at a time, dropping worn sacks on the wide part of the steps as he goes. He is nearly empty-handed, bearing little more than a headlamp and a small box of mining tools.

Once in a while over the years, when he heard her name or some talk about her, he thought about Elizabeth Lowe and that day with the whalebone sled. He wondered if he had assumed too much. He wondered if he had made a mistake by pulling away as sharply as he
did. He wondered if he had somehow read the moment wrong. It was a difficult memory. He could not quite make sense of it or resolve it, and so she haunted him, from time to time, the way a ghost might, unworked and hovering and out of reach. Once, as he was hawking through a western Pennsylvania coal town, one of the men took him down into the mines. They walked through mazes underground. Black dust. Orange light. The sweet dense reek of ore. Dead ends where the rock had given way and caved in. A cap, a shoe jutting from the rubble.

When they came back up to the surface of the earth, the sun’s brightness seared Ben’s eyes. He stumbled away from the entrance, his mind capsized by the realization that the solid everyday ground he was walking on, they were all walking on, was little more than a precarious crust.

In the late afternoon, the rain ends. He puts the wings and the still unused feathers back into their burlap sack. He goes out to the henhouse and shoos the chickens out into the yard. He drags up bucket after bucket of water from the let. He sweeps down the scour and droppings inside.

Eve

I
t was the touch she couldn’t rub out. The memory itself blurred into a rush of river, wind, rain, fog, all of it gray. Jake had passed her to someone—she could not remember who—and that someone had shuffled her up to the Coles house, where her father and others were gathered around the fainting chair in the hall—her grandmother lying on drenched blue velvet—face ashen, lips violet, eyes skipping wild and then closed, wild, then closed.

“She will not be quite the same,” the doctor said, removing his glasses and folding them back into his breast pocket.

“Not quite the same,” echoed Charles.

“She will sleep it off and wake up tomorrow. But after this sort of episode, you cannot expect her to be quite the same. There’s really nothing to be done.”

“Nothing to be done,” said Charles.

The doctor’s black leather case lay open on the marble floor: the silver glint of the stethoscope, a small bottle of rubbing alcohol, a jar of pills.

Elizabeth was carried back to Skirdagh. Eve followed slowly with her father clutching tightly to her hand. She was soaked, and she noticed as they crossed the lawn that her body had begun to shiver. It wasn’t from the cold, she knew that. It was how Jake had touched her,
it was as if he was still touching her, carrying her across the river toward the sandflat. She watched her shadow drag across the ground ahead of her, the other stuttering shadow that was her father attached by the hand to hers. They were awkward shadows, both of them, poorly drawn. As they crossed the yard, every so often she looked around for Jake, expecting to see him behind her, to her left or right. She would turn her head fast and from the corner of her eye she glimpsed him wading through the river toward her. She knew it wasn’t the river. The river was farther down below the trees and not visible. But she could see him moving through the current as if the moment were happening still, in some alterior space, she could feel it, the moment unfinished. She felt that way herself now—half-open, glaring, incomplete. It was as if her body were unwrapped—somehow
he
had unwrapped her, and now she could not find her way back to being closed.

After Elizabeth is put to bed, Eve goes down to the root cellar with Maggie. She has not been inside it since she was a child. She does not remember the small corner caves with dried roots and herbs and flowers hung in slipknot rows. She does not remember the pocket shelves built between the stones in the damp middle of the wall.

“Sit there,” Maggie says, pointing to a small stool by the woodstove. She digs out a jar of steeped thistle, orange rind, and a tin box of sassafras root.

“So you think it’s a fever you caught?” Maggie asks, lighting the woodstove.

“Maybe more of a chill. A shivering, you see how my hands shake, I can’t seem to stop them from shaking.”

Maggie sets the pot and pours a pitcher of water through cheesecloth rubbed in sage.

“It’s just a chill,” says Eve. “I thought you could rub it out.”

Maggie glances up at her and smiles. “Some sorts of chills don’t want to be rubbed out.”

“It’s just an ordinary chill.”

“Fine then, we’ll let it be that.”

“I don’t know why you would think it would be anything other than ordinary.”

“Fine,” Maggie answers, stirring the water slowly on the stove.

Eve looks away. She will say nothing about Jake—there is nothing to say—she will say nothing about the sandflat and how he carried her through the moving water toward the bank, nothing about that strange sensation of closeness she had felt as the sky drew down around them. It was the closeness that unsettled her—that sense of waking up in someone else’s hands. Distance had a logic, a familiar geometry. Since she was a child, she had lived in distance, positioned herself in such a way so that even her own edges were as far away from her as stars. She did not have words for what she had felt on the sandflat—she knew only that she had felt it then and she could still feel it now—that closeness, an impossible closeness—it was nothing familiar, it was nothing she wanted to feel.