by Dawn Tripp
Half a mile past South Westport Corner, a flash of orange breaks out of the brush—a thick tail, sharp nose, a fox, it freezes in the road, eyes glued on the car bearing toward it, Henry jerks the wheel hard to the left, the car swerves, he will miss it, barely miss it, the sun glints off the hood, the fox bolts, Henry feels the soft thud under the wheels. He pulls over, stops the car, gets out. He walks back.
It lies still—jet eyes aslant and open, one ear bent, steam rising from its snout, and something of it, something perhaps in how it lies, reminds Henry of a boy he saw once, a beautiful creature, brought into an elephant shelter by the ridge. The boy had been shot through the open mouth, the bullet lodged in his cervical spine. He had been in the same clothes for perhaps a month and they had to scrape them in places to get them off his skin. The belt was caked with dried clay from the trenches. Clots of earth had rusted out in the buckle groove and it refused to move. They had washed his body, turning him slowly. One of the orderlies held a sponge above him, squeezed the water from it, and it ran like mountain rain through his young skin. Henry checked the wound, then the pulse on the wrist, and when he could not find it, he pressed two fingers against the boy’s chest, and there, through the hard young weave of the bones, he could sense the faint and distant stammer of the heart, and it struck him then, in that far-off fading sound, that there was no logic of who was taken and who was left. There was no order to explain or justify what any one of them was doing in that place.
It is a quick memory. A stunning thought. By the time he grasps the fox by the tail, the thought is buried deep again inside him.
He drags it to the side of the road, leaves it and walks back to his car. He cranks the engine. It sticks twice, unwilling to start, then kicks back, jerking out of his hand. He finally gets it running. He climbs back into the driver’s seat and sits there for a moment, quiet, in the cool air, the car humming underneath him, his breath hanging in a fog above the wheel. He takes off his hat, sets it on the seat beside him. He presses the clutch pedal down until he hears the catch. He releases the lever, gently. The car begins to roll, and he sets off again through the midmorning October light.
As he reaches Sisson’s Corner at the end of Pine Hill Road, he realizes that he left his cigarettes on the side table in the front hall. He can see them there, the soft pack beside the crystal bowl. And so instead of a right, he takes a left. He drives down the hill, past the church, and pulls up in front of Shorrock’s store.
The chimes ring as he walks in. Alyssia Borden is at the counter bending Shorrock’s ear about a new breed of jasmine seedlings she has just received by mail.
“London,” she is saying, “a new order-by-mail company. They send direct by boat. So much more competent than those companies out of the Midwest.” She glances over her shoulder and takes Henry in. Her face lights. Her voice slows. “You would not believe,” she says, still speaking to Shorrock, but looking at Henry, “every seedling so fresh, you would not believe how fresh.”
“Fine morning, Alyssia,” Henry says. She is the wife of one of his smoking room friends. They had a blunt and brief affair two years ago. He tries not to think about it.
“Hello, darling. What brings you to this humble end of town?”
“Cigarettes.”
“Nothing more thrilling than that?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She smiles, her teeth radiant, her mouth lined in red.
“Excuse me,” Henry says, stepping toward the aisles.
“Running late?”
“Yes, I am actually.”
“So unlike you.”
“Is it?”
“Cigarettes are up front,” Shorrock says.
“Right. Sure. A pack of Chesterfields. I’ll just see if there’s anything else I need.” He steps away, around a display of Forhans toothpaste and white naphtha soap, toward the back of the store. He ducks into the last aisle and notices a girl at the other end, lifting a tin off the shelf, the smooth clean swipe of the tin into her overall pocket. Henry stops, and the girl glances up, catches him watching her. Her eyes flare, blue, stark. And he recognizes her as the girl he had seen at Millie Sisson’s house the night before. She stares at him.
“We missed you at Lady Judith’s party, Henry,” Alyssia calls from the counter. “Last Saturday. It was a capital time.”
Henry doesn’t answer. The girl at the end of the aisle withdraws her hand from her pocket. She begins to walk toward him, without taking her eyes off his face. She brushes past him and walks to the counter. Alyssia steps back. The girl sets down a small paper sack.
“Flour?” Shorrock asks.
“A pound.”
“That all for you, Bridge?”
She nods.
“On your grub bill then?”
She shakes her head, sets down a few coins, takes the sack of flour, and turns to leave.
Henry steps toward the door and she stops. He is almost in front of her, almost blocking her way. She looks up at him, her eyes cool and fierce and bold. “I’m going out,” she says, and she raises one eyebrow as if she is asking for his permission and at the same time, daring him to give it. Her mouth wrinkles and then she smiles, a reluctant smile, her face melts down, and she is beautiful.
“Henry,” Alyssia says sharply.
Henry takes a step back, away from the door. The girl walks past him, outside. The chimes ring as the door closes, and she is gone. Gone.
He moves quickly then. He drops a quarter on the counter for the cigarettes, doesn’t wait for the change. “Excuse me,” he murmurs toward Alyssia. He walks out.
From the front steps, he looks after the girl as she walks along the stone keeping wall that borders the river canal. She does not look back, but he watches her—the unevenly cropped black hair, her thin neck—he watches her until she has disappeared around the bend.
He climbs into his car and drops the cigarettes by his hat on the passenger seat. There is a bit of dust in his eye. He rubs the corner of the lid to work it out. He turns the car around and heads back down the old road toward the city. Dead leaves strike his windshield, and he sets on the wiper blades from time to time to brush them away.
Late that afternoon at the mill, an hour before the time bell, as he walks past the drawing-in room on his way down to the office, he sees an older woman seated at a harness in the far corner below the window. He stops for a moment in the doorway. She is old for the work. Hooked nose, thin arms, the veins rise out of her pale skin. He watches the fluid precision of her hands as she enters the yarn into the reed and threads it through the dropwire, and he thinks of the girl, as he has perhaps a hundred times since he saw her earlier that morning, standing in the dim light of Shorrock’s store. He wonders who she is, what she stole, what would be worth stealing. And what was it about her—some slightly wild beauty— that is haunting him now? He wonders why one path should cross another. If there is some outlying reason that cannot be explained by natural or philosophic law—a twist of a fate, a fluke, something so mundane, so benign and accidental, a forgotten pack of cigarettes left on a side table in a downstairs hall.
The woman drawing-in has not noticed him. She is intent on her work. The sun streams through the window and rests on her shoulders. Her fingers, deft and quick, slip through the yarn.
Bridge
She could feel his eyes on her as she walked away, a light warmth like the sun on her neck. She does not look back. She does not turn around. She keeps walking until she is around the bend and out of sight. Then she stops. She stands still in the broken shadows at the edge of the woods, clutching the sack of flour. She looks down at her feet, at the sunlight flung in irregular patterns across the ground. She can feel her heart beating, and it is as if her body is hollow and she is only her heart.
In her left overall pocket, she can feel the tin of oysters that she stole, its slight weight against her thigh. In the store, she had recognized him right away, of course. But it took her a moment to realize she had been caug
ht—she had never been caught— it had taken her another moment to realize he would say nothing. He simply stood there, at the other end of the aisle, looking at her, and the way he looked at her washed through her like cool water, strange and intimate and unfamiliar.
She tries not to think about it. She fingers the tin in her pocket. She feels young and ridiculous, ashamed that he had seen her take it, annoyed with herself, annoyed with him. She tries in her mind not to see it at all, not to see his face, not to be moved one way or another by their encounter or the odd chance of meeting him twice in twelve hours.
She cuts down to the river. There are skiffs tied up against the wall of the canal. She steps onto one and lies down across the wooden thwart. The sun is warm on her face. She caps her hand over her eyes to shield out the light and looks toward the Head. She tells herself that she is not looking for him. She knows it is a lie. But he is gone. His car is gone. The village has begun to stir to life, bodies milling in the clear, midmorning light. Abigail Dean is opening up her hat shop, hanging a set of copper chimes on a hook above the door, sweeping off the front steps. Harold Steele draws open the window shutters of the tea room and sets small iron tables on the walk outside. On the front porch of the mail-stop, Abiel Tripp hauls himself out of his chair. He readjusts his suspenders, then takes a turn to the other end of the porch and back, his worn body ambling with a rickety grace.
Cars and trucks flow back and forth across the bridge and up Old County Road. Bridge watches them from the boat. The thwart is hard against the back of her head. The sun is smooth on her face, the river rocking gently underneath her. Her mind is loose, and it occurs to her that she is thinking of him, still, Vonniker, without thinking of him. She is waiting for him, perhaps, without waiting for him. She smiles to herself. It is late—close to ten. She stands up and picks up her sack of flour. She steps off the skiff onto the wall of the canal and walks home.
Cora
Cora sits in the kitchen between two of the galvanized tubs—one filled with bluing water for the whites, one for the rinse. She knows they are here, and she does not want to think about them—Honey Lyons and the three strangers he has brought with him. They are waiting on her father. She wants them to be gone.
She has known Honey Lyons since she was a girl. She does not want him in her yard. He is a slippery nail of a man, a damaged wolf. Once she saw him twist the neck of a goose for no other reason than to do it. She has heard he is up to his chin in the rum-running trade, that he works for the Syndicate, and these men in their dark suits he has brought with him, she knows they are no good. When Bridge walked by them earlier on her way to Shorrock’s store, two of the men had looked her up and down with that slick and hungry way some men have. Bridge had shrugged them off, paid them no mind.
When Cora was her daughter’s age, eighteen, she was already married. On the eve of her wedding to Russell Weld, who would become the father of her three children, Cora gnawed at the skin around her nails until it bled. She wore gloves for the ceremony. Calfskin. White. They were not new, and there was a tea stain on the inside of the right wrist where the second button closed. Her mother, Hannah, in a rare act of domesticity, had baked the wedding cake—sweet and rich, a buttery lightness, so full of hope—it fluttered up like wings in Cora’s mouth.
That night there was a meteor shower. She and Russell stood outside, still in their wedding clothes, her feet chilled against the doorstone. He held her tightly, their faces upturned toward the heavens as those thin green lights sliced open the sky all around them. They stood there for over an hour, gripping one another, in that strange and silent storm of dying stars.
Cora had expected that when she woke up the next morning, she would find herself changed. She had expected that to be a wife would add some weight to her, some root. And as her husband lay sleeping on the bed behind her, his naked chest rinsed in the early morning light, she had stared into the mirror above the washbasin. She scoured every inch of herself, looking for some altered feature, some sign. Her face was still her face—more peaked than usual perhaps from lack of sleep—stiff dark pockets around her eyes. She bit her teeth into her lip to flood it with color, and lingered awhile longer before the mirror, but there was nothing different, nothing changed. She dressed, gathered up their wedding clothes from the pile on the floor, and went downstairs, and it was only as she stepped outside onto the back porch that she realized that the world itself was different—everything around her, everything familiar—trees, yard, sky—all of it suffused with a new and deeper hue.
And then there were babies—one, two, three—two daughters, a son—and the world was full. Then one was lost, under the ice, and Russell was lost, in the swine flu—so much lost, so suddenly, so soon, her mind divided like a sheet of glass—and boxes and boxes of grief. They piled up and there was no room for her, so she removed herself, and it happened then: the mystery of the wind in the curtains, the mystery of light shed through the leaves—all of it died to her then.
It was the wash work that she clung to. She soaked and scrubbed and rinsed and wrung and starched. She hung nightshirts, linens, trousers, socks. She set clothes out on the line in every type of weather. She pulled and washed the sheets until there was no bed left to strip, then she went down the road to the houses of their neighbors and begged for their soiled clothes. The money she brought in from the work was slight, but steady, enough to caulk the gaps.
Each morning, she sets out the tubs. Boils the water to fill them. One for the dark wash. One for the whites. Two for the rinse. She cuts out a fresh bar of soap with a warm bread knife. Then, with a finer blade, she slices off thin chips and flakes them into the hot water. She stirs the clothes as they soak, battling out the dirt, she opens up the creases, the folds, so the soap can work its way through. The water scalds her hands. The most stubborn dirt is always in her daughter Bridge’s clothes. (For her stubbornness, Cora thinks.) Each piece rinsed, battled, rinsed again.
It is in the water that all possibility lives. And this morning, as she sits in the kitchen with Mary Milliken’s white nightshifts billowing up through the sudsy water, she notices that the men are still there—the men in the dark suits and Honey Lyons. Her father has come home from the beach and they are speaking with him. She can hear their voices through the moving surface diced with light as if the voices live under the water, as if they live in that trembling, fractured image of her face. She does not listen hard enough to make out the words. She does not want to. But she can sense the seesaw of the exchange, the back and forth, the tug and push and pull. She can tell her father doesn’t like them. His voice seizes up once, just once, then relents, softens down again. There are chinks in her father now that weren’t there before. He is awkward with anger. He does not have the knack for it he used to have. For years, she dreamed his rage. She dreamed it damp and lovely, something tangible, a blanket or the wind she could wrap herself into.
The harsh smell of lye sticks in her nose.
Her son, Luce, is still asleep upstairs—she remembers this suddenly. She has not heard a sound, not a step or a creak of the bed-springs, and she says a quick prayer to the water, Let him sleep, Let him be late for work, Let him not wake up until those men outside are gone. She does not want his path to cross with theirs. She does not want any dark little part of him to be tempted. Cora knows him well, so well it is a splinter in her heart.
When she thinks of her children, they are close to her, they are almost in her skin or she is in theirs—she can feel them wince and kick and breathe—but when she thinks of herself, it is always from a distance, as if she were observing some separate creature passing beyond the reach of her own will. It happens most often when the white clothes are soaking in their bluing water, and her hands stir through the surface—pale and thin, the webs between the fingers nearly translucent in the water with a queer and greenish cast, like the hands of a sea-maid from out of the myths.
She thinks of it this way: she was a woman once free—she was exiled by gr
ief to some lost pocket of herself, and she waits there in that dark corner, crouched and listening, waiting for the sky to open up again and take her.
Noel
Bridge comes back from Shorrock’s at quarter past ten. The day has warmed. Noel shows her the fox.
“Found it in the road,” he says.
“What a beauty.” She turns the pelt in her hands. “Don’t let Luce get hold of it. Did he ever get off this morning?”
“Left half an hour ago,” he answers. She nods and lays the fox on the porch.
“What about those men Honey Lyons brought around?”
He looks at her squarely, his eyes cool. “They came and went.”
She smiles at him and, for the moment, lets it go.
Together they unload the sea muck off the wagon bed and shovel it into low banks around the foundation of the house. Then they go into the shop to start work on the overturned hull of Duff Barton’s skiff.
As they are stripping the gooseclams and the barnacles off the bottom of the boat with a wire brush and a putty knife, Bridge asks again about the men— Honey Lyons and the three strangers. She asks what they came looking for.
“Wanted some work done.”
“Rum work?”
“Boat work.”
She laughs. “I know who they are.”
Noel shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t take it.”
“How much did they offer?”
“A bit.”
“What’s a bit?”
“A bit more than you’d expect.”
“You’re an old crow.”
“It’s a no-good job. No-good men.”
She shrugs and sets back to work on her side of the hull.
Noel doesn’t tell her that although he didn’t take the job, he didn’t refuse it either. He told Honey Lyons he would need a night or so to think it through. Everyone knew that Honey Lyons was in tight with the Syndicate, and had no allegiance to any of the local rum-running gangs. He’d work shoulder to shoulder with each of them, any of them, if there was a season for it, but he was a double-bladed knife. They all knew it.
