by Gail Godwin
“Okay, I think.”
He appeared to be pondering my stingy reply as we drove down Seashore Road. He was still pondering as he drove us across the causeway. He was expecting more, but what could I loyally add?
“She tried to paint with her left hand,” I said. “It didn’t work too well. She couldn’t control the brush and she gave up.”
“What did she do after that?”
“She slept for the rest of the day.”
He pondered some more. Though I tried not to I could hear his thoughts.
I kept quiet until we were on the causeway, passing the people fishing over the railings. “What kind of fish are they fishing for?” I asked.
“Catfish mostly. It’s also an opportunity to socialize.” A resignation in his voice indicated that he was not going to pry any further. I had let him down.
“Look, I’m not sure I can—” I had to stop; I was choking up. I looked out my window so he wouldn’t see. “I’m not sure I can keep her from fermenting.”
As soon as it came out I realized my stupid mistake. In terms of loyalty to Aunt Charlotte, it was probably the most ill-chosen word I could have hit on. “I meant to say festering,” I corrected myself. “I don’t know why I said the other.”
“They both have a certain applicability,” he remarked and left it at that.
“Did you sell the 1965 Rolls-Royce yesterday?”
“Ah, no. The minute he laid eyes on my beauty here, he fell out of love with poor Silver Cloud.”
“But you can’t sell the Bentley. You said you loved it.”
“He made me a handsome offer, but I haven’t decided. It doesn’t do to get too attached to things. But as I say, I haven’t decided yet.”
Like the middle school, the mainland library was a well-kept one-story building with extensions added on, surrounded by bright bushes in bloom. In one of the extensions there were a lot of glass windows and they were open and you could hear the commotion of children and a woman’s voice telling them to settle down.
“That’s my niece Althea in there,” Lachicotte said. “I recognize her voice. She runs the summer pre-K for the little kids. You’re going to be surprised, Marcus, at how up to date we are in our gadget room. We have the very latest in microfiche.”
The computer and microfilm room was in one of the new extensions. On the wall to the right as you entered was a large bronze plaque that read THE MARGERY LACHICOTTE HAYES WING. 1994.
“Is that one of your relatives?” I asked.
“My mother. Our family has always been passionate about libraries. I’m glad she lived to see this wing finished.”
A smiling lady in a crisp pantsuit hurried forward to meet us. “This is Mrs. Daniels, our librarian,” said Lachicotte. “Lucy, this is Marcus Harshaw, who’s interested in Hurricane Hazel.”
“I’m very happy to meet you, Marcus. We are all so proud of your aunt. We have one of her wonderful paintings above our front desk. Lash, I have all the envelopes ready. I got them out after you phoned yesterday.”
“We’re much obliged, Lucy.”
“No trouble at all, they were close at hand. Being as this summer is Hazel’s fiftieth anniversary, we’ve had a right many calls on those old newspapers. And I’ve got a new magazine for Marcus as well. This month’s State Magazine is featuring stories by people who lived through Hazel. Marcus, I expect you’ll want some help setting up the scanner and printer?”
“No, thank you. I used one like this when I was writing my research paper at school. I just need a user’s card to stick in that slot.”
The librarian was impressed and I think Lachicotte was, too. They hovered over me until I had taken the first fiche out of its envelope—being careful not to leave fingerprints on the film—and slid it into the tray, and started reading the screen. Then Lachicotte said that since I seemed to know what I was about, he and Mrs. Daniels would go and print me out a library card. “Would you like your middle name on it or a middle initial?” he asked. I said Marcus Harshaw would be enough. I didn’t have a middle name.
Left alone with my research, I became impatient then indignant at the skimpy information found on the screen. Here were the microfiches from three state papers of fifty years ago reporting on the aftereffects of Hurricane Hazel, and not one of them rendered up anything as useful as the one state paper I had pored over from a hundred and fifty years ago while researching my seventh-grade school project back in Jewel about a nearby North Carolina mountain town that had been split in half by the Civil War. One side was Confederate and the other Union and the two sides slaughtered each other.
The South Carolina state papers of fifty years ago offered plenty of nonhuman information about Hazel. The hurricane had hit on the day of October’s full moon high tide, the highest lunar tide of the year, which meant the most water damage. Hazel left Haiti as only a Category 2, but kept gathering strength as it headed up the Atlantic coast. When it hit north of Myrtle Beach on the morning of the fifteenth, it was a Category 4. The newspapers reported wind velocities and estimated the millions of dollars of property damage it left in its wake. There were some eyewitness evacuation stories, but they all ended safely. All told, Hazel left nineteen fatalities along the coast of North Carolina and one fatality in South Carolina—but there were no names. Where were the names? I scanned the film until my head began to hurt and I still never found a single name. If even the accounted-for fatalities didn’t rate getting their names in the papers, what hope for you if your body was never found?
I gave up on the fiches and paged through the “old-timer” stories in the fiftieth anniversary state magazine the librarian had left for me. Their Hazel recollections were the kind that began “Mamma and I were driving to the island to see her sister, who was a year-round resident. But when we got to the causeway, we were stopped by a highway patrolman who told us we had to turn around, everyone was evacuating …” Or “A week after the storm, when J. W. McLauren of Charleston finally crossed to the island, he found his family’s hundred-year-old island cottage with all its tongue-and-groove joints miraculously intact, only the waters had moved the house a hundred yards down the beach.”
There were a few vivid descriptions—winds snapping trees like chicken bones and a family hunkered down in a truck bed with salt water filling their noses, but the eyewitnesses of those scenes had lived into safe old age and gotten interviewed by this shiny magazine fifty years later.
I left everything in a neat pile for Mrs. Daniels. She was not around, so I returned the user’s key for the fiche machine to the woman behind the front desk. Involved in her own work, she barely looked up from her computer to acknowledge me, so I was able to study the painting that hung over her desk in peace. I recognized it from one of those postcard reproductions Aunt Charlotte had sent to Mom. It was a long, wide painting of the island’s shoreline at dusk, just the sand patterns and shallows at low tide, not a single breaking wave, not a living thing in sight, not even a single shore bird, everything glowing and peaceful in a soft orange end-of-day light. It made you feel glad you lived close to such beauty. I made a mental note to tell Aunt Charlotte how well I thought the painting graced the library wall, setting the tone for the whole place.
Then I went to find Lachicotte, who was in the pre-K room, sitting at a table beside a gray-haired lady, their backs to the open door. Below them on the floor, the children were finger-painting on sheets of paper. I had never seen children wearing kid-size latex gloves to finger-paint, but it seemed like a very practical idea. Moving closer I saw that Lachicotte and the gray-haired lady, who must be his niece, were making small finger-paintings of their own at their table. They, too, wore latex gloves, and were so wrapped up in what they were doing that I hung back in the doorway, not wanting to disturb the scene. The gray-haired niece was painting a still life of the jar of yellow roses placed in front of her on the table. Aunt Charlotte would have judged it “a competent little painting.” Lachicotte, hunched forward raptly, swirled vigorous c
ircles of dark blue paint behind what looked like either a lopsided mountain or a crouching white beast. I would have stood there longer if a watchful little girl hadn’t broken the spell. “Why is that man over there spying on us?” she cried.
XVIII.
Lachicotte’s painting of the lopsided mountain or crouching white beast turned out to be his “farewell portrait” of his 1954 Bentley R-Type Continental. “Even while I was painting her—or trying to, I’m no artist—I knew our time together was over” (togethah, ovah). He told me this as we ambled around downtown Charleston while Aunt Charlotte underwent her wrist surgery at the medical center.
Her “sprain” had been a misdiagnosis. The first x-ray taken weeks ago at the local hospital had missed the lesion and now everything had to be done all over again, with a projected twelve more weeks in a new cast. What she had was an “occult fracture of the scaphoid bone”—I tried not to read any messages into the occult word beyond its medical meaning of a hidden injury. The break was found in her follow-up x-ray, which also revealed a loose piece of bone fragment that had to be excised. So now the ligament and the scaphoid bone were being properly reconnected and “fixated” with a metal screw. The surgery was being done under general anesthesia, after which she would spend a further hour in the recovery room before we could take her back to the island. Lachicotte was driving her car now, the old Mercedes sedan, while the mandatory seat belts were being installed in the Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, which the buyer hadn’t wanted after he laid eyes on Lachicotte’s beloved Bentley.
“Were you sad when you saw your Bentley driving away?”
“You might say I felt an elegiac pang. But then I turned my mind to all I could do with the proceeds.”
“Was it a lot of money, or is that rude to ask?”
“It was a fair amount because it’s a rarity and he had to have it. I can buy my niece a waterfront condo and donate a much-needed new roof to my church.”
“You must really like your niece.”
“Althea has gone through some rough passages, but she’s kept her humanity intact. Which is admirable in itself.”
“What kind of rough passages?”
“Well, she was fifteen when she lost both parents. Her mother was my sister. They were flying up to see Althea at her school and my brother-in-law’s Cessna crashed in a fog.”
“That was your sister who loved her boarding school in Virginia?”
“You remembered that. Yes, I had only the one sibling. When Althea was in her late teens she hit some turbulence. She blamed herself for her parents’ death because they had been coming to see her—but we got her through that, Mother and I. But then as soon as she turned twenty-one, she eloped with a deep-dyed scoundrel who had been waiting in the wings. After he’d run through her money, he decamped and left her with all his debts and a broken heart.”
“Did she have any children?” I wondered whether Althea’s story would meet Aunt Charlotte’s standards for a shrink-wrapped tale of family woe.
“One daughter. Unfortunately their temperaments clash. But Althea adores her little granddaughter, who I’m afraid was that child at the library who accused you of being a spy.”
We went to the art supply store because Lachicotte wanted to buy Althea a paint set. “When we were finger-painting with the kids while you were busy at the fiche machine, my niece said to me, ‘You know, Uncle Buddy, I haven’t had so much fun in years. Isn’t it a shame that grown-ups forget how to play?’ ”
While Lachicotte consulted with the saleslady about what kind of paint set to buy for his niece, I wandered around inspecting the lavish displays of paints and crafts. This was the temple of Aunt Charlotte’s vocation, and not only was she not here with us to inhale the smells of her art and be tempted by new brushes and pigments, but she was lying anesthetized on a table while an orthopedic surgeon cut and clamped and probed and “fixated” her painting hand. He would do his best, he told Lachicotte, but he couldn’t guarantee total return of flexibility. We would just have to wait and see. There would be months of physical therapy to help, of course. The new x-rays had shown some arthritis, and we had to remember Mrs. Lee wasn’t a ten-year-old skateboarder with miraculously supple bones. No, Lachicotte had told him, she’s only a gifted and successful painter at the peak of her talent and her earning ability, and you are the head of wrists and hands over here, so we’re counting on you to do your utmost. They knew each other, of course. Lachicotte seemed to know everybody.
There was something I needed to consult with Lachicotte about. I had been preparing how to ask it in the art store and as we were walking back to the medical center I took the plunge.
“Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I went off to boarding school?”
Lachicotte came to a full stop on the sidewalk, clasping his gift-parcel to his breast. “What has given you this idea?”
“I’d be out of the way. Aunt Charlotte could have her solitude back, except for when I came home for holidays.”
“Wait a minute. Help me think this through, Marcus. What would be the advantages for her?”
“She wouldn’t have the burden of being my guardian nonstop.”
“What makes you think it’s a burden?” He commenced walking again.
“Because I’m always there. When people are cooped up together too long they get—”
This wasn’t going so well. What was it about Lachicotte that made me choke up when I was trying to say something important? “I mean, even back with Mom, we sometimes got on each other’s nerves. And Mom was out at work most of the time. But Aunt Charlotte’s always in the house with me. And now she’s going to be in the house more than ever.”
“So you’re saying if you weren’t there she’d have her solitude back. How else would it be an advantage to her, not having you around?”
“I don’t mean right now. I know I can be useful right now while she’s in her casts and has a hard time, well, you know, filling her days without being able to paint. But I think …” Here came the choking-up danger again. “I think if I went away to school for most of the year it would be better in the long run.”
“What do you mean by the long run?”
“Until I’m eighteen and don’t need to have a guardian anymore. When I’m eighteen she’ll be free of me. I mean, I know she gets a stipend for being my guardian and all, but I really think she’d prefer going back to her old lifestyle.”
“Has it occurred to you there are ways you might be her guardian?”
I said it hadn’t.
“Well, you might want to take a little time to consider it. However, let’s look at this proposition from another angle. What would be the advantages for you if you went away to boarding school?”
“The main advantage is I wouldn’t wear out my welcome with Aunt Charlotte. The disadvantage would be that at a boarding school they might be more curious about genealogy and that kind of thing. Whereas at the local school, they’d know who I was now. The thing is, I don’t know much about my father’s side. What I mean is, I don’t know anything, not even who he was. Mom was going to tell me when I was old enough to understand.”
We walked on in silence. Lachicotte appeared to have sunk into one of his pondering states and I had time to wonder whether my disclosure had been more than Lachicotte wanted to hear.
“You know, Marcus, I was delighted when your Aunt Charlotte discovered she could paint. It was just what was needed. Nothing better in the world could have showed up in her life at that time. And now I’ll tell you something else. The day you and I met, when I came to the house that morning (maw’nin)—it took me only a few hours in your company to feel the same delight again. Nothing better in the world could have showed up in her life. You were just what was needed.”
XIX.
Aunt Charlotte’s mood underwent a further change as she began her extended convalescence. Strangely enough, she had been more annoyed and despondent when she had believed she was facing only a matter of weeks with h
er arm in a soft cast and then a return to painting. Now she seemed to have entered a state of passive indifference, spending hours in a chair on the screened porch gazing out to sea, her right arm in a more serious cast resting on the chair arm, her left foot in its cast propped on a stool. I had felt more at home with her old combative self.
In this new phase she spent less time shut away in her studio/bedroom. For a while I was required to uncork fewer bottles of red wine. She was in pain after the surgery and condescended to take the Percocet the doctor had prescribed. That may have decreased her desire to drink, or maybe she was simply taking seriously the dire warnings on the bottle about mixing opioids with alcohol. She had expressed a horror of “turning into a dope fiend” and made me keep the bottle hidden in my room and dole out the pills as needed.
Lachicotte’s suggestion that I was also her guardian had sunk in, and I swung between pride in this responsibility and resentment at some of the restraints it imposed.
The worst restraint was the sacrifice of my late afternoon bike ride to the north end of the island. Aunt Charlotte seemed to appreciate my company particularly in the late afternoon. Of course, I continued to go faithfully to Grief Cottage every morning, via the road or the beach, depending on the tides, while she was still asleep, but those morning visits had become sterile. There was no longer the sense that he was somewhere just behind me. He might be inside the cottage but he was no longer available to me, even as an unseen listener. I felt I was being punished for dividing my attentions. Now whenever I spoke aloud with my back to the door, I was more than ever the crazy boy talking to himself on the top step of a ruined cottage.
After I got my own card, I had biked over to the library a few times. In my saddlebags I brought home promising books that either fulfilled my hopes or didn’t. I tried The Count of Monte Cristo, which I had started back in Jewel, but then had to return to the school library because someone else was waiting. Now even opening the book made me sad and a little queasy and I returned it on my next trip. I took out Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and read it straight through. Bradbury always reminded me of Wheezer, who had introduced me to him. I had hopes for a horror writer’s thick omnibus of his “favorite scary stories,” but found I had read many of them already.
