Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Where are you going to take him?” I said.

  “Osprey Head,” he said. “That’s what he asked for. We’re going to go over and pick a spot this morning. I’d like you to be part of that, and he would too.”

  “Mike,” I said, my heart beginning to pound, “I can’t go to Osprey. Please don’t take me. I can’t…you don’t know.”

  “Yeah, I do, if you mean that’s where you did your swan dive that last summer,” he said mildly. He wore khaki shorts and a faded old MIT sweatshirt and Top-siders without socks, and he looked so much like the Mike Willis I had last seen out on this bay twelve years before that I could not even be angry with him for the little meanness of his words.

  “I guess Grammaude told you too,” I said wearily. “She’s been the Mouth of Maine this summer.”

  “I’ve known since the day you did it,” he said, looking over his shoulder at me. “Don’t forget it was my father who pulled you off your boat and carried you up to Liberty, shaking like a leaf in a gale.”

  “Then don’t you see why I can’t go there now? I’ve been awfully sick for the past few years, you might as well know that too. Sick like in a psychiatric hospital. I just got out this summer and my dad wouldn’t take me; otherwise I wouldn’t be up here. My therapist said I needed to avoid conflict as much as I could—”

  “I know all that too,” he said. “I don’t think your therapist meant you couldn’t go sailing on a calm day with an old friend. I’m sorry about the hospital, Darcy; you don’t know how much. But your dunking yourself in the bay off Osprey didn’t make it holy water. It’s water like any other around here, and there’s something on that island that could make up for what happened here back then. I’m sure of it. So we’re going.”

  Over my head the mainsail bellied out with a great snap, and the Tina dropped her lee rail and lifted up and soared off toward Osprey Head like a toy paper boat in a breeze. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists on the rail and took a deep breath. I could feel the fear coiling itself like a serpent deep within me, but the cold knot held it down. At that moment I couldn’t have spoken if I wanted to.

  But the steady sun on the top of my head and the peculiar rushing silence of a quiet day under sail soon loosened my fists, and I opened my eyes to find Mike leaning back against the wheelhouse, drinking wine from the bottle and looking at me. He handed the bottle to me, and I took it and drank. It was lovely wine, soft and full of flowers.

  “I thought I was going to die for a long time,” I said. It seemed necessary that he recognize my pain.“Kill myself, I mean. I really did think that, and I’m still not sure I won’t someday. You can’t possibly know how strong the pull is sometimes. My family does that, you know. My mother told me that my great-grandfather did it by swimming out too far in cold water up here, and my grandfather went off Caterpillar Hill in his sports car. And she’s doing it too; it’s just taking longer. You feel almost like it’s an obligation, sometimes.”

  “So you think you’ll get it, like a virus?” Mike said. “What your family has a history of is running away, your grandmother excepted. You don’t catch that, you learn it. And you’re getting a good start on it, seems to me.”

  “How dare you say a thing like that to me?” I said, anger boiling past the knot. “You don’t have the slightest idea what my life has been like or how I feel. What about you? Grammaude said you were married for a little while but that you couldn’t take the idea that she had a lot of money, so you split. What do you call that if it’s not running away?”

  “If you think you’re going to make me mad by throwing M’Lou up to me, try again,” he said, reaching out for the wine bottle. I passed it over to him. “Your grandmother was absolutely right about that. I did run. If I hadn’t I’d be a southern society architect today, designing cutting-edge barns for pampered horses, with weathervanes on the top of them. Probably a bourbon drunk, too. I didn’t say running away was necessarily a bad thing. Not for me, anyway. I don’t think it’s the answer for you, though.”

  “Well, you shit. Why is it right for you and not for me? That’s hypocritical crap.”

  “No, it’s not. I was running from a clear and present danger, a person with the power to do me real harm. You’re trying to run from a place. Places can’t hurt you. They can heal you sometimes, but they can’t hurt you. Only what you bring to them can.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Willis,” I said sullenly. I would have been angrier with him if my shrink back in Atlanta hadn’t said substantially the same thing, many times. But I was still angry, and the thought of Mike with a wife, no matter what sort, suddenly rankled sharply.

  “What sort of precious adorable name is M’Lou?” I said.

  “Just the right one for precious, adorable Mary Lou Campion of Nonesuch Farms, just outside Lexington, in the heart of Kentucky’s fabled bluegrass country,” he said. “Lots of honey-blond hair. Lots of white teeth. Lots of charm and softness and lots and lots of money. I met her at Wellesley. Her folks named her M’Lou because they were friends of the Whitneys. You know, the horse Whitneys? Marylou Whitney?”

  “I know who the horse Whitneys are,” I snapped. “Why didn’t they just name her Sea Biscuit and be done with it?”

  “Wrong stable. I know, though. I think the preciousness of her name, and all that it implied, got to me long before the money did, and what they all wanted to do with it and me. Or anything else. When it really started to bother me, I said I wanted to come back up here to live and practice. She said Maine was a toy place for rich people and I said what the hell did she think she’d been living in all her life. She said real people didn’t live up here. And I realized then that, to me, no place and no people on earth are realer than here on the cape. After that, I just…couldn’t stay. There wasn’t any real bitterness on either of our parts, I don’t think. We both knew we married in a hurry. She hadn’t even finished Wellesley. It was the spring after you left the last time.”

  There was nothing to say to that, so I said nothing. The salt knot was back, but the anger had faded. So had the fear. I put my face up to the sun and closed my eyes and leaned back. I was very, very tired.

  “Darcy, what are you going to do now?” he said.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said. The sun on my eyelids felt heavy and hypnotic. I wanted to lean there forever, rocking on the pillowy sea under the sun.

  “It’s four days until Labor Day. Everybody goes home then. Your grandmother always goes back to Northpoint the day after. Are you going with her? Going back to Atlanta? What?”

  “I have plenty of time to decide,” I said drowsily. “Why does everybody have to plan everything ahead of time? You sound like Grammaude. She wants me to come back with her to New Hampshire this winter and stay. Can you imagine what I’d do in a tiny little place like that all winter with nothing in it but a boys’ school?”

  “I imagine it’s coed now,” he said. “Most of them are. I don’t know. It sounds like a good idea to me. I think she’s going to need you this winter. She’s grown awfully frail since I saw her last. And it would be easier for you to get her back up here next summer. Maybe you could teach at the school. Most of them have very good communications curricula nowadays. They’d for sure waive the advanced degree requirement for Peter Chambliss’s granddaughter.”

  Teach? I had not thought about that. Teach…. In my mind I saw classrooms with sun coming through tall mullioned windows, and young faces serious about receiving what I had to give…. What I had to give. I had not thought in terms of giving for a very long time.

  “I’m not coming back here next summer,” I said.

  “It will kill her not to come.”

  “She has Uncle Petie and Aunt Sarah,” I said. “She can come if she wants to. She can hire somebody to do the housework and tend to her; she’s always done that. She doesn’t need me to come to Retreat.”

  “Yes, she does,” he said. I did not answer. He did not speak of it further.

  “I’ll p
robably move my office back here,” he said minutes later. “Grandpa left me his house. Dad told me this morning.”

  I did open my eyes, then, and looked at him. He was looking at the green bulk of Osprey Head, coming up fast on our bow. He had busied himself with the lines.

  “Oh, that wonderful house,” I said, meaning it. “I always thought there was something magical about it. Will you live there too?”

  “Yep,” he said. “I’ve wanted it since I was five years old. I didn’t know he knew that, though. I thought he’d leave it to Mom and Dad. But then they built the new one.”

  We slowed and stopped, and the Tina settled into the water like a proper New England matron.

  “Come on,” he said. “Roll up your pants legs. It’s shallow enough here to wade in.”

  “No! I can’t!”

  He jerked me up by the hand, and before I could even protest he had leaped over the rail and pulled me after him. By the time I got my mouth open to scream at him, the cold green water had closed around my legs at mid-thigh and pebbles rolled under my sneakers. I stood gasping for breath, glaring at him. He was already going ashore, picking his way over the rocks.

  “Not a ghost or a corpse or a ha’nt in sight,” he yelled back. “Come on. You’ll get frostbite.”

  Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I looked down into the clear, vivid green water. I saw pebbles and coarse sand, and snaking scarves of green seaweed, but nothing else. Nothing. I hitched my sopping pants legs up and sloshed ashore after Mike.

  We were on the other side of the island from the bridge and the eagles’ nests. I wondered why we had not sailed around and gone ashore there. We could have put in at the bridge and tied up and not gotten wet. On this side, toward the body of the bay, nothing was visible but the distant bulk of Islesboro and, beyond that, a smudged blue smear, the Camden Hills. A line of white sails dotted the calm bay like children’s toys back toward Western and Green ledges and Hog Island, but none were near Osprey. We had the island and the sea to ourselves. Mike dropped the basket with our lunch and the wine in the shelter of a leaning glacial boulder and held out his hand to me.

  “Come on. It’s not a long climb.”

  “Is it the eagles? I don’t remember them over this far,” I said.

  “Nope. They’re here, or the nests are…. Dad told me the young ones are hunting for themselves now, so there aren’t usually any around the nests this time of day. No, this is something else. Something new. You’re going to like this.”

  We climbed for about five minutes, up through immature stands of fir and spruce, over flat rocks set flush into the earth and shawled with the hectic green, cloud-soft moss I remembered, through yellowing blueberry tangles and bracken going white-gold, and once through a perfect little stand of adolescent birches, their bark just beginning to roughen, gleaming like silver in the green gloom. He held his hand out behind him and I clung to it, feeling the rough place on his middle finger where the drafting pencil had worn a callus, stumbling on the loose shale and over deadfall limbs in my slippery wet sneakers. I had been trembling with cold when I came ashore, but by now my pants were drying, and sweat had begun to run from my hairline into my eyes, and no-see-ums bit like little points of fire.

  “If I meet one mosquito I’m out of here,” I called.“I don’t care if you’ve found the Holy Grail up there. How much farther?”

  “Here,” Mike said, and we broke out of the undergrowth to a clear space about halfway up the dome of the island, a place of gray stone that had a blasted look of great age, as if a monstrous bolt of lightning had struck here in the dawn of time. Mike pointed silently.

  On the other side of the clearing stood a dead fir, or the trunk of one. It had been broken off about halfway up. In the space where the first branches had begun, a sort of bowl had been formed, and in it a large nest was cupped, as in two sheltering hands. It was not the size and depth of the eagles’ nests, but it was larger than anything else I had seen. The sun, directly overhead, dazzled my eyes, and I put my hands up to shade them. And then I saw them clearly against the cobalt of the sky: four of them, elegant flat raptor’s heads hooded in black-brown, cold yellow eyes staring, curved beaks and white throats and bellies shining. One of them lifted powerful white-speckled wings and beat at the air, and they all gave shrill, angry cries: cheereek! I stared, feeling the air vibrate with the wind from the wings, seeing the patches of black on the cheeks that I had read about. Ospreys. Not fully grown, I did not think; their wings had not achieved the four-to six-foot wingspan I knew the adults had. But almost grown. Ospreys. For the first time in colony memory since my mother had destroyed their nest and sent them into exile, ospreys on Osprey Head.

  “Oh, Mike,” I breathed. “Oh, Mike!”

  We stayed there, being as still as we could, for nearly half an hour. The ospreys made short circling flights around the nest but did not leave it. They shrieked and flapped at us, too, but still did not go.

  “Folks are out getting lunch,” Mike said under his breath. “These big spoiled brats aren’t about to leave when grub’s on the way. We’d better go now. The adults are bigger and fierce as hell when something gets near the nest.”

  We scrambled back down to the beach, slowly now, my eyes dazzled with the wild power and beauty of the young birds, the salt knot swelling until I could scarcely swallow. I knew I would remember the sight until the day I died.

  “Thank you for making me come,” I said, when we had sat down in the shade of the boulders and uncorked the wine. “It would have been terrible to miss this.”

  “Does it change anything?”

  I shook my head slowly. “No. But it makes things…better.”

  “Did you know that the parents virtually never leave the nest?” he said. “They’ll stay through anything: storm, fire, drought, direct attack, gunfire even. You can kill them. They’ll stay until the nest doesn’t exist any more.”

  The knot spread swiftly up my throat to the base of my tongue. I actually put my hands to my neck. I thought I was going to…what? Scream? Choke? Weep? The ospreys, who would stay until the nest didn’t exist any more, stay through anything with their children, die there with them….

  “I’ve always thought they were far better to their young than most humans,” Mike said, watching me.

  I could only nod.

  “I wanted you to see them before they’re gone,” he said. My heart stopped, still and cold. Then it jolted and shuddered on. I watched him but could not speak.

  “Your great good friend Warrie Villiers owns Osprey Head now,” he said. His voice had not changed; he might have still been talking of the birds. “He bought it from the Park Service late this winter. It’s tough to do, but it can be done, if there’s enough money. The island never was anything but a drain on the service, and Warrie had enough money to make it a done deal within a day or two. Still does, I hear. Yep, old Warrie has great plans for Osprey Head. There’s going to be a yacht club and marina the likes of which even Northeast Harbor hasn’t seen, right here. He’ll have to dredge, of course, but hey, that’s nothing. Around where the bridge is, on the side that faces Retreat, you’ll be able to see the whole project. Going to be a resort to end all seaside resorts along there, with condos and shops and tennis courts and maybe a nice little nine-hole golf course. And a marine repair facility. And all kinds of pretty things. Right where the old cottages are now. Going to take up the whole waterfront half of Retreat, it is. He’s calling it Cape Villiers. A nice international touch, don’t you think?”

  I stared at him, saying nothing.

  “It isn’t going to take him long to get all the property he wants,” Mike said. “He’s got a good start now. I don’t know what he’s been telling all the old ladies who’ve signed on, but he wouldn’t have to tell them much. They know his folks, don’tcha know. Magic words up here, always have been. And as for money, he’s got enough to buy the rest of the colony if he wants it. Though he probably doesn’t. Just the half on the water. Of co
urse, the other half won’t be quite the place it’s always been.”

  I still did not speak.

  “Where did he tell you he got the money, Darcy?” he said. “From his wife’s family? From his dear mama, dead so tragically before her time of hepatitis? Bull-shit. He might have gotten a little from the girl’s folks, to get him out of the family and out of Italy, but I know for a fact his mother died of AIDS in a charity hospital without a penny. He got a lot of it from Gretchen Winslow personally, along with a lot of Gretchen, and he got the promise of the rest from her family’s bank. Good business, it is. Cape Villiers will sell like hotcakes. Best location on the East Coast.”

  “That is a lie.” All I could do was whisper. My throat was monstrously swollen. I thought it would burst.

  He scrubbed his face with his fingers and spoke through them.

  “I wish to God it was. It’s not. I checked. Anybody could have; the site and project plans are on file in Augusta, and I got the rest from a private detective in Portland. I hired him after Grandpa called me late this spring and told me Warrie was up here buttering up old ladies and buying up property. Grandpa paid for the detective. It didn’t take long. Any one of the folks in Retreat could have found out at any time; your uncle Petie could have done it without even hiring a detective, the circles he moves in. It was just that nobody did. They all knew his family, you see. It’s all true. I have the report, and photocopies of the site and the plans. He doesn’t know I have them, of course. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with them. I guess I was going to use them if I needed to. And maybe I still will. I think it depends on you, whether I need to or not.”

  I looked at him mutely, fighting cold salt bile and the awful swelling in my chest and throat.

  “He can’t do it without Liberty,” Mike said. “He won’t have septic access without Liberty’s half of the meadow. Your grandmother is the only holdout he’s got; when she’s gone, if someone doesn’t keep Liberty, he’s as good as got it. He could pay millions for it; in the end almost anyone would sell. I just don’t think he figures he’ll have to.”