Moon Tide (32 page)

Lazy old woman, she thinks, but she lingers for a moment in the doorway to be sure, watching for a sign of movement, a sign of breath, when she notices, suddenly, the book of lists is not on the night table. She crosses the room and strips the red chenille from the bed. The pillow faces glare up at her. Plucked. Expressionless.

The window is coated with leaves and rain. She hoists it up. The wind tears through and she scans the yard, the woods, the lower meadow, the empty wagon trail that leads down to the river. There—on the small dock at the end of Cape Bial, Maggie sees her. Elizabeth. A small precarious figure, the hunched back, walking barefoot toward the end of the pier. Her arms are open, not raised up, not yet, but turned slightly forward from the shoulders as if she might try to catch the storm in the palm of her hand.

Millie Tripp

M
illie Tripp refused to leave the post office when they came for her in the police truck. She could see the Sawyers, the Lynches, Tim McIleer, his son, Ralph, and Martha Dwyer, huddled in the back. They sat in rows inside that truck, stripped of their belongings like dogs on their way to the pound.

“No thank you, Danny,” she says to the young officer. She has known him since he was a wick in his mother’s belly. “I’s here in the storm of ’thirty-three, and the storm of ’twenty-four, I’s stay here now.” With a damp flick of her hand, she waves them on. Two years plus eighty, she has seen it all. She has heard the wind screech like a pack of wolves and shake the windows like the banshee. She has seen shingles borne off houses spin like mad hatter blades through the air. On a blustery day in 1917, she saw a pair of toads rain down in a hailstone. They fell on the road just outside the post office. The ice cracked apart, and those two toads just picked themselves up and hopped away, the smaller one, a little stunned, dragging his left foot behind him.

For sixty-four years, she has been postmistress. She has sorted letters of love and death. Letters that altered lives. She sleeps on the second floor above the mail room and keeps her own hours. Over the years she has become adept at slicing through a seal, and if the knife
won’t do, she will hold the envelope over a flame until it unfastens. She reads the contents, then repastes it closed again. She’ll watch for the addressee the following day, guardian of his secret until he arrives to claim it. She is one of the ladies of the thread—the three crones who spin and measure and cut. She knows a man’s fate before it strikes him.

She watches the police wagon heading off down East Beach Road. It stops at every house, pavilion, store. She sees Mr. Burnam carried out on a stretcher, his wife and that sausage-shaped dog nicking at her slipper heels. When the truck passes behind several rooftops, Millie climbs to the second floor and watches from the upper window as it continues on its fitful stops and starts down the road—bracing itself into the driving wind and spray.

And that’s when she sees Ben Soule walk out of his house up on the knoll, dragging some sort of immense dead bird after him. Crazy old gnat. Her family had been in a long-standing feud with his ever since the manure from his father’s herd ran down the hill on the runoff and formed a slop pool of shit and milky waste in the rows of Hubbard squash and cucumber in her father’s vegetable garden.

Millie watches as Ben sets a ladder against the side of his house. The wind knocks it down. He picks it up and sets it again, deeper in the relative shelter of the north wall. He grinds the ladder’s stubby legs into the mud and begins to climb, hauling that tremendous limp bird after him. He nearly falls when he reaches the highest rung. The ladder sways like a living thing under his feet. He grasps for the base of the chimney with one arm and pulls himself up onto the lee pitch of the roof. He flattens down as a gust splits open the sky. The largest weeping cherry in front of the stone house is forked in two. A black smoldering mass in the heart of it.

Israel Mason

H
alfway out, the calf shakes its head from left to right, the wet and bloodied face, a white dash on its forehead, the mouth gulping air as the front hooves paw to get free of their hole, then sink back in again. Spud Mason’s son, Israel, had brought the cow in from the field that morning when the weather got strange and locked her in the stanchion. He knew the change in pressure could bring on her labor, and sure enough, less than two hours had passed when he heard her first cry—a deep and low-pitched groan that reached him in the stable next door.

As he pulls at the front hooves of the calf jutting from the cow, the wind tears the barn door loose off two of its three hinges, and the panel flaps against the frame. He sets it closed again with a heavy spade and an iron weight.

The calf is too big. He pulls again on the forelegs. The cow’s belly contracts, and he can feel the back legs kick against her insides. She moans.

He takes a coil of rope hung over the lantern nail and ties it around the front hooves of the calf. The wind bears down on the door—a hideous roar—the iron scrapes against the floor, and the last hinge snaps. The door rips from the frame and sets off like a feather to wild flight across the field. The rain surges through the gap, drenching
Mason and the laboring cow. Her head twists hard against the stanchion as he pulls. She bellows.

Mason tightens the rope and begins to walk slowly away from her toward the open door and the gray slash of the rain. His face is soaked, he can barely see, but he will have this calf, he will have it. He pushes his way across the rain-sodden straw toward the empty frame of the door and the heaving squall of the wind that drives against him.

He feels the calf fall, the shake of the ground under his feet. The rope drops slack and free. He slips forward and lands on his hands and knees. Mud splashes up across his face. Warm. Silty. And he lies down in the smell—it is everything he loves—his cheek to the ground as the warm rain pours in sheets over him.

Vera Marsh

V
era Marsh’s twins arrive home from school with their metal lunch boxes and tall stories of the bus ride home: dodging branches and downed wires, roofs stripped off chicken sheds and sailing toward the woods.

“Nonsense,” she says, “it’s not so bad a storm,” and she pushes them firmly inside.

Her husband, Elton, has gone back into the shed, and her oldest, Albert, is still on the swings. Fifteen years old minus a good three-quarters of his brain, he has the mind and the joy of a two-year-old. His thick legs push up into the air. He is laughing, delirious, as the wind lifts him one way and then another.

“Fly!” he cries out. “Fly!” The big box elder west of the pergola quivers like a reed. Vera’s youngest, Abigail, has not let go of her skirt, and she is whimpering now for a Little House story.

“Fly, Mama, fly!” Albert cries out again. The same current of wind that carries his voice breaks one of the porch awnings loose. Abigail claws at her mother’s dress, climbing her leg, monkeylike. Vera peels the child off and shuts her in the house. She begins to wade across the lawn toward the swing where Albert is pumping his knickered legs as the wind bears him up and his weight takes him down.

Leaves paste themselves to her bare shins. Elton comes out of the shed with a wheelbarrow load of his tin cans. Vera screams after him to help her. Her voice spends itself within several yards and ricochets back. He waves at her, and begins to push the wheelbarrow toward the house.

Vera reaches the swing set. With one hand gripped around the pole to keep her balance, she grasps for the chain as Albert swings by her. She misses. Her knuckles bang the metal seat, and her son’s legs knock out to the side, wild, his shoe barely missing her cheek. She falls back into the mud, then struggles up and waits for him to swing by her again, but as he reaches the top of the arc, he lets go of the swing and sails off. His thick body meets the wind and drops gently, beautifully, to the ground. He lands on his feet and glances back at his mother on her knees. His face is twisted, the way it was when she saw him for the first time—just out of her, the tiny squished body covered with blood and that grotesque look on the face, eyes gasping from the pressure of the blue cord wrapped twice around his neck, and she knew, even before they told her, that something was just so wrong.

Albert runs off in the direction of the house, where his father is unloading the wheelbarrow full of cans through the open cellar door.

Muddied and bruised, her hand scraped, Vera pulls herself back across the yard. The wind catches under her apron and it flaps up, wrapping her face like a shroud. She pushes it down, her eyes full of tears. She crunches her head against the brunt of the wind.

Patrick

P
atrick leaves the city at seventeen minutes past three. Second Street, south of Pleasant, is blocked by a toppled roof, and he turns up Fourth, bears onto Spring, then back onto Second. He heads toward Rhode Island Way. By the time he has turned onto Main Road, trees have begun to topple like long rows of dominoes. Torn leaves fill the sky.

The house is empty except for Charles, who has bunkered himself into his study: the door locked. There is no sign of Eve, and Patrick gets back into the car and pulls out of the driveway. Across from the old hotel, he sees Vera and Elton Marsh in front of their house, struggling to board up the downstairs parlor windows. Patrick pulls off the street and steps out of the car.

“My wife,” he shouts. “Have you seen my wife?” But the wind shreds his voice. A gust snaps the glasses off his face, cracking the right lens. The hook wrenches hard around his ear. He begins to cross the yard toward Vera and Elton. Each of them grips one end of the batter-board as they try to raise it to the window. Their voices come to him downwind.

“Keep your end still, Vera!” Elton is shouting. “Keep your end still!” The wind catches under the plank, and the wood thrashes up. They drag left and then right, back and forth under the window in a
clumsy dance with the wavering board between them. They do not notice Patrick. When he is less than ten feet away, he cups his hand around his mouth to ask about his wife, to ask if they have seen her, but before he speaks, Vera turns and sees him. Guilt wrinkles her face.