The Shore (8 page)

After her first try and the resulting whirlwind in the raspberry patch, Grandpa had gotten Sally to practice whenever they had a chance, to reach out and tug at the wind, drag out the tide, pull rain down from the sky in little patches, just to see what she could do. Most times she had pulled too hard, drowned her mother's tomato patch or blown the chickens all across the yard, but he'd never seemed disappointed or frustrated with her.

After Mitch's broken foot had healed, Sally had triumphantly shown him how she could raise a wind; he'd tried to outdo her and sent one of the hens straight through the toolshed window. Crying, he had brought what remained of the chicken to Grandpa and, after the funeral, lessons had involved both of them. They had always spent a lot of time together, just the three of them, but after that Mitch spent more time at Grandpa's heels and less time sitting in the corner by the oven under maternal instruction to think about what he'd done wrong this time. Perhaps it was because, after the parachute incident, he was wary of taking Pierce's advice on any matter.

They'd raised baby whirlwinds, and made pillow-sized rain clouds, but nothing big, nothing serious. Grandpa had made it plain from the start that playing small was a good thing, and would give them practice, but anything bigger than their pocket storms would throw the entire Shore out of whack. If you were going to mess with the weather, you had to be able to control it, keep an eye on it at all times, calm it down or rile it up as people needed, not just pull and tug when you felt like it and forget about it the rest of the time.

They go to see him again the next day; the drawing pad is still on the bedside table. He's staring out the window, and doesn't move when they come in. The machines beep quietly, regularly, like breath. Sally goes up and touches his arm—his skin is cold—and he turns his head toward her. His eyes are unfocused, searching, but after a few moments they lock on her, and he smiles. It's a dialysis day: he's always worse on dialysis days.

“Hey, little bit,” he says.

“How you feeling?” she asks.

“I been better.”

Mitch pulls out the pack of cards, but Grandpa shakes his head.

“I was thinking,” he begins, “about when your mother was a little girl.” His breath is a wheeze, and comes in bursts. “I tried to teach her, I really did. But she didn't want anything to do with the wind and the rain and the snow. She was like your grandmother, always with her hands in the dirt.”

They think there is a point to this story, but they aren't certain what it is. So they pull the stiff-backed chairs up to his bed, and tell his own stories back to him all afternoon.

He has always told them stories. Family stories, about his childhood and their mother's childhood and how they all came to be, and more private, half-mythic stories that they know instinctively are not to be shared; people knew vaguely what they could do, but it didn't help anyone to strew reminders about.

The story of his grandmother Medora was of both types,
and they did not know how much of it was strictly true. She was a come-here, he said, and a wise woman, the mixed-race daughter of a Shawnee Indian and a white landowner, who knew native herbs as well as she knew medicine. They got their gift not from her, but from her second husband Thomas, who passed it down to his son Michael, who Mitch was named after, and Michael's son who was their Grandpa Tom.

Her first husband built with her inheritance the house in which they still lived, with its broad, sagging porch and thick peeling pillars, but he despised her for the color of her skin and soon took up with another woman. She avenged herself—she hadn't killed her husband, but their grandfather always skipped over the details of that part, saying they were too grisly—and then ran out to the marshes to take her own life. Instead of dying, she was found by the first Thomas Lumsden, who had a European father but a native mother. This man, who could heal the ground and the sky the way she could heal the body, fell in love with her and hid her in the trackless marsh.

The poor knew where to find them when cures or rain were needed, and she stayed hidden from the rest, biding her time. Before Michael was born her first husband's history caught up with him: a wanted confidence man, he was traced to his grand house and arrested in the middle of the night. She had come out of hiding then, and since she could prove that all of their estate was in truth her inheritance, to which he had no claim, her husband's creditors could not touch it to cover his debts. Her revenge never came to light, Grandpa said most likely because the man was too ashamed of what she'd done to him to make it generally known.

They still live in her house, still keep the dark wood of her
medicine chest oiled, but even though they have these tangible reminders of her she has a mythic quality in their eyes. They cannot trace their lineage any farther back; Thomas had been part of a vast but loose tribe, his wife had come to the island with no familial ties. Perhaps, once before, their cousins would have also inherited the gift, would have shared out the duty. Now they are the only ones left.

There's a dry wind blowing the next day, some cooler than it has been all summer. Sally scuffs her feet in the dirt on the edge of the turtleback road. A call has just come through from the rest home: her grandfather is in a coma. Mitch went straight to his room when he heard, Mom went to the home, no one else was around. The greenheads are swarming; she isn't sure why she went for a walk.

She remembers something that happened, when she was eight perhaps. Grandpa had a little cottage of his own, and she would sit on the countertop in the morning and watch the coffee to keep it from boiling over while he did other things. She remembers the sharp smell of the coffee, and the rising foam of bubbles around the edges of the pot, and her grandfather's voice in the background. He was on the phone, walking up and down across the kitchen, stretching out the spiraling cord like she and Mitch would stretch their slinky between them. His voice was strained, tight.

“I really am sorry, Vince, but I can't do anything about it. There is no water up there—the sky is bone dry clear out to the mainland. I know your irrigation pond is empty, mine is too, but I can't do anything about it right now.” The voice on
the other end bled through, and he stopped his pacing to bend against his hand, as though his back were hurting him, and listen. The voice was harsh, angry, almost panicked, and Sally thinks it may have been the first time she ever heard a grown man sound truly afraid.

As he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, she reached up into the sky, felt around a bit, and found that what he'd said was mostly true—there wasn't enough water in the air for a storm. Curious, she reached out farther, and bumped the coffee saucepan. Her hands jerked to the handle to keep it upright before she realized that she'd only bumped it in her head: the part of her that felt the wind had found the water in the coffee. It had begun to steam gently, and she dipped her mind into it. Her grandfather had his back to her, so she poked at it some more, bullied the coffee until it began to climb reluctantly into the air, forming a soft cloud like a ball of molasses candy over the pot. Her grandfather mumbled apologies into the phone, hung it up, and turned around to see a tiny brown rain shower falling neatly into the saucepan from two feet up, Sally smiling guiltily.

“And what do you think you're doing, missy?” he'd asked.

“If you can put the water in the sky, why does it matter that there's none there now?” she'd asked. The cloud had sprayed a fine mist of brown on her nightshirt sleeve, and she began to suck the sweet stain out.

“I wish it was that simple, little bit, that I could just give them rain whenever they thought they needed it. Reach farther.”

She did, stretching her mind until it ran thin as watercolor paint, until it bumped against a massing, angry wetness far out to sea.

“Feel that? That's coming in a day or two, and none of them know it yet. I'm not going to be able to stop it, but I can calm it down and spread it out enough so that it'll be more good than harm, if the ground isn't waterlogged when it gets here. We have to give people what they need, not what they think they need.”

Sally remembers this now, and she thinks that she understands.

She thinks about the moment the day before, when he looked at her and his eyes focused. When he said her name. Then she turns her thoughts upward, into the heavily laden air. Moisture. Cloud, even: mare's-tails. She remembers a phrase from grade school, and stretches out across the bay, to the city where her grandfather once drank away the memory of rain. Condensation nuclei. And there it is: auto exhaust and smoke and coal dust, hanging lightly in the air. She finds a breeze, gives it a twist, and pulls the particles across the bay like teasing knots out of her sister Lilly's hair. It is a gradual process, and her pace slows as she waits. The ambient moisture begins to bead and grow heavy, a million pregnant bellies. Then, she brings it down.

The first drop she catches on her tongue, and then the million others plummet after. Suddenly the wind is whipping by like the gale she raised when she was seven years old, and the raindrops are falling like hailstones, stinging her face. She breathes deeply. It smells like her grandfather.

1876

O
UT OF
E
DEN

I
t was June, and the air in her father's house in Franklin County, Kentucky, was thick with unfallen rain, had a physicality to it that made breathing difficult. It was the sort of day for which porch sitting had been made, but her father had dragged Medora up to her room by the hair just after breakfast—she'd managed to say something, or do something, or not do something, that riled him. At eighteen the dragging was quite undignified, but preferable to the other physical manners in which he sometimes expressed his temper.

Her room was more pleasant than his company, in any circumstance.

When it had become clear that he wouldn't be coming back to let her out for a good while she had stripped nearly naked, skinning off dress, shoes, stockings, and layers and layers of petticoat until all that was left was her thin muslin chemise, so that she felt peeled and, if not new, at least not so hot. She'd displaced her masses of curling green potted plants, morning glory and English ivy, columbine, aloe, clematis, and the trailing philodendron that threatened to pull the curtains down, so that she could roost on the broad windowsill. The anemic breeze
served only to make her chemise stick to her gleaming skin, but one of her grandfather's books was open across her legs, with more stacked from the floor to her hip yet untouched. She spent an inordinate amount of time in this room, in this manner; she often thought that her father might as well brick her up like a nun, for all the time she was given the run of the place; at least then they'd keep from touching off one another's tempers.

The sound of an unfamiliar voice outside made her look up, twitch the edge of the curtain aside just enough to let her see without being seen.

He was a tall young man, younger than most of the men that came to see her father on business, and dressed more expensively as well, in city clothes with the stiff and shine of newness still in them. Her father walked beside him, leading his stallion Mercury with ease and comfort in his shoulders, even though he had to be stifling in the double-breasted waistcoat and jacket that he wore. Watching her father and Mercury together made Medora think of old couples walking hand in hand; Andrew Day simply looked like a man leading a horse he wasn't too sure about. They stopped a few feet off from the porch, where she could still see them, and her father rested a hand on Mercury's cheek while they talked. There was a tentativeness to Andrew's movements, a flutter in his too-big hands, made all the more pronounced by its contrast to her father's deliberate gestures. He was clearly there about the tobacco, rather than about the horses.

Afterward she thought that in that moment she should have felt something, or her heart should have jumped, or some organ should have given a flutter, the way the hearts and organs of young women in books always did. Or maybe not. It wasn't love, just opportunity, she felt that afternoon; the sight of him as
he led his gelding up toward the house had simply set her mind to turning. When he stepped up onto the porch and passed out of sight she held still for a moment, staring into the middle distance, then turned back to the
Medicinal Herbal
and continued reading about the uses of
A. vulparia.

That he was the means by which she would escape her father's house she concluded over the next few hours of reading, though she had not yet determined how. She wouldn't embarrass herself by trying to seduce him; the idea was inherently ridiculous. Matters of birth aside, she was not the type gifted in the tools of seduction. Her coarse black hair was shot heavily and prematurely with silver, and fought its way out of any arrangement. The years of contention with her father had set her face in a sullen grimace, which even concentration and a mirror couldn't fully remove. She stooped, she squinted, she stepped heavily. Her bones were large and solid, and when she bothered to winch herself into company-worthy clothes she looked even more ridiculous, more manly, for the juxtaposition between her coarse darkness and the lightness of fine silk. Her shoulders, hands, and face were broad, her skin a shade or seven too brown. She'd known from childhood that the usual feminine methods would not work for her, long before Calley, her father's housekeeper and the woman who had mothered her into adulthood, had begun to tell her that she'd have to make her way by her wits rather than by her caboose. He was a man, but a businessman: they would have to negotiate.

Her dinner was brought up to her that night. She could not tell, and didn't care especially, if it was because she was still in disgrace or her father didn't want his half-breed bastard at the table with a new business associate. Women, ministers,
local families, none of them visited anymore, though Medora vaguely recollected small, golden-haired children rolling with her younger self on the parlor rug while a mushroomy man in a clerical collar and his reedy wife sat nervously on the horsehair sofa. Her father was no respecter of persons when it came to exercising his temper, and only men about the horses, or men about the tobacco, or men looking to buy or sell or sit on the long open porch in the evening air sipping bourbon until the heavy moon hung low over the horizon came round anymore. This did not bother Medora. She spent the majority of their visits locked in her room, its plain paper beginning to peel, the bedstead and two of the windowpanes cracked, plants in chipped pots and teacups and jugs slowly massing and reaching toward the window, her handful of childhood toys put up on shelves above the empty fireplace and their place on floor and bedside table taken by drifts of books gradually migrated from her grandfather's study. It lacked the dusty sumptuousness, bordering on excess, of the rest of the house, but it was her space.

Medora's parents had never married. Her mother had been one of the few remaining Shawnee, who wore dresses and pinned up her dark hair like a white woman, mended clothes and worked the fields, kept her eyes on the ground. That's what Calley had told her. Medora herself remembered little: still, dark eyes watching her through the kitchen window, a seamed hand reaching out for her own, feeling of “mother” like a pile of warm down quilts. The smell of the pipe that she smoked while sitting opposite the kitchen door, back braced against the
chopping block where Calley beheaded chickens, waiting for Medora to come out to her.

Her father frequently entertained himself with female hands, but they had all been careful or had men of their own, so until Medora came along there had never been issue. Her mother had no husband, no family, did not cover up her condition, named him openly as the father, and from Medora's birth he held a grudge against them both. Her mother worked her father's fields with Medora tied to her back at first, but when the girl had grown enough to totter barefoot up and down the rows of tobacco he had sent one of his overseers to bring her into the house. He had expected her mother to give her up with little argument; she'd bitten the overseer's arm bloody, and two of the hands had carried her away and locked her in a curing barn to keep the man from shooting her like a mad dog.

It was not usual for a gentleman to claim his bastards, but her father had ceased to abide by the dictates of “usual” years before, and he could think of nothing that would hurt the woman more than laying claim to their child. Medora had been handed over to Calley, who had not yet graduated to housekeeper but was undisputed mistress of the kitchen, with instructions to keep her quiet, out of his sight, and away from her mother. Calley had taken charge of the toddler without comment, made sure she was kept clean and fed and happy—and assiduously turned her back when the Shawnee woman appeared at the kitchen door.

Medora was five the first time that her father found them, herself and her mother, sitting together on the kitchen stoop. Calley had gone down to the root cellar just moments before, which saved her from dismissal. The sound of his raised voice brought her back at speed; she tucked Medora's face under her
apron and held her still there as he shouted, threatening to have the Shawnee woman arrested if she came near the house again. Medora didn't see her father throw her mother into the kitchen yard, but she heard it, heard the impact of her mother's body against the ground and the air leaving her lungs in a rush. She had tried to fight her way free, but Calley held her tighter; a moment later she was glad of this as her father then directed his venom at them, cursed Calley's incompetence and threatened to have her arrested as well if it proved that she'd been abetting covert meetings. Only when he had gone back in the house was she allowed out from under the apron; it was the first time she had ever seen tears in Calley's eyes.

The visits did not cease, but they became shorter, more clandestine, only occurred when Calley was out of the kitchen completely. They were not caught again until one late winter night when Medora was perhaps seven. They had been sitting by the fire, wound in each other's arms, and her father came unexpected into the room; when she was older Medora looked back and guessed that someone must have told him that he would find them together. This time Calley was too far to hear, and so no one kept the child from watching, from hearing, as crockery shattered and furniture cracked. Even so, Medora's memory of that night was blurred, except for the moment, sharp as glass, of looking through the kitchen window into the night and seeing the vague lump of her mother's body, crumpled on the frosted ground. That was the last time Medora saw her.

Calley had not been dismissed as he had previously threatened, but he had taken Medora out of the kitchen and brought her into the house, to be tortured into the form of a Southern lady much in the way a French gardener would shape a box
hedge. She should have been married off as soon as she was old enough, to one of her father's overseers or some man of similar station. She should have been sent to foster with a family, perhaps one of his cousins, where she would have had the benefit of a mother. He should never have brought her into his kitchen, certainly not into his parlor. She often wished, after he had decided to take notice of her and make her into his idea of a lady, that he had left her in the kitchen, pretended that she was Calley's daughter. She did not understand why he bothered with her, whether it was out of stubbornness, out of the same perversity of nature that had made him take her from her mother in the first place, or if he did indeed feel some affection, some responsibility for her, if he were perhaps doing by her as best as he knew how.

Her upbringing came in stops and starts, and frequently she was sent back to the kitchen and out of her father's sight, where she had cheerfully helped in whatever way she could and hoped that he would forget about her. Those banishments were the happiest parts of her childhood; she had helped Calley can and jar and absorbed the woman's knowledge of herbs and natural medicine seemingly by osmosis.

But eventually her father's temper abated, no matter how severe the cause had been, and she was always called back into the house to sit stiffly, behave properly, and sneak off to occupy the tedious hours surreptitiously in her grandfather's medical library.

Medora was let out of her room before breakfast the next morning, and contrived to have a chance encounter with the stranger
on the back porch while her father was mixing his pre-breakfast julep in the dining room. Maybe she should have simpered, preened, looked coyly over her shoulder and said something poetic about the dew on the narcissus. Instead she walked up to him and candidly stuck out her hand and introduced herself. He was taller and broader than she'd realized from the upper window, but still too thin in the beard and around the middle to be many years past twenty.

His handshake was weak, and though he managed to tell her his name without hesitation—Andrew Robinson Day, Andrew after his father and Robinson after his mother's most beloved fictional character, an introduction she found a little excessive—his brief fumbling for polite small talk gave her physical pain.

“It is…I should say…very pleasant…a very pleasant morning for—I suppose you would ride, you do ride, that is…yes?”

“I do enjoy a turn about from time to time. It is a wonderful way to get some air, I find. Are you yourself quite fond of horses?”

His answer was lengthy but amounted to “no”; she let him fumble through a comment on the weather, the hospitality of her father, and the becomingness of her dress before losing her patience and making her proposition.

“If I may be forthright, Mr. Day, I do believe that you and I may be of some use to each other. If you would be so good as to ask me riding this afternoon, we will be assured of privacy and have the chance to discuss further—my father tends to nap just after dinner.” She went back inside before he could respond, and remained demurely quiet through breakfast, carefully keeping
her eyes down. He walked out with her father after the meal on his habitual review of the property and, sensing opportunity, she slipped up to the guest bedroom that the young man was occupying to undertake her own review.

There was nothing of interest in the pockets of the clothing that he had recently worn, and nothing but the usual necessities in his valise, but his document case—cordovan leather, gently scuffed at the corners, well made but with a flimsy lock—proved interesting. She didn't dare lay out the entire contents, for fear of getting caught by Maisie, the upstairs maid, when she came to neaten up the room, but she did flick through the papers and booklets, pulling a piece out now and again to read it fully before sliding it back and moving on. She left the room with plenty of time to spare, and as close to the way she had found it as possible, overly anxious about being caught; she didn't care what the repercussions might be if she was found snooping, but if her father became party to what she had found in the case then she would lose what leverage she had.