The Maytrees

by Annie Dillard

  —It’ll take a day or two to close the shack. You two go right into the house. Pete and Marie can help you set up.

  Lou watched him take off jagged, arms inside his jacket, across the dunes. He walked as if his legs and feet were prosthetics. He entered the fog as into a wall of fresh plaster. It enfolded his foot. She watched him contract and vanish as he moved on, leg hip shoulders head, as if he were walking into solvent. She had never imagined seeing him again. They could all be in town as soon as tomorrow night. She should get busy.

  How would she stock the house? She changed her mind and decided to leave the shack now; it had no part to play. Pete could close it. Now she wanted to clean the glass on those beachside doors and beg, borrow, or buy bedding, food, bowls, and plates. She regularly visited friends and helped the staff at the Manor. Her friends there would lend her a wheeled overbed table. What sort of bright painting might Deary like by her bed? What did heart patients eat? She hoped it was potatoes, cabbage, turnips, winter squash and greens, clams, short ribs, and fish.

  She drank water, hooked the outhouse door, and stuffed laundry and the brown garbage bag in her knapsack. She had to hurry—so much to do in two days. Why not keep daylight savings time forever? Weren’t farmers about one percent of the population?

  The fog was burning off. She angled down the foredune crest to the jeep ruts. A pale dog joined her out of nowhere and zigzagged over the dunes with her. She never heard Maytree mention a dog. The sight of Maytree lamplit and filling the door, night over his shoulder, had taken her breath.

  Dew wetted the sand and made it brown. Maytree’s footprints, and now hers, broke through the brown film to the dry sand below. Dry sand in footprints looked blue. The swale drained the dunes like a vein. She stopped to drink from the almost-permanent pond. There grew archaic plants from the world’s first wags: club mosses, lichens in mounds, puffballs, sea stars, and bug-eating sundews. She stepped over this saurine landscape, and over heather, and started climbing. The pale dog raced ahead and looked back over its shoulder as if chiding her for not running.

  Deary must be very helpless, more desperate than he, for him to come to her, not quite crawling, but crawling must have crossed his mind. She could better imagine a cloud in pain than Deary, the sapling eternal. Can disease kill painlessly? Any hope of getting a doctor in the picture? Maytree, had he but arms and hands, would make an ideal houseguest. He would lure Pete and Marie to visit often while Maytree and Deary stayed in town till he healed or she died, whichever came last. And Pete and Marie would bring little Manny.

  Did Maytree, before he fell, still climb ladders? His knees were obviously shot. There was a roof leak she wanted him to look at. She needed a new hot-water heater. Windows stuck, and their frames parted. A live-in carpenter: Here comes Santa Claus. With dying and beloved old Deary in his sack. She was throwing a deathwatch house party. Had she ever been so astounded?

  Suddenly she descended the last leg to the oak-pine woods by the road. Where was the dog? From the trees overhead she heard a red-eyed vireo’s call: —Do you see it? Do you hear it? Do you believe it?

  PART THREE

  LOU WATCHED PETE CARRY Deary into the house. Deary rolled her head over his arm and smiled loopily. —Hello, Lou. Lou saw Deary’s twenty years’ change. Her skin grayed, her eyelids tripled. But why would she wear a Harris tweed suit and earrings? Deary must see this incursion, Lou guessed, as a particularly tricky social call.

  —I can barely move my arms and legs, she confided as Lou turned down the bed. I should have been a belly dancer! Lou privately agreed.

  Pete and Sooner Roy’s son had angled the big bed’s sections downstairs by the French doors so Deary could watch the sea, and moving sky, or any beach walkers. When Pete carried her around the house and spread her bones on the bed, she remained exactly so till Lou raised her shoulders to put a pillow under her head and straightened her skirt.

  —These things happen, Deary said.

  Whatever things Deary meant, Lou thought—dying, or running off with your friend’s husband—she said, They sure do. Her amusement appeared to put it to rest. —Did you bring a bathrobe?

  —A freight car full.

  Helping Deary into a gown, Lou saw she was mostly dead already. But a miss at that line is, for a while, as good as a mile. Deary removed her emerald ring, then rested. She took off her other rings, rested, and her bracelets, rested, tried to unclasp her heavy necklace, and at last, wincing, her gold earrings. Lou guessed how good it would feel to throw in the towel. The gown was silk. The backs of Deary’s hands were darker blue than they were a few months ago, Pete said later. Yellow bones straight as meteorites crossed pools of dark blue.

  Lou gazed through the glass doors and remembered seeing Deary cut bait. Bait was horseshoe crabs from Cape Cod Bay. Deary baited her own eel traps. She was living on an alley that May. Lou came across her cleaving horseshoe crabs with an axe. Beside her, horseshoe crabs scratched in a garbage can. One such she placed on its back on a beaverboard square in the alley. Raising the axe, she split it. Then, as its halves crawled apart and away, she gathered them back as one would join the halves of an onion, gave them a half turn, and split them again. Lou remembered that the animal’s four quarters also tried to crawl away. Deary threw their kicking pieces in a basin, drew out another crab by its telson (Nausets used these for awls), and lifted the axe again. Lou looked on. Deary gave her many eels for bait.

  At first she talked. The third full day, rasping, Deary told both Lou and Pete about rocks. She was passing on a last-minute legacy. It took about two hours on and off, and it was this: Frames of film comprise every rock in the world. (—Have you got that?) If you slice a rock thin enough, and splice the slices serially as frames, you have a documentary film. The film displays the long history of the world from that rock’s views. Together the world’s rocks hold a visual record of all time. You splice the frames and store them in reels by continents and by some rough stabs at their more or less infinite subdivisions of regions and times. It all badly needed film editors.

  —It’s not my idea, she said. I just heard it. Lou begged her to name whatever she would like to eat or drink. She licked her lips.

  —At any stage after the splicing, one need only run the films through projectors to see it, any of it, eventually all of it, the world from everywhere and all angles in all its times. At least up to a random cutoff point when someone—wild with curiosity—called a halt and began slicing again. During and after the big work, ever-new rock would record films of the ongoing life of their sites: people showing up on the planet, and moving over it.

  Was she off her head? Lou let her face ask Maytree. He stood beside the bed stiff in slings. —She has always had theories. Lou was glad Deary had not worn through his chivalry. How did he stand it for twenty years? She wondered again what Deary learned in school. Oh, but—how does anyone stand anything?

  —How do the cormorants stand it? Deary piped up. —Stand what? They looked. —Stand the cold water. It was that chrome winter day’s last light; the smoke of sea-frost blurred the horizon. Did Deary eat? Barely; applesauce.

  Pete Maytree and Charlie Bonobos widened door frames for Deary’s wheelchair. In the event, Deary never left her bed. Maytree slept on the couch, and Lou moved Pete’s old bed to her room.

  Deary shrank, and her face thinned. There did not seem to be much to her head but lobes and draped skin, ears long and yellow, lipless mouth, and eyes emerging from ziggurat levels like their turtle Yankee’s. What would she like? Pete and Marie let their Manny climb on her. She never winced. Manny at that time was fat as a Macy’s float. Manny climbed the bed, and crawled knee by knee across the covers over her body. He leaned against the wall, knelt back over Deary, who fingered his calf, and descended sock by sock to the floor, whence he launched repeats. Then he tried to engage Yankee the turtle in play.

  Pete’s Marie demanded that they all try to make Deary drink hourly around the clock. Or at night she could suck a wet
towel. Marie said her grandfather had survived lobar pneumonia in his twenties solely because his whole family heard old Dr. Gaspar shout, Your life depends on how much water you can drink!

  Everyone saw Deary’s eyes follow the people and dogs who used the winter beach as road. Some were friends stopping by. Everyone strained at wind. Children played on. Every few minutes a gannet fired itself aslant and raised a white foam wedge. Black ducks, buffleheads, and loons glided around the bay for their southern winter. They looked like decoys.

  Lou and Maytree and Pete took turns going out. Each got out once a day. Dumping garbage was an outing; they breathed the wind. Maytree mailed bill payments; Lou drove Deary to Dr. Gaspar, Jr., who, while Deary forced their exit, was trying to get the emergency room in Hyannis to take her if she would go. Jane and Reevadare, the Roy boy, Irene Bonobos, the Kodays, Cornelius, Pete’s friends, and many fishermen and painters called daily with chowders, macaroni, Skully Joes, clam pies, kale soup. Most days, one of the Macaras brought haddock or scallops straight from the water. Twice a week someone left eggs in a bowl inside the door. Jane offered to trade places with Lou for a week to relieve her. Lou declined; it would take the week to teach her when to do what and how.

  Pete replaced his watches on the boat and kept ashore for the duration. He took charge of dump runs and provisions for both houses. When his friends asked how they could help, he said, Walk by our beach. He and his mother dug a deep hole in sand near the glass doors. They mixed cement in a paper paint bucket, poured it, and mounted a bird feeder Lou loaded with leftovers and lard. Pete thought a woodpecker that hammered lard would get stuck. Cornelius came in from the frozen dunes; he stayed with Jane in town. Jane clothed Tandy to a fare-thee-well, and Cornelius walked her mitten-to-mitten back and forth in boots on the beach beyond the French doors—her first long walks. Inside, it was Lou who peeled Tandy down a few layers and sat her red-cheeked in bed by Deary. Deary’s eyebrows were circumflex furrows. The mighty sight of a baby’s face by a crone’s lasted only a second before Tandy escaped.

  Reevadare had absconded to Brewster, where she married an old Brewster man who hailed her with, Thar she blows! or Thar she breaches!—a habit that Lou found literary. It swept Reevadare off her feet. Pete had met him once and asked, You got your sou’wester for the nor’easter? Pete of course said no’theaster. Lou would not admit Reevadare as a caller until she sounded her out about Deary’s perceived moral status. Maytree told Lou he knew from her green-inked letters over the years that Reevadare bore Deary no malice. —A long time ago, they said.

  When Reevadare arrived in the sickroom, in sable coat and lined boots, she ordered Pete to go home, and tried to shoo Maytree and Lou: —Go take naps. Baths. A powder. Every day from Brewster Reevadare brought something needless.

  One day from a chair by the bedside Lou asked Reevadare why, since she had all her horsepower, she sold her house and moved away. Deary liked to listen to talk. —Because of the garden, of course. She was heating cocoa at the basement stove. —My knees staged a strike and refused to work on the garden, even to maintain it. I hated to leave home.

  —Why not just let the garden go?

  Lou could not remember anything’s so scandalizing Reevadare. —Oh, no! she said, You can’t let a garden go!—as if Lou proposed infanticide. Now Reevadare spent her days driving Route 6 and 6A, her hat barely clearing the steering wheel.

  She had expensive new teeth and looked like Burt Lancaster. People said she was so sociable she would appear for the opening of an envelope. To Provincetown’s galleries Reevadare drove her rich Brewster friends. Lou heard her telling one trapped painter that intellectuals lacked common sense. She could prove it in two words—natural childbirth. Or how about open marriage?

  Nights after Lou changed Deary’s nightgown and turned in, she heard Cornelius and Maytree downstairs, often with Pete, drinking and telling stories at her green kitchen table late—good. She and Deary would sleep. But would Deary breathe better if they sat her up?

  Propped behind the headboard, slings akimbo, Maytree lifted Deary’s stuck curls. He let them slip. He blew across her scalp. Her head felt swampy. Pete had gone out and Lou was asleep. Lou never had the grip to hold a grudge. Here Maytree was at home—with Deary, Pete, and Lou. Lou and he worked the days as smoothly as fishing partners drew nets. Their old ease together calmed and slowed him. He had not noticed his speeding up. He put his wristwatch aside. He reset himself to the tides.

  He stayed at his post those twenty years in Maine. Deary seemed to regard their stockpiling stuff and money as a natural part of aging. Had Deary been happy with him? She was born happy. He remembered Reevadare’s leaving parties saying, I’m going on to the Whites’. The whites were her sheets. She wanted her hosts to think she was going to another party (possibly a party to which no one invited them). Now Deary was staying with the obliging Whites indefinitely. She bit at the air and lunged at it. She twisted from the oxygen mask he tried. It dried her out.

  One of the last things Deary said was about the war, dancing stateside with sailors in Dixie cup hats or GIs, dancing to—what were all those numbers? (Maytree’s mother’s version of the war, to which she gave much war-bond money and years of volunteer work, was that grinning sailors and grinning GIs somehow defeated cartoon Hitler and cartoon Hirohito with nylon stockings, chocolate bars, Luckies, and lard.) Deary whispered a song: Go in and out the window, Go in and out the window, Go in and out the window, As we have done before. Lou recognized it and sang along. Once Deary tried to sing “Happy Birthday,” always a tough one. On the sill outside Maytree saw a chickadee whose breath was condensing just beyond its beak into a white pellet. It looked like a cartoon balloon that should inscribe chickadee wit inside. One pellet vanished and another appeared, and behind that another. The chickadee was shooting a cannonade of pearls. A few days before she died, Deary whispered for the record that she had felt worse with Hong Kong flu. Maytree recalled that winter; they skipped Christmas. Now he laid sleeping Manny beside her bent arm. Both bodies perspired.

  The next day she stopped using the chamber pot. Her feet and ankles bulged to the size of four-by-fours, then locust logs, then melons. Her slit attention opened seldom. In those waking moments her cross-eyed courtesy suggested to all that their small talk was boring her to death. —Head, she said once. She stopped following motion with her eyes.

  Deary was charring and buckling like a leaf. Maytree watched Lou change wet cloths on Deary’s forehead. No one wanted to leave the bedside where Deary slept noisily so long as they talked. She still turned from every wet fruit they thought might tempt her, and from water, ice cream, and chipped ice. He thought people died in three days without water, but no.

  It took eight days for unconscious Deary to die her death. It was eight weeks since they had come. She lowered without fuss like a pilot light. A process within her, far behind her eyelids, evidently piqued her full attention. What could it be but the big blank’s advance? She weighed maybe sixty-five pounds. She turned blue and rattled away. Once she spooked them by lifting an arm in the air, as long ago she had hailed seals or first sun. In her last few days, dying made her face young. Her skin smoothed on her forehead, eyes, cheeks, and the corners of her mouth, and reflected light. Pete lifted her wrist, turned it to rest on his thumb, and felt it with three fingertips. The radiator banged. Stars sang in their sockets through the night.

  Yankee the turtle crawled out from under the couch and stretched his snake neck. He stood square as a pack mule waiting its load, like the lowest totem-pole animal resigned to shouldering all the rest, or resigned to lifting the seas that floated the lands, if this was that kind of world. He regarded dead Deary with the obsidian calm of a god.

  WHEN DEARY DIED, MAYTREE got Pete to help him shave his beard off. He got Mrs. Smither to help wrap Deary’s washed body in sailcloth as she used to sleep in the dunes. Then Mrs. Smither drove back to Camden. That night was dark and drizzly. Time to sneak Deary out to the Provincetown dune
wilds. Maytree walked holding a burlap bag of bayside stones. Lou and Pete and Jane took turns carrying Deary like duffel. Cornelius carried Tandy, and Pete carried Manny on his shoulders. Jane made faces at Tandy. She and Marie trailed carrying spade and box. They buried Deary in a stretch of forest where dunes encroached. Despite her fixed hope to set every boat in the harbor on fire posthumously, they curled her body in the mainsail and tucked it, pastrylike, in a box, and buried the box too, piled with stones.

  Mettle fatigue, Maytree called it. Lou and he slept most of a week. Maytree slept in Pete’s old room, now again a spare room with its single bed. Pete was back at sea. From the area by the many-paned doors in the basement all Deary’s tables and pillows and chairs were gone. With Cornelius and Jane, Maytree and Lou shifted Lou’s pipe-frame bed in sections back up two stories.

  Maytree’s casts—most—were off. At the kitchen window he hefted mason jars—first jars empty, then full of water, then full of sand—to regain his strength. He thought rehabilitation might take a few days, as it had when he was young. He and Lou returned everything they borrowed.

  The baldness of Deary’s death—and where did she go? was individuation a waste?—was an insulting reminder, a blow from reason to reason. The belief that we were all pieces of a cosmic whole he found less wishful than pointless. His mother, for instance. And the frozen fishing crew they watched drown one day at Peaked Hill Bars thirty yards off the beach where the townspeople stood helpless, for instance.

  WHEN HE WAS A boy, his mother took him along the night she went to see a fishing boat aground on Peaked Hill Bars in a storm. Frisch Fragonelle was the first to go. In the blackness Toby Maytree knew him by his narrow shape, as everyone on the beach knew every man clinging in the rigging by shape. He squinted into spray and happened to see Frisch Fragonelle let go. Seas ruptured on bars in rows behind the vessel and before it, so streaming foam silhouetted Frisch Fragonelle’s drop an instant before it covered it. He fell upright and straight as a plumb bob.