I thought of the laughter we had shared on the water—was it really only yesterday?—and his soft voice telling me about the hospital and his mother, and the feel of his hand in mine as we ran up the lane together, laughing. The feel of his hand on my hair….
“No.”
“Stay, Darcy,” Mike whispered. “Stay and fight him. Without Liberty he can’t do any of it. Stay on after she’s gone. All you have to do is accept the cottage. She wants you to have it, she’s told me that.”
“I can’t, oh, I can’t….”
High above us, in the thin, hot blue air above the clearing, the scream of a young osprey rang. I lifted my eyes from the beach and looked up. Far away out over the sea, the pure line of great wings slashed the sky, angled in the characteristic dip that only ospreys in flight have. The parents were coming home with food for their young.
“Then do it for them,” he said.
The knot in my chest exploded, and I felt a great primitive surge of grief and fury pour out behind it. My ears rang as if there had been some awful cosmic cataclysm; I could not hear the noise I made. But I could feel it, flowing up from the very pit of me and out into the still air, feel the force and fury of it. I don’t think I ever made words, but the sound doubled me over physically, jerking me as if I had been thrown. Mike held me hard on the beach as I half lay, half knelt on the loose shingle and shrieked and vomited all the endless red rage I had never been able to find, in all those years in the hospital and even before, out into the air of Osprey Head.
When I finally stopped, my throat was as raw as if I had a illness, and my ribs and lungs and stomach hurt. Tears still pumped from my eyes over my face and down onto my hands and Mike’s arms. The world seemed too bright and too sharp, and everything was thick and queer and soundless. It took almost half an hour for my breathing to slow.
“Stay,” he said again, finally, holding me to him, my body boneless with depletion. “Stay.”
I spoke against his shirt. It was as wet from my tears as if he had been in the sea. I could feel his heart beating, and his ribs under my clutching fingers. I let my hands and arms go loose.
“I can’t stay here,” I whispered. “I was never strong enough for this place. You have to fight too hard to stay here, Mike. I’m through fighting. I can’t fight any more.”
“You’re never through fighting, Darcy,” he said into my hair. “Nobody is.”
“No. Not in this place. This is not my place. There is no one of mine here.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “There is.”
I did not answer him. Presently we waded back to the Tina and he set the mainsail for the long beat home. I did not speak the rest of the way; my throat felt flayed and bloodied, and every muscle in my body ached as if I had been beaten. Hot water and then bed. Sleep. Just that.
We tied up at the boatyard dock.
“I’ll run you home,” he said.
“No. I’ll cut through the woods. I want to walk.”
“You’ll have to decide now, Darcy,” he said.
“Then,” I said, turning to look at him as I stood at the edge of the little wood, “I’ll decide. I’m going home. I’m going as soon as I can pack and get out of here. Uncle Petie and Aunt Sally can take Grammaude back. They always do.”
He stood looking at me and then turned away and walked down the dock toward the boathouse.
“Have a nice trip, Darcy,” he called back over his shoulder.
Chapter
Nineteen
She came into my bedroom as I was finishing packing. I had not brought much with me, just what I had had in the hospital. It did not take long. I had glanced out onto the sun porch when I reached Liberty and seen that she was asleep there on the chaise, Zoot around her throat like a muff, and had not wakened her. It was going to be hard enough to tell her later. Let me have a little time. The sight of her, still and small under the Spanish shawl, her face so very old and defenseless, hurt me like a hot poker on naked flesh.
“I wish I could have been more use to you,” I had said very softly, and went upstairs.
“Darcy,” she said from the doorway as I closed the suitcase, and I turned to look at her. I had not heard her come. She held on to the doorframe, and all the life seemed to have drained from her, even from the black eyes. I thought she would simply sink to the floor, and went and supported her by her thin, knobbed arm and led her to the bed. She was trembling all over, like a small half-frozen animal. She sat on one side of the suitcase and I sat on the other. Across it, she said to me with bloodless lips, “What has happened?”
I told her. I told her everything I could remember of what Mike had said, and when I could remember no more, I simply stopped talking and waited. She would see, must see, why I could not stay.
“Well,” she said after what seemed a very long time, “it’s good to have it out on the table. It’s better, really, than I was afraid it would be. This can be handled. You’ll have to stop him, of course. It’s yours to do, but you can do it quite easily. All you have to do is hang on. I was afraid too much would be asked of you, but you can handle this.”
Some of her color came seeping back as she spoke, and her voice strengthened until, by the time she finished speaking and sat looking at me, it was quite strong. She smiled.
“What do you mean, it’s mine to do?” I said. The high, silvery ringing started again in my ears, and I could feel the rage building once more. I thought I had spewed all that out, back on the beach at Osprey Head.
“Because you’re my granddaughter, and my daughter’s daughter,” she said. “Because you’re the great-granddaughter of the woman who taught me this: it’s what we do, we women. We hold this place.”
The rage exploded and I heard myself shouting at her: “Granddaughter! Great-granddaughter! Daughter! What is this shit? What are you talking about? The hell with this place, the hell with holding it! I’m not anybody’s granddaughter, or daughter either! Neither I nor my poor crazy mother ever had a real mother! She never loved me in her life, and you never loved her; she told me! She told me! You simply would not be a mother to her, and she would not be one to me; you loved only Petie, Petie and Granddaddy, and a Mama never loved anybody but Granddaddy! All those men, only those damned men…. Always and only the great, perfect, walking-dead Chambliss men!”
Grammaude sat still, stricken.
“I never told either my son or my daughter that I loved him best,” she whispered. “And I am certain your mother never told you or anyone else she did not love you just as much as she did her father—”
“She didn’t have to, and you didn’t either,” I cried furiously. “You spent a lifetime showing them and everybody else! They didn’t have to hear it from you, those men; they knew they were enough. This whole place up here, this whole little paradise, is for them; men are emperors here! It’s the girls who need so desperately to hear the words, and they never do! Not up here! Not in this place…. Grammaude, damn you, you should have stopped him that summer!”
“Oh, God!” my grandmother cried softly, and I stopped shouting and looked at her, and I saw anger in her white face. Real anger, hot and living. I had never seen it, not even at my most outrageous childhood excesses, not even at Warrie Villiers. Not this kind of anger.
Grammaude took a deep breath and let it out.
“Oh, the sheer, ignorant tyranny of the young,” she said as if to someone else. “Just listen to you! ’You should have stopped him. Be my mama. Be only what you can be to me and nothing else. Have no life and no reality but the part I can understand, the tiny bit that applies to me. Me, me, me. Be a fraction of a woman, or I will not love you.’ God. You know nothing of me. None of you do.”
I put my hot face into my hands once more and cried. Her words called out a grief so old and simple and pure that I knew instantly it was the heart, the crux of everything. She was right. I had fought and flailed my way through the world, demanding a parent from it, a parent of her, and had found only…people. A
nd except for her, that was all I ever would find. I cried and cried. After a long time, I felt Grammaude get up and come around the bed and sit down beside me and put her arms around me. Without looking up I turned into them and laid my head on her shoulder. I had to lean over to do it. Still I cried; the tears would not stop. Who would have thought the human body could hold so many tears?
After a long time, Grammaude said, in a different voice, her own again, “You’re right, of course. Men have always had the overt power in Retreat, but it was we who gave it to them. So it was really ours all along. I think I must have always known that. Look at us, a world ruled by old women for men children. And our daughters die for lack of love.”
She raised my chin with her hand and kissed me on my wet cheek.
“I love you, my dear Darcy, with all my heart,” she said. “I always did. I always will. You owe me nothing and you owe this place nothing. I will not make you pay with any more of your life for my loving you.”
I held on to her as hard as I could, unable to stop the child’s tears.
“I love you too, Grammaude,” I sobbed. “I wish I could have helped.”
“You have,” she whispered. “You will.”
Neither of us wanted supper. Neither of us wanted to talk any more. I did not even want to think about the next day. I simply wanted to sleep. She must have known that, for she came back up after I had had my bath and pulled the old thin-worn Princeton blanket up over me and turned off my light.
“Go to sleep now,” she said. “Are you old enough to know that things always look better in the morning? I think you are. I hope so. It will get you through a lot of nights. This will look better too. You’ll see. Go to sleep.”
And I did. As swiftly and weightlessly as a very small child, I fell into bottomless blackness, unlit by dreams. I don’t think I even turned over until near dawn.
I dreamed she was calling me. I dreamed that I was very small and lost somewhere down on the shore—for I could hear wind, and water moving—and she was looking for me, calling me over and over from far away: “Darcy! Darcy!”
I struggled up through the heavy layers of sleep and still she called: “Darcy…”
I sat still in the lightless darkness for a long moment, breath held, and then leaped out of bed and ran downstairs toward her voice, switching on the overhead stair light as I ran.
She lay at the bottom of the first stair, her arm thrown up over it as if she had been trying to pull herself up. She wore only her long white cotton nightgown, and her white-streaked black hair was wild around her head. The gown had pulled up around her legs, and I could see that she was still moving them feebly, still trying to climb. Zoot circled her, trilling low in his throat. Her flesh was blue and white and threaded with veins and knots, and the old bones showed through as if she were lit from inside. Birds’ bones, dry sticks. She did not seem to be able to move her head, but her eyes found mine and held them. Her face was as white as old snow. When she saw me she smiled, very faintly.
“Can you help me?” she whispered.
I knelt down beside her, feeling for her pulse. My own seemed to be trying to shake my flesh apart at my throat and wrists and temples.
“What hurts? Can you tell me?” I said, my voice trembling.
“Chest,” she said, on a shallow little sigh. “The elephant. A big one this time. Listen, I want you to light the fire…”
“Hush, Grammaude,” I said, whimpering with fear. “Lie very still; I’m going to call the ambulance. Just lie still.”
“Darling, the fire…”
I pulled blankets and throws from the couch and threw them over her, and then ran to the phone and dialed the South Brooksville rescue squad. When they had assured me they were on their way, I went back and knelt by her again. Zoot had dug himself into the blankets beside her.
She stared up at me, the whole force of her being in her eyes.
“Make a fire, Darcy, and turn me so I can see it, and do it quickly,” she said, gasping a little with each word, and I stumbled obediently to the dead fireplace and fumbled with the matches, beginning to cry again, silently. The flame finally caught, and the fire leaped up. I watched its shadows prowl on the old smoke-blackened, gold cedar planks of the walls, thinking suddenly that they looked like the walls of firelit caves. Even through my terror, even in my stupid haste, I thought, Fire is the medium. Fire is the element that passes everything on. Not blood and bone, not the pages of history books, but fire. All those stories, all those lives, all those truths, down through all of history from the caves to Retreat, borne on fire.
I went back to Grammaude.
“Lift me up a little,” she said.
“Please be still—”
“Lift me up! I need to talk to you….”
I lifted her head and put it in my lap and looked down into her face. I could see her heart, bucking like a wild thing in her chest. Oh, dear God, would they never come?
“Do it for me,” Grammaude whispered, looking into my face. “I said I wouldn’t beg, but I can now, and I will. Do it for me. Take Liberty. Fight for Retreat. Retreat needs you. Liberty needs you. You’re the only one I have now.”
“Uncle Petie—”
She shook her head slightly, weakly. “Only you.”
I began to cry again, harder. I saw my tears fall on her face, and brushed them away. They kept falling. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t, without you.”
“You can!” It came out on a long, trembling sigh. “You only have to love it enough. The power of love is everything. Everything. And you do love it enough. You always have. I know.”
“Oh, God, Grammaude, the power of love almost killed me up here twelve years ago!”
She smiled and shook her head again and then coughed. It was a deep sound, dreadful. Her thin fingers worked against her chest. I put my fingers against her lips, but she turned her head.
“You know absolutely nothing about the power of love,” she said presently. Her voice was weaker. The thrashing of her heart against her chest wall was threadier. “Listen. I’ll tell you about the power of love. I’ll tell you…what I did for love. You remember. We both liked that song. Do you remember?”
“I remember. Oh, Grammaude, please don’t talk any more. Tell me later. I’ll stay, you know I’ll stay; I won’t leave you. I’ll keep the cottage, of course I will, if you’ll just be quiet now, and be still….”
She reached her hand up and touched my wet face, very gently, and then let it fall back.
“Hush and listen,” she said softly. “I don’t think I have a whole lot of time….”
Chapter
Twenty
From where I sit in this September dawn—on the dock of the yacht club, looking out toward Osprey Head—the whole world seems frosted with autumn. The old clubhouse and the deep spruce and birch woods behind it are blurred and dreamlike in the white salt fog. I can hear the soft little slappings on the pebble beach as the morning tide turns toward the full, but I can’t see the water. It is a ground fog. Only the delicate tips of the pointed firs pierce it. It lies over the bay and shrouds all but the fierce cock’s comb of Osprey, lying like a prehistoric water beast half a mile out. But the sun will burn it off by midmorning. Then I will see the buoys, bobbing gently in the pink-foil water. Most of them are empty now. Was it only three weeks ago that tanned families worked to decant their boats from the nourishing sea and ready them for the boatyard or the long trip home behind station wagons and big sedans? I suppose it was. It seems only an eye blink, a heartbeat, since Labor Day. But it is irrevocably past and gone. I have never been here so late. Summer is long over.
I think about the boats, especially the Beetle Cats. They will hibernate in dim garages, and little boys, rushing through the black weight of the coming cold to the haven of warm kitchens, will catch from their fiberglass pores the salt sweat of this northern sea and stop for a moment, hands on the dried-out flanks of catboats, and be plummeted again into endless summer.
&nb
sp; Remember, I say silently to them. Remember. It will not last long. Nothing is forever. I was one of you once, and I know.
It is now, on these black, lengthening nights, the dark unbroken by cottage lights except the ones from Liberty, that we might get the aurora borealis. I have not seen it for a very long time, but I remember that occasionally we did, late in the summer. I remember that the word seemed to fly from cottage to firelit cottage, and sweatered families would stream out into yards and look up, pointing the faces of us children to those great flickering washes of fire in the sky. Green, violet, pure white, tender lapis blue…. What are they? I asked Grammaude when I first saw them.
“Promises,” she said.
Perhaps they are. Promises of the long sweet summer kept, promises of the slow bronze autumn to come. The dot over the “i” of summer, the final covenant to those of us who watch. Oh, if that could be true; if there could be promises kept and covenants in this place….
Even after everything, all the anguish and pain and worry, I am not sorry I stayed on. The cottagers who leave after Labor Day miss the absolute pinnacle of the year here, the supernal quintessential moment of pure being and beauty. Mornings are brilliant, sharp-edged, fizzing with diamond light on the water. In the long afternoons some of the heat will come stealing back, but the red bite is gone from it, and the drone of the cicadas in the birch woods lulls me when I drowse on the sun porch. The barberry hedge has gone pure scarlet, and the mountain ash trees burn like wildfire at the fringes of the pine forests. Along the roadside and in the salt meadows and beside the gray piled-stone walls, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace shimmer. Windfall apples are sweet in the long grass along the road to the general store. Collards in farm gardens stand like great silver-green sea anemones. Almost every time Mike and I came back from the hospital along the coast road during the last weeks our headlights would cast up white-tailed deer, bounding ghostlike across in front of us. I never saw many in the summers. Occasionally, a porcupine or red fox froze in the wheeling lights and then was gone. We have already seen the wild geese sweeping out of Canada toward the south, an epiphany against the hanging white moon.
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