Courting the Moon

On the night of the Sturgeon Moon, the five sisters of the Sweetwater Seas gather at the beach of Luna Pier in honor of her.

They have kept this appointment for ten thousand years, since the ice grandmother melted and left them behind like daughters. Once a year, when the Moon swells to her August fullness and hangs low enough to touch the water, the sisters bring their gifts. They court her favor.

Yet, the Moon has never chosen. Her light remains shared across the sisters.

Superior arrives first, as she always does, cold and enormous, trailing fog like a widow's veil. Superior kneels at the pier's end and opens her hands: iron. Shipwreck iron, four hundred hulls' worth, hammered by her own storms into a crown of black petals. "I have kept every sailor you ever mourned. Their bones lie in me, preserved. I am your reliquary. Choose me, your Gitche Gumee, inspirer of song, and I will wear this crown in your honor until the sun burns out."

The Moon says nothing. The Moon walks her long silver road across the water and does not stop.

Michigan comes next, warm-shouldered, restless, humming. The second sister pours out a dune's worth of singing sand, and the sand cries under her fingers like a choir of small birds. "I have practiced your favorite songs. Every wave I have ever broken was rehearsal. Choose me, and I will sing you across the sky each night so you are never lonely on your walk."

The Moon's road shivers on the water, which might be laughter and might be wind. She does not stop.

Huron brings her ghost lights, the blue fires that fishers swear at, the lanterns of drowned lighthouse keepers still keeping watch. The third sister releases the flames over the pier like a hundred captive stars and smooths the water beneath them as they rise. "You have only the one light, and it is borrowed. Choose me, and I will give you ten thousand lights of your own. You will never again shine secondhand."

It is a beautiful gift and a cruel one, and the Moon does not stop for cruelty dressed as kindness. The ghost lights drift back down and settle on the water, embarrassed.

Ontario steps up next. The youngest and farthest of the sisters. The other sisters pour themselves into her, the door through which every drop of them leaves. The fourth sister brings no object at all. She opens her arms toward the east, toward the St. Lawrence, toward the salt. "I am the way out. All my sisters end in me, and I end in the ocean, the one water on this earth that answers you. Here, you pull with everything you have and we rise a hand's width, an apology of a tide. There, you pull and the entire world stands up to meet you, twice a day, forever. Choose me, and I will carry you down to the sea. I will deliver you to our great ancestors."

The Moon slows. Most likely from disbelief that Ontario dares to diminish this celebration by promising the bitter when this is a celebration of the sweet. But the Moon does not stop. You do not stop for someone whose gift is sending you away.

And then Erie's turn arrives, and her sisters do not bother to hide their pity.

Erie, the shallow one. Warmer than the rest. The murky black sheep, once declared dead. Mourned by men who had poisoned her body and then pronounced her demise. Erie, who has no shipwreck iron worth crowning anyone, whose sand does not sing, whose lights are the ordinary lights of home.

Erie steps to the end of Luna Pier. Her pier. On her shore. The one thing she has that bears their beloved's name. The fifth sister opens a hand.

Lucky stones lie there. Seven of them. The white otoliths of the Sheepshead, the Freshwater Drum, each one small as a fingernail and carved by no carver with the letter L.

Superior sighs.

Michigan crouches to look, the way you crouch for a child. "Little sister, those are fish bones."

"They are ears," says Erie.

Even the ghost lights hold still on the water.

"Every Freshwater Drum in me carries two of these in her skull," Erie says, to the Moon now, only to the Moon. "They are how she hears. How she balances. How she knows which way is up, which way is toward you. My fish spend their whole lives listening for you through forty feet of water, and when they die, this remains: the shape of a lifetime of listening. It hardens into stone. It washes up here, on your pier, and the children of Michigan and Ohio seek it out to turn the tide of their luck."

The Moon stills. Her light narrows on the water and points at Erie like an accusation, or an invitation.

"My sisters brought you tributes. Iron for your grief, songs for your loneliness, lights for your borrowed shine, beginnings for your endings. They brought you what they think you lack. As if you, who move every water on this earth without lifting a hand, could lack anything." Erie turns the seven stones in her palm, and they click together like teeth, like dice, like the first sound in an old story. "I am the shallowest of us. When you pull, I feel it fastest and hardest. When you rise, I rise embarrassing distances. I did not bring you a gift. I brought you proof."

She sets the stones down on the concrete pier, one by one, in a curve. Seven small white letters, and every one of them an L, and all together they spell nothing. Yet the sisters fill in the silence as they drop: listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen.

"Even my dead pay you tribute," says Erie. "That is all I have. That has always been all I have."

The first four sisters look away, the way you look away from a love letter read aloud, a child being disciplined, and from a shallow lake showing its floor.

And the Moon stops.

She stops above the end of Luna Pier, low and swollen and sturgeon-gold. Her long road on the water gathers and pours, all of itself, into Erie. Every mile of silver the Moon has ever walked, settles onto this warm, murky, much-mourned but never actually dead water like a hand laid on a face.

She does not stay, of course. She is the Moon. Staying is the one thing she cannot give anyone, and Erie has never asked.

But every August since, on the night of the Sturgeon Moon, the Freshwater Drums rise to the surface of Lake Erie by the hundreds and hold still, listening, and the light lies on that water differently than it lies anywhere else on earth. Ask anyone from Luna Pier; they'll tell you. The waves build strength like Superior, the sands of the beach tinkle against the sea wall, and light from the old lighthouse disperses across the seiches like the ghost lights. In the morning, the small white stones in the shape of the only letter that matters litter the beach.

L, in honor of her namesake pier.

L, for luck, the love washed up for her children to find.

L, for listen.

The Moon has never chosen. Yet she never crossed Erie again without pausing and pouring into Erie all the gifts she has to offer. All on the night of the Sturgeon Moon.