Excerpt from my upcoming novel, Whale Bones
Buoys and Grills Day, 1982
The day is so clear in Sam’s memory that he can taste it, especially on the edge of sleep, or after a quick toke at dusk out at the edge of the yard, right where it meets the field, right where he always stands, listening as the chirping crickets provide tempo to the midsummer insect symphonies, the wind whisking across the long-mown barrenness deep in autumn, shaking the last leaves from the nearby oaks, and the crystalline white silence of winter, punctuated by distant great horned owl calls from the Wood, or filtered down through the front-thin air from Sampson’s Meadow and higher up the wooded slopes of Mt. Angamsit.
It wasn’t the beginning of their relationship. Or fling. Whatever it should have been called, and he’s never figured that one out. It wasn’t quite the end, either, but close enough to it. The day stuck though. It was the heat and the laughter and the childlike joy of Buoys and Grills. It was the sneaking off that the day funneled them giddily towards. The secrecy of it. The wild thrill that both of them seemed just a few years too old for, though neither of them cared. That had to be it.
Blue skies and bright sun. Not only the first Sunday of August, but the first day of the month as well. The vivid green glories of July—the road dust, tree climbing, frog catching, school’s out forever glories—were a short but fitful sleep in the past, divided from them by no more than a plump yellow moon, waxing gibbous, hung in the firmament over a community restless with excitement for the coming day, and the hotdogs and canoe races and cold juice bags and kites and fresh boiled mussels and frisbees and games and hamburgers and crunchy, salty snacks and sparkle off the water—the way it sparkled differently on that day and always had, even though no sense could be made of it.
Sam can see little Peggy Multon’s kite. A maroon pterodactyl. He didn’t know exactly—some whatchamacallit flying dinosaur. She unveiled it proudly, blushing at the accolades it received. It was huge, well over a dozen feet across, wing tip to wing tip, and constructed out of numerous plastic sheets cut to shape and all sealed together with many roll’s worth of clear tape. The spine and cross spars were made of carefully selected young branches, supple and strong, whittled to a precise thinness where nature had not made them as such. It was an obvious labor of love, as the girls’ kites usually were, painted neatly and with great care. With the help of two adults and a fair breeze, the craft got airborne and was carried swiftly aloft, every head on the beach turned up to it, rapt attention from all.
“It’s going to have some mighty pull,” he said, watching it sail rapidly higher, thick twine flying off the reel in Peggy’s little hands.
“She’s keeping her eye on the line.” Martha raised her right forearm to Sam’s eye level, showing off the faded pink scar that encircled her wrist, a bracelet of healed flesh that Sam had traced with his fingertips time and again as she reclined in his embrace. “Unlike some kids in the past.”
“Good thing your dad was keeping an eye on you as well.”
“Plenty of attention on Peggy.”
And indeed there was. Peggy’s father, and several others, were crowded close at her back, ready to take hold of the reel if need be.
Though at ground level the breeze was blowing down the beach from north to south, the kite soon reached a different atmospheric reality, where wind evidently flowed in a torrent from the land out to sea. The kite was caught by that stream quite suddenly, swooping into a downturn and rising back up in a hurried U, changing direction as it was swept oceanward. Peggy took off at a run, surely aware that she had little line left to let out, and her father followed at a brisk jog. The crowd parted, knowing Peggy’s trajectory was at the sole mercy of the kite and the winds it was struggling to harness.
The great flying beast did another U in the sky, this one much larger, diving perhaps twenty meters in seconds and swooping back up to recover only half of that.
Peggy could be heard calling out: “Oh no, no! Dad!”
“Let me take it!” said her father, and reached his arms around to grab the reel. She let him have it, no doubt with some reluctance, for the dinosaur up there in the high turbulent blue was her creation, and she in her diminutive child’s body had intended to control its flight. Many kids, thought Sam, had a spirit so much greater than their physical limitations, and sometimes greater than those of most adults, including the ones the kids themselves would become.
Peggy’s father taking the reins didn’t result in any taming of the kite. Now out over the water, it was beset by whirling drafts, made visible only by the erratic circular motions of the kite itself. Curious, Sam thought, how such power could only be seen through its interaction with other matter. The man dug his feet into the wet sand near the water’s edge, straining now to hold the line steady, while Peggy leapt up and down with urgent energy.
Martha nudged him. “This is just bad luck,” she said in his ear, and then, so quickly that she had to have been sure no one would see, she flicked his earlobe with her tongue. Sam tried to keep a straight face.
“Not in front of people, geez,” he said without looking at her. “And don’t make me laugh right when this disaster is happening.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You licking me in public, or—”
The kite plunged headfirst—literally—into what looked like another dramatic U, but there was no upsweep this time. Straight down it went at blinding speed, every pair of eyes tracing its Peregrine descent, and the last thing Sam noticed before it hit the water was that the part of the spine that ran through the pterodactyl body up through the neck to the head must have snapped with the pressure, because the whole beaked head folded back out of sight a fraction of a second before the kite hit the water. He was sure he heard the sharp crack beneath the hiss-whoosh of the tide as the rest of the frame broke apart on impact.
Peggy was still shuddering with sobs, sitting on the sand with her face in her hands, when her dad finished reeling the mangled body back in. It was even more smashed up than Sam would have expected, and a miracle that the twine had held to the brindle and the brindle to the wreckage. Peggy took one look at it and then ran up the beach, tear-streaked and miserable, while Lisa Multon shouted at her to come back and clean up her mess and their dad snapped at her in turn to leave her little sister be.
The thing’s head was missing, and though Sam recalled seeing it flap back during the plunge, he was impressed to note that violence of the crash had severed it clean off. He volunteered to take a canoe out to search for the head, but Ralph, shielding his hand against the sun to look for it on the waves, suggested he not bother, as the tide would be coming in soon and it’d probably wash up by sundown. Sam never learned whether that prediction came true.
Hours later, with games of frisbee and tag behind the attendees, tans and sunburns abounding across arms and chests and shoulders and nose bridges and cheekbones, and bellies filling up with boiled mussels from the great steaming pot overseen by Martin, the sun bid its silent farewell, dipping toward the gentle forested crown of Angamsit. Parents took their children home and some others filed away as well as the light took on its deep gold cast, then that of rust. The atmosphere on the beach underwent a transformation as old as mankind, and certainly older still. Ancient. Primeval. The temperature dropped and the night’s chill crept in, but it was the change within the occupants of the beach, in response to twilight and the dark that settled in its wake, that ushered in a new world around them. It was a world defined by the borders of the light, that hugged them close, that shrouded history and the landscape all at once. The few streetlights on Main sent up a glow in the near distance, making it like a shrouded faerie kingdom, filled with its little intrigues, and on the beach half a dozen campfires of varying sizes and strengths made bubbles of community, human forms seated in rings on the sand and makeshift benches of driftwood. Laughter and music spread out from them, and conversation about existence and more about what is unknown than known, as was seldom heard in the working day, or in the revealing light of the sun that fools people into thinking they see all there is to see. That fat waxing gibbous moon, a phantom face patterned on a sand dollar, still a few days shy from werewolf fullness, hung over the water like a faithful companion to those humans that wrapped themselves in cool night air.
When the dark comes in, everything that can no longer be seen is mystery. The spit of land to the north is surely there, but now it’s but a dragon’s tail on the water, if it can be discerned at all. All the other geography exists as it did before nightfall, but one has to keep convincing themselves that it’s not frequented with wandering spirits—at least no more than it ever was. Those around campfires, pupils contracted with the glow at the crackling heart of the circle, can barely see anything around them at a glance. The world becomes the campfire and the circle. It becomes the others in the light with you, and their thoughts and stories and songs. The lingering ape mind, that mind that came down from the trees to challenge the land-lurking predators, considers by default that the darkness can hide anything. Threats, of course, but as the careful optimists our curiosity inspires us to be, potential pleasures too. Those mysteries are imbued with animation and agency, alive but concealing themselves from blindly prying eyes, from the lake of hungers and desires behind them.
Sam and Martha threaded their way between the campfires, moving through corridors of half-lit night, the sand and grit pleasant against the soles of their bare feet. They split up and sat in on different fires for twenty, thirty minutes at a time, accepting drinks that were offered, or marshmallows on sticks to roast, and then they rose by some nocturnal synchronicity, or a half-glimpsed movement from the corner of the eye, and came together again in the dusky crossroads between the pools of light.
These were the magic hours, when the buzz was high. A couple guitars had come out. People were feeling good, the true drunkenness not yet arrived to wash Buoys and Grills day away for good, as it always did, on a tide of raucousness and slumber, nausea and argument, hugs and stolen kisses and tears. It was time to slip away to their spot, their place, and so they did, off down the beach with moonlight to guide them. They knew where to step. They’d walked this shore their whole lives. The tide had turned now but it was still high. With the bluff rising on their right, they trod close to its stony face, hand in hand down the space between it and the lapping waves.
Some time later, they reached the Cliff. Their cliff. In truth it was a section of the same cliff face that ran all the way from one end of Skye Point Beach, which they’d left behind, but there was something about this spot. The slope of it, its steepness, its height that seemed to give it a looming protective stance rather than the threatening one that gravity could well make it, like it was some old guardian of the earth. It was a burnt orange in the daylight, but at this hour it was deepest grey-blue like the rest of the world.
This was where they came for the act. The show that was just for them, to be shared on a darkened stage. It could have been in the backseat of a car, but they came here instead. This was where it had first happened, on the night of the previous year’s Buoys and Grills day, and a few more times that summer when they could each sneak down here on the same night. Through the cold months of autumn and frozen winter they might as well have not even known each other. But when spring returned, they did too—to this spot, beginning to run again like tree sap. They didn’t know what they were, how to define it, and didn’t care. They’d sensed from the beginning that it wouldn’t be forever, wasn’t meant to be, but they were young still and had desires, seeking exploration and release. Seeking each other.
There was a smooth boulder on the beach there beneath the cliff: sandstone as well, tide smoothed, the top sloping at a twenty-degree angle, with a gentle depression in it where untold decades or centuries of sea water and rain had pooled and eaten it away. They seated themselves next to each other on it and Martha let out a long sigh.
“I realized something tonight,” she said.
“What is it?”
“That this is the last time we’ll do this.”
“Oh… is it?”
She looked at him, the moonlight catching those liquid eyes like it caught the seawater glinting just beyond their feet. Glinting all the way to European shores.
“This marks one year,” she said, and her face shaped itself to conceal humor, a laughter that was always there even in somber times, that lived inside her and shone out through the eyes. With Martha it felt that nothing and everything mattered, because nothing was ever over for good, nothing ever truly ended, and so everything simultaneously mattered because it was eternal and carried memories and imprints on through time. “It’s our one-year anniversary,” she continued, still holding back that smile. “Of whatever this is, you know, and I just knew that it couldn’t go on more than a year. It’s not supposed to.”
“Okay,” said Sam, understanding on one level and on another allowing himself to be confused, and even hurt. Things could occur in two states when he was with Martha, exist on outwardly opposing planes, even those that arose from himself.
“Ever since I finished recording the new album last month, they’ve been saying things are going to get busy. Real busy.”
“They believe in the album,” said Sam, “because they know it’s awesome. You’re awesome.”
“There’s already a tour lined up for September,” she continued, not as though she hadn’t heard him, but as though she didn’t want to acknowledge the compliment. “Not just the Maritimes now. Going all the way over to Vancouver for a show.”
Martha never thought of herself as awesome—not even exceptional, thought Sam. She was just good at what she did, and what she did she loved, and other people were really good at other things, and that’s all there was to it.
“Might be out of the country next,” he said. “Down to the states, then who knows? Over to the UK? Australia?”
“Maybe.” Martha paused, drinking in the moon sparkle from the water. “Maybe, yeah. The record label, you know, it’s huge. The album will be stocked everywhere, even across the border. They say they’re going to get it all over the radio. It’s crazy.” She chuckled, but it was strained, strangely like a sob choked back.
Sam put an arm around her shoulder and hugged her to his chest.
“You’ll be out there, all over the world. Going to see incredible things, meet amazing people, eat crazy foods. All of it.” He didn’t know if he believed it, but in that instant he realized this was what he wanted, because it’s what would make her life, it was what she was meant for, in the same way they were meant to cease their lovemaking from this night. He was a part of her and she was a part of him, and they were a part of the town that had grown them. She’d extend out of Ashbasin, sail away on the clouds, reach far—an extension of them all and of everything, a folk singer bringing their stories to the wide world, in brilliant cities and exotic expanses, introducing some little fragment of them, their echoes, on her fiddle and in the songs she gave voice to. Telling stories and then coming home to recharge, to renew.
But not coming home to him. Sam felt his part in the odyssey ending, drawing to a midsummer close, halted mid-bloom.
“I’m going to come back though,” she said, and Sam didn’t think it odd that she might have read his mind just then. “And I’m not going to ignore you or anything, nothing like that. We’ll be friends, right?”
“Yeah, I mean… yeah. Of course.”
Martha turned, craning her neck to take in the dark sweep of sedimentary rock towering above them, compacted in this spot by other deposits, immense pressures and lengths of time. It must have once been part of the seabed, Sam thought, deep below the waves, witness to unimaginable multitudes of ancient life.
“We’ll always have this cliff,” she said. “It knows us.” Then, again seeming to pluck a thought from his mind, so much that it was eerily moving, she added, “It’s seen it all.” This last was not without a flash of teeth, white in the moonlight, and Sam wished that moment, that very moment, would last forever: that the air would always be August ocean cool, that the moon would shine full and bright just as it did now, that the night would be theirs, and the beach would be theirs, and of course the cliff. Their cliff that knew them.
“Any time I come down here, I’m going to think of you.”
Martha pulled away and gave him a playful shove. “That’s so cheesy.” She leaned in and kissed his lips quickly, pulling away before he could melt into them, prolonging it. “But so will I,” she said. “It holds the same secret we do, you know? It’ll hold our story.”
Sam nodded, thinking on these words, and felt fire run through him. This was it, then. The finale.
He put his hand to the back of her head, leaned in, and then they were kissing again, and melting into each other at last, and they glanced around to see if anyone was watching and of course no one was. No one came down here at midnight except Martha Lamb and Samuel Wright.
Their clothes slid off easily, even on that stone where they reclined, and Sam was young then, they both were, and his joints didn’t ache and his bones didn’t protest at the rough treatment of an unforgiving surface. This place was primordial, and the waves crashed like calm heartbeats and the water was their blood and their blood the water. Their act was as old as life.
She guided him into her for the final time.