Moon Tide (8 page)

Eve sleeps deeply with the blankets pulled close around her chin, so only her small face is visible, the pale hair floating on the pillow around it. Elizabeth comes closer. She blows out the candle and kneels beside the bed. Her knees ache. She feels through the blanket for the child’s hand and finds it curled in a loose fist by her side.

She sits there in the dark and whispers the stories to her. She can only remember them at night, and when she cannot sleep, she will come and hold the child’s hand and she will tell her that the place of stories is like the place of memory. It is like the place of the dead. An ether around them all the time. She tells her the adventures of the pirate warrior Grace and the trials of CúChulainn. She tells her the story of the cows who came up from the sea. She tells her of Oisin, who followed Niamh of the Golden Hair, and how, when he returned to Erin, he found he had been gone for hundreds of years. The land had
changed. The church had come and the bog had risen. He could find nothing, no one, he had known from before.

“He was in love,” she whispers, “and the time had seemed so short to him.” The child stirs in her sleep. Elizabeth lets go of her hand.

She returns to her own bed. She pulls the chenille close around her chin. She can feel the window sash give under the pressure of the wind. Just beyond her, the curtains rustle in the darkness.

The following afternoon, Elizabeth and Eve sit together in the living room waiting for Charles to drive up from the garage with the car. They don’t speak. Elizabeth settles in one corner of the Hepplewhite sofa that has been reupholstered in ivory silk. As she picks at a stain on the arm—a bit of berry jam—she notices a prickling heat around the collar of her dress as if spiders have come to spin inside the lace.

She glances up at the child. The birdcage Windsor spokes of the chair fan up behind her like some queer tail. Eve keeps her small gloved hands folded neatly on her lap. Her white stockings crossed at the ankle dangle just above the floor. Her eyes are the color of soft water. She sits still, perfectly quiet and contained. Yet there is something unlatched about her. Something disturbing or disturbed. A vacancy that seems familiar.

On the crossing, Elizabeth’s father had carried a vial of the holy water from St. Fiechin’s Well. When he died, Elizabeth took the vial back to Skirdagh and kept it in the sea chest at the foot of her bed. She never opened it. Never unstopped the cork from its lean-necked end. Sometimes in the deep winter, she would take it out, unwrap it from its chamois cloth, and hold it in the palm of her hand. Over time, she had watched the water level drop, slowly evaporating through the pores in the cork until only the pith remained—a slight film of dust piled at the bottom of the glass. Now, studying the child across the room, she has the sudden chilling sense that what she sees in Eve is not, as she has always thought, the strange damage and the lawlessness of Alice but, rather, some quiet essence of Elizabeth’s own nature—an image of herself when she was young and her heart was free and wild.

“Do you know the story of the willow?” she asks, nodding to the tree outside the window.

The child shakes her head.

“The willow will sprout from just a branch pushed in the soil.”

The child doesn’t answer. One of her eyes is swollen at the edge. A pinkness has begun to creep across the lid. She rubs at it.

“Leave it alone,” Elizabeth says.

The child drops her hand into her lap.

They sit together, waiting, in the awkward silence.

God was something Elizabeth had never questioned—did not doubt, did not think about or fear—her faith was as natural to her as air.

The magic of a salmon who ate the nuts of a hazel tree. A boy-hero who caught the fish, boiled it, and drank its wisdom from the scalded broth.

The child’s eye has begun to tear. She does not touch it. She just sits there, painfully still, with her hands in her lap and a slight fluid running from the corner of the swelling down her face.

Elizabeth cancels the trip they were supposed to take to the Grist Mill in Adamsville. When Charles pulls up in the car, she tells him to go on his own or not at all. She sends Maggie down into the cold cellar for three apples. She boils one and grinds it into a poultice. The child’s eye has grown so swollen the iris is barely visible. Elizabeth puts two spoonfuls of the apple mush into a square of muslin, and she sets it firmly against the infected lid.

“Hold it there,” she tells the child. “We’ll bake the other two.”

Eve nods, one-eyed, her small hand holding the cloth against her face.

Elizabeth sets the two apples into the wood oven and, together, she and Eve sit in the kitchen. They wait until the skins crack, until the warm smell of apple surrounds them. They take the pulp from one outside and bury it under the willow tree in the late summer ground. Then they eat the other one.

Jake

H
e does not see the girl again. He goes back once more to the field with his father to load the last few stones. As they haul the two-horse sled up the wagon path, he notices a small red sweater hanging on the back of one of the porch chairs. They drive the stones across town to Old Pine Hill Road, where they will begin the work of building a new wall. He does not come around the house again until the end of August, and by that time she is gone.

In September, when classes start at the Point School and the mitts of the sassafras leaves begin to brown, Jake walks through the bleat of sparrows to the library at Skirdagh. He lets himself in through the latched side door.

As he reads Elizabeth’s books, he begins to understand that a story can be hunted out like small game, or like light. It is an interim of trance with flaws and scars. It changes being touched. He will skin what he reads, separating gut, lung, scale, the open flay from tail to throat. He struggles after the innards and floats in the fibrous gap between words. Once in a while, he will surface from a text, short of breath and incomplete, and he will sense the girl the way he saw her that day, blond and falling through grass.

He turns the pages through the fall, wrapping himself in the thin flannel blanket Maggie leaves for him folded on the sofa. He extracts
brief passages and takes those nuggets with him. He chews on them as he sits at the small wooden desk by the back stove in the Point School, or as he is chinking sod into the gaps of one of his father’s walls, or when he is alone in the kitchen with his mother and she is boiling the raspberries for jam. He watches her string the cheesecloth jelly bag to a broomstick laid across two chairs. He does not tell her about the books he reads, about the ideas of nothingness and being that he has begun to gather like ripe plums from the dunes. He sets the iron kettle for her on the floor, and together they watch the fruit distill to a clear juice through the pores, and he is aware that what they witness is like any other work of art: the honing of a being to its essence.

As he reads, Jake grows displaced from his own life: the life of docks and skiffs; the seasonal trapping of muskrat, rabbit, and mink; the harvesting of wood and ice and stone. His world acquires an alien luster and, in the library of Elizabeth Gonne Lowe, he seeks out passages that will throw the growing distance he feels into a lucid and explicable relief. He wonders if he has always been removed and is only now finding the words to articulate that sense. He pores over the tremendous globe set on a rosewood stand in the corner behind the old woman’s rocking chair. He touches the continents, the warp where a mountain range has torn up from the earth. He moves his fingers across the wide and unkempt chunks of blue. The oceans fit like shim stones in his hand. He has read Wegener’s theories of Pangaea and continental drift, and he knows that the jigsawed edges once meshed together into a single mass of land that broke along its weaker faults. He will glimpse how they are still splitting, how the continents are as rootless as the men he has seen digging on the flats: fine, black splinters crawling on a skin of rippling light.

He spins the globe through his hands, trying to regather a sense of its wholeness. The foreign names of countries stumble in his mouth with the winter smells of lanolin and coal. The rain falls through the long window and clings to the branches of the willow tree as the wind cracks along the edges of the sill, and he will think of the girl, pale and
tumbling down that summer hill. He begins to map her vibration the way one might sense the heartbeat of a bird.

That fall, the fever moves through the town. It grows the way the sea blight grows, its seeds thrown to a strong wind. It spreads through the grass, sinks into their water, and they drink it from the well. It sticks tough like the grainy meat of an old rabbit, quartered, when the leg sinews refuse to give way from the bone. It lodges under their fingernails and eats them from the insides.

Jake senses the wrongness a month before when Wes, eighteen, his hands already sprouting huge out of his sleeves, strides out onto the front steps and takes down the goose on the wing. The goose flies alone, black in the sky, a lean and solitary pattern that slices the bottom third of the moon. Wes takes it on one shot, and the bird drops, a plummet of wings and thick body, passing through levels of the dark until it is lost in the field across the road behind Maggie’s root cellar.

Jake goes out with Wes to search. He is looking for a black-on-black shadow. He leaves the wagon path and cuts through the wreck in the stone fence and the tangle of greenbrier. Without knowing, he has begun to move the way his brother moves, boneless, his limbs cut free like the silk of milkweed pod.

He comes out into the lower meadow. The bird lies still, a twitch of the moon in the grass. It is white, not dark, and its whiteness catches in his throat and grows fear, swollen there. Maggie’s rooster strides in tight circles around it. When Jake comes close, the cock flies at him with its beak, furious, and a high-pitched cry.

Wes peels out of the shadow from the juniper trees on the opposite side of the field. He pelts the rooster with a stone and hits its leg. Screeching, the cock limps off.

He stops when he sees that the bird is white. It’s bad luck, he knows, to kill a white goose.

“I thought it was a brant,” he says.

Jake doesn’t answer.

“You pick it up.” Wes nods at him. For a moment they stare at one another. Neither of them moves.

“I told you to get it.”

Jake moves in and picks up the snow goose. It is as light as dried rosemary in his arms. It smells of salt and the cold.

They walk back toward the house.

“I thought it was a brant,” Wes says again. “Looked like a brant from where we shot.”

“From where you shot.”

Wes turns on him sharply. “You don’t tell Ma, hear?”

“I won’t.”

“You tell her and I’ll thrash you good.”

“Said I won’t.”

They continue up the hill.

“No such thing as luck anyhow, wrong or good,” Wes says, bending to pick up a handful of stones. He skims them toward the woods that line the wagon path. Jake hears the dull thud after thud as the rocks strike the trees. “Just ’cause a certain kind of bird don’t come around these parts much don’t mean there’s wrong luck to kill it. A white goose plucked and cut is the same as any other.”

“Might look the same.”

“Is the same.”

“All right then, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Sure’s not.”

“Right then.”

Wes looks at his brother sideways. “You don’t tell her, Jake.”

“No.”

Wes skins out the goose on the lawn behind the privy. Jake stubs his foot against an empty tin of lime as the black-tipped pinions fly apart and the down sticks in his nose.

“Dump her in the dead hen pile,” Wes says. “I’ll take in the meat.”

Jake wraps the feathers and skin in his coat and carries them down the hill toward Drift Road. But when the house has dipped from view, he cuts back. He glances over his shoulder once, twice, to be sure Wes
has not followed him, and then he walks through the cherry wood back up to Thanksgiving Lane. He comes out behind the church. Its slow windmill turns against the yellow moon. He crosses the road back to Skirdagh.

He brings the bird to Maggie because he has seen her work small spells to soothe the dead. He finds her out on the woodpile, asleep, her legs dangling over the stacked cords of juniper, oak, and pine that he and Wes had chopped the spring before. He moves close to her face, and he can see how her eyes shift under the lids as she crawls after dreams. He sits down on the cutting stump with the feathers in his arms. The rooster hoists its leg in crippled circles around the woodpile. He will not tell Maggie that it was Wes who made her rooster lame with that small and pointless pebble, although he senses she will know. He will not tell her that he has seen her with Blackwood by the alder and wild violets at Cummings Brook. He has seen Blackwood’s tremendous broken hands spin her flesh as if it were a net. He will not ask her about Eve. He can smell the blood of the white goose. It has begun to soak through his shirt into a warm paste along his arms.