Moon Tide (24 page)

Maggie

S
he backs across the room beyond reach of the light and sits down on the stool. He cannot see her. The lids of his eyes are seared. He is a mass of no beginnings. The burn worms along his limbs like a thing alive. Flesh charred, he will grow the way acorn mold grows: off a strong limbed branch she has cut, in a room that has no sun and is cold.

Her heart is not what she expects.

She knows that a tincture of marsh skullcap soothes delirium. Dwarf sumac cures rough dreams. A corn-silk tea can ease internal wounds, and there are many ways she knows to heal a burn: shredded burdock leaves with egg whites, cattails ground to paste. The poulticed root of bracken fern applied to a fresh burn can draw out the fire, but she cannot touch him. She does not know how to touch him.

She is alone with him now. He has been left to her. His wounds, left to her. How she loved him once, left to her. What he has done, left to her. What he has destroyed.

For years, she has cared for her own heart. She has kept it strong, supple, like the innerwood of a sassafras tree, resistant to decay. Every spring, when the flowers bud and the mittened leaves grow downy on their undersides, she has peeled back the furrowed bark, cut out a piece of the dark heart-wood and chewed it down, so it would lodge
and grow with the seasons of the tree inside her. She has done this for resilience.

But what is that worth now? And what if it is true—what she has never believed—that some creatures are not meant to be healed?

She leaves Wes lying on the cot in the corner of the root cellar and walks down Thanksgiving Lane. She walks past the heap of Blackwood’s store. Small throngs still gather, gawking at the ruins. She does not look. She will come back tomorrow or the day after, when they have gone. She will take a handful of what was burnt and she will plant it gently, the way he loved her, in her garden. But today, she just walks by, past the outer docks with the boats slung between them. She crosses the bridge, carrying the burden of her own split heart. She walks through the new Tripp boatyard up into the dunes. She passes down along the cranberry bogs and finds a slight crease in the sand before the second ridge. She curls herself into it, binds her grief up in her arms, and lets it carry her down.

For the first time in her life, she does not go after dreams. She walks deep behind closed lids with her arms wrapped around herself until she finds that place where there is no color, no feeling, no shape, where awareness is hushed and cloud.

She sleeps out the day and wakes at dark. They are at the edge of the bog. A pair of fish crows. They feed on fallen berries less than six feet from where she lies. In her sleep, they mistook her for rubble in the sand. She moves to startle them. Black wings spray out. They split the dark and are lost into it.

As she walks back toward town, she gathers plantain leaves from along the shoulder of the road.

Wes does not seem to notice her as she comes in. She goes to the back room and takes an onion from the pail. With a knife, she peels the skin, drives the blade deep until the flesh gives way and she can feel the center. She halves it, then cuts the halves into quarters. She chips
each section into the mortar. Its starkness burns her eyes and lodges there like wind grit, bringing tears. She comes back into the room and drags the stool over to his bed. As the water runs down her cheeks, she grinds the onion pieces in the bowl. She empties the thick juice into a shallow dish. She bruises the plantain leaves and lays them down inside it.

“When I was young,” she says out loud, “we’d hunt bonefish.”

The eyes unwind from deep inside the head. He stares at her. Gaseous eyes. She knows he can’t see far.

“We wouldn’t eat them,” she goes on, her face soaked with onion tears. “Bonefish is the kind of fish that has no meat. We’d hunt them in the shallows where they float, mid-deep. A bonefish lies still, like trout, so thin you think he’s sunlight.”

Wes stares toward the middle of the room as Maggie builds the fire. She burns pine boughs by hand and sets a pot of water to simmer. She puts a handful of dried violet leaves to steep inside it.

“This morning I walk across the bridge past what you burnt, and I see a fish in the clouds. Nothing left to that fish, it was all bone.”

She does not look at him. When the tea is brewed, she pours it in a glass. She brings it to him and lifts his head so he can drink. Then she takes a fillet of salt cod from the barrel and soaks it in fresh water until the excess brine has sloughed, and the fish is restored. She breaks it into pieces with her fingers and feeds it to him through the slit of his mouth.

When he is done eating, she peels his clothes. The flannel sticks in wads to the burns and tears new wounds. He moans. She does not want this. She does not want this black chalk man in her root cellar. Not this man. She pulls less gently. She does not look at his face. He is a mass of wormed skin; the wounds new in places, pink lakes around his neck and across the chest from where the clothes have torn away. He cries. She hates that he is crying. Ugly tears from unlidded eyes. This is nothing she knows. His tears. This cracking of her heart. This is nothing she could have imagined. She thinks of Blackwood as she strips him, the trap in the fire that Wes set, she knows this. She thinks
of the rooster, the other one that he killed years ago with that cruel impulsive stone. She thinks of the red and waxy comb, how the bird would not leave her, he would stalk around her feet in the kitchen and squawk after the baby chicks as they busied over one another in the carton between the old black hand pump and the stove. She does not want this. He has killed things that she once loved, and she does not want his pain. His crying is inhuman. It is the cry a tree might make with its sap cut. A cry that does not, cannot, matter.

His clothes pile into a clot on the floor. She will burn them later. She will build a fire by the creek that will wear itself out on the wet banks near the place where he used to tend his trap for muskrat, where he used to wait as the creek thickened up around their mouths.

She thinks of the broken rib in Blackwood’s chest and again of the rooster—its sinewed gangrene leg. She thinks of the night she spent with Wes a year ago in the root cellar. It was a night she could have loved him, maybe did, but that night was brief and like a window already closing.

She tears at his clothes, taking flesh with them. She knows she is hurting him. She wants to hurt him. She wants to pluck him until he is raw. She is sobbing by the time he is naked. They are both sobbing, and her heart is not what she expects. It is not resilient. Not unscathed.

She wraps him in the leaves soaked in the onion juice. The poultice will sink into the cracked places and he will feel his whole body on fire again. And then slowly, painfully, the skin will begin to heal. Weeping, she wraps him until he is bark, a mass of her tears and wet leaves.

When he sleeps, she lies down next to him. She coils herself around his burn. She slips into him and dreams his dreams. Fire. Muskrat. A labyrinth of running paths.

Eve

W
hen Eve comes back to the Point, it is October. She is completely unprepared for the leaves, the thunder of color and the stillness of the road. She does not remember the trees being so tall. She does not remember the number of new summer homes that have hatched along each side of Thanksgiving Lane, their windows boarded up for winter. New dirt roads have been cut through stands of birch and juniper. When did this happen? When were all these houses built? From the top of the hill, she looks across the harbor to the dunes. The cottages cling like small white moths to the insides of the bowls.

Even Skirdagh is different, although she cannot exactly place the change. Only Maggie’s small triangle of yard seems untouched: the root cellar and the chicken house, the coop swept with new corn thrown across the dirt. The woodpile, Eve notices, seems smaller, as if its top layers have been stripped. The stripping is even, but the logs that were taken have not been replaced.

She is shocked by her father’s face—the puckered mouth—how his lips pour in around themselves. She does not remember him losing his teeth. He cannot have lost them all at once. It must have been slow. But she does not remember noticing it. He cracked one, perhaps, on an olive pit—another on a wishbone, a chicken thigh—or maybe on a
Sunday morning, when the house was still asleep, he sat alone downstairs in the dining room with the silver tin of Godiva chocolates and played the game they used to play of guessing the insides. Caramel, he might have said aloud to himself, and then bit hard into an almond. But she realizes, looking at him, that it could not have all happened in the time she was away—this degree of change could not happen in a year—it must have happened slowly, over time, it must have begun long before she left, the gums growing soft, she did not notice, they had let the bone go. How could she not have noticed?

She sits with her father in the library, and he tells her that he has finally begun to write. Or not—he says—exactly begun, but he is close. On the verge of beginning. He has mapped the thing out in his mind. The skeleton of it, the structure, the major events—he has set them down like stepping-stones, he says, or no, not quite set down, but he has gathered them, or no, rather he has glimpsed them lying in the ground up ahead.

He tells her that he read somewhere—he can’t quite place the source—it might have been Eliot, Pound, or Ford Madox Ford—but someone had said that an outline drawn too hard could become the prison of a writer rather than his tool. Set down too soon, that kind of plan could rob a story of its joy.

“No discovery,” he says to her. “And my dearest Evie, it must always be about discovery.” He smiles, his face folding like a dough around the jaw, and she wonders why it is the small histories that matter—the ones that are absurd and irretrievable—the fate of a tooth.

Outside the window, the willow tree buds scratch against the pane. They leave illegible tracks of dew.

She knows that since her mother’s death, her father has composed volumes of words in his head—long novels and aching narrative poems. He has crafted paragraphs, reciting them aloud, sanding and honing the language of each one to bits. He has imagined phrases that are original enough, startling enough, to soften bone, and yet, when he puts the pen to a blank page, he cannot squeeze one word of ink
out onto it. Over years, the unused words have heaped around him. He has wandered through the language and grown disoriented by the gorgeous endlessness of it all.

Now, as they sit together in the window seat, he tells her he has begun. He has written the first sequence of a poem—eight lines for which all of his previous work has been but preparation. For a month, he has kept this fragment a secret. He has been waiting for her to come home.

He pulls out his pocket watch and then a second sterling chain. Clipped to the end is a small, silver snuffbox. He opens it carefully and takes out a piece of folded paper which he passes to her. The edges are yellowed and flecked with snuff.

“It’s old, Papa.”

“No no. I just wrote it. Recently. Last week. Perhaps the week before. It might have been August. Yes, it was. The August previous to this one. After you left—soon after—it must have been—yes—I wrote it just after you left. It is only the beginning, of course. The first part. It is what we have been waiting for.” He stands up as he says this, straightens his trousers, and steps away as she unfolds the page.

The top left corner flakes off in her hand.

There is a line in the fragment that she recognizes as being stolen from somewhere else. It has been patched awkwardly, one word rearranged to hide the stealing. There is a line about a hero lying just below the summit of a mountain in the snow and another about a ruby earring. There is an isolated phrase:
one or two windows in a life
. Eve is struck by the beauty and care of the language—how each word shimmers like dew on grass—but the whole—there is something crippled about the whole. She reads it again. And then again. She turns it over in her brain, holding it up in a brief darkness so she can see the thing for what it is—so it is only the piece itself—and she can read it without judgment—without expectation—he is her father after all, and he needs this—it is a desperate need, she knows—the need to be seen.