Maggie
She stalks him the way she stalks some dreams, the ones that are massive and do not have translation, the ones that she will steal, trick, ambush any way she can: in a dark wood, on a dead moon, in a crease of sand. He is like one of the long-legged dreams that she will follow for nights in a row. The kind she will track over distance, over hills and time, at an even pace. The kind she will seize at the point where they falter, grow weak or unsure.
She does not think of him outside her dreaming. An abstract, he lies in direct opposition to her immediate day-to-day of feeding hens, pulling eggs, tapping sap, cutting wood, cooking, canning, and putting down fish. Her chores have an order that her dreaming lacks. The knitting, mending, shucking, gathering, weeding, pruning, all of it funnels into the circular, endless thread that is her waking life, and he does not cross her mind on that day in late spring, 1932, when she finds the black bitten crust around the edge of her tomato leaves and one fattened green tomato hornworm winding its thick corrugated body up the vine.
The following Sunday, before the sun has hatched out of the fog, Maggie pulls down the old biscuit tin from a shelf in the wall of her root cellar. She empties twelve dollars in coins into a deerskin pouch that she ties around her waist. She puts a quart of molasses rum into a flour sack and walks down Thanksgiving Lane toward the bridge. She walks the two miles of new macadam road behind the Horseneck dunes.
A wagon is parked by the path that leads up to Ben Soule’s house: four narrow tread wheels, an open flat bed, low-sided, with a plank seat set across the frame. One of North Kelly’s red mares scuffs its hoof into the loam.
Across the shallow end of the let, Wes walks along the marsh bank with a long-handled fine mesh net and a bucket tied by a string to his belt that floats behind him.
“He says they’re going for perch tomorrow,” the old man says as Maggie sits down next to him. “He’s come for two gallons of bait.”
Maggie puts her hand on the ground. The small chicks run over it, pecking through the creases of her fingers.
“I tell him I see him dragging three nights back,” the old man goes on. “That grappler he use won’t pull nearly as good as an iron pipe set with eight halibut hooks, four on a side. I tell him I’ll make him one of those pipes in turn for a new bottle of that Indian Hill. The new ones got the fancy seal and the screw cap. You seen ’em?”
Maggie shakes her head.
“No salt water gets in those kind of caps. I tell him he’d be wiser than to drag in the kind of moon there was that other night. Foxes were out. A full bitch moon—you see it?”
“I saw it.”
“He tells me they don’t look for him on the full of the moon. You bring me some of those hardtack crackers?”
Maggie nods, picking up one of the chicks. Its small beak jitters into her thumb. She looks down the knoll to the man wading through the shallows. His arms rustle in the heat. He skims the net along the bottom and raises it dripping with mud and weed, heavy with shrimp. He empties the net into the pail and then skims it again through the bottom silt.
“That boy’s like loose hair,” Ben says.
Maggie glances at the old man and smiles. His eyes are blue, faded and like a silk on her face. She puts the flour sack and the purse of coins on the doorstone. He opens the jar of molasses rum, sniffs it, then screws the cap back on, and places the jar in a gap under the doorstone. He dumps the coins out into the sand at his feet. As he counts them into piles of a dollar each, Maggie watches Wes walk around the rim of the let. In one hand he carries the pail. The net rests across his other shoulder. His face is dark and leathered from long hours on the water. Unshaven.
“Suppose there’s a reason you’re bringing me these coins,” the old man says.
“I need the rooster,” Maggie answers.
The old man looks up, following her eyes toward the water. “That boy Wes could talk a dog off a meat wagon. Could talk a person into deep trouble.”
Wes has reached the pier. He places the shrimp pail on the end of it and walks up the knoll toward them. He is lean, long-armed, his fingers scarred from catching mackerel on a handline, twisting rawhide straps to set a blind, and culling through wild oysters with an old Ford tire iron. Maggie has seen him sitting on a bait pail behind the dock house with a mess of natives, some as long as twelve inches. She has seen him shuck the raw meat out of the shell, his hands cut to ribbons by the sharp edges. He will sell those oysters to Blackwood for thirty cents a solid pint, and once in a while she will steal a pint and eat them raw.
Wes doesn’t look at her. He nods at Ben. “You got a tray?”
“You think any more on my offer for the iron pipe? Eight hooks on it. Fish you eight bottles at once.”
Wes grinds his foot into the dirt, slowly, thoughtfully. He bites a corner of his lip and glances at Maggie. His eyes are pale. They pass over her face, her throat, and down her arms, across her hip. He coats her like a thin frost, and when he looks away, she can feel the slow systems of ridge he has left in her skin.
“You got a tray, old man?” he asks again.
Wes leans the shrimp net against the side of the house, then walks over to the wagon cart parked behind the shed and lifts out a galvanized tub. He crosses the yard to the hen pen, unwraps one end of the wire from its stake, takes a knife from his belt, and cuts away a strip of it, a foot wide. He moves the stake one foot in and wraps the cut edge back around it. He takes the screening down to the pier, fills the tub with rockweed, unwraps a piece of ice, and shatters it with a mallet. He mixes the ice in with the rockweed, places the wire screening on top, then empties out the bucket of shrimp and smoothes them across the wire with his hands.
“I need the rooster, Ben,” says Maggie. “I got hornworms in my garden this year. They’ll eat my crop. I’ll give you eight for the rooster—what you paid for him. Plus three more and the rum.”
“That’s not the kind of boy you should be walking out of your skin after.”
“Who says nothing about him?” she snaps without turning around.
“You think I’m that old?”
“Never said that.”
“You think I’m blind.”
Maggie shrugs. “Nothing to be blind for.” Her face is even when she speaks, but Ben can see it, he can see through the cracks into her. He can see the raw wily light in her eyes when she looks across the eelgrass toward the man settling his shrimp onto ice. He knows that look. He has seen it before. And even now, with her face turned half away from him, he can see in the set of her bones something of Elizabeth Gonne Lowe. She would be old now. She is old. He knows this. He does not rest in the thought too long.
Maggie glances up and catches him watching her.
“What?”
“That man you’re looking at—I see how you look at him, don’t tell me I don’t see—he’s not the sort who’ll give you what you want.” He says this bitterly and digs his hand into the tin pail next to the steps. He takes out a whale’s tooth. Rough, unworked, and long, it came from deep inside the gum. With a coarse file sharpened on the grindstone, he begins to take down the ridges. He sands the tooth with a piece of dried sharkskin, then coats it with a pumice made from wood ash. When Wes comes back up to the house, he pumps water and drinks it straight from the well pail. Ben holds the polished tooth out to him. The younger man takes it and tucks it by the cigarette pack in the pocket of his coat.
Maggie drives with Wes on the cart back to town. They drive east, down the stem of land that divides the let from Buzzards Bay. The gulls roll in off the ocean, dragging an avalanche of fog behind them on their wings. He takes the left turn onto Horseneck Road hard, and she falls in against him. He smiles as she pushes herself back into balance, wrapping her hands more firmly around the rooster in her lap.
He tells her they will have to stop at Ada Howell’s farm a mile north to trade a barrel of codfish for ten pounds of butter that Blackwood will sell at the wharf. He lets the name float in the space between them and, from the corner of his eye, he watches her. The name makes no wrinkle in her face, no crease or indentation. She sits beside him on the wide plank seat, reinforced with a broken oar, and says nothing. They wind up Horseneck Road past wrecked stone walls marking abandoned tracts of land that have been newly sold and cleared. The sun breaks through, and he can feel its heat crack across the back of his neck. His mouth tastes of brine, and it occurs to him that as close as she is, she holds a distance that he has experienced only in open water. The first time he went out with North Kelly past the three-mile mark, the wind was northwest. They steered directly south toward the lightship. They pulled the traps off the dogfish ledge, then pushed another mile south, and Wes watched the land fold down over the rim of the earth and disappear. When they turned north, it rose again as if it were the sun or a storm or something alien that he had never witnessed. Like this woman, her long hands wrapped around the belly of the rooster. The smell of her mixes with the taste of brine and cow dung from the fields of the Ashworth Dairy Farm. On the cow path he can see the black-and-white flanked herd, moving in a slow trail toward the river.
“You go a lot?” he asks her.
“Where?”
“To see him?”
“Who?”
“The old man.”
“Sure.”
“On Sundays?”
She nods.
“Every Sunday?”
“Close.”
He waits for her to speak more, but she doesn’t, and her silence, her unwillingness to engage, frustrates him. They pass Gifford Hollow and the Quaker Meeting House by the slow-running creek. The heat builds as they move inland, winding through the thick groves of oak and maple. They lose the wind, and the horseflies beat around them. They tick at his neck, drinking sweat, and he whips them away, sharply. He slaps the reins.
He tells her they will stop at Spud Mason’s farm to pick up potatoes and four sacks of Macomber turnips. She waits for him in the cart next to the barn, the horse pawing through the soft dirt. She holds the rooster on her lap, and her hands move through its feathers. Through the reek of cow earth and pig manure, she can smell the faint sharp tang of herring on the southwest breeze.
Except to tell her where they will stop, he does not speak again. His face is wrapped in a toughened outer skin from long days on the water. She watches him carefully. She notices how he holds the reins loose across his fingers, how he guides the mare with the slightest touch of leather to the neck. Each time they stop, he takes an apple from his pocket and feeds a piece of it to the horse. He breaks the flesh out of the softer side, peels the skin off with his teeth, spits it back into his hand, and places it under her mouth.
At the Tripp Farm, half a mile before the crossroads at South Westport, Wes pulls the wagon off the road under a locust tree. He gets out and ties up the horse on a stake.
He pauses by Maggie’s side of the wagon and points to the mass of blooming flowers that have sprouted up beside the water ditch.
“See that loosestrife there,” he says. “Fills in thicker now than this time last year. It crowds out the cattails and the mallow. Gets them at the root, so they got no room to grow.” He pauses. “Didn’t come from here, you know,” he goes on without looking back at her. “Same like the gypsy moth, got brought in from a somewhere else.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Maggie says.
“Know what a gypsy moth can do? Strip the trees and bush.”
“I said, I know what you’re saying.”
“Not saying you’re like them, but you see how it is. Skukes come in, buy up the farms, chew them to nothing for a house to live in two weeks a year. Like that stone place put up by Soule’s. That house got built so big, eats up all the old man’s sun.”
“Your brother did most of the work on that house.”
Wes digs his foot against the front wagon wheel. “Yeah? Well, my brother does what he does.”
“You’re sour on him for it?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“He’s like anyone else. Needs his work.”
“Lots of ways to work. Don’t have to do work that talks out both sides of your mouth.”
“Is that why you run?”
“Your Blackwood’s no better, you know. Rakes himself pretty fine with the business the skukes bring him this time of year.”
“You think running’s different?”
“Who says I run?”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Yeah? Well, you hear what you hear.” He smiles at her, and there is a wickedness about the smile. A slant. He nods at the driveway that leads down to the Tripp Farm. “They got a bag of feed for me waiting at the barn. Two jugs of cream.”
She smiles wryly at him. “Go get it then.”
He looks up at her, his eyes lingering over her face. “Come with me,” he says. She is about to refuse, but his face—she does not know how or when this happened—but his face turned up at her in the shade of the locust tree is suddenly open, curiously vulnerable, as if he has stripped himself quietly without her knowing.
“All right then,” she says. She binds the rooster’s legs and sets it on the floor of the wagon and climbs out. They walk together down the lane cut through the rows of corn. The house rises abruptly past the stalks on a sudden hill that empties down across a field in fallow. Farther down, the river twists.
As they pass behind the woodshed, he stops and pushes her up against the wall. The touch plummets through her. She can feel her heart under his hand. His face is hard again. That slanted cruelness in his eyes. He pulls at the front of her dress. Not gently. She pushes him off, and without a word walks back to the cart, hoists herself inside it and picks up the rooster. She feels her way along its belly to the knob of its shoulder under the wing. Her skin is burning, sweat gathering in her hair and down her neck. The heat grinds against her as she waits. The deerflies scour in around her ears.
A quarter of an hour later Wes comes back with the feed and cream. He loads them into the back of the wagon, setting the feed around the jugs as cushion for the ride. Maggie does not say anything to him as he climbs in next to her. She keeps herself separate, and when he takes the hard curve at the cross of Pine Hill and Hixbridge Road, she leans against her own side of the cart, her feet pushing into the floor.
They pass the general store. Carl MacKenzie and Ernie Manchester are out on the porch, drinking coffee milk and playing pitch. They pass the stagecoach with its sacks of mail and laundry parked outside Jack Oliver’s house and the Telephone Exchange. They pass Long Acre Farm and the thin road down to Cadman’s Neck that cuts south across the ridge.
At the top of the hill, Wes snaps the reins and they bear down on Hix Landing. As they cross the bridge, the wheels of the cart burn into the salt-eaten wood. They speed past the teahouse, then Remington’s, with the long rows of cars already gathered for the clambake at four. The women wear long gloves with small parasols balanced on their shoulders. The men are dressed in top hats and penguin suits. Maggie can smell the burning rockweed mixed with wood ash, the steam of tripe, onions, and soft-shell clams.
He leaves her at the top of the drive at Skirdagh. She climbs down from the cart with the rooster in her arms and walks away down the middle split of grass between the wheel ruts of the wagon path. Wes waits, watching her, and when she does not look back, he slaps the horse. The cart lurches, takes off fast, and he drives the rest of the way down Thanksgiving Lane to Blackwood’s store. He unloads the butter, the sacks of potatoes, and the white-fleshed turnips with gray dirt still in the creases of their skins. It has begun to rain. A soft drizzle. He leads the horse up the road to the stable behind the old sail loft on Valentine Lane. With an ox-hair brush, he grooms the mare, running his hands over her coat until it is smooth and wet. He feeds her fresh hay and the last quarter of the apple that has baked in his pocket to a sweet mud.
He walks down to the dock house through the rain, rolls back the barn-size door along its iron tracks, and slides into the game of craps with two of the Mason brothers, North Kelly, and Russ Barre. They play on an oak door balanced across two sawhorses. Red Mason is bragging about his grandfather who pitched three seasons for the Wamsuttas and threw sixty-nine strikeouts in 1892. North Kelly pours Wes three glasses of Canadian White Horse Scotch whiskey, and before he has finished the third, he has lost the ninety-five dollars he made on his last run, the Thursday before.
He looks at the pile of bills and silver coins in the middle of the table, and thinks about having that money and spending it to buy a crate load of bananas for Maggie every week on Sunday for the rest of her life. The thought enrages him. He pours himself a glass of Tommy Kent’s one-ninety proof, made in a still in the woods off Blossom Road. It is the kind of pure and homemade fire that can wash thought out of a man’s brain. He is fully loaded by the time Blackwood closes his store and comes down to join them.
Wes sits out two games and eyes Blackwood across the table before he sets himself back in with a bet on margin. He wins big twice, and Red Mason accuses him of pulling a one-eyed jack off the bottom of the deck. Wes pushes back his chair and unwinds his body across the room, tumbling glasses, cards, piles of ten-dollar bills. He punches Red Mason in the throat, and they roll onto the floor through tobacco juice, spilt whiskey, sawdust, and nails, before they wrestle one another back to standing. Mason’s fist hits Wes at the side of the head. Wes goes down, then slashes up again, his back slams Mason under the chin so the head snaps, jaw cracked. Red stumbles back against the wall. Blackwood catches Wes from behind and holds his arms. Wes lets his body grow limp and when he feels Blackwood’s grip release, he turns and lunges for him, leading with his shoulder. He drives full force into Blackwood’s ribs, and he can feel one of those slim blades give way. They tumble outside into the rain and the guts of fish that coat the wharf. They slip, grasping after one another, and fall into the river. Wes pulls himself across Blackwood’s back, holding him down until the older man’s body goes still. Wes hauls him back in to shore and leaves him lying facedown and unconscious in the marsh off the Point Meadows just east of the bridge. He shakes the mud from his clothes and walks in the soft rain back up Thanksgiving Lane to the thin wedge of Maggie’s land between the Coles house and Skirdagh. He waits for her by the shed behind the house.
Early the next morning, when she lets the chicks spill out onto the lawn with handfuls of split grits and corn, she finds him there asleep, his face white in the tall grass with a thin trail of blood winding from his ear.
She kneels down next to him and pulls his head into her lap. She takes the dreams out of his skull—a small boat, its departure from the harbor, the gradual loss of land. She can smell the hull wood baked into a brittleness by the sun, the drop over an edge into nothing but water and horizon, the slackening of time that accompanies the absence of spatial direction.
She sits there for a while, culling through his brain. Then she rolls him away onto his side and walks to the end of the drive for the milk. She carries the two aluminum cans back to Skirdagh and empties them into pitchers that she replaces on the cool shelf in the pantry shielded by a mosquito net. She waters the trays of herb seedlings set on the window ledge above the sink. Lavender, thyme, the tiny green fists of oregano pushing up through the soil.
She cooks breakfast for Elizabeth. She slices off two cuts of bread and paints them with soft butter, then drags the buttered side through sugar. She leaves the plate with the sugar bread, an egg, and four strips of bacon wrapped in cloth on the oak side table in the dining room.
When she goes back outside to draw water from the stone well, she does not look toward the bushes by the shed. She does not look to see if Wes is still lying there. She draws the bucket up slowly to keep the hinged leather flap at the bottom closed under the weight of water. The rooster has begun to pace out his station in the yard, and Maggie watches him as she draws the bucket over the well curb and empties it into the white enamel water pail. She lowers the rope until it falls slack. She herds the baby chicks back into the kitchen, into their basket of wool and soft hay next to the stove. She pours them a bowl of the fresh water to drink and leaves the rest of it on the counter next to the sink.
She takes a handful of crushed corn and goes outside to sit at the edge of the tomato garden. The rooster has found the hornworms. He has one in his beak and he shakes it furiously until the thing splits in half.
She calls him slowly. He circles toward her, then stalks away, the large waxy red comb nodding on his head. He eyes her from the corner of the yard, preens his beak into his wings, and draws it through until the feathers grow smooth and oiled. She calls him again. She names him, and clucks under her breath, the soft ticking sound of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She keeps the call low and in the back of her throat. She opens her hand with the corn mush inside it, and she sits there, waiting, until he comes to her, still stalking out his slow and unkempt circles. He moves closer, then balks away, then moves closer again. Each time he circles back, the distance shrinks until his beak pecks gently at the yellow crushed corn inside her hand.
Finally, before she goes back into the house to start the wash, she glances over to the spot where Wes was lying an hour before. The grass is empty, but she can still make out the slight bent pocket where he slept.
For the rest of that day, she pours herself into her chores. In the afternoon, when the linen has been bleached and strung up on the line, she goes out into the hen shed. She sweeps the floor, straightens the banana crates she has set for laying along each wall, and fills them with new straw. She herds in the hens. The rooster flaps away from the rest of them and flies to the highest perch crossed along the back wall just below the ceiling beams. She leaves feed for them on the floor and latches the door behind her.
It is not until early evening when she is chopping wood that thoughts of Wes begin to wind again inside her brain. The wood yard is out behind the garden shed: a square of clear ground softly padded by chips and dead leaves with a heap of undivided logs piled on one side. Maggie works until dark, the ax blade slicing bluish silver through the dusky fog. Sundered pieces fleck out, surrounding her, as the pile of raw wood shrinks. Her palms grow wet on the handle of the ax, slipping back and forth between her ungloved hands. She divides the larger cuts of wood in half and then in half again, so they will be small enough, contained enough, to burn inside the stove. And it occurs to her as she works the branches off a pine that until now, her longing has been an impersonal thing. Pure and unattached and undefined. It has been a vague reaching toward some abstract beyond. Her longing was something she had walked with since she was a child. It had carved her, formed her substance, her awareness. It was a thing in and of itself and had no object. A region of emptiness she had defined herself against. Until now. As her shoulders grow sore under the rhythmic swinging of the ax, she begins to realize that her longing has become quite suddenly specific. It has a face attached to it. A figure. A name.
She leans the ax against the chopping stump. She gathers up the split logs from the new mat of pine chips and shavings. She stacks the logs into a second pile closer to the house. She leaves a nook for herself built into the cords and, when the last log is placed, she climbs into it to rest in the stark smell of wood, freshly hewn.
That night, she goes, as she has always gone, to Blackwood. She finds him asleep, bent over the ledger on the desk, the damp ink figures imprinted into the side of his cheek. She pulls him back onto the bed, unties his shoes and eases the shirt from his shoulders. She finds the bruise on his ribs—small, a deep black, and in the shape of an eye. She puts her fingers into the palm of one of his tremendous crippled hands. It closes around her in his sleep. He has grown into her over time, mixed in her thoughts, in her blood. As he moves his aging body over hers, she can sense her own death in him.
She loves Blackwood. She knows this. She loves his swarthy age. The disfigured strangeness of his hands. His chapped and all-consuming way of loving her. But tonight as he wakes up and takes her, she is aware that something has shifted. Tonight, this night, is different from the nights that came before. The outside darkness pressing in against the window has a texture, a presence that is new. She looks past Blackwood’s shoulder toward the ceiling and the sullied patterns of orange light. The kerosene pools in gassy shadows through the beams and, as she watches them, she is aware that she is waiting. Even as her body moves under Blackwood’s weight, another part of her is lying separate, half-dormant and waiting for the sensation she had with Wes—in that moment when he touched her by the shed at the Tripp Farm—that lightning in the chest.
Blackwood falls away from her onto his back, his breathing ragged. Maggie runs her hand over his heart and finds the broken rib. She touches it gently, tracing the jut where the break stubs the skin, and she senses, without knowing for sure, how it happened. She puts her head against his chest and listens—the slender fracture has a sound that is not unlike the sound wind makes through a halyard—a slight persistent ticking in the bone—as the blood pushes through—a slow leak widening inside.
Over the next few months, Maggie passes Wes four times on John Reed Road. She sees him on North Kelly’s boat tied up at the dock house unloading his catch into the floating pots. She sees him on his way up to Caleb Mason’s icehouse, the wagon stacked with pots and weed. She sees him once at the end of the causeway. He stands on the rocks with a gaff hook balanced on his shoulder looking out across the bay and, as she watches, his head bends back slightly, as if the movement is unconscious and against his will. The sun pours across his face.
He catches her watching him. His eyes harden, and the light breaks away from him.
He follows her back toward the bridge. He cuts through the deer path that parallels the macadam road. When they take the bend and the river drops through the trees into view, he pulls her into the oak scrub.
For an instant, she imagines fighting him off. She imagines the ways of defiance—how she will slip, filch, scrap herself away from his swift hands. His mouth is wet on her ear.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she says.
“You did.”
As he comes inside her, she grips her fingers into his shoulder, gathering him into her like a dream out of the wheelbarrow that has stood for days at the edge of her garden, its wooden belly full of sea muck, a compost of sod, wildflowers, and shells that she will grind to ash and lay across the tomato seeds. She feels through the muscle of his shoulder toward the bone. She feels for the nakedness of the man she saw less than an hour before standing on the causeway rocks. She digs toward the vulnerable in him, and he runs through the cracks in her hands.
“I need you,” he says. Her body opens under him like earth.
They walk back to town separately. He is ten yards ahead, then twenty, and by the time she has reached the bridge, she can see him at the top of Thanksgiving Lane past the church. He turns onto the wagon drive that leads down to her root cellar.
There is a dead swan in the marsh. She takes the path by the old ferry dock along the small beach and crosses the mat of salt marsh cordgrass. The bird lies on its back, its legs hooked underneath, its heart pulled out by the crows. Farther off, by the dock, she can see the mate, peddling its tireless moored route back and forth along the shallows.
Maggie stands in the dry grass and looks across the river. From here, she can see the room where Wes lives on the top floor above the Shuckers Club. For months, she has crossed the bridge at dawn and felt him there, watching her through the blinds. This morning, she sees, as she has seen many mornings, a shadow bend across the glass and, for the first time, she recognizes that shadow for the trick of light it is.
He is waiting for her in the root cellar. He catches her wrist as she comes down the stairs. He makes love to her on the dirt floor strewn with geranium petals and ginger stems. He comes into her from behind and pulls her hips back into him.
Later as she sleeps, he runs his hand lightly down the midline of her chest, then back up over her breast. His fingers pause for a moment at the dent in her throat and then his hand begins to move again, in long ovals, circling her ribs. She doesn’t stir.
He digs a whale tooth from his hunting coat pocket, a small paintbrush, and a four-ounce corked bottle of india ink. On one of the wooden shelves by the stove, he finds a sewing needle stuck into a pincushion. He sits back down on the spring cot next to her long body lying still under the sheet. He uncorks the bottle and spills a few drops of ink onto the flat edge of the brush, and he coats the bone until it is a blackness in the palm of his hand. Then, slowly, he begins to cut the lines: a ship, the slight boats, the sullen thrash of a tail. He etches the harpoons the way he has etched them before—as thin as the needle he uses to cut them. They sprout from the whale’s curved flank like misplaced bones. Once in a while, he will lose the image. Even squinting, he will not be able to differentiate sea, spear, man, whale. Each one is a simple scratch of whiteness in black ink.
He knows what happens next: one boat will be hit by the tail and capsized; a spear will be thrown to strike the beast in the head; the whale will run for two miles on a length of rope unwinding in the bow until it tires. Then, its tremendous body will be dragged back to the ship and hoisted halfway up the port side. The blubber will be stripped into blanket pieces, which will be cut again into smaller horse pieces, and then again into bible leaves until its massiveness has been distilled into oil casks, an acre of baleen, and three stave barrels of bone.
But for now, it is only the moment before—before the tipping of the first boat—before the harpoon strikes the head. Ben Soule has taught him this art. He has taught him this moment, and Wes has sketched it over and over. He has held it still and learned it by heart. No matter how many times he cuts the same scene, he will never exhaust it, because what he is looking for is something already written, already lost.
He glances up. As if she can feel him watching her, Maggie turns over on the spring cot, her body long in the deathly yellow light. Her eyes are closed, and yet he has the eerie unsettled sense that she is watching him. Her eyelids shift as if she tracks him in her sleep.
He goes on working the tooth: he cuts lines that are delicate, precise. He carves the scene until it is done. Then he coats the tooth again with ink and takes a piece of cardboard that he bends back and forth in his hands until it grows as soft as cloth. Slowly, carefully, he sifts the ink away from the bone.
He buries the finished tooth in the mattress close to the springs. She is still asleep. He touches her face, gently, the closed eyes, her mouth slightly ajar, and he sees his father’s rough hands as they moved across his mother’s face when she was lost inside the fever. He remembers how futile it was—that unwieldy tender gesture of him loving her. Now, he opens his hand and holds it just above Maggie’s skin. He will not touch her. He will not come that close. He cups his fingers around the wide plane of her cheek, an almost imperceptible pressure, hovering there, the heel of his palm close to her mouth as if he could capture her breath in his hand.
The next morning, he watches her dress. He lies propped on his side. His shoulder takes the light, pushing out from the sheet. She pulls on her boots, straps the laces once around, and ties them.
“Come back,” he says.
She shakes her head. Straightening, she tightens her skirt at the waist.
“Come back.”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I’ve got things to do.”
He scowls for a moment, and she can see in his expression that he has assumed, the way it is easy for some men to assume, that by his need he has marked her.
She considers it now—what stirs in her for him—not love exactly. No. It is an unpolished hunger. It thrills her, stings her, frightens her. He is the kind of man she could lose herself to.
“Come back,” he says again, his face softening. The gentleness takes her off guard. “Come back,” as if those are the only words that he remembers how to say. Maggie lets herself be drawn. She reaches the edge of the spring cot, and he pulls her down, removes her dress. He unties the laces of her boots and slips them off her feet. His arms wrap like deep sea roots around her.
“I won’t choose,” she says quietly as his mouth moves over her breasts. “You can’t own me, and I won’t let you make me choose.” She holds his head in her hands, twists her fingers through his hair as he makes love to her, and when she comes, she grips him tightly, even violently, trying to hold this moment between them for as long as she can.
She leaves him lying on the bed, picks up her clothes from the floor and backs away, slow steps backward away from him across the room.
“Where are you going?” He laughs at her. “Why are you walking backward like that?”
She doesn’t answer. As she retreats, her vision clarifies again, and she can see his face change through different skins—wanting, pulling, needing her, cutting her off, pushing her away, because his desire—she can see it now—it is like her own, unlivable, it heaves like clouds across his face—a desire too big, it leaves him ashamed, desperate, angry—with a need to leash, possess, own because he thinks, mistakenly, that she has done this to him.
She continues walking backward, watching him, his shoulder knobbed with yellow light, the damp earth walls of the root cellar behind him. She will see these walls a thousand times. She will see them every night after he is gone.
She does not tell him this. She does not tell him that he will forget her. He will resent her for his wanting. He will keep a distance from her the way the rooster hefts a distance from the hens to keep them contained. Over the next several weeks, he will cut her to pieces and put her away. Piece by piece: into the back of a bottom drawer; wrapped in burlap into one of those crates of stolen whiskey; sealed under a trapdoor in Mason’s icehouse under a mountain of soaked hay. He will take his runs in the skiff. He will drive his rum load to the city at dawn in the back of Kelly’s cart packed under lobster catch and rockweed. He will drink and fish and hunt, he will push deep into his life—she does not know how far—and someday perhaps—someday—No.
She walks up to Skirdagh, lets out the chicks, and climbs the stairs to Elizabeth’s bedroom on the second floor. She empties the thunder jug, pours fresh water into the washbasin, and lifts the shade. The light pours across the old woman’s face. Elizabeth reaches out, her eyes weakened by the brightness. As Maggie turns to draw back the covers, through the open window she sees Wes leave the root cellar. The rooster is out in the corner of the yard closest to the garden. Wes leans down, picks up a small stone, and throws it in a cutthroat path angled toward the rooster’s leg. The chicken jumps, and the stone whistles past it, just missing the edge of its wing.
Maggie will think of this for days afterward. In the mornings, while she is breaking eggs into the fry pan, in the afternoons, as she gathers kindling for the fire. At night, lying with Blackwood in the yellow-lit room above the wharf, she will think of the rooster—that other one she buried years ago—its gangrene leg. She will remember the inexplicable wound—how it would not heal—and over and over again she will see Wes throw the stone. She will hear the mindless cruelty in the shrill cry of that pebble through the air.
That morning when he leaves the root cellar, Wes stops in at the dock house. Russ Barre is alone in the back room overhauling his gear. As he fixes a new hook to the trawl, he tells Wes about the ship due in from the north that night around the Sow and Pigs.
After dark, the wind picks up, and a crescent moon rises over the bridge. Caleb Mason meets Wes at the dock and they push off just shy of ten. They reach the mother ship by quarter past eleven. They bring the first load to the tip of Gooseberry, tie a cork mooring to one end, and dump the crates overboard into the shallows. They take a second trip out for another load, storing the unmarked wooden crates under tarps and lobster pots. They come back into the harbor, silently. They slip through the black water with their engines cut, on a rising tide. As they pass the wharf and Jewel Penny raises the draw of the Point Bridge, Wes glances over his shoulder to the room above Blackwood’s store and thinks of her.
Three trucks, six pleasure cars, and fifteen men are waiting in the turnout north of Haskell’s barn to help them unload. As Wes is lifting the last crate from the deck, he decides that he will go to her. He will find her in the root cellar asleep in the thin light from the woodstove. She will be waiting for him. He loses his grip on the crate. One bottle slips out. He reaches down and arrests it, just barely, above the ground. He bites hard into his lower lip.
That night when the work is done and the new roll of cash digs hard into his thigh, Wes goes back with North Kelly, Thin Gin Tripp, and Caleb Mason to the dock house, where they drink three bottles of Indian Hill bourbon and lose to one another at cards until dawn.
On the next full moon, from the window of his room above the Shuckers Club, he sees Maggie cross the lane and slip through the back door of the wharf. He sees her shadow climb the inside stairs toward the yellow kerosene light above Blackwood’s store.
He watches the door. The moon washes over it, striking a slow, lean path across the wood, before it continues on its route west down the street and toward the river. He watches that door all night. Shadows climb around the frame. Close to dawn, she slips out. He moves quickly down the stairs and follows fifteen yards behind her up the road toward Skirdagh. He keeps himself off the sidewalk, walking at the edges of the lawns. She looks back once, and he thins himself behind an elm. She stands still. Her eyes play the street from one side to the other, down the lane toward the wharf. She scans every inch of what is behind her with the exception of the spot where he is. Then she turns and continues walking.