Moon Tide (5 page)

H
e is not like Wes. He is not a hunter. He does not know how to shuck the weight out of his shadow until it is a thing noiseless and separate from himself. He does not move through the landscape with that same kinesthetic understanding of the rhythm of trees, boulder drift, the laws of camouflage. He cannot walk through the salt marsh without impact. He does not sense the shallows where fish hide. He cannot read storms in the gravel ballast that has been sliced out of the belly of a cod.

His brother, Wes, wears the woods like a skin. Wes knows how to slip across a meadow without bending light, how to dissolve into the shuffle of dry leaves. He can tell the weight of a rutting buck from the depth of the wound its antlers leave in a swamp maple. He can smell the oil in a mink pelt before there is a trace of scat. He can sliver a trout in one cut. The knife moves gently, as if the blade is water. He stalks coons with a single-shot twenty-two, a gun he has shaped by use. By the time Wes is fifteen, the gun is tame as a cherry stick in his hands.

Jake’s life is a map of the seasons. A map of his brother, working eels off the stern of the skiff.

In summer, they will go at night. Flat calm, no breeze. They leave from the bridge an hour before slack tide and head north, the lamp hitched to the stern, to light the shadows of the eels as they snake through the bottom mud.

Wes sets the boat on a dead drift and climbs onto the edge of the hull. Jake watches as his brother stands motionless, the balance of cunning, with the eel spear poised and so still, it might be an extension of his arm. Wes stalks the eels as they spook along the bottom. He waits until he sights a pack; then he hurls the spear down, pulls it up, and flicks them, writhing, onto the floor of the boat. “Pail them,” he says to his brother and, without turning, he thrusts the spear back down into the mud.

Jake gathers the eels into the tin bucket as Wes works them off the bottom until they are gone, until that ground on the flat is empty. Then Wes rows the skiff farther north upriver. The oars slip through his big hands.

Year-round, they jab eels. Even in dead winter, they work them, walking up the frozen channel toward Ship Rock. They rarely speak and there is no sound but the ice cracking under their feet.

Jake knows the shapes that ice can take. He knows that ice grows the way a man does, compressed under its own mass. When it is young, it is supple and translucent, barely skin on the river’s surface. It shapes itself between the wind and underwater. By January, the ice has thickened along the zone of salt marsh cordgrass. White at the river edge, it holds whorls of currents frozen the way a red oak holds memory in the layers of its bark. By midwinter, the deepest channel is eighteen inches thick, the surface ridged like wind-cut sand through flat planes in the dunes.

Midwinter ice can hold the blood of fish, a molted feather; it can hold their weight. Its underside has acquired a hardness that is not affected by the pulse of water moving three feet underneath. It will gather a density with shadows and once in a while trap a small animal in its freezing. He has dreamed himself into the migration corridors of shorebirds. Terns. Plovers. The snow geese that mate on ice meadows in the flooded basins of the Arctic, where they molt their whiteness all at once,
breed in a mass of shed feathers, feed and teach their young to fly. He has eaten the pages of the books he reads; passages about northern twilight where the moon does not set for days; where light deflects off sea ice and a breeze can tip layers of air to serrate the landscape into mountains, islands, where there is nothing but barren sky. He has dreamed himself into the belly of a whiteout because he wants to taste what it is to live with no shadow, no spatial depth, no horizon. He knows that ice can grow in years the way a man grows, a creature with blue rivers wrapped through its surface and a still heart. It can travel in packs or alone, shore-fast or wandering, with leads that split black like veins through a leaf.

And so he thinks as he walks, five yards behind his brother, Wes, up the frozen channel of the east branch of the Noquochoke River, the ice as alive to him as the barrier dunes that transgress each year, their sea edges torn into abrupt cliffs by the winter moon storms, their backsides sloped. Wind-smooth. Female.

Wes stops suddenly, thirty yards before Ship Rock.

“Here,” he says, marking the ice with the spear. “They’re here.” Even through a four-foot freeze, he can smell the eels. In the winter, they drift, dull and familial, braided into one another through the soft bottom mud. Wes marks a circle of a dozen spots on the ice around the eel ground, and they chop the holes, working clockwise and counterclockwise until they meet. Then Jake waits, crouched in the middle of the circle with the axes and the tin pail, while his brother spears the eels through the wounds they have made in the ice. He draws up two at a time on the flangs, sometimes three, and heaves them out onto the white ground. Jake watches them as they writhe, not made for hard surfaces. Their blood streaks the ice. Later, he knows, his father will toss the eels into a bucket of wood ash to remove the slime. They will be split, cleaned, and fried, and his mother will serve them with a plate of thick corn johnnycakes. The four of them will sit at the kitchen table as the half-light from the woodstove hacks red shadows through their faces. They will eat without words.

As Jake coils the eels into the tin pail, he runs his hand along their
length. He touches the places they have been. The sargassum swamp they were born in, slow channels of seaweed and heat, the thousand-mile trek north they made when they were still young. He takes in the journey through the slime they leave on his hands.

This, Jake knows, is his life. This extended twilight of a water snake in his hands. Year after year, he will circle back to this freezing, this moment on the river, with Wes, a dim and luminous scar, moving up ahead.

Maggie

S
ix days out of every week, Maggie works for Elizabeth up at the big house. On Sundays, she leaves the root cellar at dawn and goes to visit Ben Soule. She crosses the bridge and walks south down the oiled dirt road toward East Beach. The fog moves inside her like pale fish nudging up against her lungs.

As she walks, her thoughts drift back to Skirdagh. It is 1918, summer again, and they have come for their six weeks—Elizabeth’s son, Charles, and his daughter, Eve. Each year they arrive in June amid a flurry of trunks in the new Model T. Maggie watches them, with that lean and at times ruthless curiosity that is her nature. She has seen how Charles burrows into his study, his papers and books—he emerges at mealtimes with blustery eyes and disheveled hair. She has seen the child stealing food. She has said nothing about it to Elizabeth, but on the evenings when Charles takes Eve to walk on the beach, Maggie goes into the girl’s room. She marks the small piles of tart and cherry pits, a slice of molded cheese wrapped in the lavender curtains. Over the course of a week, she tracks how the piles change, how some grow into larger cairns while others shrink. She finds the oldest stuff in the camphorwood box under the bed. The child has lined the lid with a rag soaked in iodine to cut the smell.

Maggie continues walking through the summer village of East
Beach, past the fishermen’s shacks and the dank heaps of sea muck, past the summer homes with their wide green lawns that line the road. Across the let, she can see Ben Soule shoveling huge clumps of red weed he has raked off the beach into his wheelbarrow. He is thin, his bark stripped from him like a girdled tree. The white tangled beard has grown halfway down his chest and stopped, refusing to grow farther.

Maggie waits for the old man as he drags the wheelbarrow back up the knoll and empties it out into his garden. He turns over the sea muck and mixes it into the sand. She knows that he will grow carrots out of this compost that are straight and long and sweet. He will grow huge smooth potatoes that sprout like the skulls of men out of the sand.

Maggie buys her hens from Ben, and he tells her that the sky is a table and when the clouds pass low over the earth, they are hungry and will take a woman in her sleep. He keeps a flock of Rhode Island Reds in a pen next to the cold cellar where barrels of salted venison and codfish stand shoulder to shoulder in the cool dark. On the south side of the house is the garden, and next to that a second pen, with a huge black- and green-feathered rooster. The rooster is solitary, proud, its red comb greased by the sun. It struts in measured circles around the inner perimeter of its wire mesh pen.

When Maggie comes on Sundays, the old man breaks from his work. They sit together on the doorstone and he scrimps black lines into a whale’s tooth with a sewing needle and a small bottle of india ink. He tells her that when he was a boy, his father hired him out for two pennies an hour. He rode horse, dug potatoes, cut ice. He tells her that the soul is a thin bone in the shape of a maple leaf and it can leave the body through the mouth in sleep years before the body dies.

Maggie watches the fierce circles of the rooster in its pen. She listens as the light bends down across the water and the old man tells his stories about hunting elk in the white hills of New Hampshire, about hawking his way down the Appalachian Range. Maggie listens for the cracks in what he tells her, for what he hides in the stories. She wraps her long arms around what is unsaid and watches the sewing needle
nick the white surface of the whalebone. The needle has grafted itself to his fingers from years of the art. His body holds the smell of the red weed, this man who was a riverbed once.

He tells her that his life has been a continual letting go. An over and over turning to realize that there is still something he is holding, some expectation, some preconception, some desire. Over and over, he says, he must learn to pry his fingers away from whatever it is, to let the thing go and be free. He tells her that sometimes his heart is as sieved as a dragonfly’s wings and all he can do is pick up the cries he has heard and keep walking.

It is something about her, he says, that squeezes these things out of him.

Maggie says nothing. She looks past him, a hundred yards across the let. She can barely see the break in the marsh where the maze begins in its gentle switchback curves through the tall grass where Ben Soule’s wife was found, drowned, with a bag of cobble she had roped twice around her own feet.

Maggie comes to see the old man every Sunday. As he works the whalebone, they sit together and smoke corn silk she has rolled in burning paper. The sun grooves a straight and tethered path across the sky. The light flays the surface of the let and the distant mass of Cuttyhunk rises like a knuckled fist out of Buzzards Bay.

Maggie rests her head on her knees and listens to the soft tick of the sewing needle on the bone. She takes small drops of the ink onto her fingers. The blackness coils in the creases of her skin. Her head light with corn ash, she lies down near the doorstone in a small patch of switchgrass, the smell of red clover close to her ear. She watches how bees crawl around on the flower and dip their back legs in, coating them with pollen dust. She turns over and looks up. The grass bends into a rush shelter above her and she traces the roots of the clouds in the sky.

On Thursday nights, when Blackwood’s wife has gone to the Deaconess Bandage Rolling Circle at the Methodist church, Maggie
climbs the narrow back stairwell to the room above the store. She finds Blackwood with his account ledger sprawled across the desk in the small yellow-lit room, an oil lamp on the floor and the curtains drawn.

As their bodies twist under the sheet, he tells her that he remembers everything about the night he almost drowned. He says it is nothing like green gardens. It is not a gentle sinking of the body, a tender underwater light. It is not a slow loss of sound. It is a thrashing, a hurtling of limbs. He tells her that he remembers how the surf pounded him deep under the surface, and when he gave himself up at last to the sinking, it was that same surf that coughed him up again. The air tore in bullets through his lungs. He tells her how the oar struck the side of his head and he heaved himself across it. He wrapped it between his shoulders and his neck, and he floated that way, crucified, across the mountains of the waves.

Water is black, he says. The blue skin of the ocean is a lie. It is a void, a devil, a sin. He takes her arm and bends it gently backward at the wrist. He puts his mouth against the inside of her palm.

Maggie has heard the stories of other men in the town who have tasted their own death: Spud Mason’s cousin Jewel, whose neck was neatly severed under the front wheel of the trolley at Lincoln Park; Asa Howland, hit squarely in the chest by a six-inch ball of hail; Ezekiel Tripp, who scratched his leg tripping over a fence and thought nothing of it until he woke up a week later with a Paraguay-shaped strip of gangrene along the inside of his thigh.

It is the death stories that she looks for. She knows that a man who has traded with his own death loves differently than other men.

Blackwood lies back against the pillow, his dark face settling into the down. Maggie puts her cheek against his chest, and she can smell the cancer that has begun to spot his throat—the smell of ripened cantaloupe, the smell of ash.