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A Maid on the Shore
Sonya Taaffe
Forlorn echoes at
the water’s edge: he lowered his hands and hunched his shoulders
beneath the heavy cloth of his jacket, a little embarrassed that
someone might have heard him, that no one had heard him. Out on the
water, overcast rain-light turned the waves grey as rough glass,
cloudy, wind-scuffed, like something that he might stoop to lift from
the tide-line in one curious hand. He bent and gathered pebbles,
rattled the wet sliding weights between his fingers like a gambler
nerving for the throw; instead he tossed each into an oncoming wave,
dull curl and tumble of silt, foam, sand dragged into a still
sculpture-curve for no more than a second before it broke and flooded
against his feet, covered the sound of the pebbles’ striking with its
liquid breath and crash. When the pebbles were gone, he stood there
with his hands empty at his sides. Wind furled spray off the water,
stung his face. He did not move. He did not know where to go.
Already rain was
dropping out of the low clouds colored like the sea. The waves hedged
him, pinned him to the broken line of stones and sea-strewn weed; rain
nailed his shoulders, his hands, his upturned face when he raised his
head and squinted into the iron sky, looking for someone, something,
anything. He did not have the courage for another call across the
water. One shout, no more, as though she would have heard him and
shouldered the water aside at his cry: salt streams sleeking her hair
that looked pelt-brown in shadow and russet black in the light, crimped
leaves of kelp draped slick about her broad shoulders, striding out of
the sea with her awkward land gait; feet stamped on the shingle as
though she were never sure that the earth would not move under her
feet, rock out from underneath her with the flirting sidestep of a
wave, chancing element that she loved. He had never been able to love
it for more than her sake. Rope and sailcloth and the hauling of nets
had scarred his hands, sun and salt winds tracked history around his
eyes and mouth, and he could not remember a time when he had not opened
his mouth and tasted the shattered-glass scent of fish salting the air;
still he did not trust the water that his eyes searched.
Shivering, he pulled
his jacket around his shoulders and kicked at the rain-glossed stones,
raised his voice once more into the wind and heard the words fall away
unspoken behind his teeth. Come back. I love you. Are you there?
Please. Pleading words, a suppliant’s words, defenseless, naked, and
the men would rag him without mercy as he tried to drain his pint and
pretend that he had not spent that afternoon raining into evening
trudging the shore, crying for a woman whose name he had never known,
who had given him no more than a dream-handful of her time, not worth
his while, never within his reach. He was shaking, bent against rain
and memory, remembering: when he first saw her surface from the water
that ran from her skin like glass, round-shouldered, bulky, deceptive
in her size and her deliberate movement, skin pale against the fall of
hair dense and dark and wet as the pelt gathered around her shoulders;
she had hold of his trouser cuff for a moment before she turned back
into the next wave and he gripped the rail of the boat in both hands,
open-mouthed, paint flaking under the pressure of his nails, and he
would have thought her a flick of sun-dazed fancy but for the salt
stiffness drying in the cloth; he closed his mouth and pulled his cap
down against the sun and did not say anything to the men who pressed
him for stories, Tadhg, and Micheal and Peadar, drinking men, fishing
men, salt-weathered and storytelling, who knew the secret that he did
not, how to ride on the sea’s back and joke about it afterward, how to
wink at the girls behind the bar, how to catch one by the hand and let
her go in the same dancing movement, though when he tried the same he
nursed a five-fingered burn of shame on his face and walked the shore
alone after that.
There he found her,
sunning herself on a spar of rock where barnacles and limpets clustered
and tough slippery weed sprang in clumps underfoot. Her hair slid
unbound over her naked back, hot to his hand when he knelt and touched
it, trembling--it felt like silk, though he had never touched silk,
only heard the word and seen the weaving; like the fine shawls of his
mother and sisters, that could pass through a wedding ring--until the
last strands trailed through his fingers and he touched her skin,
fever-hot, sweatless, and the sweat started on his brow. Only a little
salt had dried along her spine, brushing away beneath his fingers. When
she turned onto her back with a lazy, massive assurance that made the
breath snap in his throat, his hands brushed across her breasts: the
blood jumped in him and he could not speak. Under the hot summer sky,
she pressed him down to the shingle and there were stones like fists
jutting into the spaces between his ribs, shells crunching under their
weight, sand in his hair and all the folds of his clothing; he blinked
tears against the sun, blinded, dazzled, his hands full of the pelted
richness of her hair, his head full of the sight and smell and feel of
her, though she never bent her head for his kiss, he never tasted the
salt currents of her mouth, and she seemed to run through his fingers
like seawater or rain as light burst in the marrow of his bones. He
came to himself because a seabird was crying in his ear, tugging at his
hair with a curved and curious beak; he flailed it away with one hand
and started awake, sandy-mouthed, sun-struck, sprawled on his back
among the rocks with his jersey stuck with dried seaweed and his
trousers in a state and a head on him like a week’s revelry spent in a
night. Shamed, exhilarated and bewildered, he gathered himself together
and hurried back to the boats. Behind their hands, he knew, grins and
jokes were flashing at his expense; and the girls who looked at him out
of the corners of their eyes were measuring him against some standard
he did not understand, finding him wanting, and moving on. He did not
care about them, now. If he lingered on the shore, she would come: like
a delirium dream, as though the furnace heat of her body kindled a
fever under his skin, like something out the stories that went around
the table when the glasses were emptied, shedding her sea-sleek fur to
take him in her arms, strong and broad and depthless as the sea; no
matter how many times he reached for the core of her, eluding him every
time. He told no one, and haunted the skerries in hungry secrecy.
If he was crying, he
could not tell among the curtains of rain; he did not know what tears
felt like, though he knew that something clawed in his throat, his
breath scraped thin over loss; he did not know how to cry. Still he
stood where the backwash of the tide flurried foam and broken bits of
weed, staring out over the heaving skin of the sea. Waves dinted under
the rain’s rough hand; darkness coming fast out of the west where the
sun had gone cloud-hidden under the sea’s brim. Rain hissed and rattled
on the water, drummed on the stones. He had nothing to say and knew it;
the storm outspoke him. He clenched his shining wet hands and felt the
nails dig into the calluses on his palms. The only calluses on her
hands had spanned the linkage of her fingers, a roughened web at the
top of the palm; he had loved to trace the strange skin with his
fingers. The color of her eyes defied his gaze, drawing him into
darkness, until he looked nowhere except where she was—
Hunched between
rain-grey clouds and cloud-grey waves, he crammed both hands against
his face and breathed out harsh, angry words into his palms until he
could straighten again, could breathe the damp air coming off the sea,
could move without feeling his bones splinter against her absence. Let
them laugh at him, Micheal and Tadhg and Peadar coiling rope in the
sunshine and winking at the girls who walked the shore with their
shawls crossed over their breasts and their bright hair like flags in
the wind, storytelling men drinking and saluting their clumsy dreamer
as he stumbled out of the salt wind and the rain like a half-drowned
man: he had touched their secret in the hot sunshine and the salt burn
of sweat, and now he could turn his back on the trustless sea and walk
against the wind, not pleading for her, not begging her back into his
life, masterful. So she waited for
me boys, and for all I know she’s waiting there now: seal-brown,
seal-round, out on the shore where the gulls sweep and cry on the wind:
and damned if I’m back there again. I’ve no wish to find myself a
drowned decoration at the bottom of the sea. I’ve no wife to swim down
and bargain for my bones. But stand me another round and I’ll tell you
again how I found her sunning herself on her skin… Long faded
from his cheek, the slap still smarted under the skin. But if he caught
her hand tonight, when he had drunk his pint and told his story, if he
touched her hair threaded ember-red in the flaring light, would she
slap him again? He thought of her and walked faster, thought of black
russet hair and felt his heart clench, tightened his teeth against
memory and hurried over the rocks with long, sharp-moving strides.
Out of the
rain-blown evening, crags and slabs of rock jutted black and darkened
grey; he almost barked his shin against a fallen stretch of stone
overhung with frilled weed, splashed one foot down in a tidepool risen
with rain, laughed and came to a halt against a split back of stone
where he leaned with his arms crossed, head tipped back to the pouring
sky, and grinned until his face began to hurt. Then he saw that one of
the stones was not a stone, was pale beneath its shag of seaweed,
moving in response to his nearness and his hard panted breath of
laughter, turning toward him a face full and broad-boned as the moon
that tugged the tides: rain dripped into his open mouth and he could
not tell if the sound in his throat was moving toward delight, anger,
sorrow as he caught at the rock to steady himself, grit and seaweed
slide beneath his palm and a barnacle biting into the heel of his hand;
he was kneeling to reach out to her, thoughtless, wondering as the
first time he saw the sun falling deep into her five-fathom eyes, his
hand almost on the smooth round of her shoulder before he saw who was
in her arms, whose face her dense hair curtained, whose mouths had met
in a kiss as deep and potent as the turning tide.
Pale eclipse of a
face among hair spray-darkened to the color of wet embers, slender
hands holding fast to the heavy sea-graceful body that had held him
between earth and sea on a hot summer’s afternoon: he cried out and
felt slick pebbles sliding out from underneath his foot, collapsing
like a heartstricken man when it was only the sea tugging his
certainties out from under again, all story gone out of his head, all
language lost. Blood shocked through him as he fell, rain-pounded,
abandoned, remembering when it had been his hands on her secret skin,
his fancies of what that long red hair would feel like tangled between
his fingers, and it was no kindness that neither face laughed as he
clambered to his feet and ran away through the rain, as the men would
laugh as he drank bitter pint after pint until he could no longer taste
the salt burning in the back of his throat like tears or the sea that
had branded him when she reached out of the water to touch him once and
make him hers forever, though she was not his, she had never been his,
and neither had the girl whose hands Peader caught and loosed like a
game, whose eyes Micheal snagged with a wink, who listened on the
breath of Tadhg’s spun stories; they would never hear this story from
him. Toward the lantern light he ran, choking on his breath, slipping
on the wet stone and turf while the rain beat on his back, knowing that
everyone knew the secret and he did not: though he did not know anymore
what the secret was.
Their eyes stayed
with him, though he ran like a madman all the way to the light.
END
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