Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  “Anything that strikes a chord. A line a day, or nothing, or as much as you want. Anything that strikes you as worth saving for yourself. A passage from something you read, something someone said—write it down when it’s fresh and don’t censor yourself. No one’s going to see this little book but you. And when you have filled up all its pages, go out and buy another one. Store them in a secret place.”

  “Can it be just thoughts I have?”

  “Absolutely. And also,” she smiled, “the thoughts you don’t want to have.” By then she had glimpsed the individual beneath the presenting material.

  ***

  “You know the words a realtor never wants to hear?” Charlie Coggins loved explaining to reporters: “Secure the site. That’s right, those three little words: secure the site.

  “But in this case I gave the order myself. I was early on the scene, thanks to Lachicotte Hayes phoning me on his mobile from the spot of the accident. ‘Right now the fire squad’s knocking down a wall to get to him,’ Lachicotte said, ‘so you’d better come.’ By the time I arrived the medics were getting the boy’s breathing stabilized before they set about moving him. I knew just what had happened. He had gone and done exactly what I’d told him not to. He went into that upstairs south room and fell right through the floor. The ‘wall’ the firemen had been knocking down, on the south side of the house, wasn’t a true wall, just a boarded-up makeshift with some shingles nailed on top, so they had an easier time than they expected. The boy fell through the upper floor and landed in a small enclosure beneath the staircase and beneath part of the south upstairs room. Nobody knew this enclosure existed; even I didn’t, until our helpful Historical Society kindly obtained the old plans for me. Originally it was a wood storage closet built into the south wall, so you could load in firewood from an outside opening and then fetch it from a door inside the house so you didn’t have to brave the elements. Rice planter families stayed though November and it was cold by then.

  “Then, when later owners decided to build the south stairs and the upstairs room, they nailed up a partition to close off the wood closet from inside. They removed its lift latch because it stuck out and then whitewashed over the door.

  “Then, when Hurricane Hazel hit us in 1954, the south porch burned down for reasons still unknown. The rest of the house stood up just fine. New owners, interested in a quick flip, sheared off the burnt porch and boarded up the south wall. That’s the quote-unquote ‘wall’ the firemen knocked down. After my dad bought the cottage from the flippers, who had run out of money, he sent me over to nail some vintage cypress shingles over that unsightly makeshift wall.

  “Like I said, when I got there the medics were still stabilizing the boy’s breathing, they hadn’t moved him yet, and when they did that’s when we all saw what he’d been lying on top of. I say lying, but the skeleton was in a cramped sitting position and the boy had fallen right on top. It looked like he was sitting in the skeleton’s lap.

  “Then everybody began speculating. Folks can’t tolerate loose ends—they’ve got to tie up a story. So it was, Are these the remains of a murder victim? How long have they been buried in there? Is the perpetrator still alive? My first thought was, Oh, ______, now I’ll be stuck with this property until the victim is identified, and maybe even until the murderer is apprehended! But then I recalled going through the house with this very boy not long ago and him talking so much about the boy that got lost during Hazel. That’s when I was almost positive I knew who these bones belonged to. In that case, the sooner I got it confirmed the better, and that’s when I said, ‘Nobody touch or move any of those remains till we get the forensics people here.’ So in this case it was the realtor who gave the order to secure the site. By the way, the inside door to that old wood closet is preserved in fine shape. It’s got its original eighteenth-century lift latch and strap hinge, and even the old wrought nails. I’m going to make a gift of it to the Charleston Museum.”

  ***

  “She must be really mad at me,” I said to Lachicotte when I was emerging from my semi-conscious fugue in the hospital.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because, why isn’t she here?”

  “She wasn’t sure you would want to see her.”

  “Why not?”

  I really could not think why. It would be weeks before all the events (both inner and outer ones) of that day were reclaimed. The first memories to swim up were the bike ride with Cutting Edge hectoring me all the way to Grief Cottage … then a blank … then pain cracking inside me … and another blank … then being carried across sand in daylight with voices calling back and forth against the sound of the ocean, and me thinking as they carried me, Please don’t drop me on one of those Spanish bayonets.

  “Well, that note you left her,” Lachicotte said.

  “What was in it?” I didn’t remember writing a note.

  “You thanked her for taking you in but said you were no longer a good person and you were going somewhere else.”

  The words sounded familiar, but why had I written them?

  Then I remembered they had gone to the surgeon that day. “How is her wrist?” I asked Lachicotte.

  “The news was guarded but good. This surgeon never gets overenthusiastic. Most surgeons don’t. Your aunt is deeply concerned about you, Marcus. She cares about you, more than she shows. The last thing she wants is for you to feel you have to stay with her when you’d rather go somewhere else.”

  I was puzzled. “Why should I want to go anywhere else?”

  ***

  Aunt Charlotte’s secret project, dubbed Filthy Auntie’s Pictures by Cutting Edge, and the events leading up to my invading her studio, would be one of the later memory sequences to return. When I did remember and apologized for disobeying her, she simply nodded and then formally invited me into her studio, much as she had that first time when she wanted “everything to be aboveboard” about my trust and about the “nice monthly stipend” she would receive.

  In the same matter-of-fact monotone she presented me with a “shrink-wrapped” version of her demon-father’s violation of her childhood, beginning when he took her and her doll on business trips when she was five and ending when she ran away at sixteen. (“That’s enough now. With your super-active imagination, Marcus, you can fill in the rest.” She didn’t add, “Besides, you have the memory of the little paintings to help you picture the scenes.”)

  The paintings were never mentioned. They truly did become her “Unpainted Pictures.” I have no idea what she did with them. The corkboard once again bore its former items, tacked up in their former spots: details from landscape paintings she admired, sketches of clouds, of the ocean, the postcards of her own paintings, and gallery announcements and local press cuttings. She asked Lachicotte to move the big easel back to its old spot and would I mind, until her casts were off, changing her linens again and giving the studio a good sweep and dusting in preparation for her return to work.

  The opening entry in my first pocket-sized notebook (those Moleskine ones with the elastic band and sewn spine had just come on the American market) was the old professor’s advice:

  Don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves…

  —The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

  And many notebooks later, when I was in medical school, I recorded this treasure:

  It could be said of all human beings that at times when instinctual frustrations lead to a feeling of hopelessness or futility the fixing of the psyche in the body becomes loosened and a period of psyche and soma unrelatedness has to be endured. […] The idea of a ghost, a disembodied spirit, derives from this lack of essential anchoring of the psyche in the soma, and the value of the ghost story lies in its drawing attention to the precariousness of psyche-soma existence.

  —“Dwelling of Psyche in Body,” Human Nature,

  D. W. Winnicott

  “Yes, the anchoring of the psyche
in the body is very precarious,” I wrote on the following page. “What I was sure of at the time was that I had seen. What I was not sure of was whether I was different from others my age. If so, was I super-sensitive to the uncanny or was I going insane? Could another person of eleven have this experience? Or was this my experience alone because the ghost-boy was inseparable from my history, my personality, my needs? I knew he was related to my life, but he also appeared to be an entity on his own terms. How could he be both? What I needed was a mature personality who could earn my trust, comprehend my contradictions, and help me form a concept large enough to contain them.”

  ***

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” My leg was in its cast. I felt perfectly fine. Why was this my fourth day in the hospital?

  “Well, I am telling you now,” said Lachicotte patiently.

  “But it’s too late! They’ve moved everything. I found him—I was the one who fell on top of him, for God’s sake. And you’re just telling me all this now?”

  “You were unconscious when we found you, Marcus. We didn’t know if you were going to make it.”

  “But I didn’t get to see him.”

  “You can still do that. The remains are at Johnson’s funeral home. I’ll take you over when we get you discharged.”

  “But I’ll never see the way he was when—”

  “They took lots of in situ photographs before anything got touched or moved. Charlie Coggins had the presence of mind to secure the site. You can look at the photographs. And the bones will be laid out in their anatomical order.”

  “Why is he at the funeral home?”

  “The forensic team finished their work on him there. It was relatively quick. Dates and times matched. They concluded he was hiding in that enclosure, probably from the hurricane, and then the fire started, perhaps from his cigarette dropped on the porch, and he died from asphyxiation while waiting out the hurricane. When the cousin arrives, she will be the one to decide where the remains go.”

  “What cousin?” I couldn’t believe the unfairness of it all. I was the one who found him and then they went ahead and did everything without telling me!

  “Well, she’s that cousin of Mr. Dace, very old now, the one who settled out of court with the Barbours fifty years ago. The Barbour family was able to provide her old address and it turned out she was still living there. Her DNA matched up with the remains and now Charlie Coggins is flying her in from Louisville at his expense.”

  “Why is he doing that?”

  “She says she won’t be at peace till she sees the boy. Or what is left of him.”

  “Lachicotte, I need to see him. This is important. Can’t you get that surgeon to discharge me?”

  “It’s not the surgeon who’s keeping you here, Marcus. They need to make sure you’re not a danger to yourself before they sign you out. If you had swallowed a few more of those tablets, we would be making arrangements for your burial, too.”

  So again I was trapped in my old situation. The wheels of the law had to turn first. Nevertheless, I felt robbed, betrayed. This was far worse than missing out on the hatchlings’ boil. Unfairly, I measured Lachicotte against William, my ad litem, who had immediately understood I needed to see my mom’s body before it went to the undertaker.

  “Can you at least tell me how we looked when you found us?”

  “How you looked?”

  “How we looked. After the firemen had knocked down the wall, and you first saw me and him. What did you see?”

  “I saw only you, Marcus.”

  “But what about him?”

  “You were as much as I could take in. We didn’t know if you were going to make it.”

  “I can’t believe nobody bothered to tell me.”

  “Well, I do have some good news. Your friend Coral Upchurch, who’s on the floor below you, is recovering. She’s going home tomorrow, weak but on the mend.”

  ***

  It was the kind of human interest story everybody loves. Long ago mystery solved—and on the fiftieth anniversary of Hurricane Hazel, when the mystery had begun. A local boy falling on top of a skeleton boy who had been sitting cramped in a forgotten closet in an abandoned cottage built two hundred years ago. It had all the elements. It had “legs,” as the newspeople say. It had staying power. Today I can tap in “Johnny Dace” and see those in situ images photographed by the forensics team. There are his bones huddled upright in a corner of a forgotten closet, waiting to be found. I was identified as the boy who discovered him. Marcus Harshaw, age eleven, a resident of the island.

  We buried him in the cemetery of Lachicotte’s church. Coral Upchurch was present in her wheelchair, attended by Roberta Dumas. The DNA cousin, in her eighties, took the spotlight—for a while. Her life had clearly been lived at the other end of the spectrum from Coral Upchurch’s and she had not held up as well. But she could still walk and talk and had some faded Polaroid snapshots of Johnny Dace in her purse. She blossomed under the attention of the newspeople until the discrepancies in her narrative piled too high and toppled. The Polaroids were of a much younger Johnny, a frowning child who was too much for his parents to handle; they had sent him off several times to a facility for wayward youth, but kept bringing him home to try again. In a later version of the cousin’s, he was a smart, sweet boy if you knew how to handle him and had been like a son to her. Finally, in her toppling version, Elvis himself had passed through Louisville and told Johnny Dace, “You could pass as my double.” But the problem was that Elvis had only begun his career the year Johnny Dace went missing in the hurricane.

  That was when Charlie Coggins murmured to her that there was just enough time before her departing flight for him to show her the cottage where her only remaining kin had spent the last fifty years. Refusing the realtor’s offer to pay for transferring the remains back to Kentucky, she signed papers releasing him to be buried on the island on the condition that she would not be liable for any of the funeral and burial expenses.

  Before Johnny’s burial, Lachicotte took me to the funeral home to see his remains. He was five-feet-eight-and-a-half, had bow legs, and large hands. I had hoped to check out the broken and badly repaired nose, but the nose was gone. They allowed me to run my hand along the long tibia bones.

  We ordered his stone from the monument place Lachicotte’s family always used. It was down the coast, near Georgetown, and we drove there in a 1936 Bentley Derby touring car Lachicotte had just taken on. We had the top down, or rather Lachicotte was having a new top made, and my hair whipped in the coastal wind the way Pickett’s did when he was arriving in Ed’s Jeep to destroy my evening. The steering was on the right side of the Bentley and we’d moved the passenger seat back all the way to accommodate my straight-leg cast.

  At the monument place, a very tan young woman in shorts and a T-shirt was at work outdoors chiseling a stone for a monk who had died in 1904. After Hurricane Floyd had flooded the monastery in 1999, she explained, all the monks’ remains had to be dug up and relocated to a new cemetery built on higher ground. New stones were needed because marble crumbled when you tried to move it. “This is the longest order we’ve ever taken on. Eighty-one stones! We’ve been working on them for almost five years. We have to do it between other jobs, but the abbot said that was fine, because monks were taught to live in a different kind of time anyway.”

  Lachicotte was fascinated, and so she took us around to the back where some finished stones were stacked on wooden trays, waiting for delivery to the monastery. All the stones were the same modest rectangular size and carved exactly alike. IHS at the top, then underneath the monk’s name, below that, his dates of birth, profession, and death.

  “What’s IHS?” I asked.

  “The first three letters of Jesus’s name in Greek,” she said, and Lachicotte obligingly spelled out the name for me: I-h-s-u-s.

  We had gone back and forth about choosing the appropriate stone to lie on top of Johnny Dace’s grave. Aunt Charlotte and Lachicott
e and I were dividing the cost among us.

  “But if we just put his birth and death dates, it’ll look like any old boy who was born in 1940 and died fourteen years later,” I reasoned.

  “Yes, but when in doubt, less is usually more,” said Aunt Charlotte. “We want to stay away from the maudlin.”

  “What’s maudlin?” I asked.

  “Smarmy, sentimental, melodramatic, like for instance, ‘Lost in Hurricane Hazel, 1954, Miraculously Found, 2004.’ That still doesn’t tell enough and it uses far too many letters.”

  “Let’s think what he would want,” Lachicotte finally suggested, “if he were here (he-ah) to give the order himself.”

  By the time Lachicotte and I headed south in the Bentley Derby to the monument place, we had settled on the simplest information.

  “That’s probably enough,” I said. “When Mom and I used to discuss our funerals and burials, she said all she wanted on her stone was ALICE HARSHAW, and her dates. She didn’t even want her family name on her stone. I still haven’t decided.”

  “Decided what?” Lachicotte asked. “What you want on yours?”

  “No, I haven’t ordered Mom’s stone yet. My ad litem back in North Carolina is going to take care of it when I decide. The money’s all set up to pay for it. All I have to do is say what I want on her stone.”

  The young woman at the monument place sat down with us and made some sketches. JOHNNY DACE with birth and death dates. She showed us the possible fonts on a chart. We both liked the name in square capital letters. “It looks like a Latin inscription,” said Lachicotte.

  “I wish we had something more,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like those monks have. Something above themselves to watch over them.”