Moon Tide Read Online Free PDF Page A

will likely be gone all day. The boy Jake stands in the door that leads in from the kitchen. Maggie leans against the frame, a tall shadow behind him. He is thirteen, but small for his age, his hair dark and cowlicked at odd angles from the cap he holds in his hands.
    Elizabeth nods at Maggie. “Bring the chicks in off the wet grass before they chill. You, boy, come with me.” She leads him down the hall into the library, takes the key to the desk off the long chain she wears around her neck, unlocks it, and draws the flat china box out of the top drawer. He stands in the room, looking at the rows of books. Slowly, she counts out the coins, watching him, as his head tilts sideways to read this title, that one.
    “Go on,” she says. “They won’t be biting you.”
    Jake doesn’t look at her; he reaches out and removes one of herbooks. He peels it apart in his hand, holding it so the two halves float like splayed, dismembered wings. Elizabeth remarks, carelessly, as if she might be speaking to the willow branches the wind has struck against the glass, that she has decided to build a lending library, that anyone he knows who might live within walking distance, who might want to borrow books, could come, take them home, or sit for a while and read in the sitting room, on any chair but the mahogany rocker by the window. That chair is hers, but any of the other chairs would be fine. She says all of this at once, watching the boy to mark any clue in his face as she counts out the loose coins for his father.
    “What is your name?” she says.
    His eyes swing toward her. “Jake,” he answers, and his voice is steady, clear.
    She knows that he comes from the town. There are at least five strands of Wilkeses, and they are linked by marriage to the Masons and the Howlands and the Tripps. She knows that names in Westport are like names in Ireland. Bread, fire, marsh. They belong to families who have worked the river since before the whalers came. They grew out of the land with the pitch pine and loaves of stone.
    She asks after his mother: has she been looking after Blackwood’s wife, six months with a child? She asks if he has been to fish the run of winter cod that she has heard have come back to the shoal off Gooseberry Island. She notes the broken laces on his boots, the cuffs of the gray trousers unhemmed. He swims in the flannel of the pants, they dwarf him, held up only by the cinched belt at his waist. His eyes are deep green. He listens, answers her questions quietly and with patience as his eyes walk along the pale city of books stacked on the shelves.
    He takes in what she says, although the words themselves don’t strike him so much as her brogue. It holds the thickness of pine sap that he has taken with his solitude between his fingers, rubbed back and forth until the pitch sinks in and leaves the callused tips of his fingers soft, with a slightly darker stain.

    For the rest of that winter, Jake walks the four houses up Main Road to the sitting room at Skirdagh. He goes early, at dawn, before the fog starts to lift through the juniper woods, when the light has the color of stones. He lowers himself into the novels of Hawthorne and Conrad and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. He staggers through Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, and Plato’s allegory of the cave. He reads her husband’s books of expeditions to the lower Americas, farther south than the birth of eels. He saws through river jungles: trees ten meters wide, insects the size of small frogs.
    Sometimes Elizabeth comes downstairs to sit with him, her hair unwrapped and in one long braid. She sits in the mahogany rocker, nibbling a piece of sugar bread, and the boy sits across the room from her. Above his head, a whalebone sled hangs on the wall. She watches his face twist over a passage of Melville, and her own youth comes back to her in reckless shards that hurl like the gannets off the cliffs of Inishshark, with patches of distinct recollection as if the light