In May the tides went to work hauling away the dead marsh grass. It drifted along the salt creeks like a constant flotilla of rotting, hay-brown rafts. Early in the mornings, when I knew I would be alone, I stole out to the dock in the rookery. I would stand there with the light soaring across the marsh, filling my nostrils with the egg and sperm smell, and watch the great floating exodus, the immaculate, scouring way nature renews herself.
After I’d learned how my father had died, there was a lifting away of sorrow. I can’t explain that, except to say there’s release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there’s nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at least, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
Mother seemed relieved to have the truth come out of its long hibernation. She went on confessing pieces of it to me, usually in the evenings when the day turned dark and grainy and sifted past the windows. She told me that Kat and Hepzibah had boiled batches of the plant leaves and chunks of the root, cooking them down to the consistency of pea soup. My father had insisted on drinking the brew from one of the chalices used during mass. I’m sure he was trying to help my mother understand that dying is a sacrament, too, that there was holiness in the sacrifice he was making, though I’m sure she never understood it.
I’m not at all sure I understood it completely. I didn’t know if my father had horned in on God’s territory and cut the thread that belonged to the Fates…if he’d usurped what wasn’t rightly his—the terrifying power to say when. Or did he only usurp God’s deep heart, laying his life down as a sacrifice, wanting only to take away our suffering? I didn’t know if it was hubris or fear or courage or love or all of them.
In the night I dreamed of whales thrusting their sickly bodies onto the shore to die willful deaths. At first I stood there bewildered, screaming for them to go back to the ocean, but in the end I simply walked among them, running my hands along their mountainous backs, easing them toward the mystery they’d chosen.
Mother said my father had held the chalice with both hands and gulped quickly. Later Dominic had sent the cup with Shem to be placed on the boat, fearing that the poison might never be washed out of it. She told me that as he drank, she started to sob, but he’d gone on swallowing until there was no more, and then, looking at her, said, “I didn’t just drink my death, Nelle. Try to remember that for me. I drank my life.”
What I most wished was that my mother could somehow have remembered that, as he’d wanted her to.
Hepzibah showed up at the door one day with the jar containing Mother’s finger. Mother placed it on a lace handkerchief atop her dresser, between the Mary statue and the photograph of Dad on his boat. Gradually other objects appeared around it—three scallop shells, an old starfish, a sand dollar. It began to look like a small shrine.
I didn’t ask her what it meant—it seemed wrong, somehow, to intrude—but I felt she was, in some obscure way, offering her finger to the ocean, hoping it might be transformed into something else, the way Sedna’s fingers were.
One night, as the breezes off Bone Yard pulled the scent of the sea through the open windows, I went to Mother’s room to say good night. She sat at the dresser, gazing at the finger jar. I let my hand brush across her thumb, touching the scar on her index finger. “I wish you’d tell me why you felt you had to do this to yourself,” I said.
When she looked at me, her eyes were as clear as I’d ever seen them. She said, “Last February, right before Ash Wednesday, I found dead finger growing on the side of the house by the water spigot. I smelled it from the porch. Two little plants. The next day there were three of them. I’d never had it grow in my yard once since Joe died, and then there it was. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, Jessie. I dreamed the leaves were growing through the windows into the house. I had to do something to make it stop. To make everything stop.”
She lifted her hand to Dad’s face in the photograph, and her eyes welled up. “I wanted to make up for what I did. To undo it. I just wanted him back again.”
That was all she said about it. All she would ever say.
She wanted to undo it. She wanted him back.
I don’t know if I’ll ever understand it. Whatever it was she was trying to do by planting her finger in the rose garden and adorning the jar with sea trinkets, it was more than a sad gesture of atonement. It was a last, desperate reach for him. I believe that what she wanted was to regrow him from all the cleaved, tortured places inside, to re-member him the way he’d been, the way they’d been, before everything happened. She wanted to make the guilt and longing stop.
During those days I compulsively painted my father as I imagined he looked that night sitting in the mermaid chair having just drunk his death and his life. Using the photograph on Mother’s dresser as a model for his face, I painted him with squinting eyes, his face engraved with weather lines, browned and tough as boot leather—that “old salt” look visible on so many island faces. He sat very tall and regal, as if on a throne, holding the winged mermaids on the chair arms and gazing out at me.
Directly beneath the chair, at the bottom of the canvas, as if down in a subterranean realm under the floor, I painted a rectangular chamber, a secret, magical room. Inside it I painted a little girl.
I worked in the living room and occasionally on the porch, unwilling to hide what I was doing from Mother, who would sit for hours and watch with squeamish wonder as his image came forth, as if observing the birth of a baby.
I felt that way, too, but for different reasons. What I realized was the amazing degree to which my life had been shaped around my father, around his living and dying, the apple peels and the pipe. I saw it clearly as he streamed out from my brushes: Joe Dubois, the hidden, pulsing nucleus around which my life had taken form.
“Who’s that in the box under the chair?” Mother asked, peering over my shoulder at the painting.
“I suppose it’s me,” I told her, slightly irritated at her use of the word “box.” I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but I saw how true it was. The little girl was not in a magic room, a lovely room. She was in a box. The same girl who would grow up to express herself through diminutive art boxes.
When I was finished with the portrait, I hung it in my bedroom, where it became almost iconic in its presence, in its ability to speak to me of invisible things. It had never been a secret that I’d idealized my father, that I would’ve done anything to please him—to be the apple of his eye (to use the worst and most obvious cliché)—but what I didn’t quite get until the painting was the sadness of all that trying. I hadn’t understood the small, powerless places it had taken me. But even more than this, I had never completely realized how this same thing had gone on with Hugh. I’d accommodated myself to him for twenty years without any real idea of what it was to have possession of my own self. To own myself, so to speak.
I felt as if I’d found the fairy-tale pea hidden under the mattress, the thing that had kept the princess tossing all those nights, that had quietly made her black and blue.
I would sit cross-legged on the bed staring at the painting and listening to my tapes on the Walkman, thinking what an ideal father Hugh had been, not just to Dee but to me. God, to me, too.
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I took that away. If I tried to relate to more than his fatherly side. Let him be Hugh. Just Hugh.
On Mother’s Day, Dee called. I stood in the kitchen holding the wall phone, leaning against the refrigerator. At first the conversation was all about happy Mother’s Day and summer plans. She told me she would not be taking classes but going home to be with her father.
At the mention of Hugh, there was a pause, and then her voice rushed at me, full of anger and incomprehension. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” It was such a stupid thing to say.
“You know what I mean!” she shouted. “You left him. And you didn’t even tell me.” I could hear her crying, these horrible muffled sounds far away.
“Oh, Dee, I’m sorry.” It became one of those songs you sing in rounds. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
“Why?” she pleaded. “Why?”
“I don’t know how to explain any of this to you.”
In my head I could hear Whit in the boat that day, the precise words he’d used. I never could make them understand that what I needed was somehow to be alone with myself. In a spiritual way, I mean. He’d called that aloneness a solitude of being.
“Try,” she said.
There was only so much I could say to her. I drew a breath. “This will sound ridiculous, I guess, but my life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played. I had loved doing them, Dee, I really had, but they were drying up, and they weren’t really me. Do you understand? I felt there had to be some other life beneath the one I had, like an underground river or something, and that I would die if I didn’t dig down to it.”
Her silence after I’d spoken was a relief to me. I let myself slide down the refrigerator until I was sitting on the floor.
Back there, somewhere, I’d lost the solitude of being that told me who I was. The whole mystery of myself. I’d been incapable of wearing the earth on my arms and legs, of diving and surfacing in my own erotic depths.
“Don’t you love Dad anymore?” Dee asked.
“Of course I do. Of course. How could I not love him?” I didn’t know why I was saying this to her. How much of it was placation, how much true.
Hugh and I had gone through our days with such good intentions, but with the imagination leaking out of our togetherness. We’d become exceptionally functional partners in the business of making a life. Even in the hidden business of being what the other one needed: good father, good daughter, little girl in a box. All those ghosts that hide in the cracks of a relationship.
It seemed right to have destroyed all that. Not to have hurt Hugh; I would always be sorry for that.
“Are you staying there all summer?” Dee asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I just know that I—” I didn’t know whether to say it, whether she wanted to hear it.
“That you love me,” she said, which was exactly the thing I was going to say.
I showed up at the monastery in the middle of May. The heat had descended in typical fashion—all at once, an oppressive, woolen canopy pitched across the island overnight. It would not be lifted until October.
Approaching the Reception Center, I saw a dozen monks sitting on the wide lawn in the abbey quadrangle hand-tying cast nets. They were spread out in orderly exactitude like chess pieces on a great green board, each with a heap of cotton twine in his lap. I paused, taken back momentarily to my childhood, those days when the monks fled the scourging heat of the Net House for the breezes coming off the marsh.
“The air conditioner quit on them,” a voice said, and I turned to find the bald monk I’d met that day in the gift shop when I’d bought Dominic’s book. He frowned at me from his huge Jack Benny glasses. It took me a moment to remember his name. Father Sebastian. The humorless one. The one who kept the monastery on the straight and narrow.
“I don’t know how you get through the summer in these robes,” I replied.
“It’s a small sacrifice we make,” he said. “People don’t want to make sacrifices anymore.” The steady way he gazed at me, emphasizing the word “sacrifices,” gave me an odd feeling, and I thought suddenly of my father.
I turned to stare again at the monks on the grass.
“Are you looking for Brother Thomas?” he asked.
I whirled around. “No, why would I?” I was stunned by his question, and I’m sure it showed on my face.
“You don’t really want me to answer that, do you?” he said.
How could he possibly know about Whit and me? I couldn’t believe Whit would have confided in him. In Dominic maybe, but not Sebastian.
“No,” I said, and it was barely a whisper. “I don’t.” I drew back my shoulders and walked away, out into the cloister square toward the abbey church.
The wind had blown snipped-off bits of twine all over the place. It looked as if the Fates had come through on a binge of cutting. One of the monks was chasing a strand, repeatedly reaching for it just as the wind snatched it away. Something about this filled me with sorrow and longing. I began picking up pieces of thread as I walked, whatever little scraps were in my path, tucking them into my pocket. I could feel Sebastian still there, watching me.
I hadn’t lied to him. I had not come to see Whit. I was here because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t resist the morbid fascination of seeing the mermaid chair again in light of what I now knew about my father’s dying. But it was also true that I’d come in the morning when I knew that Whit would be on the abbey grounds and not in the rookery. I had washed my hair. I had worn the aqua shirt.
I hadn’t seen him in almost a month, not since Mother’s hospitalization. The absence had created a strangeness, an incipient, self-fulfilling distance between us that I didn’t know how to confront. Much of our time apart had been necessary, dictated by circumstances. But some of it—a lot of it, really—had not. I couldn’t account for the part of me that remained removed from him.
The church was empty. I slipped back into the ambulatory, pausing at the entrance to the tiny chapel. The mermaid chair sat alone, the clerestory window behind it siphoning in a frail, trimmed light. My eyes went instantly to the mermaids on the chair arms. Their greens, reds, and golds were the only brightness in the room.
As I’d painted my father, I’d imagined the chair as maternal—the pietà, the immense lap of dying. I’d envisioned the mermaids like exotic midwives on either side of him, their wings conjuring up images of angels carrying him to heaven, their fish tails making me think of night-sea psychopomps bearing him into the dark mother of the ocean. I’d imagined them singing eerie, plaintive songs, crying—not the fake pebbles in the boxes in Kat’s shop but real tears. I’d thought that when I actually saw the chair, I would be weighed under by all this, but what I felt was the most extraordinary lightness.
I went and sat down. Leaning my head against the twisting Celtic knot, I let my hands hold on to the mermaids’ backs. What came first to my mind was the time I’d spent as a child scattering rose petals around the island as if they were my father’s ashes, how I’d especially heaped them here on the seat of the mermaid chair. I wondered if I could possibly have recognized the residue his death left behind, the concentration of good-byes.
Sitting there, I understood so little, and yet much more than I had before. My father had died here, but in a way I had, too. When I’d sat in the chair all those weeks ago, I’d given myself over to loving Whit, abandoning my old life. I had begun then to die away.
I sensed that Whit had come into the chapel even before I saw him. He called my name. “Jessie.”
He was wearing his robe and his cross.
As he walked toward me, I stood up. The knocking started inside my chest.
“How’s Nelle?” he asked.
“Much better. She’s out of the hospital.”
His face was pinched, and I knew in a way I can’t explain that he possessed the same removed piece inside that I did.
“I’m glad,” he said.
“Yes, me, too.”
I felt the moat widening and thought how like detachment the sounds between us were. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
“Father Sebastian told me you wanted to see me,” he said, the formality in his voice unmistakable.
My mouth opened in surprise. “But I didn’t.” Realizing how that must sound, I added, “I mean, I’m happy to see you, but I didn’t tell him that.”
Whit frowned.
“A while ago when I bumped into him, he made it perfectly clear to me that he knew about us. He was very pointed about it.” I felt awkward saying the word “us.”
“I’m afraid Sebastian has a nasty habit of reading my journal.”
“But that’s inexcusable.”
The light flickered in the room. I remembered how it had played on his face when he slept. How he’d washed my feet in creek water. I did not understand the mystifying place where our intimacy had flowed back into reserve.
“You know, I wasn’t sure until now that he’d actually read it,” he said. “I only suspected.”
“I had the feeling when Sebastian was talking to me that he was really asking me to leave you alone—without really saying it. I can only imagine how hard he’s made it for you.”
“You would think so, but the truth is, he’s been kinder to me since then. Like he wanted me to really do what’s best. He told me I should ask myself why I came here, what it means to me to be hidden here with God. I guess he got tired of waiting for me to figure it out.” He shrugged. “Sebastian is a great believer in facing things head-on.”
People don’t want to make sacrifices anymore.
I think beginnings must have their own endings hidden inside them. Gazing at Whit, I knew that the end had been there the first night we met, back when he’d stood on one side of the monastery wall and I on the other. The sturdy bricks.
Whit knew it. I could tell by the way he’d slid his hands inside the sleeves of his robe, the sadness caked in his eyes. I could see he’d already made the sacrifice.
We stood there staring at each other. I wondered if I would’ve fallen in love with him if he’d been a shoe salesman in Atlanta. It was a bizarre thought, but it seemed somehow the most sensible thought of my life. I doubted I would have, and it was disillusioning to me in the sense of stripping away the last remaining illusions. My falling in love with him had had everything to do with his monkness, his loyalty to what lay deep within him, the self-containment of his solitude, that desire to be transformed. What I’d loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself.
It felt cruel and astonishing to realize that our relationship had never belonged out there in the world, in a real house where you wash socks and slice onions. It belonged in the shadowed linings of the soul.
I had come to the irreducible thing, just as I had with my father, and there was nothing to do but accept, to learn to accept, to lie down every night and accept.
I closed my eyes, and it was Hugh I saw. His hands, the hair on his fingers, the Band-Aids on his thumbs. How real all of that was. How ordinary. How achingly beautiful. I wanted him back. Not like before but new, all new. I wanted what came after the passion had blown through: flawed, married love.
Whit said, “I honestly thought I could go through with this, I wanted to.” He shook his head and looked down at a fraying place on the dark, carpeted dais.
“I know. Me, too.”
I didn’t want him to say anything more. I wanted the letting go to be silent, to go quickly.
Whit nodded. A deep, emphatic nod at something I could not see or hear. He said, “I will miss you.”
“I’m sorry.” My words cracked as I spoke. I felt I’d been the seducer. I’d sat on the sea rocks like one of Homer’s sirens and lured him. Even though he was ending it as much as I, I felt I was really the betrayer. That I’d betrayed my confessions of love to him, my promise of anniversaries.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” he said. “The thing is, I needed”—he reached out and touched my face, a place near my jaw—“I needed to love you.”
He could have meant a million things, but what I wanted to believe was that his grief over his wife had deadened his heart and falling in love with me had resurrected it. I wanted to believe that now he would give his heart back to the monastery. He would go on foraging in the rookery, waking to the sound of frogs in the bent island oaks, to the smell of Brother Timothy’s bread, catching these little bits of God showing through.
“It’s true of both of us, then. I needed to love you, too.” It came out with so much awkwardness, so much ineptness, I felt as if I should go on explaining, but he smiled at me and stepped closer.
He said, “I told you we’d be damned and saved both. Remember?”
I tried to smile back at him, but it moved painfully on my lips for only a second before evaporating. I reached for him. We held each other without the slightest worry of someone’s wandering by. I did not cry, not then. I held him and felt the tides sweep out from the marsh island where we’d made love. I felt a place inside open up, the secret place where I would carry him. And when he’d left, and I was there alone, I felt the pull that must happen inside the egrets when the moon rises in the early dark—that unbearable tug home.
I walked to Bone Yard Beach and sat on a piece of driftwood that arched out over the sand. I stared at the ocean, where shrimp boats were roosting in thick, green waves. The tide was coming in instead of going out, which seemed backward and ironic to me. It seemed everything should be leaving. That there should be stretches and stretches of emptiness.
I had lost both of them.
Long ago, at the All-Girls Picnic when Mother, Kat, and Hepzibah had walked into the ocean up to their waists, I’d watched them from nearly this same spot. I began to picture them out there, the way they’d giggled as they’d tied their three threads together and thrown them into the waves. Benne and I had wanted to go with them, had begged to go.
No, this is just for us. Y’all stay back there.
Who would’ve imagined what would come out of the knots they’d made that night?
I tugged off my sandals and rolled my pants as high as I could. Despite the heat, the ocean was still chilled from the winter. I had to go in slowly.
When the water swelled above my knees, I stopped and dug in my pocket for the bits of twine I’d gathered off the lawn at the monastery. I wanted to tie a knot that would go on forever. But not with anyone else. With myself.
All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I’d tried to complete myself with someone else—first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.
I sorted through the cotton strands, wondering if something in me had known what must be done even as I’d collected them.
I stood still with the waves cascading against my thighs, elongating as they flowed beyond me toward the shore.
Jessie. I take you, Jessie…
The wind moved sideways past my ears, and I could smell the aloneness in it.
For better or for worse.
The words rose from my chest and recited themselves in my mind.
To love and to cherish.
I took the longest string and tied a knot in the center of it. I gazed at it for a minute, then flung it into the ocean at roughly one o’clock in the afternoon, May 17, 1988, and every day of my life since, I return to that insoluble moment with veneration and homage, as if it possesses the weight and ceremony of marriage.