“What kind of reason?”
She laughed again. This time it sounded like glass breaking. “Who you think send my Ronnie to school?”
“I suppose—” I looked away, out over the dark, inscrutable face of the sea. Moonlight touched the whitecaps with brilliance, making a shining swath across the water. “I suppose Uncle Hoadley?”
“Yes. Mr. Hoadley. That why people think Mr. Hoadley be Ron’s—that why people talk about Mr. Hoadley and me. But we never. Not Mr. Hoadley. I don’t mind the talk; don’t make no matter to Belle. Belle used to talk. For what Mr. Hoadley done for my Ronnie, people can talk about Belle. Belle be grateful to Mr. Hoadley for what he done. But you must know it ain’t true, Miss Stella, because you is my friend, and it would pain me most grievous to have you think that I—and for Mr. Hoadley, too. It ain’t fair for you to think that he—”
“But I wouldn’t! He couldn’t! Not Uncle Hoadley!”
She sat up and put her hand lightly on my knee. “You just a baby, ain’t you?”
“I’m nineteen.”
“Tron, my first, were born when I were sixteen; Ronnie when I were seventeen. But you still wet behind the ears. Ain’t going to be easy for you in Illyria. Listen. Listen to Belle. Things get too much for you, come to me. Belle will help.”
Things were too much for me right then. I scrambled to my feet, spattering sand. “Thank you, Belle. I appreciate it. I won’t forget.”
“I won’t forget, neither, Miss Stella. Belle never forget. And, ma’am, ever you need Belle, just follow the path behind the big dune. But when you come to the fork, remember to go to the left hand. Right hand lead to Mr. James’s house.” She held her hand out to me. I did not want to take it because, despite the heat, my hands were sweating cold sweat. I seemed to be standing in a stagnant pool of dirty, icy water. I felt in the pocket of my dress, my beautiful dress made for my trousseau, and pulled out a handkerchief, rolling it between my palms.
Belle put her hand lightly on my shoulder. “Forgive me, Miss Stella, ma’am. I come bringing the gift of friendship in my hands, and all I give you is fear. Don’t hold it against me. Better you hear it from me, better you hear what is true, than all the mud people been slinging around. Some of it going to hit you. Give me your pretty little handkerchief and I take it home and wash and iron it for you. Let Belle do at least that little thing.”
It was a handkerchief Terry had given me. I held it in a damp ball, tight in my fist. “No, it’s all right, thank you, really.”
She bowed her head, as though I had hurt her, but accepted it. “I know you will be good to my Ronnie. Belle don’t matter. Only her boys.” She stood in front of me on the dune, raised herself up on tiptoe, and stretched her arms up to the sky as though to pluck a star. “Don’t forget, Miss Stella, ma’am, you going to come see my Granddam. Be important. She want to like you, but iffen you don’t let her and her heart turns dark against you, oh, I would be afeared for you then. You will come? You will?”
“Yes. I’ll come.”
“And soon. It be urgent.”
Ron James, leading a red horse by the halter, crested the dune, silhouetted against the moonlight. “Mother, Mrs. Renier.”
Belle, to my surprise, drew back. “Ronnie.”
“What are you up to, Mother?”
“Talking with Mrs. Renier. With my friend. I go now, son. The Granddam be calling. Take care where you go with that horse. Scrub ain’t safe for you no more, black scrub nor white scrub.”
“I can take care of myself. Good night, Mother.”
Belle smiled, curled her fingers in a small gesture of farewell, ran lightly towards the scrub. Ron stood, one hand resting on the red flank of the horse. Silence lay between us. To break it, I said, “That’s a nice horse.”
“Yes. Thales used to belong to Miss Olivia. She gave him to me when I came back to Illyria. He’s old now, and can’t do much beyond a steady walk—he has rheumatism, too—but he’s a big help when I have to go see someone back in the scrub. Thales can go places I couldn’t possibly manage on foot. No wonder some of the people have never left their little clearings in their lives.”
I held out my hand, palm up, and the horse snuffled into it, pulling back his lips and showing his long, yellow teeth, but not at all ferociously. “What did you say his name was?”
“Thales. After Thales of Miletus. Ionic philosopher. He predicted the eclipse of the sun in the reign of the Lydian King Alyattes, and he maintained that water is the origin of all things. It is water out of which everything arises, and into which everything resolves itself. Well-educated, aren’t I, Mrs. Renier?” I thought of my conversation with Belle and did not answer the bitter question. “I’ll walk you home, Mrs. Renier. Forgive me for interfering again, but it might be as well if you don’t see too much of my mother. Her powers are not like Honoria’s, but neither are they to be taken lightly.”
“You believe in these—these powers?”
He pressed the toe of his English shoe against the wet sand, so that water oozed about it. He wore an English riding habit, shabby but still quite presentable. “You expect me to say no, don’t you?”
“I never know what to expect from you, Ron.”
We walked along the water’s edge, down the beach towards Illyria. “A belief in Honoria’s powers, or my mother’s, was not included in my education and medical training. It would have been laughed at as savage superstition. But I can’t say an unqualified no, Mrs. Renier. Perhaps it’s because I’m a Negro, because I have one foot still in Africa.”
—But only one foot, I thought, looking at him, at the milkiness underlying the darkness of his skin. If I had grown up in the South I would have realized immediately that Ron’s father, if not Uncle Hoadley, was a white man. “Ron, I don’t have one foot in Africa. Why do I take it seriously?”
“Perhaps it’s because you love and trust Honoria.”
“But Honoria’s afraid of her powers, isn’t she?”
“No, Mrs. Renier. Fear isn’t the right word. But my grandmother has seen powers misused and abused. When she was a girl in Kairogi they were all mixed up with witchcraft. And here in this country it has been even worse, because she has seen powers deliberately used for evil.”
“By whom?”
Without answering, he led me to the broken-down dock on which we had sat the evening before, helped me up. Water lapped against the barnacled pilings. I waited for him to speak until I thought that he would not. But he said, as though there had been no pause, “Mrs. Renier, I’ve spent most of my life away from Illyria. When I was in England I thought of myself as being wholly a black American; or perhaps an Illyrian would be more accurate. But when I returned to Illyria I found that I had almost forgotten my own country, and particularly the scurb, where I was born. I had almost forgotten my mother and the Granddam. I remembered Honoria and Clive and the old ladies and conveniently forgot all the rest. It was a grave error.”
“Why? What kind of an error?”
“An error or underestimation. If I take Honoria’s powers seriously, it’s a mistake to forget the powers of the scrub.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t, Mrs. Renier.”
Again there was a silence, in which I felt condemned for my obtuseness. “Please. If you’d try to tell me—”
He kicked his heels against the rough piling. “It’s something you have to understand through your pores and in your blood, not with your mind. I had forgotten that, too. I had thought that my mind was capable of coping with my background. But I’m half Zenumin, and I would do well to remember it. When you came to Illyria, Mrs. Renier, there wasn’t anybody in the scrub who didn’t know about it.”
“But how—”
“The people of the scrub have a way of communication which is more effective than the telegraph. It’s the way of the jungle, and it’s been forgotten in England. But it’s real. It works. It is not to be taken lightly. Honoria knows this. And she knows that the dar
k people of the scrub fear her, as well as respect her.”
“Why would they fear her?”
A wave broke against the end of the dock with a sound like a sigh. “Because of her powers. Because she will not lend her powers to the Zenumins. Because she knows the kind of things that go on in the dark clearings. Most of the people in the scrub are simple, decent, God-fearing people trying to scratch a living out of the ground and maintaining a kind of integrity which civilization has forgotten. But there are dark things in the scrub, too.”
“Dark things?”
His voice was suddenly savage. “You want an example, Mrs. Innocent Renier? All right, I’ll give you one. Where there are already too many babies, there is no sentimentality about them. There isn’t enough food for those who survive, which may be why I don’t get more angry when babies are brought to me too late; if I save their lives, what am I saving them for? If they grow up at all it will be to be hated, abused, and sometimes obscenely murdered. But there are other obscenities. Babies have been sacrificed in the dark clearings, because the inebriated god likes to get drunk on human blood.”
“Ron—Ron—no—”
He jumped down from the dock, splashing into the small waves of the incoming tide. “Does that seem so strange to you, Mrs. Renier? How different is the altar of the scrub from your Christian altars? Isn’t blood part of the sacrifice there, too?”
“But that’s different—it’s different—”
“Why? To kill a baby for sacrifice is one of the more merciful ways of death. Their throats are slit quickly. It’s not like the long-drawn-out agony of a lynching done by Christian white men.”
“Ron, I was brought up an atheist, I don’t understand these things, but it’s not the same, it can’t be! Ron, you don’t really mean it, do you? Not babies—” I looked at him in anguish; in the moonlight his face was impassive, austere; he wore an expression I had seen before only on Honoria.
He spoke slowly, thoughtfully, the rage drained from his voice. “Mrs. Renier, for my grandparents’ sake, for Terry’s sake, I feel a sense of responsibility for you. I wish I didn’t. Because I don’t know how I’m going to keep your youth and your idiotic ignorance from leading you—and the rest of us—into danger. Because the air smells of danger. We both know that. And part of the danger is your innocence. You don’t understand, for instance, that I’m a Negro. You don’t understand that I’m a doctor, and that I’m hamstrung. You don’t understand that Illyria is my grandmother’s house and I would give my right arm to use it as a hospital, and instead we can live in it only as servants. To bring my patients there would be to endanger everybody.”
“Why? Why, Ron!”
“The Riders wouldn’t stand for it, for one. I’d be lynched. You ever seen a lynching, Mrs. Renier?”
“No—no—”
“You should. Makes that baby sacrifice that upset you so look like child’s play. I’ll tell you about a lynching. Jimmy. Honoria’s and Clive’s son, Jimmy, went after a man with a knife. It wasn’t the first time my mother’d pleasured herself with somebody else, but it was the first time he caught her at it. So he went out to kill. But he got drunk first, and he wasn’t quiet about it, and the Riders were waiting for him. They lynched him. They rolled him in burning tar. Do you know what hot tar on a man’s flesh smells like, Mrs. Renier? It smells like roasting beef. Delicious.”
“Stop—stop—you can’t possibly remember—”
“I wasn’t born till three months afterwards. No, I don’t remember Jimmy’s lynching. But he isn’t the only Negro around here who’s been lynched. I saw a man strung up simply because he was a Zenumin. If the Granddam is filled with hate, she has plenty of reason. They tarred Jimmy, the noble Riders, and they feathered him, and then they dug out his eyes. They did other things to him, too. I won’t tell you those. Then they took the bloody, screaming pulp which was all that was left of what had once been a man and they hanged him on a tree and left him there swinging. Mado went and cut him down. She was a small woman but she carried him in her arms to her carriage and brought him back to Illyria.”
I rolled over on the rotting boards of the dock and pressed my face against the wood.
After a long time I felt Ron’s hand on my shoulder. “You’re like the twins. Everybody thinks the twins are idiots. In the world’s eyes they are. So people laugh at them and show off their little tricks. I’m no better than anyone else. They have fantastic memories, even for dates before their time. As what hour and on what day did Claudius Broadley start the building of Illyria? When did Honoria first come to the beach? What was the dark moment when evil entered the scrub? Go on back to the house, Mrs. Renier, before they send Clive out to hunt for you again.”
“Was it true?”
“Yes. Quite true.”
“I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it.” He helped me down from the dock. The tide had moved in, and we had to splash through the lacy criss-crossings of wavelets to get to dry sand. The beach around us was vast and empty.
“Where’s your horse—Thales—”
He looked up and down the empty beach. “Either gone back to Illyria or up to the twins’ cottage. Most likely up. Will you be all right to walk home alone?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
He gave me a small bow of farewell (Did he indeed wish me to fare well? I believed, against the evidence, that he did), turned, and ran up the beach towards the small and comfortable warmth of the twins’ cottage.
I could not run. I walked, slow as Aunt Olivia, back to Illyria.
5
Nothing had changed.
Uncle Hoadley was reading. Aunt Olivia was playing the piano, Finbarr at her feet. Aunt Irene and Aunt Mary Desborough were bent over the backgammon table. The kitten, curled up on top of the piano, announced my presence by leaping onto the keyboard with a crash. Aunt Olivia pulled him into her lap. “Hoadley, you’ve got your lamp turned up too high. I can smell the mantle burning.”
“Much obliged, Auntie.” Uncle Hoadley turned down the guttering flame. It lit up his delicate and austere face, and I wanted to put my arms around him, both as a request for comfort and as an affirmation of faith in him. But nobody would understand such wild and impulsive behavior.
I sat on the old day bed, covered with the beautiful but scratchy Oriental rug, and listened to Aunt Olivia playing Scarlatti, to Aunt Irene and Aunt Mary Desborough rattling dice, watched Uncle Hoadley quietly turning the pages of his dark, dry-looking legal tome. As Aunt Irene and Aunt Mary Desborough finished their game and Aunt Irene started to put it away, Aunt Olivia turned from the piano, swinging around on the stool, which gave an anguished creak. “You know who I thought about today? General F. X. Everard.”
Uncle Hoadley looked over his book; his wire-rimmed reading glasses had slid halfway down his nose. “Do you still have his pistols, Auntie?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Where are they?”
“I keep them in a safe place. When the children were little—Therro and Jimmy, and you, too, Hoadley—I was afraid one of you might get hold of them. Do you remember him—the General?”
“Of course, Auntie.” He looked at me, generously drawing me into memories I did not share. “General Everard was Treasurer of the United States for a while, Stella child—he was appointed by Lincoln. I don’t know where he was from originally, or how he happened to come to San Feliz.”
“He had money,” Aunt Des said reprovingly. “He wasn’t quality. His daughter built a house in San Feliz, but he chose to live on top of a dune in a big tent, which fascinated the boys—didn’t it, Hoadley?”
“It did indeed. We wanted to live in a tent, too.”
Aunt Mary Desborough, putting backgammon pieces in an inlaid teakwood box, clucked in reminiscence. “He began to study Greek after he was eight, and Mado said he had a brilliant mind. I suppose he was considered an eccentric.”
“That’s doubtless why he pitched his tent near us,” A
unt Olivia said.
Aunt Mary Desborough bristled. “I, for one, do not consider myself eccentric.”
“Perhaps, Auntie,” Uncle Hoadley spoke in his calm way, “all Aunt Olivia means is that the General knew that you would not criticize him, or make unkind judgments.”
“Know ye not,” Aunt Olivia murmured, “that ye shall judge angels?”
“One Corinthians, chapter six, point for me. Eighteen to twelve,” Aunt Mary Desborough triumphed. “And it is hardly pertinent.”
“Why not? You ought to be used to angels, having lived in Illyria as long as you have. General Everard looked like a great, dark, fallen angel in his big black cape. It had a black fur collar, and he always wore it in cold weather, and we used to wonder how he kept warm in his tent—it does get cold at the beach in winter, Stella, though that’s hard to believe in August. I wasn’t frightened of the General the way you were, Des. I thought he was grand.”
“He was a horrid old man.”
“Why? Because he saw us all as women? One morning I was talking to him, standing on the dune by his tent—I’d gone to pick scuppernong grapes and he came out to chat, and we saw Mado walking to the beach in her bathing suit, and he said, ‘Mado has damn fine legs, and she knows it.’ First I was shocked—people didn’t swear in front of ladies in those days the way they do now—and then I giggled, because it was true. She did, and she did know it.” Aunt Olivia rose from the piano stool, took her case, and limped over to the day bed, sitting beside me and putting her hand firmly on my knee. “Touch. He loved young people, and was fascinated by us—because to him we were still young, then, Mado and Des and I. He had a theory that if he touched us—or, what was much better, the truly young, Therro or the little boys, if he put his hand on their knee, like this, or held on to us while he walked on the beach—an electric current would pass into him and invigorate him and prolong his life.”
“I never let him touch me,” Aunt Mary Desborough said. “He was a lecherous old roué.”
The Other Side of the Sun Page 14
