Free Moon Tide by Dawn Tripp Page B

the gravel and the cries of the minks that seem everywhere. Their coal eyes fill the dark around him.

CHAPTER 10
Maggie
    S he wakes in pasted early light, fog stuck between the cords of wood. She finds the white feathers on the stump. The blood has begun to crust and dry brown. She carries the feathers to her garden, where she digs a flat grave. She lays them down into the shape of the goose they were.
    By midmorning, the rooster’s foot has yellowed, the skin puckered around the wound. Maggie wraps it in a strip of cheesecloth soaked in rosemary and marjoram, but by midafternoon he has pecked the cloth off, and it trails in tatters behind him through the dirt.
    “Who did this to you?” she asks him softly, watching from the doorstone of the root cellar as he stumbles his proud route through the yard.
    That night when she goes out to draw water from the well, the leg has turned the color of camouflage. The rooster hobbles back and forth along the length of the pen, his feathers drooped and the red comb turning dull. He follows Maggie back toward the house, hefting a distance from the hens. They have noticed his limp. Curious, they dart in at him, one at a time. His beak flails to keep them away. By the next morning the foot has swollen to a marbled green. Maggie takes rose-hip paste from a glazed pot in the shed and, holding the bird firmly, she coats the wound to stifle the gangrene. She pries open hisbeak and feeds him handfuls of corn and oats she has soaked in the drinking water from the well. He spits it up. Squirming away, he drags across the yard. She lets him go. That evening she watches the reds tighten into a pack around him. They fly in one at a time and peck until his feathers tuft out in small explosions. Maggie leans against the door of the henhouse, her eyes wet. She watches him until he cannot stand and the sun has thinned to a pit. She watches him as he sits, the proud waxy comb outlined in the moon, his feathers plucked out by the other chickens. As the dark mixes into the fog, he rises up, floating for a moment in midair.
    She wraps the body in a scarf and lays it down in a wicker basket with the four corners of the cloth hanging over the outside edge. She rakes juniper twigs, wood chips and dry leaves into a pile. She lays the basket on top with a branch of holly, takes a lucifer match, strikes it, and sets fire to one corner of the silk.
    Past midnight, Maggie leaves Blackwood asleep in the yellow-lit room above the store, the oil lamp turned down to an unkempt glow that washes his naked shape into hard, uneven bones. She pushes away from his chest, dresses behind the closet door, and slips down the stairs. In the dark, she can see the harpoons suspended from the ceiling, the narwhal tusk and the deer head breaking through the wall behind the counter, the empty aisles of Nabisco tins and Campbell’s soup, cans of peach syrup, molasses, and blackberry jam, the nail kegs stacked into one corner, rows of hammers, paint, and window glass, tackle, cigars, rubber boots, chewing tobacco, oarlocks, cleats and lines, wire baskets, tar paper, and galvanized pipes; the sail chest against the far wall piled with oilskins, foul weather gear, and halfgallon tins of kerosene. She can see the knives through the glass case and, next to the cashbox, the mason jar with the massive spider skewered by a lady’s hatpin inside it.
    She slips out into the road and walks past the dock house. She can hear voices through the slit in the barn-size door and the chatter of dice. She walks along the piers, past skiffs tied between the piles. It isa new moon tide, and the river has swelled. It presses up against the boards, the water soaking into the pores of the wood until the pier grows supple. She can sense the pull of the current through the soles of her feet.
    She lies down at the end of the west dock and rests her head in a coil of line. She listens for the wandering of soft-shell clams, the packs of mussels drifting in the