So I knew to expect the fear, but still, just past Brooksville, as the familiar green and blue waterscape of Spruce Head and Walker’s Pond loomed up on my left, I stopped and found a pay phone in a general store and called Peachwood. The terror was just too great, the free-fall unbearable.
“I can’t do this,” I said into the phone when the front desk operator answered. But when she said, “With whom did you wish to speak, please?” that fifties-modern plastic-palmed reception room with its soothing motel abstracts of green and blue—soothing colors for the entering beasts—and its antiseptic stench bloomed whole and awful in my head, and I hung up. I could not go back there. I bought a Coca-Cola and took two more Xanaxes with it, and rode onto the cape with my blood fizzing like charged wine.
Past the village, just before the place where the old gray oar stood on its post at the turning into Retreat, I saw, suddenly, the little cemetery where Mike Willis and I used to go and smoke cigarettes and tell each other stories; go when we had sinned flagrantly, to escape retribution; go when the sheer out-sideness of the two of us became oppressive. It seemed empty from the road. I slowed the Pontiac and rolled down the window. Summer and quiet and the ghosts of cigarette smoke and gull cries and laughter vanished many years before washed over me in the cool wind off the bay, a benediction. Without a conscious thought I wheeled the car sharply in between the stained marble pillars and parked and got out. Here was peace, if peace there was for me in Retreat. I would sit here for a while, under one of the great spruces, until my heart ceased its deathly galloping and I knew I could go on to Liberty, where my grandmother and all those long-ago summers waited for me.
I sat for a long while against the big spruce at the top of the hill, Mike’s and my favorite place. From here we could see the entire business of the harbor and bay spread out before us: the white triangles of sails out from the yacht club, the comings and goings around his grandfather and father’s boatyard, early lobstermen coming in to the village docks on a bad day. From here, too, we could see, behind us, anyone approaching through the gateposts and so avoid capture, if we had misbehaved, and mere adult intrusiveness if we had not. Immediately beyond us lay the graves of all his Willis and Duschesne ancestors, and beyond them and to the right, the grave of my older brother, Sean, who had drowned off Osprey Head before I was born, and beside it the grave of my grandfather, Peter Chambliss, who had been killed when I was far too young to remember it, in a car crash from the top of Caterpillar Hill. I had, I remembered, envied Mike the sheer numbers of his dead clansmen, and he had envied me the exotic manner in which mine had died.
“Far as I know,” he said once, “all of mine died in bed from something you catch or just being old. None of ’em died in a special way, like yours. My folks still talk about the way your brother and grandfather died, but they don’t ever talk about any of our folks. Not that I hear, anyway.”
“Well,” I had replied, thinking to comfort him, “maybe some of them died in ways so awful and disgraceful that nobody talks about them. Why don’t you ask your grandfather?”
I did not even think to suggest that Mike ask his father. Caleb Willis had only one leg and was dour and dignified, unlikely to share glittering skeletons with his son. And his mother, Beth, who had cared for me and continued to, after that, until I no longer needed caring for, and whom I loved, was nevertheless the absolute soul of practical rectitude. There would be no enlightenment there. But Mike’s grandfather, Micah, was another matter. Dark and black-browed and stern though he might be at times, his white teeth sometimes flashed in laughter, and he told stories with my grandmother; I heard them often, after I had been put to bed in the big back room. He was around Liberty a lot, and I adored him, as Mike did. He spent considerable time with us, when we were small, on the water in our catboats and in Liberty or in the Willises’ wonderful, cluttered house on the road, and there seemed no end to the stories he would tell us, if we asked.
“My grandfather doesn’t like to talk about our dead relatives,” Mike said. “I don’t think he ever did, not after my grandmother died. I don’t want to ask him.”
I did not remember Mike’s grandmother Christina, but my own grandmother often told me about her, a beautiful, serene woman with fair coiled hair, who played the violin magically and came to Liberty more often even than her husband.
“A wonderful friend, Tina was,” I remember Grammaude saying often, a soft smile curving her mouth.
“We could ask Grammaude,” I said to Mike that day. “You know, there’s nothing you can’t ask her.”
And that was true. For as long as I could remember, my dark little grandmother had been Mike Willis’s strength and refuge, the port of absolute safety in the frequent storms of his small life, the binder of bruises, the baker of cookies, the teller of truths and the recipient of them.
“I don’t much think she’d know,” Mike said. “Summer people don’t know anything about us, not really. My father says that. Mother, too.”
And now, perhaps twenty years later, I still did not know if any of Mike Willis’s ancestors had had the glory of colorful and violent deaths.
And would not find out now. Mike and I had parted in bitter, searing anger that last summer; he had not said goodbye and I had not been back. He had not written, and I had not. For all I knew, he was married and had children; Grammaude had written me a few times in Atlanta about him, but I had torn the letters up, wanting nothing in my life of him and little of her. I did remember, though, that he had become an architect and had an office someplace on the water. But it was, I thought, far away from Cape Rosier and Retreat. I was not even sure I remembered what he looked like. Dark, solid, blue-eyed—but what else? An odd lapse. For sixteen summers he had been the other half of me.
The sun was beginning to lower straight out across the bay when I got up, cramped from sitting on the ground and light-headed from hunger and the waning drug. It had been a good idea to come here, though; peace hung in the air like smoke. I must remember this place. I looked out over the bay once more, shading my eyes against the diamond-edged glitter on the sea: a weather-breeder day, I thought suddenly, the phrase rushing at me out of my childhood. I was nearly blinded with the silver-foil dance of light on water.
“Maude?” The voice came from behind me. I turned but in the glare could see only the dark shape of him, a solid, square man sitting down. But the shape of the head, and something in the way he held it to one side…
“Mike?” I said. And, when he did not answer, “Is it you?”
“No,” the man said. “Come closer, so I can see you. The light’s in my eyes.”
And I knew who it was then and ran to him in joy. “Mr. Willis! Micah!”
And, on reaching him, stopped. The low line of blackberry brambles along the stone wall broke the glittering light, and I could see that it was indeed Micah Willis, but he was old. Very old, and ill. He sat in a wheelchair, and only his head and the hand and arm on one side moved. Stroke, I thought. His slack, lined face and filmed eyes and lank white hair all spoke of it: illness, helplessness, age. He must be very old; he was older than my grandmother, and she was…what? In her mid-eighties? I felt such grief that my eyes filled with it. He had been the most vital, forceful man I had ever known.
“So,” he said, looking up at me. “Darcy O’Ryan, isn’t it? Maude said you were coming this summer, but I thought it was tomorrow she was expecting you.”
His voice was thin and frail; petulant, almost. And then he smiled, and it was as if the years spun away from him and backward, like something in an animated movie. He was there after all, Micah Willis, under the wreckage. It spoke in his smile, if not in his eyes and voice.
“You’re the image of her,” he said. “Thought you were her, for a minute, there under that tree, silhouetted against the bay. Take away that red hair and blacken those blue eyes, and you’d be Maude Chambliss when I first knew her, when she was younger than you by maybe ten years.”
“And I thought you were
Mike,” I said, smiling at him. “Sitting there with your head cocked. He used to look at me like that when he thought I’d done something stupid, which was most of the time. So we’re even.”
“Not much of Mike in the rest of me,” he said matter-of-factly, looking down at his thin body in the chair.
“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly, “was it…?”
“Stroke. Three years ago. Don’t be sorry. I get on pretty well. One of the younger Duschesne girls stays with me except when I sleep—my wife was a Duschesne, you know—and Caleb and Beth look in every day and bring my groceries. And take me over to see your grandmother once or twice a week too, so I’ll be seeing something of you as well.”
“Good,” I said, wondering if he knew why I was in Retreat this summer. I could think of nothing else to say, and so said, “Grammaude told me about your wife. I’m sorry.”
He looked out over the water, and then to the cluster of graves, and sighed.
“Ayuh,” he said. “Me too. Well, you better get on down to Liberty if you’re going; your Uncle Petie and Aunt Sarah will be coming to get your grandmother for supper, and you’ll miss her if you don’t get along. I’m glad you’re here, Miss Darcy. It’s your place, Retreat is. You be gentle with her, now. She was like somebody with only half a heart when you left, and she trembles like a bird with happiness that you’re coming this summer. Whatever way you left her, try to make it a good time now. She’s been alone a long time, and she’s not young any more.”
“I’ll try. Can I give you a lift?”
“No, Caleb’ll be back directly. He drops me off here every afternoon or so and comes and gets me on his way back to the boatyard. Thank you, though.”
“Well, then, I’ll see you,” I said, turning to walk back to the Pontiac. I wanted, suddenly, to ask about Mike but somehow could not. Let it lie, let it be….
I had opened the door of the car when he called after me, “Nice car. Interesting coloration. What is this IT that happens?”
I squinted back up at him and saw that he was grinning his old white grin.
“You darned well know,” I called, and he laughed aloud, and I drove out of the cemetery with, for the first time in two days, a heart that was not devouring itself in fear.
The fear returned, though, diving and stabbing, when I came to the rotted old post and the skewed oar. The white lettering on the blade of the oar was completely worn away now, but it still meant Retreat to me as no other symbol did, and I had to stop the Pontiac and lay my head on the wheel before I could go on.
“Shit happens,” I whispered to myself finally, and turned in and drove down the lane into the colony. My hands gripped the wheel so hard I thought they could not be pried off, and it was a good thing; the lane was still not paved, and the potholes sent the car springing and careening. I knew the county would not have filled them this early in the season, and the frostline here lay fourteen inches deep. The Pontiac gave a grating, drunken lurch and I heard metal scrape rock and muttered “Cheapskates” under my breath. Only then, after my treacherous car had announced itself to all comers, did I dare look around me. Pure, stinging sensation flooded in.
There was no one on the tennis court, but to my eyes it thronged with figures in wrinkled white, mine and Mike Willis’s among them. I could feel the slant of the low summer sun; taste my own earnest sweat and the bitterness of defeat at the hands of some tanned young Retreat royalty; smell the pine and spruce and salt and the dark, secret dampness of the birch grove beyond the court; hear the nasal prep school jibes at my Irish clumsiness and reddening face. I swung my head to the right; the row of old gray-and brown-and white-shingled cottages began, and each one was as familiar to me as a chamber of my own heart. There did not seem to be anyone about. Tears and terror mingled in my throat: the first spoke of innocence and love and remembrance; the second of the death of all those things. I did not look around again. I drove on to the driveway of Liberty, still sheltered behind tall barberry hedges, and turned the car into it. I did not want to look up at the tall, sprawling old house before me—surely it would be altered, darker, smaller, shabbier—but then I did. It seemed not to have changed since the day I left it. It stood as it had for more than a century, and it said to me as it had all those years ago, “Safe. I will keep you safe.”
“You lie,” I said aloud, and got out of the car and walked into Liberty.
I walked through the living room and the dining room and into the kitchen: empty, spotless, unchanged. Ghosts beckoned and capered; voices called and cajoled. I would not see or hear them. There would be nothing of me in this house this summer except what I granted. And that would be little and fleeting. Three months. Three months of necessity, and not a day more by choice. I put my head into the big back bedroom that had always been mine, but it too was empty, fresh and shining and waiting. My grandmother was nowhere to be seen: good. Perhaps she was at Uncle Petie and Aunt Sarah’s, as Micah Willis had said. It would give me time….
I walked out onto the sun porch, and she was there. She lay on the old wicker chaise that had been her afternoon reading spot for all the summers I could remember, and she was asleep, wrapped in the soft, thin folds of the old Spanish shawl she had always kept there for cover against the cool twilights. Its colors were faded now, so you could hardly tell what they had been, and against her still body and hands it seemed, suddenly, a shroud, a wrapping for the dead. The thought came whole and clear into my mind: my grandmother is dead.
When I had left her she was vivid and dark-skinned, her curly hair streaked black and silver, her face soft and tanned and crisscrossed with tiny lines, like old silk velvet. Her dark eyes danced and her small pointed chin was sharp and firm, and her body was still curved and quick in the pants and sweaters she always wore. She refused, except for evening cocktails and dinner out, to wear the print silk and linen dresses the other older women wore and wrapped herself, instead of in silk-bound cardigans, in shawls. She always wore the same pair of dangling gold earrings in her pierced ears, and I always thought of her as a secret captive of this place, a gypsy brought and kept here by some unbreakable spell. I told her that once.
“I am.” She laughed. Grammaude laughed a lot, a rich, throaty laugh. “I am indeed. And,” she went on, “I’ll wear the little dresses and little sweaters when I apply for porch privileges at the damned club. And not a minute before.”
But she wore a dress now, a navy print shirtwaist that seemed to swallow her frail body in its starched folds. She seemed to have shrunk in on herself; her tiny bird’s bones showed plainly, and the slack skin draped and folded around them like stretched fabric. She was still dark, but now it seemed the dry, dead golden darkness of long mummification. Her mouth was a thin bleached line, the mouth that had been full and soft and quirky, and there was not an inch of her face and hands and arms that was not as finely etched with wrinkles as something long cured and dried. Her closed eyes were sunken in dark pits that seemed to claim half her small face, and the bones of her forehead and cheeks were those of a beautiful small skeleton. Her eyelids, drawn down over the round marbles of the eye orbs, were bruised-looking, fine as crumpled tissue. Old: dear God, she was so old! My breath seemed to simply stop. This fragile old mummy with the pure-white dandelion hair and the silk-tissue skin could not possibly keep me safe.
Only then did I realize that I had thought she could, and that the thought had brought me all those trembling, dry-mouthed miles from Atlanta. I closed my eyes against the terror. I tried to get a breath and failed; I stood on the sun porch of Liberty in the presence of an ancient and possibly dead woman and knew I could not go on living.
“Prrrow?”
It was a soft, throaty, trilling little sound of inquiry, and I knew it in my bones and heart. My eyes flew open. A huge Maine coon cat raised its head from the folds of the shawl, its cloud of tawny-striped fur almost invisible against the same-color pattern, and stretched its legs and kneaded huge paddle feet in the air.
“Oh, Zoot!
” I said softly, and began to cry.
I picked him up from the chaise and held him over my shoulder and buried my face in his fur as I used to do. It still had the same smell: of dry silk with the sun and a bit of dust trapped in it. He was light on my shoulder; I remembered that most of his bulk had always been the luxuriant gold and brown tabby fur. He lay patiently under my grasp, and I remembered that too. Zoot had always been a phlegmatic animal. It belied his exotic appearance. Named Zut Alors by the young man who had given him to me my last summer in Retreat, he quickly became Zut and then Zoot for my grandmother, who claimed that his full leggings looked a great deal like a zoot suit. We had looked at her blankly, and she had shaken her head in mock irritation.
“You children know absolutely nothing,” she had said. But he remained Zoot. It suited him better. He was never a French cat.
“I thought you would have died,” I said to him, wiping my nose in his fur. “I’m so glad you’re still here.”
“Darcy?” a thin voice said, and I looked up. Grammaude was awake and staring at me. She seemed almost afraid. Her dark face had blanched. Her eyes, though, were those I remembered: dark and liquid and shining. And then I saw that tears stood in them.
“It’s me,” I said. “Hello, Grammaude. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
My voice sounded silly in my ears, high and childish.
“Is it really you?” she said, and the tiny voice strengthened a little. Some of the soft richness of the Low Country, which she had never really lost, clung in it.
“It’s really me. I decided to drive, and I got here a day early, and I didn’t think to call. I’m sorry if I startled you.”
She shook her head as if to clear it and smiled. More of the old Grammaude came flushing back into her face.
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