by Gail Godwin
“Maybe the wounded vet who gets him will live by the ocean and they can go on walks and Barrett can splash a little in the waves.”
“That’s a sweet thought. Well, Barrett, that’s enough beach time for us. It’s been nice talking with you. You take care, now.”
I put on my helmet for the ride home. The seniors and early exercisers were trickling down to the beach, some unleashed dogs racing back and forth between surf and owner, then bolting off to chase and smell other dogs, activities that would never be part of Barrett’s life. And yet he would be loved and needed. He would have a fabulous dog bed in a permanent home. He would feel, in whatever manner dogs felt things, indispensable to his veteran.
My cowardly bolt from the boy disappointed me. I’d had my chance and blown it. This was the fullest he’d ever shown himself, and I hadn’t been able to endure it.
What I was sure of was that I had seen. I was also sure that I couldn’t tell anyone. What I was not sure of was whether I was different from others my age. Could another person of eleven have had the same experience? But I didn’t believe another person would have had this experience. Why not? Here I strained to reason it out. Because the whole series of episodes that had led up to this morning was inseparable from myself, from my history, from my personality. The ghost-boy was related to my life, yet he was also an entity on his own terms. Yet how could that be? How could he be both? Didn’t something have to be one thing or the other, either real or imagined? Or could it be that the two things weren’t mutually exclusive?
There was no one to ask. What I needed was someone wise and experienced, a mature personality who could take all of my information and give me back a definition, a diagnosis, a concept large enough to contain it all. There were surely such people in the world—only, so far, not in my world. Maybe later there would be a special teacher, like Mom’s esteemed night-school teacher who had been so generous with his knowledge until he died, someone I could consult and look up to, who knew things I needed to know and if he didn’t know them could show me how to look for them.
XXIV.
I had never met a person as old as Coral Upchurch. I had never met a person of any age remotely like her. Lachicotte had promised I would appreciate her, that she was quite the raconteur, but I certainly never expected to hear the story she told that first afternoon.
Lachicotte came to get me at two o’clock, leaving behind a steak-and-mushroom pie identical to the one he was taking to Coral Upchurch next door. “Preheat your oven to three-fifty and put this in for thirty minutes,” he said. “Do not use the microwave or your (yoah) crust will be soggy.” He had been to the barber and smelled and looked like an older gent who had taken extra pains with his appearance.
During the seven hours since returning from Grief Cottage, I had been pretty busy myself. After a shopping trip to the island store, I had spent some quality time with the turtle eggs and done two loads of laundry. I had been neatening the kitchen shelves when Aunt Charlotte had burst out of her off-limits studio and asked if I had time to wash her hair before Lachicotte arrived. “I wonder if we should cut it first,” she said, frowning at herself in the mirror over the sink.
“You want me to cut your hair?”
“I don’t see why not. Unlike me, you’ll have the advantage of seeing the back of my head. All it needs is an inch off.”
“Should we do it after we wash it, or before?”
“Before. Just grab a clump and take an inch off. Then grab another clump and do the same thing all the way around.”
“What if I mess up?”
“I’d make a bigger mess if I tried to do it with my left hand. Start at the back. You’ll improve by the time you get to the front.”
I felt uneasy laying hold of my aunt’s wiry mop. It was barely long enough to get a grip on. I had cut Mom’s hair and she had cut mine, but that was another world from this. Seated below me, humbly baring her neck to the scissors, Aunt Charlotte looked defenseless. I could snip-snip carelessly and brutally and make her look terrible. I could go crazy and stab her in the back. All kinds of worrisome associations ran through my mind. The last time I had grabbed a clump of someone’s hair, it had been Wheezer’s silky roan locks, when I was holding him close so I could better hit his face. Aunt Charlotte’s neck was dead white and on the stalky side, like the ghost-boy’s. What if I should suddenly blurt, “Listen, Aunt Charlotte, I know how you feel on the subject of ghosts, but I had a sort of hallucination this morning and I need to tell someone.” Even imagining such a confession made me cringe. I could hear her alarmed thoughts: Oh no, when things were working out so well. Hallucinations are not something I’m equipped to deal with. He’d be better off going somewhere else.
On the other hand, the service I was performing for my aunt was one more way I could be of use to her: cutting her hair and keeping my hallucinations to myself. And after I had washed and dried it, Aunt Charlotte raised her eyebrows at herself in the bathroom mirror and told me I had made her look “formidably sleek.”
Coral Upchurch’s cottage was in another class from Aunt Charlotte’s “renovated shack,” as she liked to call it. The Upchurch cottage was one of the old ones, not as old as Grief Cottage, but built in the mid-nineteenth century by a family with money who took it for granted that their descendants would be enjoying it long after they themselves were dust. The kitchen was on the ground floor across from the garage; the main body of the house was above, resting on the sturdy bricked footing columns that supported all the old houses, only these columns were screened by a painted white trellis. Lachicotte imparted all this to me as we walked from Aunt Charlotte’s to Mrs. Upchurch’s. Her caregiver, Roberta Dumas, sat outside in the shade of the breezeway between kitchen and garage. Her fingers flew, weaving a very large basket. When she saw us coming, she rose from her stool, brushed bits of grass from her smock, and picked her way around a barrier of buckets filled with different shades of tall grasses. She was one of those heavy people who carry their weight lightly. Her skin was truly black, with highlights of blue and purple when she moved out of the shade into the sunlight. She wore a white pantsuit uniform beneath a colorful, flowing artist’s smock.
“Mr. Hayes, you always come bearing gifts.”
Lachicotte introduced me and handed over the steak pie with the same warm-up directions he had given Aunt Charlotte and me.
“I’ll take it up and show her,” she said, “so she’ll know we’re gonna eat well tonight.”
“How was your all’s winter, Roberta?”
“Well, you know Mr. Billy passed away in January.”
“No! How come she didn’t tell me when I phoned yesterday?”
“It knocked the wind out of her. She says it’s not natural, the parents are supposed to go first. Mr. Billy was just turned sixty-five. He went to get his pacemaker batteries replaced and had a heart attack right there on the table.”
“And her not saying a thing!”
“She’s still taking it in. When they called her from Washington, she hung up on them. When it commenced to ring again, she told me, ‘Don’t you dare pick up that phone, Roberta. Some nasty person is trying to frighten me.’ ”
“But she sounded just like herself yesterday.”
“Oh, she’s herself all right. It’s made her mad, more than anything. Just go up and talk about it normally. She likes to talk about him. She knows he’s buried in the family plot in Columbia, but we’re almost back to the place where we’re expecting his annual visit. The mind is a wondrous thing, isn’t it, Mr. Hayes? It hasn’t got to stay in just one place at a time.”
“What is that imposing object you’re weaving?” Lachicotte asked.
“That’s my monster. My grandson calls it my Boogie Basket.” Laughing, she lifted it from the breezeway floor and set it on her stool, which it overlapped. “They wanted it this size, but the proportions are all wrong. The handles, if I get to them, are going to look like elephant ears. I’ve a mind to stop while I’m ahead and send
word that I passed on.”
“A commission, is it?”
She nodded. “They saw it in the Smithsonian book and wanted one just like it, only triple the size. It’s one of Granny’s models. She’d turn over in her grave if she saw this. Mrs. Upchurch said if I decided not to send it, she’ll pay the commission price and we’ll use it as our laundry basket.”
This struck me as hilarious, because that’s exactly what it looked like. I got the giggles and then Lachicotte laughed, and Roberta joined in.
“My aunt just finished a huge painting of these rich people’s beach house,” I said. “It was forty-two by fifty-six and they wrote her a check too large for her to keep in the house overnight. She said the next thing she painted for herself was going to be six by ten, or maybe even four by six. Unfortunately, she broke her right wrist that same night and can’t paint anything for a while.”
“Now that’s a shame,” said Roberta. “I slammed some fingers in a car door once and couldn’t work with my hands for six weeks. I about went crazy.”
Roberta led us up a flight of outdoor stairs, next to which had been built a ramp for a wheelchair. Inside a screened-in porch a tiny lady sat in the wheelchair awaiting us. As we rose into her sightline, she was taking a last greedy puff of her cigarette before extinguishing it in an ashtray on the glass-topped table next to her.
“What were you all laughing at down there? I thought you were never coming up.”
“It was my monster basket. Look, Mr. Hayes has brought us a steak pie.”
“Bless you, Lachicotte. Roberta won’t have to drive to the store and interrupt her art. And this is Marcus. Welcome, Marcus. This pie smells heavenly, Lachicotte. Come kiss me and we’ll dispense with condolences over Billy. I’m still cross with him for breaking ahead of me in line like that. Marcus, why don’t you sit in that chair across from me?”
For the second time that day, I imagined how Mom would see a woman who’d had better breaks in life than she’d had. (“Now that simple summer outfit, Marcus, was really costly in its day. And look how well-preserved it is. It’s gone back and forth to a quality cleaner for the last forty years. And notice her pampered complexion and the teeth! She’s had them capped or veneered, otherwise they’d be yellow from age and smoking. And she’s still got all of them! This old girl is a prime example of high maintenance over the long term.”)
“I’ll leave you all to socialize,” said Roberta. “What do we want to have with Mr. Hayes’s steak pie?” she asked Mrs. Upchurch.
“Oh, ice cream will be fine,” replied the indulged little child-queen of ninety-five, ensconced on her wheelchair throne. Close by her on the glass table, besides the ashtray, were binoculars, a bird book, a carton of cigarettes with a silver lighter on top, a carafe of ice water covered by a drinking glass, and one of those pill containers with slots for a week’s supply of morning and evening doses. On our side of the table were two tall glasses, a pitcher of iced tea, two folded cloth napkins, and a plate of unusually flat cookies.
Coral Upchurch’s lively old eyes engaged with me. “So you are Charlotte Lee’s great-nephew.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Oh, please call me Coral. I’m trying to strip down to essentials. If I live much longer, I’m hoping even the ‘Coral’ will become superfluous. When you reach my age, you want to perform archaeology on yourself, get beyond family names and given names and polite forms of address.” Her accent had a Lachicotte base with what sounded like overlays of voice training from somewhere in her past.
“What would be beyond Coral, archaeologically?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out! Maybe you’ll help me. What would ‘beyond Marcus’ be like?”
This was a really interesting question. I had to close my eyes in order to think harder. “Maybe not any given name,” I said. “I mean, for instance, say you had a turtle and you named him Luke. Before he was Luke he was just a turtle. Or, if you wanted to be specific, a loggerhead turtle. And before that—I’m going to have to think about this some more.”
“I wish you would. I’ve never known a Marcus. Plenty of Marks but no Marcuses. The only Marcus I can think of offhand is Marcus Aurelius.”
“That’s who my mom named me after! She loved his Meditations. She had two copies of it. One of them was in Greek on the left side of the page. He wrote it in Greek, you know.”
“Was your mother a scholar?”
“She loved studying and learning things. She was planning to go to college and become a teacher.” I was about to add how determined she was to make something of herself, then remembered I had been through this before with Lachicotte, who had generously suggested that she’d already made something of herself by bringing me up so well.
“Lachicotte told me what a great help you are to your aunt,” said Coral Upchurch, “but when you’re not being a great help, what do you do to amuse yourself? Have you made any friends?”
Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time with this boy. He’s a little older than me, fourteen, and he’s been dead for fifty years.
“I ride my bike a lot. And I’ve made friends with this man on the Turtle Patrol, Mr. Bolton. This year there’s a clutch of loggerhead eggs buried below my aunt’s boardwalk steps.”
“Marcus has taken quite an interest in our local history,” Lachicotte said. “Particularly the old Barbour cottage up at the north end. We went to the library to look up that poor family that was lost during Hazel, but he couldn’t find a single mention of them in the microfiche.”
“Well, I expect I can tell you more about them than anyone else still living,” said Coral Upchurch. “I don’t mean the Barbours, who still reside in Columbia as far as I know. And I don’t know much about the unfortunate parents, except that the father’s cousin sued the Barbours. But Billy knew the son. They were the same age. The boy was kind of a dark customer. Archie, my husband, made us leave the first weekend in October because he thought the boy was corrupting Billy. We usually stayed for the entire month of October. It was my favorite time. I would be by myself during the week, then Archie and Billy would drive down from Columbia on weekends. Archie had his law practice and of course Billy had school during the week. I was quite put out, having to pack up and leave—like we were being evicted or something!—and lose my favorite month just because of that boy.”
“Do you remember his name?” I asked.
“It was something simple, like Billy, only of course it wasn’t Billy. The family name wasn’t one you hear every day, but it was an Anglo-Saxon name. When I remember I will write it down for you. These days, Marcus, I have to put in requests to my brain, as one does at the library, and then a little worker takes my slip and disappears into the stacks. It may take him a while, but he always comes back with the goods.”
“How was he corrupting your son? If it’s not too rude to ask.”
“Billy came back with smoke and liquor on his breath. Archie said it wasn’t just any smoke, it was marijuana. You have to understand. Back in that era marijuana was considered the ‘stepping stone to heroin.’ It was way before the time when doctors started prescribing it to sick people. In the early 1950s the states were enacting severe penalties for narcotic offenses. And the boy was … peculiar … in other ways. He never went into the ocean. Billy said he never even took off his clothes or shoes. He just walked up and down the length of the island, fully dressed—that’s how Billy met him, as he was walking past our house, scowling. That would appeal to Billy’s open nature. Billy loved to reach out to scowlers. There’d been some hardship or setback with that family, as I recall, something to do with their house, and there was a problem with the boy as well. The father was employed by a coal company in Kentucky, some low-level management job, not a miner. Some friends of the Barbours knew of their misfortunes and felt sorry for them, and since the Barbours weren’t using it in October they offered their beach cottage. I don’t know if it was charity, or whether there was payment involved. But the Barbour
s certainly paid for it later. After the family got washed away in the storm—Dace! That was their name, Dace. My little worker just came back from the stacks! The boy’s name was Johnny Dace. Now where was I?”
“After the family got washed away,” I said.
“Oh, yes, even though no bodies were found, a cousin on the father’s side sued the Barbours. The cousin said the father was all she had left, and she only wanted her due. Money changed hands—the cousin even asked that the family’s old car and their personal belongings be returned to her!—and soon after that the Barbours sold the cottage. In Archie’s opinion, the proper defendant in the cousin’s lawsuit would have been Hurricane Hazel. It wasn’t the cottage’s fault. It’s too bad, really, that the Daces didn’t stay inside it during the storm. That house was built to last. They’d probably be here today. The only part that didn’t last was the south porch they say the boy burned down with his cigarettes.”
I felt like Barrett the dog on his tight leash, straining toward the beguiling waves. There my beguiler sat, approximately the same distance from me as the waves had been from Barrett this morning, and I wanted to plunge in and immerse myself in whatever she could remember about the boy. My list of questions piled up, but I was on my “company” leash: Lachicotte and I were paying a social call on an ancient neighbor and we each had to take turns telling our news. We had to drink our iced tea and eat the unusual cookies, so thin they demanded you eat more of them. Aunt Charlotte’s injuries were described and assessed, her recovery time speculated upon and wished for. Lachicotte brought Coral Upchurch up to date with island news, which at least touched upon the latest developments pertaining to the fate of Grief Cottage.
“The people who bought it from the Barbours should have either restored it or torn it down,” said Coral Upchurch. “But they ended up selling to someone else and then Mr. Coggins the realtor, the late father not the son, snapped it up and couldn’t sell it again. But I never understood why it was allowed to fall into ruin like that. Most townships would have forced the issue, was Archie’s opinion. Every year until Archie died he’d walk up to see the cottage and come back appalled. He said it was a disgrace to the island and made us all look bad. It was Archie who frightened old Mr. Coggins and the commissioners into putting up the wire fence and those warning signs. Otherwise, he told them, you are just shopping for injuries and lawsuits. And even then it took twenty years to force the issue. By that time it had become a genuine ruin. Everyone had long since been calling it Grief Cottage when that fence finally went up.”
