by Sonya Taaffe
She opened her eyes to clouds like wet slate, sun sliding toward evening and the rain still as cold, Quince’s arms wrapped close about her and her throat just enough less ravaged for Quince’s name. It might have been a question.
“I don’t know.” This voice had never whispered to her in bed, in a museum, over tea; Quince had never shivered like this. Answer and denial at once, “I don’t know. If it’s mine….”
Acacia said softly, “Mine.” As suddenly and unconditionally as a small child, she wanted Leo; she wondered if he would hold her through that word, single and irrevocable; if it would make a difference. “The others?”
Quince’s throat jerked, a swallow of nothing like a flinch. “I have no children.”
A scrape of ash in her mouth. “You are a monster.”
One of Quince’s brows raked an amused, caustic angle; she bent as though to kiss Acacia’s forehead, stopped. “I’ve never been anything else. Not in this world, how could I be?” Her face was very quiet. “And you never thought I was.”
“No….” Acacia shifted in Quince’s arms, enough to see her profile like weather-carved stone against the flat brick facade, punched-out windows and hanging gutters, motionless as rain traced her parted lips: a gargoyle from a painted mirror, a shadow of cataclysm at the back of her eyes. The question faded on her tongue, unasked; she said instead, “I don’t accept a God that would ruin the world for anything as beautiful as your child.”
Momentarily, Quince’s smile was real and rare as a falling star. “As beautiful as your child, too. You’ve never believed that: that you are beautiful. I must have told you enough times. You and Leo, you amaze me, always. Even now.” The smile slid away with the rain. “Especially now.” Wind drew damp nails over Acacia’s skin and she waited beneath Quince’s silence, her gaze as distant as when Acacia had come up to her beneath the gutter, centuries ago, no time at all: the messenger. “This I know: fire, water, fucking locusts, it doesn’t matter in the end. This place, that you like so much? Times change. Everything falls apart, sooner or later—rusts, dies, dissolves, decays—and nothing, no matter how cunning, how profitable, how lovely, lasts.” Quince’s voice was very soft, her body where Acacia leaned very still. “Nothing.”
“Yes,” Acacia said, as softly. “I know.” But she lay in Quince’s arms anyway, for this moment, and they watched the rain fall.
LAST DRINK BIRD HEAD
The house of darkness, smothered in the dust: the last stair of descent, where the dead gods lie. My hands on the flute were sliding with sweat, lapis sheened under salt like a weeping eye. I had tried wearing the ring, carnelian carved tightly with seated gods and winged demons, and even on my thumb it dangled like a stolen safe-conduct. But the shadows rustled with the dry-mouthed dead, and defense was no more than another delusion to be stripped; I would have bowed before the judges, but their minister met me first.
On his hands, my brother, dragged down screaming in his finery, and the hounds had bayed to one another in mockingbird imitation. On his hands, the blood of the ones I had killed, too few and too slow, that ran milk-white and faintly luminous and dried tautly as semen, but nothing sprang up from its shedding: among crocus and aconite, I had cleaned the knife on the cold earth and known how it would tear itself open for me; who would greet me in the desolate courts below. He wore agate on every finger like a lidless stare. The lenses of his glasses were blind. His wry and weary, hieratic face that could still have been a stranger’s, but he called to me, softly, “Martu,” and I was never any daughter of his.
I could have said, They laughed at you in the halls of heaven. I could have said, You are not a dead god, who cannot die. But my mouth tasted like beer, burned bread, a smoke of incense; fear; and no other words would have brought my brother back. I held out the only ones I had. “I will drink. I will eat. Let the mourners come up with him.” The ring, the flute, myself that descending had torn as bare as bone: all I had brought with me, and he took it from me, name-sealed, the last circle of law. In my right hand, a pitcher of dust. In my left hand, a platter of clay. Between the mud-cracked lintel and the threshold without garlands, I swallowed and there was only dryness in my throat before the darkness bowed me down.
It is there still, like an unopened door; shadows settled on me like a sediment of time, one feather for each year that my brother did not walk in the light. Which of the bird-faced ghosts he had been, I do not know. Perhaps I wear his discarded death, gathered up from the dust like the treasures I did not ransom him with: the love-gift of a ring, the flute he played as he left, already like a shepherd in springtime. But someday there will be pursuers and no one to flee to, a dark man with pale hounds, and all the earth will gape thirstily for him. All death’s children are corpses. And in my father’s house, I will wait for his son, until I am mortal again and it rains.
**
When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces…
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon
THE BOATMAN’S CURE
The dead man was a nail-biter, tucked up in the back seat with old theater magazines and a water-stained Baedeker of Malta, his free hand still nearly white-knuckled around the haft of his oar. All the way from the North Shore, he had complained about her music until Delia popped the tape with a sigh and a protesting click of plastic and stopped the radio on the same alternative station she had spent her first few years out of college waking up to, and they passed the last few miles on I-95 peaceably enough on the White Stripes and the Black Keys and the Decemberists, David Byrne chiming in with cities of dreams and highways of fire as she took the exit for Memorial Boulevard. Mid-morning sun put a duckweed gloss on the Crown Vic’s hood, the same chipped post-police paint job that always looked as wet as if she had been driving through rain. New-bricked, glassed-up, the downtown skyline still deepened around them like a well-known hand, as familiar to fall back into as beds she had not slept in since her hair was long enough to braid. In the rear view mirror, the dead man blinked at a passing mall and said with the distant, pointed persistence she had been trying to tune out with both sides of Brass Monkey and the first track of Soldiers Three, “Would you mind reminding me how much longer this is going to take?”
He must have had a faun’s face once, long before he died, when that cross-cut mouth could still smile without turning in on itself, before he hid those wide-set eyes behind glasses so heavy, passing views of sky and saltgrass and green-darkening trees flowed off them like the bend of a windshield and his cheekbones tightened like kite-struts under the skin. She had taken him for a retired athlete at first, a distance runner or a high jumper, some other lanky discipline, but not unless he had lost all his grace—the hands he never seemed to know what to do with, the angular carelessness with which he had let the door bang shut behind them, and even in his own front hall he had hunched into a clay-blue turtleneck and a duller windbreaker as if mid-May in the estuaries of Essex County were the gutter-end of a moorland November. His voice was at once waspish and distracted, curiously top-storeyed; she was no closer to pinning down his accent than the first time she had wondered what it was. The name he had shaken hands over was Evelyn Burney, but Delia knew better than to believe either phone books or introductions. She had been calling herself Ari since she was fourteen. She said now, “We’ll be there in five minutes, give or take another of these lights,” and heard the dead man’s silence as soundly as a snort.
“And we’re going where?”
South Water Street onto Point Street, the red light at the overpass was taking its time; Delia said nothing, staring at her hands beyond the cuffs of her father’s old corduroy jacket, with its thready buttons and leather-patched elbows like the teacher neither of them had been—small and solid, scratched all over with the marks of sedge and sharp pebbles and human fingernails. She came up to Evelyn’s chin, when he remembered not to slouch. Just the once, she had felt the thinness under his lingering-winter clothes, and still wished she could take it
back. At least she had stopped recognizing the song on the radio.
“Home,” she said simply, knowing it was no such thing.
“Oh, God, I hope not,” the dead man sighed, and opened another magazine.
**
He had not been hard to find; at the time it had not surprised her. A printout with some notes scribbled over the phone had been all the directions she needed, following the signs from Ipswich until the roads wound into sea-lavender brushes and billows of salt hay, inlets glinting like sky-bright needles among the lowland green and beyond Plum Island, the Atlantic at her right hand, forever rolling home. Nothing for miles but cordgrass and curlews and the pale shells of cloud reflecting in the channels like sails, but no one else would have been living in this peeling, periwinkle-boarded stilt-walk of a house with oil-blue mussels clustered on the pilings and low tide already idling around the rust-sponged cement blocks—inside, Delia was half expecting the cabin of a China clipper or a beachcomber’s drift-line hoard, ship’s brasses and netted floats, tarry rope-ends and trade-wind charts, the smell of water everywhere and the windows screwed tight as museum crates with a long century’s newspapers to keep out the draft. Mostly she saw bookshelves, a writing desk, a paler armchair where a dark-blue towel was drying, the sun collecting warmly on hardwood and clean cream walls. A stack of string-tied shoeboxes on the floor was spilling old photographs and undeveloped film, but the next corner over held a tall jade plant, monkey-puzzling in a brass pot. Evelyn looked the odd man out in his own rooms, an uneasy guest hesitating on the couch with a tumbler of half-melted ice rolled slowly back and forth between his palms; he glanced up through his wide-angle lenses, and down at his drink again, and said very little whether she talked or not.
Even his agreement was ambiguous: an unreadable “Oh,” and then abruptly, in the same skimmed-off edge of a voice, “Yes. Yes, of course. Wait here,” and then nothing, head still bent away from her, one long-knuckled hand rubbing automatically at the knee of his trousers where condensation had dripped off his glass, bright as a wet cobweb. His hair was dulse-brown in the afternoon, disarrayed. He would have a trick of raking his fingers back through it, she thought, or he had all but fallen out of bed to meet his visitor, absentmindedly touching his glasses into place with a wariness so well-worn, it could serve as well as indifference; his first look through the storm door had given back only her face in pixelated miniature, the last imprints in a corpse’s camera-obscura eye. Handwaved into the kitchen, she had glimpsed a bed through the receding frame of doorways, book-tumbled, the window shades snapped too far up against the flooding sun and a clothes pile all the same commonplace browns and blues taking up most of the cereal-colored coverlet, but otherwise kept as neatly, surprisingly, as even the sink where Delia dried the salt off her hands, its only signs of recent use a china plate and a bright-cut butter knife, slightly tarnish-spotted, glittering with water in the dish drain. She could not figure out what he had been eating: the refrigerator was stocked with bottles, the one she jack-knifed the cap off as thickly brown-glassed as a patent medicine and labeled in an inky, spidery smear. It tasted of pears, an unexpected orchard tang. Still seated, Evelyn tilted his glass so that the remains of ice in it made a faint, sliding clink and something that was neither a sea breeze nor second thoughts went over the nape of her neck with a shiver, as if a stranger had passed her trailing a shadow she knew. He rose without looking at her and walked from the room, as straight as a sleepwalker, and Delia hunkered down to study his books.
He was gone for long enough that she began to wonder if he had simply ducked out of the house to avoid her, gone birding in the marshes or taken the rowboat tied up off the steps with a coil of toothpaste-colored rope—its own paint splitting along the strakes, a dull plimsoll red—and pushed off into the sound. He came back still carrying the tumbler in one hand, creek-rinsed by the flecks of silt clinging inside, a bundle of cable-knit wool in the crook of his arm. His feet were bare and white as flounders, sharply boned under their dark speckling of sand. Catching his gaze again, Delia thought there might have been something like humor among the tight angles of his face, as private as the rest of him and as quickly put away. She was still holding 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, the empty bottle of perry set down on the floorboards where it had no chance of touching the books; she made herself slide the old hardcover in its dust-and-Scotch-taped jacket conscientiously back beside Harrison’s Prolegomena, another university discard tagged with Dewey-white ink on its spine. Evelyn was unwrapping his parcel on the desk’s polished thrift-store top, an old sweater with both elbows out and one shoulder raveling purplish-black, like fading ink. She did not trust herself to say anything that was not too eager, too close to anger he did not deserve. Behind his glasses, the man she had driven from Baltimore and Boston to see was expressionless again, personable as a catalogue. “You wanted to see this,” he said unnecessarily, and held out the oar.
It was not much to look at: short and splintery, of some tight-grained, greying wood, and glittering in patches where the varnish was beginning to peel. The faintest red traces still ringed the shaft, lobster pots or Cycladic ochre. Evelyn held it awkwardly, as if he were unused even to the idea of handling it, but Delia did not miss the slight, protective crook of his fingers as she lifted it from him; it weighed as lightly in her hand as a branch of driftwood, as cool against her skin as the salt-cracked shingles of his house.
“It’s not really, of course, the oar that Odysseus took inland to make his peace with Poseidon, although a Byzantine commentator by the doubtful name of Aelius Retiarius certainly seems to have thought so.” She had not expected a lecture on provenance: he must have been talking to fill the time until she handed the thing back to him, all without taking his eyes from the dike-flat panorama beyond the window or sounding any more engaged. The foreignness in his voice kept slipping, now that she could hear more than half a dozen words together, southern California to London council housing to something less automatically Anglophone; she found herself thinking of the Mediterranean, although he might only have put the Greek islands into her head. “It was, he maintained, gear of that very same ship in which the hero made landfall at the black headwaters of Acheron, past the groves of Persephone and the gates of the Sun; it had cut through Ocean’s stream and the waters of death. The gods swear by the Styx; it is their binding. Odysseus needed to hold the sea-god to his promise, a better end than storm or shipwreck or monsters: such a gentle death from the sea. What more appropriate seal than the seaman’s essential symbol, Styx-steeped? Not that the original scholia are so theoretical about it.”
The edge of her thumbnail just fitted into a small dent in the blade, an old gouge sea-worn back to smoothness, like a long-healed scar. Without looking up, Delia said, “And you believe any of this?”
“Of course not. The man also glossed πολύτλας as an epithet of Charon,” and she heard it again, a clip of the never-setting Empire that had never existed beyond wireless broadcasts and the sound stages of Gainsborough and Hollywood. “Retiarius claimed to have seen the oar at the nekromanteion of Poseidon at Tainaron, but he would have found that rather difficult by the tenth century, not to mention the oar as we know it wasn’t even catalogued by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Venice until 1643. A clerk with the minimally more plausible name of Anzolo da Canal wrote that it was a family heirloom of the Venier, handed down from Roman days, and cited Retiarius. He didn’t credit it with its present powers; that was a Florentine magician named Dionigi Berdini, writing a half-century earlier of an object he’d never seen. Most likely it’s a case of two or three traditions conflated with at least one forgery at worst, armchair antiquarianism and wishful thinking at best. But the legend stuck.” He sounded as if he were scoring a point off the conversation, so dryly underplaying: “They do that.”
“And if I ask how it got from a museum in Venice into your hands?”
“It was entrusted to me.”
He started to say something el
se, and stopped. Afterward, she thought it was the stillness of his look—dark-eyed, magnified—that warned her more than his earlier evasions; his hands at his sides made a flat-fingered, aversive gesture, pushing the question away. She did not step backward in a stranger’s house, his most precious possession tire-iron-clutched in both hands; Evelyn did not reach to snatch it from her, so that the two of them swung through his quiet, sun-papered rooms like brawlers at some bridge in a folksong. His hands closed on themselves, empty; the expression on his face was so blank, she would have taken it for acceptance if she had not been watching him all day. As gently as her dry mouth would let her, Delia said, “I told you I was going to need it. I was sent to you for it. I spoke with Petrakis, last week in Kensington. Aronowicz on Salem Street gave me your name. She said you understood the arrangement.”
“I’m not a safe-deposit box.”
She could not tell if he was trying to joke. The silence had filled back in around them, drifting in through the warmth opened windows with the smell of returning tide. If he had more than half a foot on her, she knew the stubborn breadth of her shoulders and her weight carried low, a heavy-breasted anchor if she needed to be; she would not move first.
“We’ve both made promises.” She could not comfortably call him Mr. Burney, or reassure him he was not a safe-deposit box without the break of laughter in her throat giving way: trying to keep the drama down. The old wood left its scent on her hands as she shifted and resettled them, not the salt-bleached sea weathering she had imagined, but something smokier, damper, as if he had been keeping it under the thatch of a cottage in the days of whitewash and peat fires. “I don’t make many promises, Evelyn,” even if it was not the right name; she might never know what that was. “They’re too easy to break. This is me keeping one,” and if she should not have used his own language against him, it was no more than the truth. “This is my binding.”
