The Maytrees

by Annie Dillard

  IT WAS AFTER TWO o’clock the next day that they hazarded the Orleans rotary. He sat by Mrs. Smither while Deary dozed and jerked in back. The Cape land was flimsy; it lacked stones. If Nausets discovered a glacial erratic, they wore paths to it to grind corn; later surveyors reckoned by it. Maytree saw gaudy roadside shops clear to Eastham. A gas-station map showed that the green-tinted National Seashore takings, which they had all fought, had saved the lower Cape. They passed dead Pilgrim Lake. Ahead a moving dune was crossing the road footfirst like a snail. He saw half a dozen highway employees (convicts?) trying to sweep the dune back with brooms. Left toward the bay. Pulling up to his own old house, Mrs. Smither found no parking space. Town had shrunk and multiplied walls as crystals form facets in vials. They parked back on Bradford. He asked Mrs. Smither to leave the ignition on so the heater worked. His hip hit the car door shut. He would walk. His jacket hung open over his casts and slings.

  How would he start? He had outgrown eloquence. He started the first time by introducing himself. Lou might well not be amused. He needed more air. He would be able to tell from her face.

  On the top step he knew she was gone. He rang the bell, waited, walked into the house that smelled like sea and her skin, and called. The empty house where they had lived still seemed hospitable. Back in the car he told Mrs. Smither how to find Pete’s.

  Pete’s Marie opened the door where the outside stairs ended. Maytree identified himself. She held the door for him. Marie stood taller than Pete, slim-faced and exuberant. Her laughing chatter was either her habit, or, more likely, extra happiness. She displayed for him, in her thrust arms, black-eyed baby Manuel who stared at air. The baby had more eyebrows than Cary Grant. Braced to confront Lou, Maytree found himself undone by this in-the-translucent-flesh grandson who set him blinking. Pete’s boat was due in after sunset, Marie said as if she had known Maytree all her life. He sat and knocked back a beer. His bones’ pain was a siren in his ears. It wore him out all over every instant, and he could barely strain to take in the world behind the blare. Marie said Pete’s mother was out closing the shack. In December? Bowing, Maytree left. He had to walk to her there before dark.

  There was a new motel off-street on Bradford. —Where are we? Deary whispered when the car stopped. Oh, look, it’s Provincetown. The lives we live! She reached in her bag for a mirror. Last week she almost stopped eating. She was shutting down one tube at a time. In the motel lobby Maytree checked them in. From the bed Deary could watch sky stir over the bay. Maytree’s broken bones registered each wave’s break as a bomb. Mrs. Smither handed him water to drink. She buttoned his jacket over his casts and pulled his watch cap over his ears. He set out north for the dunes.

  When Maytree was young, men, women, and children found their way in starlight alone. When clouds covered the night sky, as now, the whole Cape knew it: Dark night! they said, in a greeting then as common, and almost as frequent, as—Fine day! The answer was, Sure is, or Real dark night. Night was their familiar parlor, a scented time all its own. Now that electric lights wrecked the night sky, he mourned as if the great universe had died within his own lifetime. People forgot to look up. Maytree knew his remembering starry nights dated him as the war did. Except that the war, unlike humans’ sight of stars, had lasted fewer than ten years.

  Dark would catch him somewhere in the dunes. At this thought he turned back and kicked his motel door politely. Mrs. Smither obliged him by removing his shoes so he could feel his way. Deary smiled. He wondered if she remembered the dunes.

  THAT MORNING AT THE shack, Lou unhooked the long-handled tinsnips. She cut a coiled copper scouring pad into strips, and knelt with a palette knife to force the strips to caulk holes and cracks in the walls and floor. The task required her moving everything in the room, including the bed. Scouring pad and steel wool worked as razor-wire for mice. If she failed to jam it, it blew out. A few mice and snakes always got inside anyway, perhaps through the gaps between nuclei and electrons. The mice, from scrapings of pillow, made nests the size of basketballs.

  A flying wedge of cirrus was coming in high. She watched the sky fill, crowd, and close. By noon low cloud shut it. The foghorn started. That evening from her shack Lou saw blurred lights white and red in dark. The lights meant that most of the fleet, alerted by forecasts, had drawn inshore to dunes’ lee. Always ominous, the sight scared her for years, until she learned that in hurricanes she would see no boats at all. Was Pete there? If the storm were going to be worse, those boats would have made for the breakwater and the harbor behind Provincetown’s seven hills, or at very worst gone offshore for searoom.

  Maytree crossed the cold highway. His feet had softened in shoes for twenty years. He entered the woods and felt pine needles give way to sand as he climbed. All he had to do on this part was climb straight up sliding sand. It was like walking up a down escalator.

  The first high clearing with its 360-degree prospect comprised all the dim dunes left and right. Here forest backed horizon’s arc. Behind him a strand of lights, now blurring, dotted both Provincetown and its reflection. The lights burned no holes to relieve the black but instead seemed glued to its cloth. No matter how dark the night, sand’s albedo was barely lighter than bushes’ and trees’. Foundering behind a blowout, he rehearsed his bearings. The dunes and the people’s path through them might have moved. The southwest wind at his neck could not serve as direction finder because it might shift.

  Maytree was—as their old friend Mary Heaton Vorse said—“night-footed.” Up and down and veer up and veer down and veer left and with luck find the swale’s hard sand. Farther along in the night’s burrow, he must strike the wavy jeep trail south behind the big rise to the foredune. He must stay in the jeep trail’s ruts through each curve without bumping a scrub tree or the old coast guard station’s broken wall. Then if he could balance atilt on the tracks’ left edge in order to feel with his feet any sand dip wider than a toad track in the foredune’s lee, and if he could by chance count these footpaths, then he might even find the thready shortcut left to the foredune’s ridge and the last hard right to the shack. If, as likely, that failed, he could climb the foredune anywhere—unless he unknowingly passed the shack—and keep just at its grassy edge till he hit a shack or trail he knew. If he walked into the sea he had gone too far.

  He started balancing across these steeps with his sore arms tied across him. He knew only the old route, and where he was now, where the shack was, and which way the sea. Not enough. Surely if the foredune and shack had fallen in the sea, Cornelius or Pete would have told him.

  In the dark he could not walk fast enough to keep warm. Why during that eight-hour drive had he never once stopped to buy, say, soy sauce for Lou? He could have brought her anything. Asking, yes or no, for a month or two’s room and board and twenty-four-hour nursing for two—especially for these two—called for one superb hostess gift. After two decades the A&P he saw on Conwell must carry soy sauce. He remembered Lou’s translucent beauty of twenty years ago, her still carriage, and her friendly note above all. He was shaking from cold. The worst she could do was say no and mock him and kick him out. This worst was looking worse by the minute.

  His head hit a dead branch and it broke. Last night awake in Camden he had fabricated some convoluted formula proving one minus one plus two equals just fine, downright dandy, in the presence of vodka and yelling pain and the absence of alternatives. How did it, impossibly, go? Something like…He, Maytree, would return home in courage—he had of course grown in courage—and part of courage is thinking well of people, even people you have wronged. He climbed the sand. Of course: never mind Lou, never mind Pete, never mind Deary, he was the bloody glorious hero. Fortunately a favorite aphorism from Howards End came to mind; he and Cornelius repeated it for years: “Unworthiness stimulates woman.”

  A tall pale dog joined him from nowhere. It was going to be the dog of this particular walk. An unknown dog ex nihilo often found him and joined him for one walk, a dog he never saw bef
ore or since. A strange dog might appear in Camden to escort him around his own block. This dog waited. Its muzzle seemed white. Such dogs never wore collars. They came up beside his leg and took him as charge. Maytree never patted or spoke to any of this otherworldly breed.

  Presently his clothes were wet, from ground fog or sweat. He should have worn another watch cap or two. He fancied some tea. His cracked vertebra, people said, like his ribs, would knit in time. That was just yesterday. Near the great second dune’s foot he felt with every plantar nerve for the slim berm of clay, or the hard sand beside it, that would lead him ’round the swale. He found it and hazarded the swale’s bog. Cranberry patches felt good underfoot but meant he was off course. Dried grass stalks bloodied his insteps. The danger was a fall or a tree limb in the eye. The wind had clocked clear around to northwest, at him now, and soon at his back. The new wind was wildly cold, but it might beat back a line squall or two. He shook through atmospheres of blackness and blank.

  Actually, he would rather turn back and find the lee of a beach plum in the swale, discover some brandy, and sleep abutting the strange dog. And not ask Lou what he had to. Still, he held the rigging. To be safe he nixed the shortcut and climbed the foredune on a known steep path. Of every step he gained, he lost half as his foot slid down sand. At the top he turned east. Thornbushes were colonizing this final ridge. From pre-eternity the ocean ahead lashed and threw salts. There far on the right was her light.

  TO LOU HE APPEARED in the doorway as a watch cap and orange-white eyebrows. It was in-the-flesh Maytree. Lord love a duck. Empty sleeves hung from his bulged jacket, as if behind his buttons he held a new baby he happened across. The kerosene lamp blinded him and paled his irises.

  —Well, come on in. He nodded without moving. You’ll let the heat out.

  Tall thin fellow, neck a bit forward. His skin had shrunk over his temples, nose, and cheekbones, revealing a round skull. —Take off your hat, she said, and plucked it up for him, handless as he was. His hair was thin, but there. He stood at a loss in the one room. She started tea.

  Then she saw Maytree could not shed his jacket. She unbuttoned it and bared two plaster casts from which his blue fingers dangled like squid arms. She found herself amused for no reason. She drew for him his usual chair. She stuck a quarter-round and another in the stove. You would think plucking a man’s hat from his personal head and so naturally unbuttoning his jacket would relax him, and it seemed to. He sat and shrugged the jacket halfway off, and sat in his damp socks. He had a short red beard. Pete had mentioned a beard, she recalled. She herself was easy as ever. She could see his creased face had a smiling habit it cost him to sober. He rose, opened the door, and looked around.

  —What?

  —There was a dog. He stepped outside. Without bumping him, she too looked into the living night for a moment.

  From where they sat, the windowpane made of one lantern two. The weaker one trembled like a moth outside. He turned. What big ears you have! Aging had thinned his mouth as it thinned hers; they were drying up. Only stubby rows of white lashes propped his eyelids. The lines at his eyes’ edges splayed like the comet’s tail in the Bayeux tapestry.

  —Pray, what brings you out here? She stopped herself. There was no reason to kid him. She was pretty sure she knew: If he had hurt his arms he could not take care of Deary whose heart was failing.

  —Maytree, she started again, and smiled. Good to see you. He was the one who used to overdo things.

  He bent to his tea mug and looked worried into it.

  —You used to do the talking, she said. How are you both?

  Had they no close friends after twenty years in Maine? Had Deary no mother? She used to possess quite a well-tailored, competent-looking mother who fled Provincetown eons ago when she saw a topless sunbather on the beach, then two men holding hands. Had Deary a brother or sister? No. No hospitals in Maine? Nursing homes? Visiting nurses? She knew Deary thought medical science killed its victims. Lou’s only sincere question was this: Should she break into Maytree’s travails now, and put him out of his misery, or let him dangle a bit for the sake of the long-lost jilted Lou? Of course she would take them in. Anyone would.

  —Deary’s dying real soon. He looked up at her like the gentleman he was. Maybe you’ve heard. She nodded. —Actually, she doesn’t know she is dying. I always promised to bring her to Provincetown to die and here we are. I can’t take care of her anymore. I broke my arms. I can’t take care of myself for now.

  —I will take care of her, of course, she said, as he went on without seeming to hear—Pete and Marie live in two rooms.

  He would think of imposing on betrayed Pete and Marie and their baby Manny? He and Pete were all patched up—but did he fear her, Lou, that badly? And with her no patching was needed, never mind what he or anyone else might think. Maytree and Deary were her old friends.

  What would ease Deary? Lou would have to learn. She bade her solitude good-bye. Good-bye no schedule but whim; good-bye her life among no things but her own and each always in place; good-bye no real meals, good-bye free thought. The whole fat flock of them flapped away. But what was solitude for if not to foster decency? Her solitude always held open house. When was the last time anyone needed her? She was eager to do it, whatever it was.

  —Come, of course. Not really hearing herself, she went on, We’ll move Pete’s old bed downstairs by the beach, so Deary can look out, and you can use the couch. Or instead of the couch I could bring in this shack’s cot mattress, and find it a frame. Surely it would be more comfortable than that old couch.

  —Or we could take apart our big bed and carry the frame down in pieces, then the mattress. That would be best. It has a good mattress—and I’ll take Pete’s old bed.

  Across the table he was regarding her wide-eyed as if she were deranged. She recalled this only later. Possibly she had never spoken so long. Possibly he found crucial household mechanics peripheral. He looked as though he had never given mattresses even a thought. Lamplight made the night shack look like one cell in a beehive.

  He stood; their heights matched. Why not name the shack Shrunken Heights? He looked away, not uncomfortably. He asked her to button his jacket. He expected to walk back that night.

  —Don’t be silly. He resisted and relented, though cloud cover was breaking up. When he stepped out for a minute Lou remembered that in the last decade or so invading Japanese wild roses crowded the shack. She wondered if a rosebush would trap him. How could he unstick himself? Well, he would just have to call out. She would be helping both of them, her arms serving as everyone’s. How soon do broken bones mend?

  He slept as shack guests always slept, in a sleeping bag on the cot mattress on the floor. When he settled, she blew out the last lamp. After some time she heard him speak from the floor in the dark, now sounding tight-throated, making light.

  —Not going to slug me?

  —I considered it, when Petie was a baby and you wore earplugs.

  —Earplugs? I don’t remember any earplugs. Actually, I ran off with Deary.

  —I did notice that. You brute. Get some sleep.

  —You’re wonderfully…

  She growled and he stopped. He was treating her like a stranger who was helping him change a tire.

  She could not sleep. Should she pretend to find it all difficult, and not so much a matter of course, to ease his chagrin, or at least to make it seem apt? She declined this ploy as tiresome. Or did he think so poorly of her, and so well of himself, that he fancied his chucking her and Pete for Deary had left her ruined and angry for twenty years? Surely he knew her better than that. Surely!—or else he really would insult her.

  She opened her eyes in the dark to make lists. In town Deary and Maytree would draw their old friends to visit. She needed tumblers, cups, plates, bowls, forks, and spoons. She would drive to Snow’s in Orleans, in Mrs. Smither’s car. She needed sheets, many, and towels, also many. Chairs. The laundromat was across town; she could borrow Jane’s car.
Thinking up meals above all, and shopping for them, cooking, serving, and cleaning up, cleaning up and organizing everybody’s everything: That was the hell of it.

  Would a wheelchair fit through the bathroom door? How did Deary move from wheelchair to bed? Maybe that was another place she came in.

  At breakfast on the hoof by the woodstove he told her that in the motel lobby yesterday he heard a tourist tell his son that the Milky Way was a star formation over Arizona. Later he stepped from the shack and then called, Where did the outhouse run off to? She laughed and told him; it must have been in its new location at least fifteen years.

  —Where’s the mirror?

  —I took it down. There’s a hand mirror in the drawer.

  —Took it down? Why?

  —It wanted products.

  —Products? He was smiling as she supposed she was, to see how readily they slipped back. He was starting to yield to her stubborn view that they had indeed previously met. When he smiled and also when he did not, she saw parallel lines in his cheeks like presliced bacon.

  He was leaving for town. Outside where they paused, white mist obliterated the lowlands. —I’d forgotten how unearthly this place can be. From a white lake of fog opaque as paint, the tips of dunes, and only the tips of dunes, arose everywhere like sand peaks that began halfway up the sky. Dune tops protruded from a flat fog line evenly as atolls. She could see every stick and pock on their tan tops against dark blue sky. These sand peaks lacked nothing but connection to earth and a cause for being loose. They looked like a rendezvous of floating tents. She looked down and could see only a white fog wall under which her own feet showed.

  Mrs. Smither would drive back to Camden soon, he told her, and fetch Maytree back to Maine after Deary died. When was she going back to town? He still avoided her gaze.