Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  On the first Sunday in August, at a little past four, the sheriff’s dusty blue sedan pulled up in the driveway of Liberty and a still-faced John Gray got heavily out and reached in the back seat and pulled Happy out and marched her up the path to the door. I had been reading on the sun porch, half drowned in Retreat’s Sunday stillness and the thick peace that precedes a storm. I met them at the door, my heart pounding in slow, sick, profound thuds. Happy’s face was blanched absolutely white, and her nose and eyes were puffed and scarlet with crying.

  “What is it?” I could hardly get the words out. “Is she hurt? Has there been an accident?”

  “She’s not hurt, no,” John Gray said. “And no, I don’t reckon you could say there’s been an accident.”

  His voice was as neutral as his face, but I could see that he was having difficulty with his breathing, and something that seemed, incredibly, to be rage looked out of his eyes. I had known him for years, ever since he took office from Sheriff Perkins; he was a gruff, jolly man whose voice boomed out often, in greeting to his neighbors and in the choir at the chapel on Sunday mornings. But it did not boom now. I had trouble understanding him. I looked at Happy, who began to wail and covered her face with her hands.

  “What?” I said, wanting more than anything in the world not to hear his answer.

  “Caught her and Francie and Jackie Duschesne over to Osprey Head,” John Gray said. “Got a call on the radio from a boat passing out in the bay. By the time I got there they’d knocked the nest down and torn it to shreds. Rocks, had ’em a right pile stacked up. Must have finished it with their hands. Birds were gone, except one they got with a rock. Looked like near to grown, but wouldn’t have been flying too good yet. I shot that one. Had to. You know, I shinnied up and measured that nest once, when the birds were gone for the winter. Close to five feet, it was, with a circumference at the base of twenty-one feet. Two and a half feet high. Been added on to every year since it was first built, and that’s before anybody alive now can remember. I don’t know yet what they could be charged with, not the girls, anyway. Probably could have held the boy. Have before. But if somebody around here wants to bring charges, I’m not going to stop them. I took the other two on over to Clovis. If I was you I’d keep this one out of sight. Them birds meant a lot to folks around here.”

  He turned and strode back down the path, leaving me standing in sickness and horror, looking at my child.

  “Why?” I whispered. My ears rang, and the still air buzzed around me.

  “They made me,” Happy howled. “Jackie and Francie made me. They said they wouldn’t be my friends any more if I didn’t. It wasn’t my fault!”

  Rage so freezing and terrible that I thought I would vomit filled me like water. I could have shaken her until she lost her senses at that moment; I could have done anything at all to stop her voice. All that grace and fidelity, all that fierceness and pride and beauty and value….

  “Go upstairs to your room and don’t come back down,” I said, literally having to force the words between my teeth. My mouth shook. “Stay there until I tell you you can come out. I’ll bring your dinner to you, but I don’t want to see you for the rest of the day. I don’t care who told you what. There is no power on earth that could make a humane person do what you did to those birds. It’s the most monstrous thing I have ever heard. I know that we will get past this, but right now I don’t see how.”

  “Oh, I hate you!” Happy screamed. “You made me do it, just as much as they did. I want my daddy; my daddy wouldn’t let you talk to me this way!”

  “Well, you shall soon have your wish, because I’m calling him right now,” I said, and turned away from her.

  “No! Don’t call Daddy! Don’t call Daddy!”

  Her voice slid up and up and into hysteria. I could hear the desperation in it, and the terror, and the abject self-loathing that would haunt her all her life. I had said dreadful things to her, things that drew her blood. In that moment I did not care.

  “You know what your father told me the day before he left the first time?” I said. “We went over to see the ospreys, and he said, ‘I’ve always heard it was terribly bad luck to kill an osprey, but to me it’s purely a sin.’ I think he’s going to be very sorry he has to come back to this, Happy. Now go.”

  “Well, he’ll come anyway, won’t he?” she shrilled as she thumped up the stairs. “Whether or not he wants to, he’ll have to come now!”

  I went and made the call and then went out onto the sun porch and simply sat there until darkness fell. I shut the terrible sunlit images out of my head and let a swarming whiteness fill it; I heard the telephone ring several times and did not move to answer it. Sometime during the evening Amy Potter came onto the sun porch and stood beside me, and took my hand in hers, and said, “I just heard. I’m so sorry, Maude. I’ve always thought that Jackie was a little horror…. It will pass. The summer’s nearly over. Take her home early, and when we all get back next year it will be in the past, and no one will mention it. You know they won’t. You know no one thinks it’s in any way your fault.”

  “Everyone knows by now,” I said lifelessly. It was not a question.

  She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Yes. I expect they do. Is Peter coming? Do you want me to stay with you?”

  “No, thanks anyway,” I said, and squeezed her hand. “He’ll be here in an hour or so. I…need the quiet. Oh, Amy. Our children.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Our poor children.”

  Peter came in just before midnight. His face looked as if the flesh had been boiled off the bone; I had a sense of how he would look when he was very old or dying. I don’t know if he was angry with me as well as Happy or not; if he was, it vanished when he saw my face. It must have been as terrible as his. He made a small sound and came to me and put his arms around me and buried his face in my hair, and we rocked back and forth in our anguish. Finally I lifted my head.

  “You’d think somebody had died,” I said hoarsely. “Surely it’s not that bad.”

  “I feel as if somebody had,” he said. “I almost wish—”

  “Peter!”

  “Is she in her room?”

  I nodded. “Peter, maybe it would be better if you waited until tomorrow. I was awfully hard on her, and she’s just terrified of what you’ll say. I think, really—she says Jackie Duschesne made her do it.”

  He simply looked at me.

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t imagine she’s asleep.”

  I never will know precisely what he said to her. I heard her scream, once, and had the wild thought that perhaps he had struck her, but of course he had not, would not. I half rose to go to her, then sat back down. It was obvious that nothing I had said, could say, had reached Happy. At least she would hear Peter. I listened as hard as I could, but I heard nothing else from the top of the house. I thought of the burbling, trilling, pattering little towhead she had been, trailing endlessly in Peter’s wake like a small sturdy dinghy wallowing after a sail yacht. Oh, my baby, I said silently, around the cold salt knot in my throat. What was it I could not give you, and he could not? What would it have taken? What will it?

  When he came back down Peter would not speak much of the session with Happy, except to say that she had agreed to several specific things he had spelled out for her. One, she would go in person to each cottage beginning in the morning and apologize. Then she would, of course, never see or speak to Jackie or Francie Duschesne again. She would be taken back to Northpoint as soon as we could pack up and close the cottage, and she would participate in none of her school activities that winter, but come straight home after classes, and would not go out in the evenings. Her allowance for six months would go into a fund to be presented to the Maine Wildlife Protection Agency, toward rebuilding an osprey habitat on Osprey Head.

  And finally, she would write a letter of apology to the entire village and mail it herself to John Gray, and Peter would ask him to read it aloud in church the Sunday he received i
t.

  “I called him from Northpoint,” Peter said. “I offered to write a check on the spot for any fine or damages he thought would be appropriate. And I told him Happy would be adequately punished.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he didn’t expect there would be any charges; what good would they do? And he wouldn’t hear of my sending a check. I don’t blame him. No money in the world will undo it. I doubt the birds will ever come back. They don’t, usually, when a nest is gone.”

  “Oh, God,” I said tiredly. “How awful for everybody. What a nightmare. But at least you’ve said your piece, and she has some concrete things to do, and terribly hard ones, and we can get on with living. You must know how sorry she is. If she can stick with your terms, we can forgive and forget.”

  “Can you forget this, Maude?” he said.

  “I guess not. But at least forgive.”

  “No,” Peter said. “Not that either. We’ll go on, and we’ll have our lives together, and they’ll probably be good ones, but I won’t forgive her this.”

  “You didn’t tell her that?”

  “I did. Just that.”

  “Darling, please go back up and—”

  “I won’t lie to her, Maude. I don’t think I can forgive this. Not now. Maybe, after she’s done what she has to. Let’s see how the apologies go in the morning.”

  But the apologies did not go at all the next morning. We awoke late to a world flat and white and echoless with salt fog, and Happy was gone.

  She was nowhere nearby. By noon I had called everyone who conceivably might have seen her within miles of the colony, and Peter had been out with the car, inching his way the length of the rutted blacktop that loops around the cape, calling and calling, blowing his horn, blinking his light. He was hoarse and soaked when he came in, and shaking with fear as well as cold; the temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the night. By four he and Parker Potter and the Stallings men and even Freddie Winslow had been house-to-house in the colony and the village, searching attics and barns and outbuildings and boathouses. At five o’clock we called John Gray. By seven there was an all-points out for Happy, and several sheriff’s posses, made up of men and boys from our village and surrounding ones, went out into the whiteness. No boats were missing from any of the village moorings or the yacht clubs, so the search did not, that night, take to the sea; in any event, no one could have taken a boat out in the fog. But we all thought of it, that black, silent sea lying just beyond the boundaries of our senses. I know we did. Thought of the sea, and the deepness of it, and the darkness, and the coldness, thought of the endless seas around Osprey Head. The sea ran in my veins instead of blood, that night, black and icy and dead.

  Amy came, of course. All the colony women who could leave their children came. Christina appeared out of the fog, serene and tender, with a great basket of food and her altar guild’s enormous coffeepot, and all through that first night she kept hot coffee and sandwiches coming to the men who went out and the women who waited. Micah brought in wood and built up the fire and came and squatted down before me in the wing chair that had been Mother Hannah’s and looked intently into my face. He did not touch me.

  “She isn’t in the water, Maude,” he said. “She can’t be. We’d know; she’d have taken a boat. So we’ll find her. It might be a spell, but we’ll find her. She couldn’t have gotten far. Fog will lift by dawn.”

  I looked into the dark face and could say what I could not to Peter or any other living being that night.

  “I did this. I did it with my tongue. I wouldn’t tell her it was all right, and I didn’t make Peter do it. I never have loved her like I do Petie, and she knew it and it killed her.”

  He did touch me then, lightly, on my cheek.

  “You didn’t kill her. Peter didn’t kill her. She’s not dead. Don’t say that again. We can’t help who we love, or how much. It isn’t your forgiveness she needs, or even her dad’s, it’s her own. That’ll come along with the light, and then we’ll find her or she’ll come on back by herself. Wait for the light, Maude.”

  The light came with the morning; Micah was right. The fog was gone. But Happy did not come with it. At seven all the sailboats that had skippers went out, and all the power launches, and the Coast Guard came, in three sleek blue-and-white cutters. Micah went out with the first of them. Peter and Parker went out with the second and third. Peter and I could not seem to speak to each other; we could not even meet each other’s eyes. In his I saw only the unforgiveness that had sent Happy out into the fog. For the first time I understood how the loss of a child could tear a man and a woman apart. I had never understood that before. We will not withstand this, he and I, I thought clearly. We will be dead to each other if she is.

  By noon the numbness that the first fear had brought with it had worn thin and I felt hysteria rising in my throat and behind my eyes, threatening to close over me like the dark-blue cold sea outside Liberty, and I knew if I once went down into it I would never come out. I looked wildly around the room and the crowd of women gathered there, blindly seeking something to anchor myself to. The first-face I saw clearly was that of Gretchen Winslow. She took one look at me and crossed the room rapidly and grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me up onto my feet. I saw Amy frown and start toward us, but Gretchen shook her head at her, and Amy stood still.

  “Listen, Maude,” she said sharply. “This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to hold on for fifteen more minutes. You can do that. Anybody can hang on for fifteen minutes. And then it’ll make an hour, and you’ll say, ‘I’m going to hang on for one more hour. Anybody can do that. I can do that.’ Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said. And that is what I did, through that endless bright killer of a day. I held on for an hour. And then I did it for another. And then another. At one point, I remember saying dazedly to Gretchen, “Why do we fight?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  At seven o’clock the sheriff came to say that the boats were coming back in but would go back out at dawn the next morning. At eight Peter and Parker came back, white and mute, and the women gave them coffee and sandwiches and brandy, and some of them finally went home to their own families. At nine Micah came by to bring more wood and hug my shoulders wordlessly and fetch Christina.

  “We went as far up as Castine and as far down as Haven,” he said. “Didn’t see anything. That’s the best sign, Maude. Tomorrow we’ll scour Islesboro and Deer and Little Deer. But we’re not going to find her in the sea. We would have by now, if she’d been there.”

  I could only nod, mutely. One more hour, one more….

  Micah left to go and look in on the boatyard. Caleb had been seeing to things alone all day. I knew that Jackie Duschesne would never set foot there again.

  He was back inside of thirty minutes, holding a filthy, sobbing Happy in his arms.

  “Found her under the tarp over that great walloping beast of Freddie Winslow’s I’ve got in for restraking,” he said, his voice thick in his throat. Happy had her head thrust into his neck and would not look up. Micah looked at me and at Peter and then put Happy down. She stood wavering and blinking, her face wet and streaked and ashen, her clothes covered with filth. She started toward me and I held out my arms, feeling my knees begin to go; then she veered and ran toward Peter. The floor rose up then, and wheeled over me, and I felt Micah Willis catch and hold me as he had done twice before in times of terrible trouble, and just before the sick, buzzing darkness crawled up my wrists and dragged me down I saw Happy reach up with her dirty arms for Peter, and saw him turn silently and walk out of the room and up the stairs. The last thing I heard, after sight left me, was the sound of Happy’s lost wail as he went.

  After that we tried harder with her. We took her home to Northpoint early, and though we were adamant that she observe the terms of the punishment Peter had set for her, we spent as much time with her as possible. Both of us cut our duty rosters back to the bone to do it. The
headmaster of a large flourishing private school wears more hats than anyone else I know; he must involve himself fully in the life of the school, the alumni corps, the faculty, the community, and the larger corporate world from which funds and largesse might be coaxed. Peter delegated as much as he could to Charles Corwin, his assistant, and put in at least an hour or so with Happy almost every evening after dinner, though he grew harried and distinctly gaunt trying to manage it. And I curtailed my endless round of committees and school-related social functions and hallowed Northpoint rituals and managed to be home each afternoon when she returned from her school. It was a private country day school nearby, with many extracurricular activities to accommodate its privileged students, but Happy had never involved herself in them to any extent, and I do not believe she missed them. She did not say. Happy in that autumn and winter was silent and withdrawn as she had never been in her volatile life.

  I oversaw her homework and fixed snacks for her and took her shopping and to matinees and movies in Laconia, and I took her to get the fine, thick, white-blond hair cut that autumn so that it swung at chin length in a shining bob, distinctive and becoming to her. I bought her a bit of makeup and her first—and long overdue—bra. Peter gave her several twin sets of lovely, thick cashmere sweaters for her birthday, and paid for riding lessons in the village when she said she might like them, and bought her a beautiful tweed riding jacket and shining English boots for Christmas. She looked so grown up in them my throat closed. She had not had much appetite since we had come back from Retreat, and was much thinner by Christmas than she had ever been before, so that her heavy breasts and rich hips stood out sharply in contrast to her small waist. With Peter’s newly emerged cheekbones and the new haircut she was, I realized suddenly, a striking young woman, if not a pretty one, arresting in a lush and somehow troublesome way. Her expression was usually impassive or sulky, but it did not seem mulish and maddening now, as it had when she had been a pugnacious child. It was simply challenging. Peter and I looked at each other over her head the night she modeled the riding habit for us.