Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” I said once to Mike.

  “We never tell the summer complaints about it,” he said. “What if they decided to stay on through the fall?”

  “So what does this make me?”

  “That’s for you to figure out, Darcy,” he said.

  I sit here, trying to do just that.

  The fog silence is broken now by the muffled chugging of a lobster boat putting out. The little deep-water harbor begins to emerge from the whiteness like a photograph in developing solution. There are the buoys, like seals’ heads in the water. Suddenly I miss the bustle and confabulation of hard, brown, knee-scabbed little boys pounding down the dock and thumping down the rickety stairs to the dinghies, to row out to their Beetles. I miss their yelps and laughter. The jeers of the gulls sound lost and metallic, like winter. I suddenly feel the cold of this morning through my sweat pants and heavy socks, and get up reluctantly, and walk back along the dock and up the fern-fringed lane toward Liberty. Cold dew and cobwebs sparkle icily in the birch grove. The twang-thud of tennis balls from the court is stilled, and so is the banging of screen doors. Somewhere off beyond the woods a dog barks, but it does not sound like one of the summer spaniels and retrievers I know. They have gone, gone with the caravan of cars and boats and children back to the cities. Retreat is empty, and sleeps.

  I turn into our lane and see white smoke climbing into the deepening blue vault of the sky, and I know that Grammaude has lit the logs from last night’s fire and put the coffee on to perk and will be frying bacon and scrambling eggs. Mike brought new brown ones last night. I begged her not to bother; she is still terribly weak from the hospital and so frail as to be almost transparent. We brought her home only yesterday. She slept most of the rest of the day and through the night, and I had hoped she would sleep in today. But she insisted about breakfast.

  “Who knows who’ll cook the next batch of brown eggs here?” she smiled.

  Oh, my Grammaude….

  She told me, finally, while she lay swaddled in blankets on the floor and we waited for the ambulance that night. I don’t suppose they were any longer than they had to be, but it seemed to me, clutching her icy hands and trying to stop crying, that they took forever. It was, at any rate, long enough. I know it all now: about Elizabeth’s baby, about that whole awful storm-wrecked night and what happened then and after. My God, what a woman she is, this dark little grandmother of mine. What a love affair it was, hers and Granddaddy’s. I simply had no idea, and am ashamed that I did not. Now she has shown me the whole of her life, I see how true it was that, as she said, I never knew her. I hate that. She was right, too, when she said some kinds of love have an awful power to diminish. A child’s does; mine for her did. I spent so much of my life, and hers, demanding that she be…only my grandmother. And all the while, she was this other magnificent woman.

  I told her that, when we brought her home.

  “I’m going to spend whatever time we’ve got getting to know that woman now,” I said. “I hope it’s years and years.”

  She smiled. Then she said, “So you will stay, then? Keep the cottage? He really mustn’t have it. You’ll do that?”

  And I told her I would. But I truly don’t know if I can. The woman who went to Osprey Head with her rage and terror that summer afternoon is not the woman who came back, but I do not know yet who this new woman is. I do not know yet what she must do, or what she can.

  Was the lie bad? She’ll probably never know. She’s failed so much. But while she lives…at least that.

  I hear the engine of Mike’s Cherokee. After breakfast we’ll take the Tina and go over to Osprey one last time. We’ll go under sail, very quietly. I want to spend this last day there, check in with the young ospreys; Mike says they’re fishing for themselves now. I’d love to see that, those great dark shapes plunging headlong into the sea. They’re the only raptor that does that. We’ll visit the eagles too, I think. Mike teases me that theirs was the first of the bridges I burned. He knows, as I do, that there will be others. Neither of us knows which ones they will be.

  We’ll drink wine and eat the lobster salad I made last night, and maybe we’ll go for a swim. The water off Osprey Head seems warmer, somehow, than it ever did before, and clearer. Perhaps it is just that I do not fear it any more. We should be back at nightfall. Then we’ll pick up Grammaude and her bags and Zoot in his carrier, and we’ll make Bangor by nine, and she and I and old Zoot will stay over at the Airport Hilton and fly on to New Hampshire in the morning.

  And from there…we’ll see. We’ll see.

  Epilogue

  Darcy asked me before she left with Mike this morning if I was afraid to stay here by myself. I think, if I had said yes, she would have stayed with me. Her attention to me since the hospital is nearly total and touches me deeply. So I would have said no, even if I had been afraid, but I have never been less so. There has not been enough time in this long day to remember all I wanted to.

  I really think I am the only person in Retreat at this moment. It is a lovely feeling; as if for just this instant I truly do own it. It used to be a fancy of mine that I did, owned this place all by myself.

  “Greedy guts,” Peter would say. “Black eyes, greedy guts, eat the world up. What would you do with it if you did own it?”

  “Put up a chain across the lane and lock the world out,” I would say.

  Or was it Micah I said it to, and did he say that back to me, about greedy guts?

  It scarcely matters. Both of them would have understood what I meant. And now, for just this twilight moment, I do own Retreat. What a gift solitude can be when one is old. It is a thing the young simply cannot know yet.

  There has been no one in Braebonnie for some days now, Darcy tells me. I don’t know if Warrie Villiers has gone to New York for the winter, or simply to tap into more of the Winslow money and come back here. Darcy and Mike say he cannot possibly have any idea she means to keep Liberty, and so he still must have plans to court her, if that is what the dull, sly little lies he told her that day she took him sailing can be called. He knows she has been devoting all her time to me at the hospital; it must have disappointed him no end when he heard that I was still alive. I don’t know what he makes of Mike Willis’s being with her so much. Nothing, probably. Men like Warrie simply can’t imagine women would prefer…another sort of man.

  I am just as glad that she’ll be out of his reach for a winter, though. She will spend it with me in Northpoint, or at least those are the plans. I hope it happens. It will be like summer, having her there. When next summer comes he’ll see for himself that she is going to fight him, and Mike will stand with her. I don’t know what they can do about Osprey Head; Warrie does own that outright. But at least no monstrous clubhouse affair will sit there. Mike said last night that he planned to take the matter of the island up with the environmental protection people as soon as we left, to see about getting some protected status for the birds. Warrie would probably sell it then. He has no need of ospreys or eagles.

  “And if he does,” Mike said, “before God, I’ll find a way to buy it.”

  “It seems a lot of trouble to go to, all that fooling around with bureaucrats,” I said.

  “But worth it, don’t you think? Besides,” he said, “it’ll give me something to do until you two get back next summer. It was looking like a long hard winter.”

  Oh, yes, infinitely worth it.

  I heard an osprey call earlier this afternoon. There is no sound in the colony to compete with the birds now, and the sea might well have carried that shrill cry all the way from Osprey Head to my sun porch. I like to think it came from the island, and that they heard it, my two children, at the same time I did, perhaps even saw the bird itself. Osprey Head, through all those years, as solid and immense, in its way, as Gibraltar. She has gone there with Mike and been healed, just as I went there all those years ago, after Sean’s death, with his grandfather and found healing of my own. Lookin
g back, all this long day, I have seen afresh how often I ran to Micah Willis….

  Oh, Micah. Do you remember the last time? The first summer I was back in Retreat after Peter died, back in despair because Retreat was closed and bitter to me without him, and yet I could not stay away, because all I had of him was anchored here on this old cape? I was alone in Liberty that summer; Happy would not let Darcy come to me and would not come herself, and Amy was gone, and Parker, and Christina, and you seemed lost to me too. You had buried yourself in the boathouse, Caleb and Beth told me. Locked yourself up there with your loneliness as I locked myself into Liberty with mine. You even slept there most nights, they said. Brought a cot from the house and set it up in the sail loft. That broke my heart more than almost anything, Micah Willis, that even that wonderful house held no comfort for you then. But I knew that feeling too. I moved, that summer, up to the little upstairs bedroom because I could not sleep in the big one downstairs, where Peter was not.

  Do you remember the night I came to you? Just got up out of bed, ill and finally nearly wrecked with loneliness, and put a raincoat on over my nightgown and walked through the dark, dripping birch woods to the boathouse and saw the light up in the loft and climbed the stairs in silence to where you sat on the cot, reading by lamplight? You remember. I think the long healing began then, for both of us, though of course it was not, could not ever be, complete. But what we did then enabled us to live on and stay here, even to laugh. To be, again, whole people, if wounded ones. I have always loved you the more for it.

  The love we made on the narrow cot was as simple and without forethought as my coming to you in the night. You did not speak, and I did not either, until it was over. It was lovely love, my old Micah. Tender, fierce, sweet, funny, enduring. A covenant. You asked me after, when I lay still in your arms—and I always knew that they would be hard and brown as they were, and taste of the salt of the sea—if I was disappointed. Oh, not for a minute, not for a second.

  “On the contrary, you are some stud, Micah Willis,” I said then, and you turned a dull red to the roots of your hair. Imagine you blushing, a man going on seventy. It was the first time I had really laughed since Peter, and the first time you had, I am sure, since Christina. So we did begin to heal each other. Didn’t we, my other love?

  But when you said, “Will you come again, Maude?” I said “No.” And you were silent then, and finally you said, with a half smile that hurt to look at, “You see? I told you about the summer people. The distance between us is too far after all, isn’t it?”

  “I’m waiting for Peter, Micah,” I said, and you looked at me in slight alarm, as if I might have gone gently off my head.

  “He’s gone, Maude,” you said. “You’re here.”

  “No. He’s not really gone.”

  You shook your head.

  “What a waste,” you said. “You need a living love, Maude.”

  “I have one,” I said.

  That first time was also the last. I wonder if you have been sorry? I still do not know, all these years after, if I have been.

  I did not tell Darcy about that night. She has it all now, she has everything of mine…except that. I am not ashamed of it; it is simply that it is not something she can comprehend yet, not really. “Only when love and need are one,” I would have had to tell her. Only with Peter alive, and Tina, could Micah Willis and I have had a complete and living love. We both saw that, Micah and I, the night we tried it, no matter what he said. Darcy cannot know that yet; it is not a thing you can tell the young. If they are lucky, they will learn it. Many never do, but I believe she can….

  She was very still while I told her about Elizabeth’s baby. About seeing instantly, in the light of that guttering candle, that it was not my son’s child but my husband’s. It was premature and already doomed, but it was Peter’s child. There could be no mistake about that; Peter saw it too. Petie, bless him, did not; only Peter and I, but we knew….

  Darcy sat motionless, holding my hands and dropping her poor tears down on my face while I told her about holding that beautiful, blue, even-then-dying child in my arms, rocking, rocking and weeping, until my hand over its nose and mouth finally stopped the terrible struggling breath. Told her about the sacrifice of my own son, Petie, when I let the entire colony go on believing that the child was his. Most who remember it still do, I suppose. I know Petie still thinks it, and his Sarah.

  When I stopped talking, and lay there trying to breathe around the elephant, her tears stopped. She looked at me in simple wonder.

  “And all these years you’ve let them live with that?” she said. I did not think there was censure in her words, and I heard none in her voice. It was hard to talk, but I wanted her to understand about this.

  “Well, darling, you see,” I said, “Petie had always been a little arrogant. Very much the male Chambliss. And he always had Sarah. I didn’t think a little humility would hurt him as badly as having people know…the truth…would have hurt his father.”

  “And what about Sarah? It must have hurt her terribly, Grammaude.”

  “Petie always did need a dash of salt, Darcy,” I said. “He was in danger of becoming a very dull middle-aged man, very closed to possibility. I always thought a little salting of sin…a little doubt…was what drew him and Sarah so closely together afterward. It was a big risk, I know, but one I felt fairly sure of taking.”

  “But Granddaddy knew the truth, and you did,” she said. “And yet you never even thought of leaving him, you protected him all those years.”

  “Elizabeth Potter was a sickness,” I said to her. “She was both sick and a sickness in herself. I could never blame any man for a sickness. As it was, Peter almost could not bear what he did. His whole world was in ruins. It was my job to make it whole again. Petie’s world was safe by that time.”

  She stared into the fire, still holding my head, and I lay still, hoarding breath. I knew we were not done talking.

  “What if it had been Gretchen Winslow in that room?” she said. “You told me she’d been after Grandpa all her life.”

  “Then I would have left him instantly and never looked back,” I said. “Gretchen was simply…bad. Elizabeth…Elizabeth was death.”

  “I guess she was, in the end,” my granddaughter said, starting to drop her tears again. “She was death for Grandpa, at any rate. Wasn’t she?”

  I closed my eyes. Were you singing, Peter? Oh, were you?

  “Hush,” I said. “I’m tired now.”

  She was silent for a long time. I lay listening to the snicker of the fire, feeling Zoot purring softly against my neck, feeling the elephant press down, press down.

  Presently she whispered, as if to herself, “Mother Hannah was right to be afraid of you. She was right. You came in here and broke every rule in this place; you changed this whole little world, didn’t you?”

  I opened my eyes again and looked up at her. I thought she was about to laugh.

  “Someone would have,” I said. “Just as someone will this one. It’s not important that this little world is changed; what’s important is who does it. That’s what you have to look out for. This one…this one could be changed by someone like you, or someone like Warrie Villiers. Do you see? Don’t forget that, about who does the changing. I’ve always thought Retreat was really rather lucky it was me.”

  She did laugh, then, and put her face down to mine and kissed me.

  “Grammaude,” she said, “you really are one hell of a woman.”

  “Us southern girls are wild at heart, my dear. Don’t you forget that, either.”

  “I won’t,” she whispered against my hair. “I won’t.”

  The ambulance came then.

  She has promised me she will fight. Keep Liberty, fight Warrie Villiers, make a place for herself here in Retreat. I know she is lying, but I also know the depth of her love for this place, and its hold on her, and perhaps the depth of her love for Mike, though she does not really know that yet. What she knows now
is her need for him, but it is a good start. “Only when love and need are one….”

  And yes, I know even the depth of her love for me. So the chances are good that she will keep her word to me despite herself. She is a good child or, I should say, a good woman now, and quite a different one from the wrecked child who came to me at the start of the summer. Something happened to her out on Osprey Head the other day; she left something behind and brought something new back with her. Interesting; it would be interesting to see who this woman is.

  Whoever she turns out to be, my blood runs strong in her veins. I think, if she will let it, that strength will carry her home.

  I hear Mike’s jeep crunching down the lane now. Good. It’s full dark, and I am tired, so very, very tired…. Oh, listen. Mike is singing that old song that Peter sang to me that first night on Wappoo Creek: “It’s three o’clock in the morning…we’ve danced the whole night through.”

  Fancy, those children knowing that old song….

  I rise and run lightly down the steps. The screen door bangs behind me. Mother Hannah will be furious; she hates it when I do that. There is laughter from the tennis court, and applause. The air is crystal blue and sweet with lilac. I hear the Potters’ screen door bang too, and Amy calls, “Maude. You there? Maude?”

  The car stops at the foot of the driveway.

  “Maude,” he calls. “Over here, Maude.”

  The heavy door opens and he is there, smiling, his sleeves rolled up on his tanned forearms, the flaxen hair, as usual, in his eyes. Gray eyes, eyes like sea water. The sun burns on his face and hair. He is all light, all flame.