Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  “What kind of shoes?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Could they have been boots?”

  “They could have been, I suppose. Billy told us his friend always wore his clothes on the beach, and never went in the water. Billy thought maybe he couldn’t swim. Or he might not have owned a bathing suit, was Archie’s opinion.”

  “Did he have on a shirt?”

  “I think so, but Marcus, this was half a century ago.” She turned away from me to responsibly exhale her smoke toward the ocean. “Lachicotte said you were intrigued by that unfortunate family. I wish I had more to tell you.”

  “It just seems wrong they were the only ones lost in that hurricane and they’re never mentioned.”

  “Oh, but it was talked about at the time. Billy was quite distressed when we got the news from the Barbours. He kept saying, ‘But he’d promised to come and visit me!’ Archie said he’d never been glad of anyone’s death except Hitler’s but he confessed to being relieved we were spared the boy’s visit.”

  The next time I rode my bike to Grief Cottage, I pictured the two friends walking south toward me. Billy Upchurch saying to his friend Johnny Dace when he spotted his parents walking toward them, “Oh, shit, here come my parents.” Or did he say, “There’s my mom and dad! Now I can introduce you!” And Johnny Dace would have said, “Count me out.” Or something more ruffianly. And then spun around on his (shoe? boot?) heel and decamped. It was easier to do it from Johnny Dace’s side. Of course he didn’t want to meet Billy’s parents. He wanted to escape being judged. How did he know they would judge him? Well, ever since he and his own parents had arrived to be charity occupants of the Barbour cottage, they must have felt some of the ways people like the Upchurches conveyed their judgments on people like them. I myself was more of a Dace set down in the midst of Upchurches than otherwise. I simply had more camouflage: my great-aunt was a respected local artist and had given herself the surname of the general of the Confederate army, and I had entered this island community with Lachicotte’s seal of approval.

  Recent events concerning the figure in the cottage had changed my perceptions. He was now two beings. There was the ghost-boy, the presence that I had sensed behind me on my first visit to Grief Cottage and that I had seen twice since, standing full-length in the doorway. And there was Johnny Dace, short-lived friend (and bad influence?) to Billy Upchurch. And the Johnny Dace who came to the beach with his parents and without a bathing suit.

  After my last encounter with him, I altered my routine at Grief Cottage. I still crawled beneath the wire fence with all the warning signs and climbed the rickety stairs to the slanting porch. But I now sat facing the door, my back against one of the upright beams that propped up the roof. My old way of sitting with my back to the door had been so he could observe me without feeling threatened. But now I was the one who felt threatened. Better to face the door than to suddenly feel the grip of an unseen hand from behind.

  Since I had flunked the test of standing my ground when he appeared to me, he may have, in his ghostly manner, established new rules for my appearances. Rule one: No more “showings” to the visitor. I had become the “nervous animal.” We had reversed roles. Now he needed to ration his presence so as not to scare me off.

  I continued to talk to him, however. I believed it still offered the best chance of maintaining the frequencies between us—if any remained. As before, I opened with the “safe” natural subjects: the ocean and the surroundings we shared, the current phase of the moon, the progress of the loggerhead embryos (“Ed Bolton, the retired science teacher, predicts they’ll hatch the middle of next week …”). Then I filled him in on my recent routines (“My aunt had to go back and have a metal pin put in her wrist … Now she’s started some secret project. I’m not allowed to enter her studio …”). Then I thought it worth a try to suddenly drop in my visits to Coral Upchurch. (“You never met her, but she’s the mother of Billy Upchurch, the boy you made friends with when your family was staying in the beach cottage before the hurricane? Do you remember Billy Upchurch? Now I have to tell you something sad. Billy died this past winter. He was sixty-five. He was having the batteries changed on his pacemaker, that’s a device invented after your time, they plant it in your chest and it regulates your heartbeat…”)

  I did feel some kind of agitation in the air between me and the empty doorway. What had set the agitation going? Was it sympathy for Billy or revolt at the mention of Billy’s name, or was it exasperation with the tiresome boy on the rotting porch cluttering up the silence with “trues”?

  XXVII.

  Aunt Charlotte and I were having our one meal of the day together. “His mother told me Billy Upchurch was drop-dead gorgeous. Did you ever see him?”

  “Of course I saw him. That first summer when I was fixing up this place he was over here every day of his visit. He was enthralled by all the construction going on. He couldn’t stop gabbing with the hunky young men doing the work. He was certainly good-looking. He was very attentive to me, too, though I knew he didn’t swing that way and he knew I knew.”

  “Did his mother know, do you think?”

  “I would guess like a good Southern lady she saw only the parts of him she wished to see.”

  “She wasn’t in a wheelchair then, was she?”

  “Oh, no. She was all over the place. Then about ten years ago she was going to fly up to D.C. to visit Billy and when she got to the airport she just crumpled and had to be carried out. Her spine had disintegrated. Lachicotte says she can still put herself to bed and doesn’t need to be helped onto the toilet. You really are a good egg, Marcus, not only shopping for them but sitting with her every afternoon.”

  “She’s one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met.”

  “Have you known many old people?”

  “I forget she’s old. We talk about interesting things—she’s doing archaeology on herself to get beyond her name and the way people see her. She won’t let you call her Mrs. Upchurch and now she’s working on getting beyond the ‘Coral.’ ”

  “You’re making me feel I’ve missed something.”

  “I haven’t known many old people. Before I met Coral, my image of an old person was our landlady’s mother. Her name was Mrs. Harm. That really was her name. And her daughter, who was our landlady from hell, her name was Mrs. Wicket. Mom and I called them Wicked and Harm.”

  “Why was she a landlady from hell?”

  “You really want to hear?”

  “Wicked and Harm—who could resist?”

  “Well, when we moved into this upstairs apartment on Smoke Vine Road—this was in Jewel, the place we lived before I came here—Mrs. Wicket made this deal with Mom. She would take fifty dollars off our rent every month if I would stay downstairs with her mother on weekday afternoons after school. This gave Mrs. Wicket some time to herself and saved her from having to pay for someone to be with Mrs. Harm until six-thirty, when the next home help came. Old Mrs. Harm wasn’t much trouble. She just lay in her bedroom with her oxygen tank and her TV. And she had on a diaper in case—you know. I got used to doing my homework to the sound of TV. It was one of those channels that played the same watered-down music, on and on. I had to go in regularly and check to see that she hadn’t yanked her oxygen tubes out of her nose, and I had these numbers to call if there was an emergency. I’m not sure she knew I was a different person from Mrs. Wicket. Lots of times, the home help evening shift was late and I was supposed to stay until she came. So sometimes Mom and I didn’t eat supper until eight or even later.”

  “That is taking advantage.”

  “Well, there’s more. Mrs. Wicket’s niece came to visit and Mrs. Wicket told Mom I had earned a little holiday and that her niece would sit with Mrs. Harm in the afternoons. But when we got our next rent bill, it was thirty dollars more. The niece had only stayed four days, but Mom said there was no use wasting time doing the math. It was ungenerous of Mrs. Wicket, Mom said, but she was our landlady a
nd we didn’t have a lease. But even when I was back on the job next month’s bill was still thirty dollars more. Mom went down to speak to Mrs. Wicket and when she came back she was really upset. The landlady told her the cost of living had gone up and she couldn’t spare that thirty dollars anymore. Mom said then maybe she didn’t need me anymore, but Mrs. Wicket said, ‘If Marcus stops coming I’m afraid I’ll have to raise the rent.’ ”

  “This makes me so mad I want to explode.”

  “It all worked out eventually.”

  “How?”

  “Mrs. Harm died and I lost my job, and then we only had to pay the increased rent until Mom was killed. You might say fate worked it out for us. Mrs. Wicket came out of it well because she had some kind of limited income insurance which reimbursed her for the month we hadn’t paid and until she found new tenants. My guardian ad litem told me she tried to get the state to reimburse her as well.”

  “Marcus, it grieves me to think how many more unhappy stories you are sitting on.” And Aunt Charlotte did look grieved. She spoke like someone who was hurting because she cared for me. Heartened by this, I was able to recall something else.

  “Believe it or not there was a good part to that night. When Mom came upstairs and told me about Mrs. Wicket’s meanness, we both flew into a rage—well, a mixture of rage and despair. I really lost it and called our landlady every disgusting name I could think of, and then I started calling down curses, all the horrible things I wished on her, and after a while Mom came over and hugged me and told me that was enough. Then she said, ‘Because we are poor, shall we be vicious?’ and went to make us some cocoa. At first I thought it was a question she had addressed to me, but when she came back with the cocoa she said it was out of some violent play written even before Shakespeare’s time. She hadn’t read the play, but this night school teacher she admired so much was always giving them famous quotes that might help them on future tests. And Mom said the quote stayed with her because it gave her a morale boost when she was beating up on herself for being poor. She said maybe it had been selfish to bring me into the world when she had so little to offer, but nevertheless she had wanted me more than anything in her whole life. She said I was her great prize.”

  Aunt Charlotte and I had moved outside to the porch. A balmy evening breeze was blowing across the dunes and the tide was on its way out. The sunbathers and families had packed up their things and departed, leaving only strollers and owners walking their dogs. There was no leash-free “dog hour” in the evening, which I thought was a shame. Barrett was probably back at the Navy brig where his prisoner-trainer would be putting the final touches on his skills. I had been down to check on the turtles: the thermocouple stuck in the sand had registered no rise in temperature. Aunt Charlotte had said to leave the dishes for later and hopped on ahead to the porch, calling over her shoulder for me to bring out another bottle of wine. Ordinarily, since she had begun her secret project, she hopped straight back to her studio immediately after supper, but tonight she was being sociable. Maybe she felt sorry for me after my sad story.

  “Oh, I forgot,” she said when I joined her with the fresh bottle. She had arranged herself to accommodate her casts: the little table that held her bottle and glass on the left where she could reach them, her left leg propped straight ahead on a stool. “Lachicotte phoned while you were next door. He said to tell you he’s booked you for the school bus. School starts the third Monday in August. Do you realize, Marcus, you’ll be in school before my casts are off.”

  “We’ll have a celebration.”

  “Let’s wait until we’re sure I have something to celebrate.”

  My heart clenched at the mention of school. So far I had stayed on top of the first summer of my new life. Though recent days had been demanding, I had so far been able to handle everything on the schedule: turtle check, followed by early morning bike ride to Grief Cottage, where I worked at building back my credibility with the ghost-boy, then home to do general housework, get the shopping list from Roberta, bike to the store, deliver order to Roberta in the kitchen, a solitary lunch, sometimes eaten on the beach beside the turtles, then laundry—if any. (I did worry about the state of Aunt Charlotte’s sheets inside the off-limit studio, but refrained from inquiring.) Next came my afternoon visit with Coral Upchurch, if she was feeling up to it, then supper with Aunt Charlotte, washing up and putting away, evening meditation beside the turtle clutch, unpacking more boxes (if in the mood), then bed, thoughts, dreams, sleeping, and waking to the tides. I was managing everything on the list, and so far keeping enough of a wary balance between inner and outer happenings to stay in the realm people called sanity.

  School would be another thing. School would mean judgment again. It was one thing to try to please a great-aunt who was more or less stuck with me, and visit an old lady who fascinated me, and pursue a precarious relationship with a dead boy, but being reminded that soon I would be thrown back into that cauldron of merciless peers made my spirit shrink.

  “You know,” Aunt Charlotte mused, “the Internet has its upside and its downside. The upside is I can sit in front of my laptop and go room by room through the great museums of the world. I can loiter in front of a picture as long as I please without someone blocking my view or saying something stupid or hurrying me on. I can replenish my wine and art supplies without leaving the house. The downside is that all I have to do to spoil a day is to type ‘wrist sprain, stage 3’ into that little rectangle on the screen and have instant access to all the less than ideal ways the rest of my life can turn out.”

  XXVIII.

  When I had been going through airport security before my flight to Aunt Charlotte’s—the first airplane ride of my life—the lady in front of me got into an argument with the official who wanted her to open her suitcase. Something inside it had looked suspicious when it passed through the x-ray machine. The suitcase was now open on the counter, and the official asked her to take everything out. “You mean I am to lay out my personal items in front of everybody?” “Yes, ma’am, it will be neater if you do it.” “This is highly irregular,” she said, “I have never been asked to do this before in my life. I can assure you there is nothing dangerous in this bag. Do I look like a terrorist?” “Please, ma’am, just remove the items and we’ll locate the problem.” “What if I refuse?” she asked. “Then I can’t let you into the boarding area for your flight.” He had tuned his patience down a notch. “Very well,” she conceded, and in exaggerated slow motion began to lay out the contents of the bag. Faded pink nightgown and worn terrycloth slippers, a yellowing white bra, underpants also in yellowing white, a scruffy stuffed animal that looked like a rat in a red vest, a magnifying glass, a hairbrush with hairs in it, a toiletry bag—“Wait,” he stopped her, “Can we have a look in that bag?” “You’re running this show,” she said with a scornful smile, handing it over for him to ferret out the culprit. “I’m afraid we’ll have to confiscate these, ma’am.” “Be my guest,” she said, repacking her suitcase as slowly as she could. “They are harmless embroidery scissors. Maybe your wife will enjoy them.”

  I often thought of that lady’s things when I was unpacking yet another box from my former life. Laid out “in front of everybody,” many of the contents would look embarrassing or mystifying to others. For me, an occasional item in a box would restore a memory; another would shed light into some obscure corner of my past. But on the whole I would be glad when the final box, packed by a social worker back in Jewel, was emptied and stomped flat and put outside for the island’s trash collection.

  Weeks ago I had concluded there had been no system in the packing of these boxes. If I had been the social worker I would have gone room by room. I would have packed all the books together, all the woman’s clothes, the boy’s things, the kitchen stuff, the bathroom stuff. After all, it was only three rooms, counting the bathroom. But having grown used to finding toothbrushes and kitchen items packed together, children’s books on top of elastic stockings and a shabby coat
, I expected to find discrepant bedfellows in each new box.

  In tonight’s box was Mom’s heavily underlined paperback of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which she always kept rubber-banded with the “serious” hardback that was in Greek on the left side with a stranger’s interlinear translation. And underneath those was an eight-by-ten framed photograph of my coiffed and stylish grandmother, who I now also thought of as Brenda, the older sister, who had referred to my great-aunt as “Crazy Charlotte.” And beneath those was a furry black bear in a gray hoodie—which had reminded me of the lady’s rat in the red coat. At the bottom of the box, its sides buttressed by crumpled newspaper, was a toy lumber truck my mom had loved as a child. Once it had carried six-inch logs of real wood, but all but one of them had disappeared by the time it became mine. I had loaded its truck bed with toy cars, or twigs piled like logs, and once, briefly, a live frog who jumped off in a huff and vanished into the shrubbery. Later, the black bear in his hoodie rode in it, sitting sideways against the one remaining log. GASTON & SONS LUMBER was emblazoned on both sides of the truck in gold letters against a background of forest green.

  Gaston & Sons Lumber had been founded by Samuel Gaston, my great-great-grandfather, in Cass, West Virginia, and after that I hadn’t paid attention whenever Mom tried to take me through her side of my forebears. She must have figured I needed her forebears all the more since for all intents and purposes I was a bastard. For the summer of my twelfth year, which would have been next summer, she had been planning a trip for us to ride the Cass Railroad up to Back Allegheny Mountain, so I could get a feel for the land I came out of. And at a later date, when I had reached a “responsible age,” she had promised to tell me about the other side, the side of the man in the photo in her drawer. Regarding the responsible-age thing she had been right. I certainly had failed to be responsible at age nine, when I showed Wheezer the photo in the drawer. Now I was left to guess what age she’d had in mind for the responsible me—not that it mattered now because it was never going to happen.