The Augmented Fourth

Excerpt from Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2004), 3.  Copyright © 2004, Kathleen Dean Moore

Rain drummed on the hatches and splashed off the decks, but still we could make out the sound of a wolf howling from the cliffs over the cove where we dropped anchor.  There was only one wolf, although we listened carefully to be sure.  The howl started low, leapt up, slid along the water, and sank away.  Nothing answered the wolf's call.  Frank and I listened, as the wolf must have listened, the question probing the clouds and damping out in the forest, the draperies of lichens and drooping hemlock boughs. 

But the only response was rain pounding, then rivering down my sleeves and soaking my gloves.  I tucked my hands into my sleeves, ducked my head, and hunched my shoulders to direct the water down my raincoat instead, to the deck of the boat and off the stern to the sea. The wolf howled again.  I knelt to raise the anchor so we could drift closer to the cliff.

I knew the song the wolf sang.  The first two tones made an augmented fourth, a dissonant interval, like the first two notes of "Maria" in West Side Story.  It's an interval of yearning, of hope--the sound of human longing.

 When my colleague, a concert pianist, explained the augmented fourth, she brought both hands together in front of her body, palms skyward, fingers spread, and lifted the air.  For her, words are not enough to describe this interval. This is a sound that floods the soul, she said, and she strained forward from the waist.  The augmented fourth is a heart-breaking interval, dissonance that comes so close to consonance, pulls itself so close, but never reaches the perfect fifth that is almost within its grasp.

She leaned over the keyboard and played two notes: C, F-sharp.  Then she flooded the room with music made of the unfinished intervals, harmonies that lead toward resolution but never reach a place of peace.  Tony, reaching for Maria.  A Greek chorus pleading with the gods to have mercy on Orestes' soul, this man who has murdered his mother.  Tristan, yearning for the white sail that will bring his beloved Isolde on a following wind.  And Robert Schumann, poor love-sick Schumann, yearning for Clara.  Yearning: this ancient word, diving straight through history from the beginnings of language itself, a word as old as home or earth.  No one in Christian Medieval Europe sang the augmented fourth, my colleague said.  It was the diabolus in musica, the devil's chord--so powerful it could grab a parishioner, drag him to his knees and pull him, scraping on the paving stones, straight to Hell. And there I was in that tide-dragged island wilderness, also on my knees, trying to understand the pull of these same two notes.

I sat on my heels and strained to hear the wolf again, but the rain defeated me.  There must have been three rainstorms stacked above us:  A greyness in the air that wetted every surface, even under the canopy, soaking our hair but barely dimpling the water.  An overloaded cloud dropping rain like sand from a shovel, hard and fast and prickling.  And one unbearably heavy cloud that held in the rain until it broke loose in huge drops that raised welts on the sea.

Listening intently, we pulled in our rockfish jigs and let the boat drift among small islands, until finally the dusk turned into dark.  Then Frank started up the engine and slowly steered us back to the island where we had made camp.

                    *

There is no darker night than a night of rain on an island.  Frank played his flashlight beam over the inlet to make sure the boat was still resting at anchor.  I sat on an over-turned bucket under a tarp stretched between hemlocks.  Under my boots, the ground was springy, a thick layer of moss on a century of hemlock needles.  Rain poured onto the tarp, pooling in a corner that sagged until the edge of the tarp let loose, dashing the water to the ground.  The tarp rebounded, spattering drops that sizzled against the lantern and wet my cheeks.  I pulled my bucket closer to the center of the tarp. Even under its shelter, it was hard to stay out of the rain.  Water bounced off the stems of highbush blueberries and salal, dripped from every stray end of rope, runnelled the length of hemlock roots. I sat hunched, forearms resting on knees, and drank whiskey, closely rationed.

Somewhere people were laughing in brightly lit places that smelled of books and coffee.  Families were sitting down to dinner, somewhere, and fishermen were making fast their boats in harbors, calling out to friends as they hoisted their gear bags to their shoulders and turned toward home.  But there were no other people here, and not another point of light for fifty miles in all directions.  Tonight, just our little family, and in my flashlight beam, a narrow strip of island rapidly sinking into a flooding tide.

A loud mournful wail. I was on my feet, reaching for binoculars, but of course there was nothing to see in that darkness.  It sounded again--a musical arch of three tones.  I ducked past the tarp and groped to the edge of the island, and there was the call again. I thought it was the wail of a common loon. Waking at night, the loon might have found itself suddenly alone, or in the storm lost sight of its mate.  It called again with frantic urgency, first, two sustained tones, the second higher and longer--two wavering tones on that rainy night after so many days of rain. Then it added another interval, even higher and longer.  That was the wild, heartbreaking sound of the augmented fourth.