Untying the Moon Read online

  UNTYING THE MOON

  Pat Conroy, Editor at Large

  UNTYING

  THE MOON

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ A NOVEL ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  ELLEN MALPHRUS

  Foreword by Pat Conroy

  © 2015 Ellen Malphrus

  Published by the University of South Carolina Press

  Columbia, South Carolina 29208

  www.sc.edu/uscpress

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

  ISBN 978-1-61117-610-0 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-1-61117-611-7 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Front cover illustration: painting by

  Anthony Palliser www.anthonypalliser.com

  For Mom and Big Jim Dickey—and Andy, of course

  Elsewhere I have dreamed of my birth,

  And come from my death as I dreamed;

  Each time, the moon has burned backward.

  Each time, my heart has gone from me

  And shaken the sun from the moonlight.

  Each time, a woman has called,

  And my breath come to life in her singing.

  Once more I come home from my ghost.

  JAMES DICKEY, “INTO THE STONE”

  To the dolphin alone, beyond all others, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage. Though it has no need at all of any man, yet it is a genial friend to all and has helped many. . . . it is the only creature who loves man for his own sake.

  PLUTARCH, “DE SOLLERTIA ANIMALIUM”

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Pat Conroy

  Prologue

  PART I: DAUGHTER OF MOTION

  High Tide and High Time

  The Edge of Heaven

  Pass by Home

  PART II: SOMEBODY ELSE’S SONG

  Chances Are

  Barrow

  Winter Songs

  Bearing Straight

  Delicate Bones

  Crossing the Divide

  Another Time

  PART III: DILIGENT RIVER

  Slow Curving Destiny

  Further Reaches

  Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD

  The novelist Ellen Malphrus and I were both students of the otherworldly poet James Dickey, who taught us poetry at the University of South Carolina. Though Ellen is younger than I am, we both consider ourselves Dickey-shaped and Dickey-transformed and there are echoes of his magisterial world in all that we write. He was not merely a teacher, but a compendium of technique and knowledge, an atlas of milky ways, a bridge to a universe unknown. He made you quiver with joy at the many noises the English language could make. He forced you into offering yourself in covenant to become a Knight Templar of that language, an avowal of blood and passion, and set you in voyage to discover whatever formed you and to find if the hunt for the Holy Grail was within you. In his class, I discovered to my dismay that I was not a poet. Ellen Malphrus found that she was one.

  Ellen and I met by accident, but in a fashion that was Dickey-esque in all of its particulars. She was, and will probably remain, the only South Carolina poet I’ve ever met in Blue Hill, Maine. I had just hit and killed a deer on the road from Brooklin to Blue Hill in a violent collision that had left my wife and me both shaken and trembling. Cassandra was certain we had killed a man, but I was sure that a deer had flashed out of the forest that came to the edge of the road before I could hit the brakes. When I found a road on which to turn around, we drove back and I saw some boys from Maine hauling away freshly killed venison in their pick-up truck. The Buick had incurred three thousand dollars worth of damage and a brand new source of nightmare for me. Cassandra was getting our prescriptions filled and I was still wobbly when a lovely woman with amazing hair approached me and said, in a rich southern accent, “You’re a long way from James Dickey’s class, aren’t you, Bubba?”

  “How in the hell do you know that?” I asked.

  It was during that summer that Ellen and her husband Andy Fishkind became friends with Sandra and me. Ellen and I bored our spouses with Dickey stories, which are not boring the first hundred times you’ve heard them. But all devotees of the great poet tell these stories with the combination of awe and inspiration that must have once enlivened the reminiscences of whalers who had put to sea with Ahab. Ellen had become a lifelong friend of James Dickey while I had passed through his stormy, illuminating classes unnoticed. But the fires he lit burn brightly in all I write. In Maine, I began to badger Ellen Malphrus for this remarkable novel Untying the Moon.

  Because she was a poet, I entertained no fears about the quality of language she would bring to this effort. You can thump all the sentences in this book and set them to ringing like a row of wine glasses. Her writing is impeccable, gorgeous, precise. I always look for poets who turn to novels when poetry becomes too contained and refined to express the immensities within them. I watched it up close when I took my class with Dickey right before they began to film his first novel Deliverance. His novel is splendid and classic because Dickey’s prose is polished from the same silver service as his poems and he writes about rivers as well as any writer who ever lived. Before he began his greatly honored career in the short story and novel, Ron Rash was writing some of the best poetry in the language and I was one of the few to know it. If the thunderheads are not gathering in their western horizon, the poets remain our pearl divers. They tell us all the secrets of refinement as poetry will always reveal the deepest shine of our words made bright in their depths. The poets send encoded messages to the stars. The novelist sends messages to us. So it is with Ellen Malphrus.

  Like many first-rate novels, Untying the Moon begins with a prologue that is both artful and secretive, yet it tells us the whole tale in miniature and lets us in on the themes and undertones the novel will roll out for us. It is also a love note to the green marshes and tidal rivers of the South Carolina Low-country. Ellen makes you smell its richness, describes its remoteness and the starriness of his dark skies, and shares with you the magical birth of Bailey Martin, an astonishing girl born in a tiny, mother-rowed boat between two islands. Dolphins observe the birth and a black midwife, Henrietta Simmons, wades out into the shallows of the Jericho River, holding her toddler son, Ben, to help her friend Merissa deliver her child by moon and dolphin-light. I have written often about the Carolina Lowcountry and believe it has served as the central metaphor of my own attempt at art. But Ellen Malphrus writes about it with the osprey-eyed vision of a native, where I came to it late as a passionate outsider. Her descriptions of this infinite landscape achieve an ardor of completeness like none other. Ellen possesses a raw genius for nature writing.

  Motion is the word that sets this novel across America toward Bailey’s troubled, unfixable past as she hits the road for parts unknown more than any character I’ve encountered in modern fiction. For the first hundred pages of this book, I thought I was in the middle of a road novel, but behind the wheels of her indomitable machine, “a 1967 Blue Skylark G-S 400 cream puff of a girl” that Bailey has christened Blue Ruby, this wild child of the eighties takes to American highways with such recklessness that she makes Jack Kerouac seem like a homebody. Bailey, an artist with a sublime gift, is running away from herself and her past and even her future as she tries to supply mortar to the gaps in herself by changing her life on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Forcing the reader to rid
e shotgun, she drives us to the coast of Maine and takes us on a cruise to the edge of Old Sow, the largest and most dangerous whirlpool in North America. With her artist’s eye aglitter, she describes the spectral, vanishing coast of Maine as though she were born a lobster fisherman in Castine. Nor does she ever allow us to escape from the twisted coils of that whirlpool as we feel the immensity of its power throughout the headlong pace of Bailey Martin’s frantic search for her deepest self. Like Don Quixote, it becomes a novel of quest and heroic self-fulfillment, but with far more demons to contend with than the Man from La Mancha ever considered.

  Whenever Bailey grows restless or dissatisfied or uncomfortable in her skin, she obeys the most authoritative voice inside her and unties the moon—that is the call of the road, the cry of moving on, to load up Miss Ruby with her few belongings and set out for the unknown. Always, she maintains a strict adherence to all the laws of escape. Yet, the Self, that most insufferable and absurd element of modern life at its most authentic, keeps asserting the rawness of its needs and congeries on Bailey’s tender yet unsinkable psyche.

  Like many southern novels, the most mordant whimper is always the ancient call of home. In any quest, only the return to Ithaca will satisfy the wanderlust. Though Bailey can help rescue whales trapped beneath the ice of Barrow, Alaska, and clean the clotted oil from the wings of seabirds and wildlife murdered by the Valdez oil spill, and lament the devastation of the environment wherever Miss Ruby takes her, she and the novel spring to amazing life whenever she returns to Kirk’s Bluff and that river that was her birthplace. Her resistance to that cry of home is heroic but futile. She was born beneath the eye of a white dolphin and though her memories of that home are complex, it is where the central action is always flowing toward. It is the one moon she cannot untie.

  In the middle of the book, Ellen Malphrus presents us with a love story that is as moving as it is disturbing. Already, she has demonstrated that the pretty Bailey Martin often has execrable taste in men. This is neither a surprise nor even a worry in modern fiction, but the Vietnam vet Padgett Turner is as appealing to the reader as he is to Bailey and her falling in love with him seems a natural finish to Bailey’s life of constant voyage. Her childhood friend Ben Simmons sounds enough alarms and warnings to set off fire bells in the reader, but the love is the real thing and when Bailey brings Padgett home to meet her laconic father, introduce him to Henrietta and George Simmons, and take him to visit the island cabin which matches all of her reveries of paradise, we learn something about love that is all too painful to bear.

  But enough. I’ve told too much already. Bailey Martin is a magnificent creation. Henrietta and Ben Simmons are two of the strongest characters I’ve come across lately and demonstrate Ellen’s intuitive and imaginative feel for the Gullah-Geechee culture she grew up around, a world she captures with certainty and devotion. The story begins and ends on the same river. It forms a perfect coda, a connection of a thousand dots in the circle, and it completes the restless journey of Bailey as though in fulfillment of a great prophesy—thunderstruck and dolphin-haunted and a significant work of art. Perfectly, the moon is tied at last.

  PAT CONROY

  Prologue

  Come in to the water and listen, child.

  Come into the water and sing.

  She wakes in the night. Nothing has startled her—she simply finds herself awake, looking into the same ice blinked sky she has taken into her dreams. The world pauses untroubled around her and she drifts in silence hearing the warmth of him nearby.

  Her wandering question is what has brought her to the surface, but whatever it is Bailey doesn’t mind. It’s good to lie there untethered in darkness.

  The sound. She feels it more than hears. Different, delicate, as if she is listening with something other than ears. Movement in the water, she knows that, but slow, so slow and entirely apart from other sounds of the abiding woods around her and the meandering river below.

  She tautens to hear it, but then the sound is gone.

  While she lies there opening herself to what it could have been, there it is again. She pictures someone standing in the water, barely waist high, completely still, except that she—it has to be a woman, for a child is too impatient to make such movement and a man too forceful—is trailing one arm slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, through the current, front to back, with the almost imperceptible sound of forever.

  As she listens, Bailey hears as well the starry voice of her mother Merissa sing of the fair curved skiff she rowed across the Jericho River that warm March morning when the moon drew all the earth into balance and Bailey was born to the coaxing hands of Henrietta. Henrietta, more than midwife, beyond neighbor and friend, beckoned from her garden by the silent calls of the young mother. Henrietta, who swooped her toddling son Benjamin in her arms and strode through the two yards and down to the boat landing. Who climbed into the skiff with her boy and told him hold onto me and don’t let go ’til I tell you, full aware there was no time to travel, the baby nearly there from the thrust of each stroke Merissa had rowed as she calmly crossed from May Isle, determined to surround this child with water as she made her way from the womb.

  The boy Benjamin, stunned, mesmerized, held tight and watched in wonder and fear and confusion. In years to come the fear and confusion fell away, but the wonder remained steadfast. Bailey was magic, otherworldly. Ben knew it as a child and knows it as a man.

  Now Bailey rises, as slowly as the sound, and walks to the water’s edge. And there she sees her—the magnificent dolphin shining alabaster in the moonlight, partly on top of the water, partly submerged, like a stray timber adrift in the flood tide. The sound is of her poised body suspended in the gentle flow toward the headwaters of the Jericho River, as measured as the moon itself.

  Entranced, she watches the dolphin pass through the channel of moon wake in the water. And when the light of the moon catches in the dolphin’s eye, Bailey sees herself and knows this ineffable creature is somehow connected to her now, that she is somehow bound to the drifter as well.

  She lies wakeful through the night, hoping the dolphin might surface once more when the tide changes, hoping to hear her again as the current carries her along in motionless repose.

  But all of it flies as she listens, as she comes from the water and sings.

  PART I

  Daughter of Motion

  (1988)

  High Tide and High Time

  Motion. Bailey wakes from a liquid dream but can only glimpse water through slits of high rise buildings. What a joke. New York is a city that does not need her. Or anyone. Click. She doesn’t belong here. Click. Has never belonged here. Click. Will never belong here. Click. Click. Click. The simplicity of it shuts out everything else and shoots adrenaline through her in a wave of delicious resolve. Motion. Sweet motion. There has to be motion—and today by god is the day. Untie the moon and walk on. Drive on. Swim on. Go. That’s what Ben would tell her, and she could hear him all the way from Philadelphia. Bossman.

  She paces the train from Grand Central to the depot in Old Saybrook, doesn’t breathe from her belly until she reaches her friend Jack’s rambling Connecticut barn, puts the key in the ignition, and folds herself into the power of three hundred and sixty horses, all raring to get the hell out of Dodge and onto the smooth southbound highway—a civilized and soothing direction—away from a city and a man and a life she’s pretended for long enough.

  But the glog of traffic.

  Maybe head north then, skirt around the glog. Hell, why not shoot up to Maine, take it to the tip, stare into the eye of Big Sow, that colossal whirlpool—see what the oracle has to say. She sweeps her long brown hair into a pony tail, stuffs it under a Galapagos ball cap and rides the northbound wave, making time, marking miles, music cranked and singing loud about living life in chains.

  And then they’re gone. The key in your hand where it’s been all along. The doorway appears and you simply walk through it and head on down the highway, out to th
e deep blue sea. If perspective is everything then motion is its all-star catalyst.

  Her treasure box and clothes are in the back half of the trunk and her pal Raymond the doorman will send books and music, artwork and desk to Ben’s place. Give away what he can’t use of the rest. Stuff. How easy to be shed of it all in a day.

  Crossing into New Hampshire she takes another long belly breath and blows a kiss to the disappearing state line. The time has come she says to Blue Ruby, the 1967 Buick Skylark GS 400 cream puff of a girl that has carried her many ten thousands of miles toward freedom in all directions, often on the way to Anywhere Else. Miss Ruby, her constant companion and means of motion through the highways, byways, and dirt tracks of North America.

  On to Maine, the great land of lobster, a state where there’s room to exhale. If it weren’t the weekend she would take a hard right tack straight for the coast. But it is the weekend, and hooking into the inch worm of traffic that crawls up US 1 each Friday afternoon doesn’t remotely interest her. It’s movement she needs, smooth sailing. That and a real deal lobster roll—a gem of American culinary creations. The properly prepared lobster roll is a glorious assemblage, and in Maine there is no shortage of them. She glides up I-95 to Augusta and cuts over on Highway 3, leap frogging the inch worm when she turns toward the sea. The sea.

  She had searched for The Perfect Lobster Roll during the better part of a summer she’d spent there, and her mental map of favorites lies shimmering before her. First stop would be that roadside stand just north of Camden, which involves a slight detour southward at Belfast but is still out of the worm’s reach. When she passes by the little road to Liberty Tool, that astounding menagerie of implements and treasures, Miss Ruby instinctively slows to turn but Bailey knows that even if she tells herself ten minutes she’ll in fact spend the afternoon smutty fingered from obscure tools and weathered books in the endless ramblings of dusky alcoves. Another day, when she isn’t so buzzed with the thrill of escape.