Free Moon Tide by Dawn Tripp

the trees. “Just ’cause a certain kind of bird don’t come around these parts much don’t mean there’s wrong luck to kill it. A white goose plucked and cut is the same as any other.”
    “Might look the same.”
    “Is the same.”
    “All right then, so it doesn’t matter.”
    “Sure’s not.”
    “Right then.”
    Wes looks at his brother sideways. “You don’t tell her, Jake.”
    “No.”
    Wes skins out the goose on the lawn behind the privy. Jake stubs his foot against an empty tin of lime as the black-tipped pinions fly apart and the down sticks in his nose.
    “Dump her in the dead hen pile,” Wes says. “I’ll take in the meat.”
    Jake wraps the feathers and skin in his coat and carries them down the hill toward Drift Road. But when the house has dipped from view, he cuts back. He glances over his shoulder once, twice, to be sure Weshas not followed him, and then he walks through the cherry wood back up to Thanksgiving Lane. He comes out behind the church. Its slow windmill turns against the yellow moon. He crosses the road back to Skirdagh.
    He brings the bird to Maggie because he has seen her work small spells to soothe the dead. He finds her out on the woodpile, asleep, her legs dangling over the stacked cords of juniper, oak, and pine that he and Wes had chopped the spring before. He moves close to her face, and he can see how her eyes shift under the lids as she crawls after dreams. He sits down on the cutting stump with the feathers in his arms. The rooster hoists its leg in crippled circles around the woodpile. He will not tell Maggie that it was Wes who made her rooster lame with that small and pointless pebble, although he senses she will know. He will not tell her that he has seen her with Blackwood by the alder and wild violets at Cummings Brook. He has seen Blackwood’s tremendous broken hands spin her flesh as if it were a net. He will not ask her about Eve. He can smell the blood of the white goose. It has begun to soak through his shirt into a warm paste along his arms.
    He does not wake her. He waits for a quarter of an hour, then unwraps the feathers from his coat and leaves them on the stump beside the woodpile.
    Back at the house, he finds his mother alone in the kitchen. The smells of woodsmoke and spices spill with the orange light through the back door. He stands by the shed watching her scrub the iron stewpot with an ox-hair brush in the sink. She is black-haired, high-boned, her forehead strung with walking lines. Her husband’s rage has worn her to a hollow silence, but she is warm the way wool is warm, spun light with a thin weave. When Jake was young and his father took Wes shrimping in the East Branch, Jake would stay close to her as she swept the house and walked down to the Point to trade at Blackwood’s store. Sometimes in the afternoons, they would lie in the field at the bottom of the hill near the creek, and she would read the clouds to him and tell him stories of her grandfather, Beans, who had built the warehousesfor the cranberry bogs behind the dunes. He built the ferry wharf on the Horseneck side of the river and then built his own house beside it. Twenty-five years later, when she was still a child, the land was bought and he floated that house with her inside it across the narrow channel to the Point, where it was set on a new shallow foundation in the middle of a peach orchard at the northeast end of the Pacquachuck Hill.
    Now, leaning against the shed with his wet coat folded in his arms, Jake watches her pass back and forth through the kitchen. She cuts up the goose and empties the pieces into the iron pot. She adds stewed onions and carrots she has brought up from the cold cellar. She stirs in a half cup of milk and chips of dried basil. She covers the pot and leaves it to simmer on the woodstove. She kneels on the doorstone off the south porch with a pail of rabbits Wes brought home that afternoon. She gutted them earlier, when they were still warm and