Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Mike drove fast and well. Only once did he half turn to me and say, over his shoulder, “Where did you go today? Over to Osprey?”

  “No,” I said. “Down off Herrick’s and on over to the mouth of Eggemoggin and then home. The fleet was out but we…I didn’t see them. I think they must have gone the other way, toward Osprey.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Just wondered. I haven’t been over to Osprey this entire year. I thought I might take Dad’s boat over one day while I’m home. Want to come along?”

  No, I almost shouted, but did not, of course. But Osprey Head, those deep waters, that killing cold, bottomless and black…I did not know if I could go back. I did not know if the sleeping fear would let me. I did not even know if I cared any more about the little island whose bridge to the mainland I had helped burn so long ago. Once I had thought of it as my island, mine and Mike’s, but there had not been anything there for me for many years but pain and loss.

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  “Right,” he said, eyes on the road. He did not speak to me again until we reached the hospital. By then full dark had fallen. It came faster now, at the end of this lovely August.

  On the third floor Mike stopped at the nurses’ station. There seemed to be no one about, so he went around to the open door at the side and stuck his head in and called softly, “Millie?”

  A stocky woman in starched white with a tightly frizzed permanent came into the enclosure from a back cubicle. She smiled when she saw Mike and then frowned.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you,” she said. “I’ve been calling you.”

  “Is there any change?”

  “No. Well, a little. He’s not really any better, but he’s said a few words pretty clearly. I don’t think it means anything, and neither does Dr. Elton, but he’s alert and we don’t think he’s uncomfortable. No, the reason I called is that preacher. The new one at the church in the village, that fundamental charismatic fool. He’s been hanging around all day, pestering your grandfather about being saved and being anointed and all. Your dad ran him off once and I did again, about an hour ago; you could hear him praying and carrying on all the way down here. Somebody told him your grandfather had never joined the church, and he thinks he’s got to baptize him or he’s headed straight for hell. I think that’s where your dad told him to go himself. The minute your mother and dad left to get a bite he snuck back up here. He’s in there now. I was just headed down, but you’ll probably want to take care of it yourself.”

  “I will be exceedingly happy to,” Mike said grimly. I smiled in spite of myself, and Grammaude did too. I knew she was thinking what I was: Micah Willis had no more to do with the rules and rituals of religion than he did with cities and nightclubs. I thought he was probably one of the most completely good men I had ever known, but it was not the kind of goodness that could be legislated by dogma.

  “By the way,” Mike said to me, “this is Millie Prout. I went to high school with her. She runs this place now, and I’m some glad of that. Millie, you know Mrs. Chambliss, I think, and this is her granddaughter Darcy. Darcy and I grew up here together summers. She’s an old buddy of Granddaddy’s too.”

  “It’s nice to see you again, Mrs. Chambliss,” Millie Prout said. She looked at me. “Nice to meet you, Darcy. You’re the image of your grandmother, aren’t you? You go on down there now and roust that fool, Mike. I’ve got some fresh coffee going, and I’ll bring you some in a minute.”

  She nodded at Grammaude and me and went back into her cubbyhole. Mike strode off down the hall, his heels thudding on the white tile. Grammaude and I sat down on orange Naugahyde chairs in the dim little waiting area. The alcove was a dreary affair, with tall dull chrome ashtrays overflowing and a coughing, wheezing vending machine. A pile of magazines with covers that dated back three and four years sprawled on a scarred and burnt table. There was no one else present.

  “I can’t imagine you’re comfortable,” I said to Grammaude, after trying to find a hollow in my chair that would accommodate my bottom. “I can ask Millie if she’s got a straight chair back there.”

  “No, this is fine,” Grammaude said, smiling at me. “I think it still fits my fanny perfectly. I spent a great deal of time in it the summer you were here. I’m positive it’s the same chair. I recognize the cigarette burns.”

  “Poor Grammaude,” I said. “This place can’t have very good associations for you.”

  “On the contrary,” she said. “This place got you well again, and they’re taking very good care of Micah. I can’t think of another place he’d want to be, or I’d want him to be, but here close by home, with a local girl to look after him and a view of the harbor if he lifts his head.”

  I looked away from her great dark eyes, like coals in sugar-white sand in the pallor of her face. We both knew Micah Willis was not likely to lift his head again. We fell silent, holding magazines in our hands but not reading them. Waiting, waiting….

  In a few minutes a door down the deserted white hall flew open and a man came scuttling out. He was tall and cadaverously thin and wore a shiny dark suit and a dark tie whose width I had not seen the likes of since the seventies, and he held a Bible in his hand. It looked from my vantage point to be the sort you find in motels, put there by the Gideons. He had a very small head atop a long neck, and lank brown brush-cut hair crowned one of the highest foreheads I had ever seen. He had a curious face; all the features were very small and close together in the middle of it, giving him the look of an ill-made old-fashioned Kewpie doll. He kept his eyes on his lace-up shoes as he came past, walking with small steps so rapidly that we could practically feel the wind of his passing. There was a scowl on his face, but it looked the sort of important, assumed grimace a child employs when it wishes to be thought adult. He jabbed at the elevator button with a finger of astonishing length and whiteness and then turned and made for the stairwell and vanished into it. He had not said a word. Grammaude and I looked at each other.

  “Mike one, Christians nothing,” I said, and she laughed, a delighted small sound.

  “Good for Mike,” she said. “The idea, trying to convert Micah Willis. Even flat on his back and not able to move a muscle he’s more than a match for that kind of drivel.”

  “You think it’s really drivel?” I said, only half teasing her. I wanted, suddenly, to know.

  “Of course it is—his kind is,” she said. “It’s simplistic. I don’t mean simple, either. It dishonors a complex man like Micah. Whatever salvation, if you want to call it that, he finds for himself won’t be a matter of saying he’s sorry about anything and hopes to do better in another life. All I wish for him is that he might be able to do the very same things he did in this one a little better. I think he’d settle for that.”

  I looked at her curiously. I started to ask her if she’d tell me what she meant, but then the door to the distant room opened again, and Mike came down the hall toward us. He had a strange expression on his face; it was suffused with red, and his eyes brimmed with tears, but I could see that he was struggling with laughter too.

  “I don’t know what you said to him, but it must have been good,” I said. “He came steaming by here like the Jesuits were after him.”

  Mike shook his head.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said. “Oh, I laid into him good, and I was about to grab him by the collar and throw him out, but in the end it was Grandpa who got him.”

  “Micah?” Grammaude said.

  He nodded.

  “I haven’t heard him say a word the entire time I’ve been home, although I could tell at times he was trying to,” he said. “But after about five minutes of back-and-forth between me and that asshole, Granddaddy said, as clear as he’s ever said anything in his life…”

  He paused, covering his eyes with his hand, and his shoulders twitched. I thought he was crying, and put my hand on his arm helplessly. But then he raised his head an
d looked at me and then Grammaude.

  “He said, ‘Eat a shit sandwich,’ and that preacher was out of there.”

  Grammaude and I burst into laughter, and Mike did too, and then he turned abruptly and walked to the wall of windows and looked out, and I saw from the harder shaking of his shoulders that he was weeping now. I started to get up and go to him, but Grammaude stopped me.

  “Let him be,” she said. “He needs it, and if you’re there he won’t.”

  Presently he came back to us, his face clear once more, though stained and reddened.

  “Ah, God,” he said. “I didn’t have any idea how bad this was going to be. Darcy, he wants to see you for a minute, and then Grammaude.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. He was running out of words, but I understood that. Go on in.”

  I had never in my life wanted less to do anything, but I went down the hall and opened the door very softly and went into the dim little room. Micah Willis lay in a high narrow bed, its sides raised to keep him from falling out, tubes and monitors snaking from a stand into his arms and nose. He lay perfectly still, and he was whiter and older than any living human I had ever seen, a marble effigy of a man. Against the pallor his white-streaked black hair looked almost grisly, vivid with life, like that of a vampire. Black stubble stood out on his jaw. His hawk’s nose jutted from his shrunken features, a thin blade of bone, and his lips were slightly parted and papery white. His breathing sounded as if it were coming from a subterranean cave. I thought of the poor, awful minotaur trapped in his labyrinth. His eyes were closed and he might have been dead except for the breathing. I turned to leave, but he opened his eyes then and looked at me. I went to the side of the bed and sat down in the chair.

  He could not move his head, but he turned his eyes to me and looked at me so intently that I knew he was trying to tell me something. The eyes probed and pierced. I took his hand and held it between mine, thinking I had never felt anything so cold and lifeless. It was as if all the life had left his body to live in those extraordinary dark eyes. They burned with life, sparked with it.

  “I hope you’re going to feel better soon,” I said, and wished I could bite out my tongue. There would be no soon for this man.

  He lay looking at me for a while, and then, very slowly, the lips parted and he struggled to say something. It was such an awful, agonizing attempt that I said, “Why don’t you just rest now, and I’ll go get Grammaude for you?”

  “Stay,” he said. It was very clear, though faint and without breath behind it.

  “I really shouldn’t,” I said. “I’m tiring you too much. You shouldn’t try to talk. I’ll come back later.”

  “Stay.”

  I sat still. What did he want of me?

  “Stay…Maude,” he breathed after a bit. I thought I understood.

  “I will,” I said, pressing his hand. “I won’t go off and leave Grammaude here. I’m going to be with her until she goes back to Northpoint.”

  He closed his eyes and then opened them again.

  “Stay…Liberty,” he whispered. Then his head lolled over on the pillow, and except for the breathing he made no other sound. I understood that he could not.

  I closed my eyes to keep the tears from spilling over and leaned over and kissed the cold white cheek.

  “All right,” I said, in a whisper not much louder than his. “All right. I’ll stay in Liberty.”

  What could it hurt? Micah Willis would never know.

  In a few minutes I got up and went out and down the hall to Mike and Grammaude.

  “I think he’d like to see you now,” I said to her, and she nodded. Mike walked with her down the long hall; she leaned heavily on him, a small, frail, very old woman, going to say goodbye to a long, long love. I thought, on the whole, that she was bearing it much better than I.

  Mike came back and sat down beside me, but he did not speak, and I didn’t either, not for a long while. After a bit, absently, he picked up my hand and held it in his, turning it over and over. I did not think he even realized that he was doing it. Presently he put a finger out and traced the thin white crescent of scar that ran across the underside of my wrist, and turned his own wrist up so that I could see the matching crescent on his. It was like a white curl of fine wire against the tan of his skin. I could see the pulse beating there, slowly, strongly.

  “Am I still an honorary Willis?” I said.

  “Long as you want to be,” he said. “Did he say anything? Grandpa?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Not that made any sense.”

  After a long time we heard the door open once more and my grandmother stood in it, looking back through it into the room. Mike went down to get her. They walked back together toward me in silence, and I thought that her back was straighter and her step lighter. In the dim white corridor she looked, for just an instant, much younger; I could see, as in a kind of pentimento, the woman she had been when she and Micah Willis were in their primes.

  “Want to stay awhile?” I asked when they reached me.

  “No need,” she said. “I think he’s going to sleep now. Caleb and Beth will be back in a minute, and they should have the rest of the time with him. You too, Mike. I hate for you to have to take us all the way back to Retreat.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ve said what I came to say to him.”

  “So have I,” she said, and smiled.

  I rose and took her other hand and noticed that she had it curled fast around something. I looked at her questioningly, and she smiled again and uncurled her fist. A round, dark, satiny object lay in it. I had never seen anything like it.

  “It’s Grandpa’s chinquapin,” Mike said, smiling down at her. “Isn’t it? He always kept it in his pocket.”

  She nodded. “Only at home we called them buckeyes. My brother used to call me that, because I was round and dark. They’re supposed to bring you good luck. He said…he told me he wanted me to have this one, but it probably really ought to go to you, Mike.”

  “No,” he said, closing her fingers back around the buckeye. “You keep it. You were his luck. You always were.”

  She laid her head briefly against his arm. It came just to the top of his shoulder. “Thank you, dearest Mike,” she said. “I will keep it. A dose of the Willis luck is just what I need right now.”

  By the time we reached the turnoff to Retreat, she had fallen asleep in the front seat, her head resting gently on Mike’s shoulder. In the white light of the late-rising moon she looked as young as she had for that instant in the hospital. Oh, Grammaude, I thought. Together you and he must have been something to see.

  He died just before dawn. I came downstairs at first light, cold and muddled from a thin sleep and dreams of falling, to find Mike with Grammaude before the fire again, drinking coffee. I did not need them to tell me; they were laughing, and it was the soft laughter of remembrance.

  She did not want us to stay with her that day. I would have, gladly, for I was hollow with loss and in need of company myself. But she was adamant about that.

  “Go on out somewhere, you two,” she said. “It’s going to be a perfect day and the weather’s due to change. Go sailing. Take her over to Osprey, Mike, and show her what you told me about. Fix a lunch and take some wine and hoist a glass to him, if you insist on memorials. He’d far rather you did that, out on his bay, than sit around here chafing the hands of an old lady who doesn’t need them chafed.”

  “Are you sure?” Mike said. “I don’t like to think of you totally alone on this of all days.”

  “My darling children,” she said, and smiled a smile that just missed being a grin. “I’m going to be less alone on this of all days than any other I can think of.”

  Tears started into my eyes again, and she said in real, if mild, exasperation, “Oh, for God’s sake, Darcy, go on and let me be. There’s far less reason to cry today than there was yesterday. Save your tears for them as needs them.”

  And so I let Mi
ke Willis take me out onto Penobscot Bay in the wake of a soft following wind, on one of what I thought would be the last great days of this summer. But instead of his father’s sleek sloop, he came around the point from the boatyard to the yacht club dock where I waited for him in his grandfather’s old lobster smack, the Tina.

  “I thought both he and you would like this,” he said, when I had rowed my uncle’s dinghy out and climbed aboard. I looked at the stubby, wallowing old boat, its brass salt-pocked and its teak deck stained from years of rubber soles and the sea, and felt the solid sweetness of the straking under my feet in the slight chop, and I did like it. Mike ran up the jib to take us out into the bay, and I saw that the Tina had a set of newish Dacron sails. But other than that, I could imagine Micah Willis taking out his Tina just as it was today, on a sweet day fifty summers ago.

  “I feel badly about taking you away today,” I said. “There must be a million things your family needs you to do, and you can’t have really taken this in yet.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “For some reason, it’s better today. I feel like being on the water. And Dad told me to get lost until tomorrow or the next day.” He squinted out into the dazzle where water met sky. “Every Willis in Maine will be congregating at the house today, and a good many of them drive me nuts. There aren’t many arrangements. He’ll be cremated. And Dad wouldn’t let that fool of a preacher near him, so there’s not going to be a funeral per se, just a memorial maybe day after tomorrow, and that’s going to be on the boatyard dock. My cousin Seth from Machias is a Unitarian minister, and he’s going to come do it. Dad and I are going to take Grandpa’s ashes out on the Tina after that. He told Dad a long time ago he wanted to go into the bay.”

  A thick clot of cold salt lay at the base of my throat. It had been there since I had kissed Micah Willis goodbye the day before, and it neither went away or grew larger. It did not feel like the fear, or even grief; I did not know what it was. I swallowed around it.