Moon Tide (3 page)

E
ve understands early that her life has the impact of leaves. At her grandmother Elizabeth’s house, the summer she is seven, the summer after her mother has died, Eve can feel that her mind is like the periphery of a circle that haunts an absent center, the way wind moves, without roots.

In her room at Skirdagh, she starts to paint on the walls with food. She does this secretly, in corners. She smuggles handfuls of spinach and peas upstairs in the sleeves of her dress. Teacups of squash and quahog pie. She leaves piles of fresh tart on the sill by an open window, and before dawn she takes what is left and puts it to rest in the camphorwood box under her bed. She lines the lid with a rag soaked in iodine to cut the smell. She mixes grains with corn and the eyes of a haddock that she steals before the fish is deboned. From the breakfast table, she slips the skin of a peach and an orange rind her father, Charles, has cut away.

In her room, she locks the door and tucks what she has stolen into the curtain ties. She nicks a chink in the plaster wall of her dressing closet and leaves a tiny offering of half-eaten cherry pits on the exposed inner beams.

She stirs her grief in with the food—shattered bits of what she remembers, what she was told and not told, what she has overheard.

Even now, at Skirdagh, they talk of it. She has come down into the pantry to steal a few hard peas. As she screws the lid back onto the mason jar and reaches up on tiptoe to tuck it quietly behind a row of pickled beets, she can hear their voices in the kitchen—Maggie and Elizabeth. They talk about her mother, Alice—how she had been a capsized spirit—not meant for the soft-boiled life of the city, not meant to be pulled from the free and rugged soil of Australia where she was raised. They talk about how her mind had grown cramped from years of riding through the narrow Boston one-way streets. They talk about how odd it was—the way she just slipped off—and how unfortunate, that Eve had been the one to find her.

“Shock enough to scuttle a small soul,” Maggie murmurs. “Drive her right out onto the skinny branches.”

Eve shrinks back into the shadow of the pantry door. She clutches the dried peas, hard shriveled knobs digging into her palm. Through the crack between the hinges, she can see them in the kitchen. Her grandmother sits in the chair by the woodstove, her tough fingers curled around a book in her lap, while Maggie stands at the cutting board, chopping onions. Eve can hear the sound of the blade as it splits the outer dryness and slides through the flesh toward the heart. The pungent smell bristles in her nose.

“Well, it’s done now,” Elizabeth remarks.

“She’s still a bit ajar,” Maggie says without turning around.

“You’d expect it.”

“I suppose.”

“You think I should do something,” Elizabeth snaps.

“Didn’t say that.”

“I hear that’s what you’re saying.”

Maggie shrugs.

And as Eve stands there, small and listening, poised in the cool damp shadow of the pantry door, she remembers back to that last morning—how her mother had left breakfast abruptly, halfway through French toast. She had gone upstairs, rummaged through her dressing closet, and pulled on her traveling clothes—the coarse white
blouse she had worn the day she sailed from Perth, the ankle-length gray hobble skirt with the dust of the Nullarbor Plain still seamed into the hem. She put on the hard black shoes and the blue velvet hat trimmed with tulle. She lay down on her bed, and Eve had found her there an hour later, her mother’s eyes black as two windows full of night.

Now, in the kitchen at Skirdagh, Maggie and Elizabeth shift their talk to the harvest of summer squash and whether or not the corn will ripen before July. Eve slips out of the pantry and up the stairs into her bedroom. She sets the dried peas and a cut of salt pork in a shallow bowl of water on the floor, and she sits there, watching, to see how the flesh reconstitutes.

Her father, Charles, keeps her close to him. Even now, eight months later, he cannot quite bear to have her out of sight. He picks her up and hugs her, puts her down, then picks her up again as if he needs to be certain she still has substance, as if he needs to be sure her small heart is still flipping through her chest.

He sets her to play in his study as he works. Eve knows that a month after her mother died, her father posted a letter of resignation to the dean at the college. He cast off his research, his studies, his professorship, his tenure and prestige, as easily as one might shed an old cloak—she could sense his flight—how he tried to dart and dodge his grief—she could sense his albatross wings.

He read poetry. He plunged down into it with a ravenous and driving need as if he could purify himself by immersion into a new element. He began with his contemporaries but found the work too accessible, too flat, and so he began to plow his way backward in time.

In the study at Skirdagh, he pores over sonnets, villanelles, haiku. Eve has noticed that he has developed a particular interest in translations of texts that are ancient, primitive, texts that have survived inconceivably intact over time, before they are awakened, Lazarus-like, after centuries of sleep.

He keeps a slight mountain of books on his desk, and as Eve plays
quietly in the corner, from time to time he will read passages aloud to her—bold fragments that stir his heart from the mystical writings of the Sufi poets—lines about a ruby earring—a flailing, blinding, rose-colored light—the sunrise in the stone—the ecstatic union. As he reads, she can feel his longing for her mother tremble in his voice. She can barely see the top of his head over the heap of books—the waft of pale and thinning hair. She can hear him shuffling through sheets of writing paper in search of his pen. He wipes the caked ink off the end and preens the groove.

She suffers through meals. She plays with her food, pushing it around on her plate. With her fork, she grinds green beans into a waxy paste that she smears into crude, abstract designs. She makes a note of what she will take later and what she will leave. She studies the flutter of silverware on the lace, the keen whiteness of her grandmother’s china, the pale blue damask of the windowcloth. She listens while her father rambles on as he is cutting through a hunk of steak or peppering his eggs. She nods and murmurs at an appropriate pause. She is patient with him. She can see the blasted wreckage of his face. She can see how he has locked himself inside his anguish. She lets him confide in her—she is all he has—they share the same fragile egg of a world. She forgives him. She knows he cannot see much farther than the four walls of his own mind. And when he turns to reach for the salt at one end of the table, she shakes a snip of bacon from her plate into her sleeve.

In the long stretched evenings of July, Eve walks with her father on Horseneck. They drive over the bridge, park at the entrance to the beach club, and cross the dunes. The waves collapse in long white bands along the shore. As they walk the beach, her father pokes his walking stick through skates’ eggs, slipper shells, and the burrows of crabs. He is looking for equations and runes, for cuneiforms.

He has told her: “Once writing was as simple as the imprint of a reed in clay.”

She knows that he has been constructing a narrative poem in his
head about a woman who plays jacks with broken pieces of the moon and a man who has discovered a fourth script in the Rosetta stone. It is a love story, he tells her, it’s about love and extinction and class.

“They are too different, Evie. The lovers. Although of course in the end they will discover we are really all the same.”

As they walk, she can hear him fumble for the first line under his breath.

“In the poem,” he murmurs, “something to do with a Sunday. A night of sweet orange.”

He tells her that the study of fossils and artifacts is the closest one can come to speaking with the dead. She manages to fall behind him, following the winding ruts made by the buggy wheels. She walks carefully, painstakingly, controlling her steps, adhering to a tightrope vertical balance along the groove left in the sand. As she walks, she can feel the leak in her heart. She holds her breath and practices growing still, so she can navigate the dimensions of the tear.

One evening when they go out to walk, the sun sets twice. Her father ambles fifty yards ahead, and the fiery light chases him across the wet sand. Its redness spreads across the bowled chests of the plovers. They have donned their evening waistcoat colors, small white ties around their necks and black-tipped tails. Across the harbor channel, Eve can see clouds, one like a woman drowning. Her hair fans out, arms reaching toward the stepped roofs of Boathouse Row. Eve counts the space between each pair of vertebrae, each pair of ribs, and as she watches, the woman sheds out of herself in the drowning until she is only one long and thin red spine. When they reach the jetty at the end of the beach, they turn and begin to walk back. Eve says nothing to her father about the woman in the clouds, left behind them. Instead she remarks that the fog has begun to wash up around the summer village at the far end close to Gooseberry Neck, and it looks as if the houses are being eaten by the ghosts.

Charles stops. He prods one end of his walking stick at a dead horseshoe crab.

“A ghost town?” he asks. “Is that what you said, sweetheart?”

“No,” she answers, “not exactly that.”

“Right then.” He digs the stick under the shell and flips it to expose the rows of feet, motionless, underneath.

At the break in the dunes that leads onto the road home, Eve stops and looks back to the plovers shuttling on their legs, desperate, back and forth along the harder sand. She looks down the beach toward the billowing fog where a cluster of houses used to be. She can just make out the lights as the night fishermen head across the tidal flat onto the island.

When they return to Skirdagh, her father sets a fresh bowl of kerosene on his desk and locks himself into the study to write. Eve goes upstairs into her room. She draws out the camphorwood box from under her bed. She unwraps a bit of cheese and a roasted garlic clove. She kneads them together in her hands to make the color of a sallow bark. She takes some parsley garnish and minces it with her nails, and on her wall, by candlelight, she paints weather she has never seen: bushfires, monsoons and dry storms, furious cracks of thunder without rain. She draws wallabies and budgerigars and the gnarled shapes of the ghost-gum trees. She draws her mother the way she remembers her: blue eyes, the color of split zaffer, not quite anchored in her face. And as she paints, Eve nibbles on the stories that her mother Alice told her about the place she came from: stories of walkabout and dreaming lines laid down like rail tracks through the outback, the story of some magpies who lifted up the sky with sticks, the story of a dry lake by the Swan River that was rumored to be the slumbering heart of a speared kangaroo.

The colors sink into the textured blankness of the plaster walls and Eve imagines that she can hear slight voices, low whispers, harsh and winding, through the glib and liquid candlelight. When she is finished, she wipes her hands clean. She blows out the candle and goes to stand at the window. She lifts up the edges of the night and empties herself into the darkness until her mind goes still.

She lies on her bed and tries to hear the sound of her father writing—the scratch of his pen through the wall. She imagines she can feel the gaps in his thoughts, and through those fissures that lengthen as the night grows on, she begins to stalk more details of her mother’s life. There are facts she knows: that her mother came from a town where not even two roads crossed, between the Gibson Desert and the Great Sandy Desert, just outside the rainshadow and not a part of either one. Her father had worked a cattle farm and she grew up in slaughter. She walked two miles along a dust road to church service on Sundays and wore a white net around her face in fly season. She had an older brother who went out one year into their father’s fields and blew off his head with a shotgun.

In the bush, that kind of sound can rip a hole in space. Dry earth can’t tell water from blood. For years, we drank his stain out of the well
.

Eve lies on her bed and lets her body grow into a thin wood; legs taut, arms honed to long branches, barely touched. In the dark of Skirdagh, she unwraps herself into the endless hiss of insects through the screen. The heat grows thick around the house and the wind sluggish. She finds a particular solace in the moths; the translucence of their wings, the color of dead grass; how they paste themselves against the fine copper grid of the screen. Trying to get in. Trying to get out. Light-hungry. Splayed. Exposed.

She holds her life like grain in her arms.

Elizabeth

T
hey come to Skirdagh that Christmas—1917—Elizabeth’s son, Charles, and her granddaughter, Eve. The child has just turned eight, and Elizabeth marks a change in her—she has grown guarded, oddly skittish; slight cloud shadows play across her hands. She clings to small rituals—ties her boots carefully, slowly, matching each loop to an exact evenness with the rest of the lace. She applies the same peculiar intent to her drawings and her watercolors. She still seems to take pleasure in poetry and art, but her joy is more elusive, more restrained. Charles is alternately impatient with her and distraught. One evening, he confides in his mother that because he does not know what else to do, and because it is the expected route, he has enrolled Eve in a small girl’s school in Boston with low ceilings and labyrinthine halls, but her differentness has already begun to set her apart from the other girls her age.