Moon Tide (18 page)

“No,” he says slowly, shaking his head. “I have never thought that.”

He puts the plate of shellfish on a small folding table that he places next to Elizabeth’s chair, and then he slips away, as they have all slipped, or was it the other way around? Perhaps all this time, she is the one who has been slipping, reaching for them as she goes, her feet sliding out from under her, they pass on the current just beyond her reach.

She looks down at Eve standing on the pier. The guests are flowing down the hill toward the river and the tables set out on the flat. Jake and the younger Mason boy have laid a wooden plank across the shallows and the guests filter across it—laughing, white dresses, sun umbrellas to cup, reflect and block that silver light—a woman slips, and
Jake catches her arm. He guides her the rest of the way across. He is up to his knees in the river.

A fragile island. They would cross on the low-tide spit.

Clouds, Elizabeth told Maggie once, are not secular at all. They are moving toward her now. They rise up out of the land across the river like mountains, tremendous solid peaks rising through the fog. She counts them—four, five, six, all Twelve Bens—she can see them out beyond her. They have always been beyond her. Solid, heavy-massed and rooted things—and just there—between Split Rock and the marsh, she can barely glimpse—as fine as gray thread—a line of black tar curraghs making their way slowly across the bay headed south toward Galway and the colonies of puffins nesting in the rock shelves of the cliffs.

She has seen it. The gardens and the fields, the houses on the moors, a pot of thyme, coals with the orange smolder beckoning inside. She has seen the world soaked with light. She has sat in the midst of it—a wrenching light that straggles through the grass and bathes the snow. She has watched it in every season, on the river and on her bedroom walls. She has seen it sink and rise and stretch and breathe. She has called it God.

The river is a mirror now. A cruel reflective glass, and Elizabeth wants to cry out to her—to that young girl standing on the dock. She wants to tell her what she knows about unused dreams. But her body is stiff. It has grown into the shellacked weave of the chair. She wants to stand up. To fly down the hill toward the grief of the Owenglen. She wants to draw the sky behind her the way she did once, her arms spread until they were long and full enough to catch the wind—they are all around her now—she knows—the dead—they are as common as grass. She stands up—there is another burst of air in her chest—brighter this time—sudden—the river flooding toward her up the hill and, as she falls, the sky breaks down around her.

She quiets herself—rain on her face—they are running now, the crowd of them running by her. The thunder shakes the deep inside of
the ground. Her fingers clutch through the blades of grass for the nubby texture of the heath and sweet rank smell of burning sod.

Maggie’s face bends down out of the sky toward her, and Elizabeth is lifted. She lies back into their arms, her chin settling into the blanket tucked around her face. She turns her head slowly, and she can hear it still—the thunder rolling—the sound of wild hooves past the curved edge of the land that she can see.

Jake

H
e has memorized twenty from the newest volume. He has studied them at night, lying on the dock with a lantern. He recites them now under his breath as he works, head down, bucketing the clams and dumping the bowls of used shells. When he looks up again, Eve has come to the table with the young architect. She halves a child potato with her knife. Quarters it. She chews gently. Her cheek smooth and white like a bark cut from the moon. They sit on the farthest bench, closest to the end. Israel Mason hands Jake another bucket of used shells, and Jake empties them off the sandflat. The shells pile into small hills in the shallows. The current, gradually rising, whittles them down.

From the corner of his eye, Jake can see the rain moving toward them, a darker, uneven mass carried in the fog. It occurs to him that he should tell someone. He glances around. At the other end of the sandflat are Mrs. Coles and George Baker. They are just sitting down to their plates. He should warn them, he thinks. He glances back in the direction of the rain traveling stowed inside the clouds. He will not warn them. He knows this. And it is not out of malice or resentment
that he makes this choice. They are who they are. They see what they see. A storm is as much a part of the sky as the sun, and it will rise and set. It will come when it comes. He puts his head back down and works the shovel under the mounting pile of shells. He pushes them loose off the flats toward the moving currents of the channel.

They do not notice until it is directly above them and the first break of thunder splits the sky. The fog lifts. Lightning forks down, igniting the water less than a mile from where they are, on the other side of Cory’s Island.

It is a summer storm and sudden. The rain empties down in torrents and they freeze. Forks halfway to their mouths. One clam belly poised above a butter dish. As if they cannot quite grasp the change. When the thunder claps, it unthaws them, and they all rise at once. Benches, plates, tables overturned. The ones closest to the river rush in, up to their knees, they slog toward the bank. The tarp is blown off the bake, the stakes ripped out, it sets across the harbor, billowing, catches on one of the new teak boats moored by Split Rock and shrouds it. Plates of food spill as the rain sweeps the guests into one scurrying flood toward higher ground.

Patrick grasps Eve by the hand and presses through the crowd toward the edge of the sandflat. He has his eye on the model of the house up above them on the hill—the painstaking hours he spent—it is his only copy, and he must reach it, he will reach it—the crowd dragging him—her fingers wet and cool are slipping from his hand, a blur of parasols, white suits, unpinned hair. His grip fails, and he loses her, he lets her go, running now, the rain pastes his clothes onto him, he is guilty, he knows it, and he looks back for her once in the rush of faces—she is there—for an instant, she is there, and then lost again, behind a red-haired woman screaming openmouthed, he looks away—his eyes straining to the spot above him on the hill—the copper-flashed twin chimney—not ruined yet—and he gives himself up to the roar of the current, drenched bodies scuffling, a bare leg, a waistcoat. A cane slams his shin and he winces, trips, but hurtles himself
over it, half-running, he slogs up the hill through the grass. There is a bald-headed man on his knees. Patrick skirts around him and pushes on, the hill has the sudden vertical ascent of a mountain and his heart beats ferocious in his chest. He reaches the model on the patio—the cardboard soaked but still intact. He throws his dinner jacket over the roof to shield it from the rain. He gathers it into his arms and rushes inside as the lightning strikes again, lifting the sky away from itself. The light forks down into the heart of the massive cedar tree. The dry young branches, parched by the long August heat, burst into fire.

Eve stands still. Barely moves. They crush around her. Pass. A new wave closes in, then ebbs away. She is soaked. Her body soaked. Hollow and quiet with the rain rushing down her insides. They push and pull and suck and scream around her, and she waits, watching them scramble over one another; they break up against the riverbank, wet skins, wet shoes, pushing helplessly against the bright, slick moss. They slip on the grass, the grass skidding out from under them, and they are down on all fours. The hill is drenched. A delirious green.

Except for the grass, what she sees is black and white. The rain dashes everything. Breaks it up so it comes to her filtered through a static. Close to the house, a slash of red that might be Maggie’s scarf, and her father—is that her father?—a man huddled by a square pillar, his arms wrapped around its sharp angled shape.

Through the blur, Eve can see Elizabeth. The old woman stands, her arms lifting to the air as light as eiderdown. And then she falls, gently, her hair loosening out of its pins as the rest of them swarm up the hill, frantic kicking tiny fish, against that brilliant livid green.

No land only water
,

and a herd of sacred cattle that lived under the waves
.

She cannot remember where she heard it, if she ever did hear it. A story poured into her ear. Or one of those myths that is born in the cells, the kind one will spend a life unraveling.

Thunder cracks the sky, and her grandmother is lifted. They bear
her on their shoulders the way they come to bear the dead. They lift her high as if they are offering her up to the rain.

Slowly, Eve begins to back toward the far edge of the sandflat. Through the churning surface of the river, she can see the struggle of the cows; their heads twist, waves kicked up under their hooves. She stares at them transfixed.

—the holler from my father’s slaughterhouse—it would wake us in sweat—

and she can hear it now—through the wind and the torrent rush of water pressing toward her.

She takes another step back. The heels of her shoes stick in the mud, and she steps out of them.

The marsh drops off suddenly, the river is up to her chest, the current tugging at her legs, drawing her into the swift moving flush of the channel. Their bellowing surrounds her. It grows into a vast untethered roar, filling with the water in her ears as the sky lowers down across the river, and fog, wind, water, clouds merge into one smothering gray. She struggles to keep herself afloat, her head above the surface. Something snares her ankle. She kicks, and it draws taut, a ropy teeth towing her down.

She does not notice Jake until he has reached her. The touch startles her, and she fights against him, thrashing out of his arms. He grasps her by the waist and begins to pull her from the current. When he realizes she is caught, he dives down, following her legs to the crab pot line wrapped twice around her shin. He cuts it loose, pushes back to the surface, hand over hand up her body. The river is pulling them both now, fast downstream toward the mouth.

“Hold on,” he yells above the rain. He slings her arms around his neck and begins to swim in a diagonal to the current, slowly edging toward the slack of slower water off the marsh.

He pulls her through the eelgrass, and they crawl onto the sandflat that has thinned to three feet, the tables sloped into the rising tide, their legs broken at the knees. One remaining bench is wedged at odd ways, half-toppled, half-standing, in the disappearing sand. Eve is sick
in the mud, heaving air and salt water. Jake picks her up, still choking. He wades with her in his arms off the flat into the shallows toward the shore.

Everything happens then. In that small journey of less than ten yards, her body soaked, heavy with the river and crushed against his chest, she looks up to his face and the rain pouring through it. The sky looms above them, its unceasing grayness slung across his shoulders. The water clings around his eyes, drops from the lashes. He does not look at her. He is speaking under his breath, not to her but to everything around her, as if the steady flow of small words could carve a passage through the relentless pressure of the wind and storm and tide. And in the words, which are barely audible, which she can barely hear, she finds something of herself, something of him, still and hovering. They are encased together, a skein of light shelter moving through the violence of the rain.

Ben Soule

W
hen he was a boy, he fenced with lightning. Broke a cedar post off a neighbor’s front fence and carved it to a sword point at one end. He walked out alone into his father’s plowed fields and dared the crooked white light to strike him.

It is a southwest wind. He sets his chair by the open door to watch the storm. The wind burrows under the surface of the let, raising the water in long ragged sheets. The water piles up onto the marsh. He has the wings on his lap. Half-knitted. He knows that they used balsam wood at Kitty Hawk, but he chose willow for the frame. He has carved two arced tiers for each half, the upper slightly longer. He has set sticks vertically between the tiers, stitching the twigs into the porous wood with galvanized wire. He wraps the frame in silk, pulled taut, and he attaches a rawhide strap that will lie across his shoulders. He sews two leather grips halfway down the underside of each wing for his hands.