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crouched in the middle of the circle with the axes and the tin pail, while his brother spears the eels through the wounds they have made in the ice. He draws up two at a time on the flangs, sometimes three, and heaves them out onto the white ground. Jake watches them as they writhe, not made for hard surfaces. Their blood streaks the ice. Later, he knows, his father will toss the eels into a bucket of wood ash to remove the slime. They will be split, cleaned, and fried, and his mother will serve them with a plate of thick corn johnnycakes. The four of them will sit at the kitchen table as the half-light from the woodstove hacks red shadows through their faces. They will eat without words.
    As Jake coils the eels into the tin pail, he runs his hand along theirlength. He touches the places they have been. The sargassum swamp they were born in, slow channels of seaweed and heat, the thousand-mile trek north they made when they were still young. He takes in the journey through the slime they leave on his hands.
    This, Jake knows, is his life. This extended twilight of a water snake in his hands. Year after year, he will circle back to this freezing, this moment on the river, with Wes, a dim and luminous scar, moving up ahead.

CHAPTER 6
Maggie
    S ix days out of every week, Maggie works for Elizabeth up at the big house. On Sundays, she leaves the root cellar at dawn and goes to visit Ben Soule. She crosses the bridge and walks south down the oiled dirt road toward East Beach. The fog moves inside her like pale fish nudging up against her lungs.
    As she walks, her thoughts drift back to Skirdagh. It is 1918, summer again, and they have come for their six weeks—Elizabeth’s son, Charles, and his daughter, Eve. Each year they arrive in June amid a flurry of trunks in the new Model T. Maggie watches them, with that lean and at times ruthless curiosity that is her nature. She has seen how Charles burrows into his study, his papers and books—he emerges at mealtimes with blustery eyes and disheveled hair. She has seen the child stealing food. She has said nothing about it to Elizabeth, but on the evenings when Charles takes Eve to walk on the beach, Maggie goes into the girl’s room. She marks the small piles of tart and cherry pits, a slice of molded cheese wrapped in the lavender curtains. Over the course of a week, she tracks how the piles change, how some grow into larger cairns while others shrink. She finds the oldest stuff in the camphorwood box under the bed. The child has lined the lid with a rag soaked in iodine to cut the smell.
    Maggie continues walking through the summer village of EastBeach, past the fishermen’s shacks and the dank heaps of sea muck, past the summer homes with their wide green lawns that line the road. Across the let, she can see Ben Soule shoveling huge clumps of red weed he has raked off the beach into his wheelbarrow. He is thin, his bark stripped from him like a girdled tree. The white tangled beard has grown halfway down his chest and stopped, refusing to grow farther.
    Maggie waits for the old man as he drags the wheelbarrow back up the knoll and empties it out into his garden. He turns over the sea muck and mixes it into the sand. She knows that he will grow carrots out of this compost that are straight and long and sweet. He will grow huge smooth potatoes that sprout like the skulls of men out of the sand.
    Maggie buys her hens from Ben, and he tells her that the sky is a table and when the clouds pass low over the earth, they are hungry and will take a woman in her sleep. He keeps a flock of Rhode Island Reds in a pen next to the cold cellar where barrels of salted venison and codfish stand shoulder to shoulder in the cool dark. On the south side of the house is the garden, and next to that a second pen, with a huge black- and green-feathered rooster. The rooster is solitary, proud, its red comb greased by the sun. It struts in measured circles around the inner perimeter of its wire mesh