Moon Tide (36 page)

H
e has lost all sense of time. All sense of orientation. His arm is pudding, sore and grating in the shoulder socket. He trips over a mass of branches and wires, the fragment of a wall. The salt blurs his eyes. The water in the bowls is up to his waist, and he wades toward the line of secondary dune. He grasps the trunk of a scrub oak with his good arm and pulls himself up. He climbs higher, the sand pushing out from under him, to get out of the path of the next surge. He reaches the top and looks toward the beach. Shaved clean. There is nothing. No houses. No structures standing. Planks and timbers drift through the flooded lowlands like great unmanned canoes. Houses turned on their sides, cars face down or belly up, they bob and dance and float in circles through the water, ghost-driven. The road has been washed over. The let washes into the sea, and the sea washes into the let, and it is all one body of water in the almost dark. Patrick strains his eyes. Blinks. Then shuts them hard. Sure that when he opens them again, it will be different. He will awaken from this dream.

Close to night, when he can barely see, he imagines that the wind has dropped and the sea has begun to lie down.

He hears their voices. A clipped calling and then another shout.
Louder this time. Nearer. He stumbles to his feet, his ankle asleep, it wrenches in the sand.

“Here!” he cries. “Over here!” On his twisted ankle, he runs down into the bowl of the dune and up the other side toward a thin light beaming back and forth across the dark.

It is a truck that was caught on the Horseneck side of the bridge: two police officers in the front and five other refugees in the back. A woman wrapped in a soaked blanket clings to her husband. Another couple with a baby. An old man with a broken leg.

“Any others with you?” the policeman asks.

Patrick shakes his head, his ankle throbbing now. He kneels and touches it with his hand. The tissue is tender, hot, swollen.

They make their way back toward the Point Bridge along the remains of John Reed Road. They go in darkness—the truck’s headlights smashed out. The baby whimpers, and the mother gives it strips of wet cloth to suck on. The man with the broken leg is in fever. He tosses on the floor of the truck, moaning about. As they reach the break in the trees by the entrance to the town dump, the right front wheel catches the edge of a rut. The driver swerves, and they slam into an oak, crushing the front end. The engine steams out a long hiss and then falls still. They climb out and go the rest of the way on foot. Patrick and the two other men make a sling with their arms for the broken-legged man. They crawl over poles and under trees that have fallen in the path. There is a boat tied up at the place where the clam shack used to be. It ferries them across the river through the darkness.

From the Point, Patrick makes his way alone back to Skirdagh, dragging his damaged ankle up Thanksgiving Lane. The windmill near the Point Church has snapped off, trees pulled up from the ground, their roots exposed. They leave vast holes in the earth.

At Skirdagh, the silver willow has fallen onto the main house, gashing the roof, the top branches cracked through the attic windows. The wind has blown off the downspouts, and the water overfloods the gutters, running down the sidewall and into the foundation.

Patrick enters through the back door into the kitchen. The chickens
fly at him, screeching, a rage of beaks and wings in the dark. He gropes for the counter and grasps the thing nearest him, which happens to be a fry pan, shields it up to his face, and strikes. There is an ear-splitting shriek and then a thud as one of the hens falls limp on the floor. They flutter in shadows around him, and he brandishes the fry pan. He shoos them into the pantry and locks them in.

He stands for a moment in the darkness, and he can hear a sound, a low hollow sound that is not quite human, straining through the floor underneath him.

He lights the kerosene lamp and opens the cellar door. Down at the bottom of the narrow steps is a gently heaving surface—bottles, cans, old lamps float by, turning aimless circles, they strike up against one another, then drift away. He grows dizzy watching them. His stomach heaves at the sight of more water—so much water—everywhere flooded—a dressed fish floats by, its wrappings slowly trailing loose. Lazarus-like, it folds back into the shadow, and he is left staring at the endless rippling surface.

He takes the dead hen and throws her down the stairs. The splash sweeps through the cellar, a slow rocking wash up against the walls.

Nauseous, he shuts the door and turns the key.

They will not come back, he decides then. When he finds Eve, and he will find her, he will explain that this town is a thankless town. A menacing town. He will explain to her that the sound of water has become a poison to his brain. It is a sound he will never be able to sleep near again.

I know that you love it, he says out loud. I understand that. And you will always love it. We will hang photographs. We will have a painting made. But we will not come back.

With the lamp, he searches the first floor of the house. Half the dining room window has blown out. The curtain rods sag under the weight of water soaked through the windowcloth. Charles’s study is locked, and Patrick can smell the kerosene leaking through the towel stuffed under the door. He pulls at the knob, pushing hard against the lock with his body. It won’t give. He takes the fire poker from the library
and wedging it into the frame, he cleaves the door open. The air inside the room is dense with heat, the kerosene box humming away in its corner. Charles lies slumped over his desk, his face covered with ink. The words have copied themselves from the wet pages onto his cheek. Patrick drags him out into the hall, sits him up against the wall, and checks his pulse. It is faint, but still there. He pulls him by the boots down to the library and leaves him lying on the hooked rug next to the fireplace.

He goes upstairs, exhausted, to his bedroom.

He notices the chunks of plaster on the bed. The crack in the ceiling. A water stain vaguely shaped like the countries of Northern Africa spreads around it. One darker patch in the center slowly drips into a puddle on the floor.

He sets the oil lamp down, fills the washbasin, and lines up his shaving cream and his razor on the dressing table. He changes into his pajamas and draws the shades.

He sits down in front of the mirror, lathers the cream into a beard on his face, and dips the blade in. It is like the foam on surf, he thinks, and nicks himself on the jaw. He shoves away the thought and starts again from the edge of his ear. He draws the razor down into the hollow of his cheek. His hand is shaking, and he struggles against himself to hold it still. He cuts a crooked swath clear, rinses the blade, and flicks his wrist as if he could shake the trembling out of it. He starts again, from the top of the cheekbone. He draws the razor in a straight-edged line, tight against his face and down.

A white film of lather has gathered on the surface of the water in the basin. As Patrick goes to dip the blade again, the water kicks up suddenly on its own, a ripple spreading from the center to the edge of the shaving bowl. It strikes the side and turns back.

Patrick freezes, his body taut, the trembling again in his wrist. He puts down the razor and leans over the basin. He peers inside it, looking for the source of that small ripple. He peers with such intensity, it is as if he half-expects the storm to be there, circling, gathering in the shallow lathery water of the washbasin. He feels a drop on the back of
his neck, the sensation cool, startling. His head jerks, he looks up and sees the second crack in the ceiling. The second water stain. A smaller shape this time—perhaps the state of Arkansas. Dark in the center. His hand reaches around to the back of his neck as if the drop is solid, as if he could remove it from his skin like a piece of crystal or a thorn. His fingers touch wetness. A slight trail of it, moving down between his shoulder blades. His face is half-finished. Half-covered with the white lather, and now, as he looks at himself in the mirror stained with oil light, it is as if the mirror is the washbasin and the face inside it a sky, half-obscured with clouds. He steadies his hand, dips the razor, and starts to cut into the other side. He draws the blade down sharply, rapidly, a stilted snatch, a nick, a scrape, too close to the skin, too far away. He just needs to get through this. To get the job done and finish with this day. He will crawl into the bed and burrow down under the sheet. He will let his face, clean and shaven, sink into the pillow. And sleep will come, it will come quickly, gently, it will wash everything that has happened, everything that he has seen, out of his brain.

He is working the razor into the dent of his chin when the ceiling cracks again. The water stain in the shape of Arkansas splits down the center, and a loaf-size chunk of plaster comes loose from the lathe. It strikes him on the back of the skull, and his face knocks forward toward the mirror with the impact, then retracts and sags, limp off his neck. His chin drops to his chest, and he pitches down, slowly, unconscious. His face lands in the washbasin, and he lies there, the bubbles bleeding up through the soapy water.

Afterweeks

T
he next day, they found the bodies. They found them face down, floating with debris in the shallows. They found an older couple buried under the wreckage of their house, while their small English terrier barked and barked, pawing with its small paws into the roof as if it could dig back down to what it had lost. The dog hung around the wreckage long after the bodies had been taken back to the Point. It would not stop barking, and one of the men who had been hired as a searcher took pity on the thing and brought it home.

They had never seen anything like it. They thought it was the end of the world. The last great storm had been the Gale of September 23, 1815, when the whaling ships and coasters were still running in the harbor. No one remembered the Gale of 1815. No one still living had been alive back then to see it.

They pulled the telephone poles back up and tied them to the trees that were still standing. They cut the trees that were lying in the road or drew them off to the side so the streets grew wide enough to allow a single lane of cars to pass.

The day after the storm was a perfect day. Calm. No wind. The sky so blue it had sound. They found one man standing up in a mosquito ditch. Dead. With his legs stuck to the knees in the mud, holding him
erect. They found bodies tangled in wires and rubble. They found Joe Gallows crushed underneath one sidewall of his pavilion and Russ Barre drowned, caught in his own trawl. They found the Horseneck postmistress, Millie Tripp, headfirst in the sand dunes, but her house, with its bottom knocked out, had floated across the let all the way up to Pettey Heights. The wind had taken it so gently that bottles on the back of the toilet were perfectly intact and standing lined up in the way they had been left.

The storm had come on a moon tide. It had gutted the land of East and West Beach. The electric was out for weeks. Even north of Hixbridge there was flooding; chickens roosting in the telephone poles; cedar and maple trees strewn in the road like cinder ash. The salt spray, driven by the hurricane wind, killed trees up to seven miles away from the sea.

The summer cottages from the harbor had washed up in the marshes, in backyards, and fields. Portions of the Kerr and Ryder homes were found washed up on the golf links of the Acoaxet Club by the eighth tee. Dismembered second stories lay capsized in Corbin’s pasture. All thirteen boathouses were swept away, and River Road was eaten thin as a blade of straw at the herring ditch.

On the Horseneck side, houses were blown miles up the East Branch. They beached on Great Island, Gunning Island, and Cadman’s Neck. Most of the lobster boats, outboards, and skiffs had been busted up and sunk, and the ones that were not had been driven into the woods, sailboats set right up in the trees. Along the riverbanks were pyres of debris: timber, broken walls, roofs, boards: the shambles heaped as high as the houses they had once been.

Horseneck itself was a wasteland of sand and stone. The paved roads were gone, the macadam chewed to pieces by the surf. Nothing stood higher than a picket fence. Lawns were flooded underwater. The flat ground on either side of East Beach Road had been narrowed by three hundred feet, and even after the tide pulled back, there was less than a hundred yards of land between the let and the sea. Every
house, outhouse, restaurant, shack, mansion, shed, and store had been leveled. In the marshes of the let, the rubble gathered: the peak of a roof, an overturned sink, the base of a fireplace, a half-smashed chimney. For years afterward, duck hunters would find the remains: a toilet, a vase, an iron box, a child’s doll, a broken trestle bed half-submerged in the shallows.

They had said that the stone house—the mill owner’s house—would never move. The bulk of it. The sheer grandeur of its four thousand square feet. They found its septic pipes, one pillar, and a few steps on the spot where they thought it might have been.