When she had started first grade, her teacher had read the class a snippet of Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and Lucy was instantly and utterly captivated. Her face was so incandescent when she told me about small Mowgli, who was saved from starvation and raised by the wolf pack, that I badgered my mother to take us downtown to the big gray stone pile of the Carnegie Library and check the book out. That night, with the aid of Mickey Mouse and a stolen flashlight, I read the book in its entirety to her, and for the rest of that fall we lived in the enchanted emerald jungle of those pages. Each evening I reread a portion of the book to her until she fell asleep, and after school, in the autumn-gilded honeysuckle thicket behind the summerhouse, we played endless games of Jungle Book. Lucy sometimes took the role of Bagheera, the sleek black panther, but most of the time she was Mowgli, and she always accorded me the role of Baloo, the great, fierce, protective bear.
“We be of one blood, thou and I,” Lucy would intone endlessly, in a kind of incantatory singsong, through those warm, vivid afternoons. And when we were separated from each other, or met again, we would cry, “Mark my trai-i-i-i-l! Mark my trai-i-i-l!”
One afternoon, when the cicada-buzzing, dry heat of Indian summer had burned so endlessly onto our heads and forearms that we felt time-stopped and weightless in a dusty golden void, Lucy unwrapped the ball of her red sweater and pulled out a kitchen paring knife.
“Let’s really be of one blood,” she said. “Let’s cut our wrists and bleed in each other, so we’ll always be blood kin.”
The mere sight of the knife made me weak and sick. I knew instantly that she would do it. Lucy often did not seem to feel the pain of a skinned knee or a stubbed toe, and blood meant no more to her than water or Kool-Aid. I knew, too, that she knew that blood and pain weakened and sickened me profoundly. She had never taunted me with it, nor lured me into harm’s way. I felt the old preLucy vulnerability and shame wash over me.
“We are blood kin,” I said. “We’re first cousins. We couldn’t be any closer kin unless we were brothers and sisters.”
“You know what I mean,” Lucy said.
I did.
“Lucy, if you think I’m going to cut myself with that thing, you’re crazy,” I said desperately. “We’ll get a whipping if we do it.”
“We won’t if they don’t know it,” Lucy said. “How will they know it if we don’t tell them?”
“They’ll just know.”
“Come on, Gibby,” Lucy said. “You’ll do it if you love me.”
She took the small, bone-handled knife, kept keen and glittering by Shem’s whetstone, and drew a welling line of red on her fragile, blue-veined wrist. It filled, trembled, and showered down in a cascade of red drops onto the dry earth of the thicket floor, which drank it thirstily and instantly. She stared dreamily at the blood, as if to memorize its course over her arm. Then she raised her light-drowned eyes to me and smiled. She held the knife out.
The dry, burning day quite literally described a slow, stately, shimmering arc over my head, and the scraping song of the cicadas retreated from my ears in a long, sucking surge, as if a tide were going out. A great, faraway roaring remained. I could seem to see nothing but the evil, efficient glitter of the little knife.
“Your turn,” she said. I could scarcely hear her through the roaring in my ears.
I turned a blinded, shamed face to her.
“I can’t do that,” I said humbly. “I can’t cut myself. There’s lots I’d do for you, Lucy, but I can’t cut my arm with that knife. I’d get sick and urp all over you. Or I’d faint. You know that. You know what happened when I got that nosebleed last spring. I was in bed all day.”
“You have to,” Lucy said inexorably. In her stillness and implacability she was like some pagan priestess, kneeling there in the burning woods with the autumn sun glinting off the knife in her hand.
“I can’t,” I said. “You might as well ask me to cut my throat.”
“I’ll do it for you,” she said earnestly. “I’ll do it real quick, so you won’t have time to be scared. You won’t even feel it, hardly. It’s real sharp. And I’ll put my sweater over it, so you won’t have to look at the blood. And if you urp I’ll clean it up.”
“I can’t,” I said again, in dull despair. The humiliation of the endless moment was complete.
She was beside me in a moment, in a silent, sinuous wriggle like the movement of a snake.
“You have to do it, Gibby,” she hissed, in an urgent, sibilant whisper that snapped my tight-screwed eyes open. Her face was paper-white and her eyes blazed, and tears stood in them. She did not, in that moment, even look like my cousin Lucy; she looked like something out of a forest far older and wilder than the one in which we sat; she looked like something that should wear, on her beautiful, narrow head, a crown of living, writhing snakes. I felt my mouth drop open into a slack O.
“Do it now,” she whispered. “Do it. It will mean that we belong to each other. It will mean that all our lives we’ll have somebody who’ll come and help us and be with us when we’re lonesome, and save us from bad things. When bad things happen and nobody else will save us, we’ll have each other to do it. We’ll know the other needs us wherever we are in the world, and we’ll have to come. If you don’t do it I won’t have anybody, and one day something bad will happen to me and there won’t be anybody to come and save me, and I’ll die. If you don’t do it, Gibby, I’m going to stick this knife right into my heart, right this minute, and I’ll die right here in front of you in awful pain and buckets of blood, and it will be all your fault.”
I did it. With the quickness of sheer desperation I pressed the blade deep into my wrist where the little blue delta of veins beat as fast as a snared rabbit’s, and the pain was as sharp and sickening as the overripe, mashed persimmons on the floor of the woods around us.
Blood did not drip or trickle; it leaped from my wrist, and flowed, and sheeted my flesh and sated the parched earth so that some of it stood in savage miniature pools and did not soak in. Lucy grasped my wrist quickly and pressed it to hers, even as the pain and nausea and dizziness flooded my veins and climbed, buzzing, up my arms, and flew up to my temples. The thicket spun mightily in the sun, and for nearly an hour after that I lay clinging to the warm earth, afraid that I would vomit my lunch.
But I did not. By the time the blood slowed and stopped and Lucy washed it off with the tail of her sweater dipped in the green-scummed water of the stagnant lily pond, my head had cleared and my stomach subsided, and pride and a great, warm sense of owning and being owned flooded over me. As she had said, nobody noticed the cuts, which were, when cleaned and dried, almost invisible, though severe enough so that we both bore the scars always. I think that if they had not scarred, Lucy would have kept at her grisly task until they did. Those small, fine white lines on our two wrists became, forever after, brands of ownership and identity.
The book I brought home that winter night we spied on my parents under the foyer stairs was Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and like The Jungle Book, it came to hover over our childhoods with such a weight and mass that it in some ways defined us. Where Lucy had been enchanted by the story of the salvation and deliverance of Mowgli, she went down into Malory with a kind of fierce and full-souled affirmation that suggested a water creature finding, at the last moment before suffocating in the blade-sharp air, the depths of his life-giving sea. I could not read it often enough; I could not read it long enough at a time, to satisfy her. Many nights my head would nod and my burning eyes would close of themselves as the pages blurred before them, and Lucy’s voice would jerk me back to wakefulness.
“Wake up, Gibby. You haven’t finished this part. Elaine hasn’t even got in the boat yet.”
“Lucy, it’s one o’clock. You’ve heard this fifty times already. I’m about to die.”
“No, Gibby, just this one; just finish this. I have to know what happens. I have to know.”
“You do know.”
“No,
Gibby, please…” and the distress would be so thick in her voice, a real whimper, that I would go on to the end of the tale before closing the book. There was no story of distress and rescue that she did not hear so often that it became a part of the very fabric of her, no tale of daring and gallantry that did not, invariably, make her eyes shine and the three-cornered kitten’s smile dance on her pink mouth. She always thanked me so genuinely that my fatigue and irritation vanished, and I counted the heavy head and scratchy morning eyes well spent.
For somewhere in that string of Thomas Malory days, Lucy had given me my soul, and I knew it. I could never again go back to being merely a small boy who read aloud to his smaller cousin, and did, endlessly, her bidding. Malory and his tender, foolish, beautiful victims were the gift I gave to her. Sainthood was hers to me.
She said it on one of the first nights I read to her from Malory, that time the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. When I finished, I looked over at her and she was sitting bolt upright, light burning on her face like white fire, color coming and going in it.
“They were always saving ladies back then,” she said, on a breath of pure joy. “It was the way a knight had to act. He had to. You’re going to be my knight, Gibby, you know that? You’re going to be the bravest and handsomest knight of all, always and always, and you’ll always, always save me. I knew you would when we cut our wrists.”
The simple salvation of identity roared in my head. I knew then, as I have never really known since, who I was. Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III. Knight.
“Well, I’d better start now, then,” I said casually, to hide my flaming heart. “Or I’ll end up being the scaredest and skinniest knight in the world.”
“You won’t always be skinny,” she said. “And you’re going to be very handsome. You’re going to look like…hmmm…like Lancelot. Or no, more like Galahad, I think. Kind of like a hawk.”
And I gave her the hawklike grin of a golden Galahad, and loved her in my deepest heart. And when I lay in bed that night, after she had fallen into sleep and I had turned off Mickey, I wept silently with the sheer relief of having been given a self. The shiny bracelet of the scar around my wrist seemed to pulse with a noble life of its own.
For it was that, in being given and accepting the role of protector to Lucy, all the years of my life as a powerless and completely irrelevant small boy vanished as if they had never been, and what was left was pure and endless power. All I was and had been that was weak and hateful to others, all that was wounding and shaming to me, became transmuted into power. My obscure and deep-buried angers were all right, because they became, in that moment, the righteous wrath of a saint. All aberrations became divine, because they were the God-bestowed stigmata of a saint. It justified all I was and would become, would do: I would look after Lucy Bondurant and scourge through the world anything that threatened her. Dear Lord, but it was a terrible and seductive boon that she gave me: to a small boy with nothing, the most seductive of all. It kept me in thrall to more than just Lucy for the bulk of my life; it kept me in a saint’s sterile self-imposed exile.
I remember once, when I was long grown, after Ben Cameron had become ill and Dorothy was considering the sale of the Muscogee Avenue house, we talked about that dreadful gift of power that Lucy had given me. It was long after I had stopped going out, except to a very few places, and those mostly at night. Dorothy Cameron’s house was one of the places I never stopped going. In those sheltering darks, there seemed to be nothing I could not talk to her about.
“Ever since I discovered that heady, all-powerful feeling of protector and knight-errant to Lucy, I have wanted to be a saint,” I said. “Or not so much wanted to be as known that I needed to be. She showed me what a life of power and exaltation that could be. So I did that. I bent everything I had, for a while, toward being a literal saint, the protector of the weak, the helper of the helpless. Saint Shep the Enabler. It started to erode that day out on the river—I’m sure Sarah told you about that—but it didn’t really begin to come unraveled until the day of the fire, when I became, in the eyes of this town, not a saint, but a…well, you know what they think I am now. And yet the desire, the need, is still there; it’s still strong….”
I could feel, in the thick darkness of their sun porch, her great amber eyes on me.
“And so you dropped out,” she said in her rich, warm, girl’s voice.
“And so I did.”
“Not a very saintly thing to do, do you think?”
“On the contrary, Miss Dorothy. Us saints have historically spent quite a bit of time over the years being hermits and eremites and such. Us saints don’t have it nearly as good as people think, you know.”
“I never thought you had it very good, Shep,” Dorothy Cameron said. “On the other hand, I never thought you had it very bad, either.”
Dorothy Cameron’s great gift to me was that she always knew me for what I was and never stopped both loving and liking me. Lucy’s was that, too, of course. But Lucy knew a different person. It always seemed to me a great pity that she could not have acknowledged at least a shadow of that entirely commonplace man that Dorothy Cameron knew so well; it would have spared us endless pain. But she could not. That was, from the very beginning, simply not given to her.
The summer of 1942 was a powerfully hot one, and so humid that doors would not close until autumn, and shoes in closets wore gray-green shawls of mold. The walls of the Peachtree Road house were almost as thick as those of a medieval cloister, and, with the floor-length drapes in the downstairs rooms drawn and the toiling electric fans droning, kept us comfortable during most of my summers there; I cannot remember, before that one, ever being truly hot in that house.
But that summer was different. Day after day dawned milky and tepid, and by noon the entire world was bleached a savage white. Temperatures did not fall below ninety-five degrees more than three or four days after June, and the thunderstorms that came grumbling in from the west almost daily did not break the heat, but only breathed a suffocating wetness into it.
My father and mother and Aunt Willa sat late into the nights on the sun porch, putting off climbing up to the second floor, which was airless and terrible, and Aunt Willa came home from her job at Rich’s in the afternoons as wilted and flushed as an infant after a long, sweating sleep, cinders and smoke stuck into the melting icing of her makeup. My father took to working in the library in his shirtsleeves, something he never did before or after, and my mother gradually stopped going out on her rounds of luncheons and bridge. Hardly anyone called, and we did not even have the surcease of the Garden Hills pool or the one at the Driving Club, because the conditions were, we were told over and over again by the radio and newspapers, made to order for infantile paralysis. I suspect we would have broken my mother’s edict about Tate that summer, and spent at least two months up there at the cottage, but gasoline was strictly rationed by then, and few people squandered it. My father had a C card, but it was a point of honor with him not to use it often. Confined largely to the house and grounds of 2500 Peachtree Road, Lucy and I slept that summer, by parental dispensation, on mattresses on the summerhouse floor, and virtually lived there with our books and a small radio my father brought us from Buckhead Hardware.
What those nights must have been like for Shem and Martha Cater, in their little rooms over the garage, I don’t like to imagine. They never appeared rumpled or cross, as the rest of us did, and I never saw either of them sweat.
“Negroes don’t sweat,” Lucy told me. “It’s because they’re so black. They come from Africa where it’s a million times hotter than this, and the heat turns them black, and that’s why they don’t sweat.”
That did not sound right to me. “How do you know?” I asked.
“I read it someplace,” Lucy said. I knew that she had not, that I had read everything she had, and nowhere was there any mention of the skin and sweat glands of Negroes. But I did not challenge her. One of Lucy’s fantasies had only to come tumbling toadl
ike out of her mouth before it turned into a pearl of fact, and it upset her genuinely and deeply to be called a liar. I always believed that she knew a truth that transcended the literal one the rest of us were saddled with, and indeed she did seem to get hold of the essence of things in a way few adults I have known ever did. I was not about to argue with her about the sweat of Shem and Martha Cater, and I was not about to ask Martha. Asking remote and thunder-browed Shem was simply beyond imagining.
Martha had her hands full that summer with small Jamie and Little Lady. During the year they had been with us, we had heard and seen little of them, for they had not needed much attention at eight months and three years respectively, and my aunt Willa had cannily kept them out of sight in the rooms allotted to them until she went to work, at which time Martha took over, with her agreeable, dim-witted teenaged daughter ToTo backing her up.
They were quiet, beautiful children, as docile as if they could sense the precariousness of their sufferance in that house, and when they were brought out to join the family at ceremonial occasions such as holiday dinners and Sunday school services and afternoon rides, Aunt Willa always had them scrubbed to polished rosiness and dressed in their starched and ruffled best. They were such attractive children, and such ridiculously obvious little Bondurants, with their rose-gilt fairness and enormous pansy eyes and perfectly wrought small hands and feet, that it was nearly impossible not to smile at them, to touch the satiny, downy surfaces of them. Aunt Willa had taught Little Lady to curtsy, a dreadful, ostentatious little parody of gentility, and to lisp, in her thin, flute-like, nasal drawl, “Thankyouma’am, pleaset’meecha,” and though my mother would flinch and my father avert his eyes, they had to respond eventually with approval and murmured accolades, just at all that sheer prettiness.
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