Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  “It was up when my aunt moved here.” A perfectly natural next question would be for me to ask if Billy had visited Johnny Dace at the cottage. “It was Grief Cottage that started my aunt’s painting career.”

  “Yes, she told me that. Please, Marcus, take that last Benne Wafer. It won’t make you an old maid. That’s an expression left over from my generation, but it only applies to girls. It’s a sesame wafer. The slaves brought the spice with them from Africa. Benne is the Bantu word for sesame. Roberta can give you the recipe. She makes trays and trays of those cookies every year after Christmas when her family celebrates Kwanzaa. Do you know what Kwanzaa is?”

  I had to admit I didn’t know, and thus Barrett and I were reluctantly parted from our beguiling waves while Coral Upchurch filled me in on the first African-American holiday, established back in the sixties, when black people were starting to take pride in their roots.

  “You could see her beginning to flag,” said Lachicotte, as we walked back to Aunt Charlotte’s. “And she kept eyeing those cigarettes.”

  “I wouldn’t care if she smoked.”

  “Neither would I. I was raised inside a fog of parental smoke. But smokers nowadays have their individual rules of honor. Obviously hers are outdoors only and not in the presence of others.”

  “Why not in the presence of others?”

  “The hazards of secondhand smoke.”

  “Oh, I knew that.”

  “It was kind of you to offer to shop for them every day.”

  “No problem. They eat mostly deli, like Aunt Charlotte and me, and this way Roberta won’t have to take the van out of the garage and interrupt her art.”

  Lachicotte laughed. “That basket sure was a fright.”

  “Just because people are rich doesn’t mean they have taste.” A direct quote from my mom.

  Lachicotte paused beside Aunt Charlotte’s Mercedes, which he’d been driving since he sold the Bentley. “How is she doing?”

  “She has some kind of project going in her studio.”

  “Oh? What kind?”

  “It’s secret. I’m not allowed to go in there. I think it involves paint but I can’t be sure because I can’t smell anything through the door. I always used to be able to smell the oils. She spends hours and hours in there every day.”

  “How is the—?”

  “Festering?”

  “You read my mind.”

  “Pretty much the same. It’s a bad time for her, she says.”

  “Well, when we go back to the surgeon in Charleston, I’m hoping we’ll hear encouraging news that will make her feel better. Is she having pain?”

  “Not that I know of. She made me hide her painkillers and there’s still a fair number in the container.”

  “Well, we may just make it through the summer. If we do, it will be largely thanks to you, Marcus.”

  “Won’t you come in?”

  “Thank you, no. I’ve got things to do, and we’ve already said hello. One hello is usually enough for your aunt.”

  ***

  “Tell me all,” Aunt Charlotte said at supper. “I hope it wasn’t too boring for you.”

  “Oh no, I enjoyed it. I liked Roberta, too. She was making an ugly misshapen basket for some people who wanted it extra large. She wishes she could send word that she died so she won’t have to finish it.”

  This amused Aunt Charlotte. She was enjoying Lachicotte’s steak pie—heated according to his directions—and putting away her usual amounts of wine. She was in a mellow, receptive mood.

  “So, what did ‘you all’ talk about?”

  “Her son Billy died last winter.”

  “Really? What of?”

  “He had a heart attack at the hospital. He was having his pacemaker batteries replaced.”

  “Is she devastated?”

  “Roberta said it was more like she was angry. She was supposed to go first. She told Lachicotte that her son had broken ahead of her in line. She was in a pretty good mood. Though toward the end Lachicotte noticed she was dying to have a cigarette.”

  “Depend on Lachicotte to notice something like that.”

  “She said she’d never known a Marcus before. She asked what I did to amuse myself on the island.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “About the Turtle Patrol. And riding my bike.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much. I wonder how you’ll look back on this period of your life, Marcus, how you’ll describe it to someone in the future. ‘When I was eleven, my mother died and I went to live with my peculiar great-aunt on an island.’ ”

  “I don’t think of you as peculiar.”

  “Naturally you have to say that. I’ve tried to isolate my peculiarities. Being solitary has been a great advantage. At least I don’t force my peculiarities on others. I hope I don’t.”

  There was no good reply to this. If I said “You don’t,” that would be admitting she had peculiarities. So I just said I liked living here on the island. I stopped myself from adding that I hoped I didn’t intrude on her solitude too much. That would sound like I was fishing for her to say I didn’t, and then to repeat her usual praise about how helpful and thoughtful and astute I was.

  As I was tinkering with these moral mathematics, I realized that I was not going to tell her what Coral Upchurch had said about the boy. He had a name now and some character traits (mostly negative ones, except for the walking on the beach). I wanted to keep him to myself until I had time to think about him some more. Ever since I could remember, I had kept a little private zone where I could work out important things for myself.

  I had certainly not told Mom everything—a lot of it would have hurt her. In my mandated sessions with the psychiatrist I stuck to safe answers. With Wheezer, up until our rupture, I had left out significant “trues” in my history, allowing him to create his own pictures of how I lived in idealized poverty with my courageous single mom.

  But I did tell Aunt Charlotte that I had offered to shop for Coral Upchurch and Roberta every day. “That way Roberta won’t have to get the car out of the garage and interrupt her work. They eat mostly deli, like us.”

  “Sometimes I think you are too good to be true, Marcus.”

  “I’m not all that good.”

  I had known as I made my shopping offer that it would link me to their lives on an everyday basis. Coral Upchurch wasn’t ready to receive company until early afternoon, but she said she wished I would be her daily visitor. I looked forward to sitting across from her and asking casual questions. And she would send her mental librarian off to the stacks and he would come back with more just-remembered facts about Johnny Dace.

  “Actually, I selfishly hope you will turn out to be good from the bottom up,” said Aunt Charlotte. “It might restore some of my faith in human beings.”

  XXV.

  The dune beside Aunt Charlotte’s boardwalk steps had become my meditation post and checkpoint for sanity. Here I could sit in the evenings above the clutch buried below the sand where 110 turtle embryos squirmed in their shells and know that, despite whatever weirdnesses I had undergone through the day, I was also part of the real day that was now ending. And this day linked me to the real days of the ancient world, when the turtles were already old news, and to a future world when I would be dead, when the whole human race might be dead, but these turtles might still be doing exactly what they had always done without any help from my extinguished species.

  I felt like the turtles’ guest. I wanted to be unobtrusive so as not to upset their progress. As they approached their hatching time, I talked to them in a wise and soothing murmur. I told them stories of what to expect, from the moment each used the little egg tooth on top of its snout to rip through its leathery shell and then stretch its body out straight (“Remember, you’ve been curled into a ball for two months, so you’ll need to do this. And while you’re wriggling around getting straightened out, your body will knock against the shells of your unhatched brothers and sisters
and stimulate their breakthroughs…”)

  This July was a “two-moon month,” Ed Bolton had informed me. Approximately every three years there would be two full moons in a calendar month. We’d had a full moon last Friday and we would have the second one on the last day of July. The second full moon was called a blue moon, which referred to a rare blue coloring, which usually wasn’t seen, caused by high altitude dust particles. Tonight’s moon was a waning gibbous—gibbosus was hunchback in Latin. The curve inside the gibbous moon did look like something hunched. But when the moon shrank to its last quarter the hunch would straighten up. Ed Bolton had given me the turtles and the moon. I would have liked to have been in his high school science classes. He made everything in the natural world sound like it mattered to him—as it would to you, if you saw it right.

  How sickening that I had missed Billy Upchurch by one year! He could have answered the really crucial questions. I would have asked him, in gradual increments, what they talked about. Johnny may have told Billy about the Dace family hardship Coral Upchurch had referred to. And she said there had been a problem with Johnny Dace, too. If he wasn’t in school in October, maybe he had been kicked out of school. He would have told Billy why he never took off his clothes at the beach, or made up an excuse. And I would love to know why Billy had picked him out when he was walking the entire length of the beach and back, something I had yet to do myself. I would have asked who spoke first. My guess was Billy, who was attracted to scowlers. And did Johnny invite him to the cottage or did Billy invite himself? And when they got there, what did they do together?

  If the ghost-boy had lived he would be sixty-five, like Billy, unless he had died before Billy.

  I still hadn’t become used to the beauty of the island. You are one lucky boy, the foster mother had said, when it was firm that I was going to live with my aunt at the beach. I did feel lucky, though the feeling wasn’t free of remorse and guilt. If Mom hadn’t died, we would probably still be living in that awful upstairs apartment on Smoke Vine Road with the downstairs landlady from hell. Though Jewel was set in the midst of beautiful mountains, for me its very name would always evoke shame and poverty. Mom had to die so I could get out of Jewel and live at the beach. How sad that we hadn’t shared beauty in any of our surroundings. Forsterville (pop. 10,000+) was a piedmont town with a furniture factory and railroad tracks, a few adulterated rivers and streams, and a manmade lake, where prominent citizens had summer cottages, fifteen miles away. The closest to a beautiful setting Mom and I had shared was the quiet cemetery on the outskirts of town with its cypresses and well-tended grass, where we could walk and she could inhale air that didn’t smell of sawdust and chemicals and shellac. We strolled among the headstones—many of which bore the name of Forster, the founding family—and played our funeral and burial game. The clothes we would wear in our coffins, the hymns and psalms we wanted. (“We should probably attend church more often,” Mom would say. “Then there would be more of a crowd at our funerals. But I don’t think God grudges me my Sunday morning sleep-in.”) Mom was cheerful and serene when we walked in the Forsterville cemetery.

  Things would now be different between the ghost-boy and me. I knew that. Everything in his presence and posture said: You summoned me. Here I am. Now what are we going to do? But I had failed the test. I was certain he would not appear to me again. If only I had remembered the rules that were spread all over the ghost stories Wheezer and I used to devour. The living person was either up to the challenge or he was not. If you wished to keep the connection going with the ghost, you had to measure up to the moment of testing. Wheezer and I had often discussed it: if we were ever fortunate enough to meet a ghost, like in one of the stories we loved where the living person measured up, what would we do and say? We were always adding to our rules for ghosts.

  “That is, for the ones you feel deserve your help,” Wheezer once stipulated, “not the other kind.” For the worthy ghosts, you had to stand your ground even if your legs were shaking and ask: What do you need? What can I do for you in the land of the living that you can no longer do for yourself? Is there a message you want conveyed to a living person? Is there a wrong that needs to be righted before you can rest in peace? If so, I’ll be your errand boy.

  “But how would you know the difference between a ghost worthy of your help and the other kind?” I asked Wheezer. He thought it over. “Maybe you wouldn’t, at first,” he said, “until your intuition kicked in. Then you’d feel either sought out or creeped out. If it’s creeped out, you’d better cut and run.”

  But facing my ghost this morning I had felt sought out and creeped out. If only I had stood my ground and asked him, What do you want of me? What can I do for you in the land of the living that you can no longer do for yourself? Maybe if I hadn’t cut and run I would have experienced an advanced stage of human consciousness.

  I needed to ask Ed Bolton to explain more about the problem of time. In school we had been prepped with just enough rudimentary Einstein to unsettle us. Yes, boys and girls, after your brains develop some more you’ll have to deal with concepts of time beyond the clock and calendar.

  I had been zipping through too many kinds of time to keep track of: waking and dreaming time, outer and inner, since yesterday’s dreaming of my mom opening the door of her beautiful apartment and telling me I had an older brother to this afternoon’s meeting of a very old lady who was able to tell me the first and last names of the ghost I had seen that very morning.

  XXVI.

  “Archie and I were married ten years before we had Billy. We concluded we were going to be a childless couple, and to be honest we had a good old time. We went places we wouldn’t have gone if we’d had small children, and we developed an intimacy that might not have flourished otherwise. I was just twenty when I married and quite ignorant and provincial in lots of ways. Archie was eighteen years older and he said it was like having a daughter and a lover all in one package. I’m not shocking you, am I, Marcus?”

  “Oh, no. My mom was married a long time before I was born. Her husband was a lot older than her, too. He died before I was born.” Not a single lie in those three bare statements. As long as I kept them bare.

  “Are you hungry? Roberta has stocked my little minibar over there with nice things.”

  “I’m not really hungry. Could I get you something?”

  “I’m not a great eater, but thank you.” Her downward glance at the cigarette carton was barely a flicker.

  “I wish you would go ahead and smoke.”

  “I’d much rather enjoy your company.”

  “You can enjoy us both. I’ve been around plenty of smokers.” Wheezer’s granny could count for at least twenty smokers. Because of his asthma, she did go outside to smoke, or into the bathroom with the exhaust fan turned on. Wheezer and I used to count how long she could get by without lighting up and she maxed out at forty-two minutes.

  “Well, I’ll keep it in mind. As soon as he walked in the door every summer, Billy would start lecturing me about quitting. And now look, he’s jumped the gun on me. I told Roberta I needed to get myself another bad habit so I won’t stick around forever. Enough is enough. Besides, I’m fascinated by death. I don’t know whether there’s an afterlife or not—I’m not a believer in a conventional heaven and hell—but I’m prepared to be surprised. How about you?”

  “My mom said the only heaven and hell she believed in were right here on earth. I’m fascinated with death, too.”

  “At your age? Oh, forgive me. You lost your mother so recently.”

  “Do you ever wonder if, well, the dead have ways to get in contact with the living?”

  “Archie has been gone forty-three years and he speaks to me every day. ‘Let me do that,’ he’ll say, though of course he isn’t there to do it anymore. Things I always did wrong, like folding up a grocery bag properly so it would lie flat. And I’ll make the extra effort and do it his way. After Billy bailed out on me last winter, I tried to scold him into appearin
g. I wanted to see him again. Even though the last few years he’d gotten red from high blood pressure, just like Archie. But Billy was drop-dead gorgeous in his younger years. You know what, Marcus, with your permission I will have a cigarette.”

  I watched the tiny woman transform herself into a forties film star as she attended to the glamorous ritual of lighting up.

  “The boy you were telling us about—did you ever see him?”

  “The boy?”

  “The one your husband thought was a bad influence on Billy. Johnny Dace?”

  “Oh, I saw him only once, when Archie and I were looking for Billy on the beach. Archie decided they must have gone up to the Barbour cottage to do bad things, and we were debating whether we wanted to walk all the way to the north end or go back and get the car. Then we saw them walking back toward us and when they got closer Archie said, ‘Please don’t tell me that sorry-looking lout is Billy’s wonderful new friend.’ ”

  “How was he sorry-looking?”

  “Oh, ruffianly and sort of … paltry. After Billy’s great buildup.”

  “How did he look?”

  “We never saw him close up. When Billy spotted us, he leaned over and said something to him and the boy spun around and headed back north. He was taller than Billy—Billy hadn’t got his full growth yet—but that might have been because Billy was barefoot and the other boy was wearing shoes.”