Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Mine, mine…yes, he was mine. Every ounce and bone and eyelash and fingernail and tooth and shriek, he was mine. I shook all over with love for him; I wept, often, at his intractable, furious pain. I felt every tremor in my own flesh. I know they thought I spoiled him badly, my husband and my mother-in-law.

  “Maude, I worry so that he’ll be spoiled beyond reclaiming, and nobody will want to be around him, and then what sort of life will he have?” Peter said once, as I rocked the baby in the middle of yet another sleepless night. After that, I tried not to go so often to my crying child. I would do anything to spare him the loneliness of alienation.

  But in the end I could not let him cry alone. I knew about outcasts and pariahs. I had cried in the night at Retreat, too. My child would be loved here in this place, if only by me.

  A week or so after Amy and I had our talk on the beach of the Little House, Peter took me over to Castine for an outing. We went alone, for once, Mother Hannah having an afternoon bridge game at the club with Erica’s visiting friends. Petie was asleep in his crib when we left, and Polly Willis sat beside him reading Anne of Green Gables. I had found her, when she first came to us that summer, a proficient reader and starved for books, so I had dug out the best of the cottage’s library for her and borrowed others I thought she would like from the little village library. I had even taken her there one afternoon and helped her get her own junior library card. Miss Prudence Comfort, the librarian, told us she was the youngest person in the library’s history to have one, and Polly was as proud as if she were writing books instead of merely reading them.

  “She’s ruined for sure,” Micah said when he brought her to us that morning. “Not a jot of work can anyone get from her now, nose always in a book.”

  But his face as he looked at his niece, reading beside the sleeping baby, was gentle.

  “You don’t fool me, Micah Willis,” I said. “I know you sit up nights and read Greek by lantern light, or something impossibly esoteric. Runs in the family, I’ll bet.”

  “That’s all you know, Maude Chambliss,” he said, going out the kitchen door. “It’s Latin, not Greek. I’ll pick you up at four, Pol,” he called back to his niece. “Your Aunt Christina won’t be here today; gone to old Mrs. Waldo’s funeral. But if you need me, call the store and send down to the boathouse.”

  “I’ll be fine, Uncle Micah,” she called back, not lifting her taffy head. Micah and Peter and I all smiled at her. Polly had that effect on people. She had a child’s generous, trusting heart in the ripening body of a young woman. It made an appealing combination.

  “We’ll be home by four too,” I said, and she smiled again, and Peter and I got into the Marmon and left. As we drove out of the driveway I noticed again how tall the lilacs had grown, once again shutting the windows away behind a wall of green and white. It seemed only days since the day Micah had cut them, not years. The smell of them was almost dizzying.

  It was a near-perfect day. The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change, but not for another day or two. Along the meadows’ edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay. I took a deep breath and put my head back on the seat.

  “This is what Maine is,” I said. “The sky, the ocean. Wildflowers and black fir and spruce, and rocks and gulls and always the smell of pine and salt in your nose. Nothing else really matters; everything else is just…tacked on. Just noise.”

  “Me too?” Peter said. “You too? Are we just noise?” But he covered my hand with his and squeezed it, and I knew he knew what I meant.

  We had lunch on the porch of the ornate wooden Pentogoet Hotel, surrounded by flower boxes full of begonias and geraniums with butterflies dancing above them, overlooking the sail-speckled harbor at the foot of the steep street. The great three-masted schooner that was the official training vessel of the Maine Maritime Academy atop the hill lay at anchor, her sails furled, small blue-clad figures moving about her decks. The packet for Islesboro wallowed at the dock, and a small crowd of soberly dressed people waited for the arrival of the great steamer, the E.S.S. Belfast, that had plied the bay from Boston to Bangor since near the turn of the century. The street and harbor had the air of a resort village or a European working port; it seemed exotic, far removed from the stark gray, green, and cobalt terrain around Retreat. From where we sat, we could not hear the noise of the harbor, but there was still a tingling feel of holiday in the air. A fat yellow cat came out of the hotel and settled down to doze in the sun, and a perfect blanc mange with a daisy on it arrived for dessert. Old ladies and crying babies and frightened young wives seemed light-years away. I stretched in the afternoon balm and smiled at Peter and felt very young again, and as free as a leaf in a lazy river.

  “It’s going to be hard to go back,” I said dreamily. “I feel eighteen again, with everything still ahead of us.”

  “Not off by far, since you’re only twenty.” Peter grinned, his eyes closed against the sun. Then he opened them and looked at me. In the light they looked more like clear ice than ever, ice over cold depths untouched for centuries. His face and forearms had already gone the deep red-gold that the long days on the water burnt them, and the shock of hair had whitened. I smiled at him, simply because he looked so fine sitting there. My husband. My first love.

  “Is it really so hard for you up here, Maude?” he said softly. “This beautiful place: does it really make you feel as if everything good is behind you? Because that’s not true.”

  “No,” I said. “I know it’s not. I do know that. It’s just that…now I know the outline of everything ahead. I didn’t, when I was eighteen.”

  “And you don’t now,” he said. “Don’t be so eager to get your life all settled. Nobody can see ahead.”

  “Can’t you?” I asked him, truly surprised. I would have thought that he of all people could see the shape of all that waited ahead for him, especially in Retreat. In that place where time had long since jelled.

  “Of course not.”

  We were mostly silent on the drive home. It had been a wonderful runaway day, and I was content to bask in its afterglow, knowing that when we reached the cottage Petie would be awake and probably howling and the magic of the last few hours would disperse. But we could always go again. There would be days and days for that, years and years….

  It was well after four when we turned into the driveway of Liberty, and Micah’s truck was already there. But instead of being neatly drawn up to the back door, as it always was, it was skewed across the drive with two wheels on the front lawn, blocking our entrance, and the front door lay back against the cab as if it had been slammed there with great force and left. The front door of the cottage stood open too, and I could see dim figures behind the sheltering screens on neighboring porches, looking toward Liberty.

  “Petie,” I breathed, my heart stopping the breath in my throat, and was out of the Marmon and running across the lawn before Peter had completely stopped it. I heard him slam the car door and start across the lawn behind me, calling my name, and then a high red keening that I realized later was my own blood began in my ears, and I heard nothing else. When the screen door burst open and a figure tumbled backward out of it, I did not even hear the noise of that. I stared at the man who somersaulted down the front steps of Liberty and lay in a boneless heap on the white gravel walkway with deaf ears and stupid, uncomprehending eyes. On
ly when Peter arrived and bent over him and said, in disgust, “Oh, Christ, Parkie!” did I realize that the man was Parker Potter and that he was very drunk and bleeding from the mouth. Sound came flooding back, and even as I raced into the cottage I heard my child shrieking, and a softer sobbing, and the cold, furious voice of my mother-in-law saying, “Get out of my house this instant. I am going to call both the doctor and the police, and at the very least you will not set foot in this house again.”

  Inside, in the lilac-spawned dimness, Micah Willis stood in the middle of the living room floor, breath coming in tearing gasps, one hand cradling the other, white as death beneath the tan of his face. His eyes stared past Mother Hannah toward his niece, who sat curled in a wing chair, face buried in her hands, crying softly. There were white rings around the irises, and his mouth was a slit scraped from granite. Mother Hannah, in her dressing gown, something I had never seen her wear outside her boudoir, had a great brass Chinese candlestick in hand, as one would hold a club, and her face was mottled with rage and slicked with cold cream. In his crib, Petie bleated on and on. I went to him and picked him up automatically, even before I fully took in the scene in the room. Behind me, Peter said, “What in hell is going on here?”

  Micah said nothing, only slowly moving his eyes over to Peter, and Mother Hannah advanced a few steps and took Peter’s arm and said, in the same cold, outraged voice, “I heard this terrible commotion, and then the children crying, and I came in and found him simply beating Parker Potter to a pulp, right there on the floor! He threw him out the door; I’m sure everyone has seen and heard it. Peter, call the sheriff; I want him arrested. I will not have this in my house—”

  “Hush, Mother. What’s this about, Willis?” Peter said. His voice was a carbon of his mother’s; I had never heard it before.

  Micah took a deep breath and shook his head. Polly Willis caught a ragged sob, and he looked back at her and then to Peter again.

  “Came to pick Polly up and found him all over her out on the sun porch,” he said. His voice was tight and flat. “Had his hands all over her, one hand over her mouth…she was backed up against the windows white as a sheet, fighting him, couldn’t breathe…. I pulled him off her and knocked the living hell out of him, and if your mother hadn’t come in I would have killed him. I still may. He’s drunk as a skunk and has been, this summer long. If you folks want to put up with him, that’s your business, but if he lays a finger on one of my own again he’s a dead man. And I mean that. That child is one month over twelve years old—”

  “You came into my home and hit a guest here,” Mother Hannah shrilled suddenly. I shook my head to clear it. I had never heard her raise her voice before.

  “He was trying to rape my niece,” Micah said.

  “Do not use such language in this house! You are dismissed as of this instant—”

  “What are you saying?” I heard my own voice screaming at my mother-in-law. “He comes in here and finds that…that oaf crawling all over his twelve-year-old niece and you stand here and tell him not to use bad language? You think Parker Potter came into your house as a guest this afternoon? Do you let your guests rape twelve-year-olds? Where were you all this time?”

  She whirled on me. “You hush your mouth! You know nothing about…about the way things are done here! You never have! I might have known you’d stick up for—for trash, against one of us…. I was asleep; I had no idea anyone was here but Polly and the baby.”

  I stared at her, speechless, and then turned to Peter. He stood silent, looking from me to his mother.

  “Peter!” I cried. He shook his head.

  “Mother, shut up,” he said levelly. “If you can’t be quiet, go back to your room. He did the right thing; he couldn’t stand there and let Parker…Christ! What a mess. Thank God he got here when he did. Micah, wait until I get him home to Braebonnie, and then we’ll talk about this. Of course you’re not fired; I hope you don’t think—”

  “I don’t think anything that’s not true,” Micah Willis said, his voice colder even than Mother Hannah’s and perfectly calm. “You better get him on home. I didn’t hit him hard. Didn’t have to. The whiskey did the rest. You can probably walk him, if you feel like getting that close to him. And don’t bother firing me. I quit.”

  Peter looked at Micah, started to speak, and then turned and went out the front door. I stood silent, Petie snuffling in my arms, one hand on Polly Willis’s trembling head. I knew I should comfort her, but I could not look away from the dark, dead-eyed man in front of me. He looked back at me, also silent. I saw his chest begin to slow in its heaving and heard his breath go nearer normal. Outside, I saw Peter come past the windows, half carrying Parker.

  “Polly, can you walk, child?” Micah said then. I felt her nod her head.

  “Then let’s get you home.”

  He came over to her, and put his arm around her, and lifted her out of the chair, and walked her to the door. He did not look back.

  “Micah, wait,” I called after him.

  He kept going. The screen door banged behind him.

  “Micah, I want to talk to you. I want to tell you…please come back a minute. Let me help with this, Micah, this is me…”

  He turned to face me, dark and hard in the sun of late afternoon. Polly sat in the truck, staring straight ahead.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t you understand? You are not one of us. I want nothing from you or your family. Or any of the rest of you.”

  “But we’re not like that! That’s not us, that was Parker.”

  “It only takes one of you,” he said. And he got into the truck and shut the door. I sat down in the wing chair where Polly Willis had huddled in her terror, and bowed my head over the struggling form of my child, and cried. Petie cried too, and I rocked him back and forth in my arms, but I did not stop crying, and I did not lift my head.

  After a time I sensed rather than saw a presence, and looked up, and Micah was there, standing silently beside my chair. His hand rested on Petie’s downy head, and the baby had stopped crying and was looking solemnly at him. He still said nothing, only stood there touching the baby and looking down at me.

  “You were there when he was born,” I said, tasting salt. “You were there for his start; you were part of it. Please. Don’t punish us all for what Parker did. I wanted…I want Petie to know you when he’s growing up.”

  He sighed.

  “I was wrong,” he said. “Not to hit him. I should have done that, and probably more. But wrong to say I was quitting. I wanted to tell you that. Polly can’t stay, of course, but Christina and me, we’ll stay on, I reckon. If she’ll still have us, and if Peter says so, she will. But it isn’t for her we’ll stay. It’s for your father-in-law. And this little tad, that’s at war with everything, like you were. And for you, I suppose. No…you’re not one of us. But you could have been. That’s the difference. You still fight it, all this, don’t you? Lord, I smell the smoke of your battles all the time. You’re some fierce, Maude Chambliss.”

  “Thank you,” I said, smiling a watery smile at him. He grinned in return, unwillingly.

  “It wasn’t a compliment.”

  “Thanks, anyway…Micah.”

  “You’re welcome…Maude,” he said, and left again, this time for good.

  After that, things were almost as they had always been in the summers, if not quite. Our hallowed routines of morning, afternoon, and evening still held, as they would on Judgment Day, I thought, and reflected again how totally enduring was the glue that held Retreat together, and how totally the product of form and custom. But this time I was glad of it. It gave me a path back to normalcy, and I felt we all needed that more than anything. Oh, Mother Hannah was cooler than usual to me for a couple of weeks, and more distant, but I could hardly count that an injury. And Christina was perhaps a bit quieter in her kitchen, and did not so often sing as she rolled piecrust or washed china, and Micah did not come so often with fresh wood or paint or the shears. But they did come
, and neither mentioned that awful afternoon, then or ever. I had not thought they would.

  After one anguished apology from Amy, to which I would not listen, hugging her fiercely, we did not speak of Parker or the scene in the cottage again. Helen Potter sent a great armful of iris from Braebonnie’s gardens, but no note came with them, and as for Parker, no one saw him for a full ten days after that afternoon. He was, Peter said grimly, off on the Circe for an extended tour around the yacht clubs and harbors of the Penobscot.

  “I told him if he came back before a week, at least, I’d beat the shit out of him myself,” Peter said. “He promised he wouldn’t. Said he was going to hole up over at Northeast Harbor with the Fitzwilliams, or somebody else over there, and get himself sober. I don’t know about the sober, but I’m pretty sure about Northeast Harbor. I hear he’s got a lady friend staying over there with friends.”

  “Oh, God,” I said in utter disgust. “There’s just no end to it, is there? I don’t see how Amy stays with him.”

  “What are her options?” Peter said, and I did not reply. There was nothing to say.

  But the fact remained that without Parker Potter the colony gradually drifted its way back into the old, lazy shoals of late June.

  On the first of July, he came back, bronzed, cleareyed, pounds thinner, and more subdued than I had ever seen him. He came straight from the Circe to Liberty, crisp in white ducks and boat shoes, his red hair still damp and comb-tracked. He brought with him an enormous box of chocolates, which he said he had kept packed in ice all the way from Northeast Harbor, for Mother Hannah, a music box that played “London Bridge is Falling Down” for Petie, and a case of extravagantly expensive Bordeaux for Peter. He had nothing for me, he said, because he did not wish to insult me with presents when he knew how I must feel about him, but I did have his solemn promise that he would not abuse the rest of the colony’s friendship again.