“Uncle Hoadley, it’s my country now, too. I want to learn more about it.”
“Then let me help you. Don’t go off on tangents of your own.”
“I’d be very grateful if you would help me.”
He studied the glow of his cigar carefully for several moments, as though seeking inspiration. “The aunties will be delighted to fill you in. They are, in an odd, off-balance way, highly educated. But of course that is a tradition in the South. A lady should be able to talk intelligently on any subject, though she must never flaunt her knowledge, nor presume upon it.”
“Not only the great-aunts. Honoria and Clive.”
The small light of the cigar paused in mid-air, then resumed. “Mado taught Honoria a great deal. And Clive was given an education at Nyssa that was unusual for a slave.”
“Ronnie was sent to school in England—” I wanted, I needed to hear Uncle Hoadley’s version. “Who sent him?”
“That’s beside the point, Stella. Presumably someone who thought it the correct thing to do. Whether or not it was, I am not sure. Often when we think we are acting for the best it turns out to have been for the worst. I am constantly finding this out in my own life.” He leaned over and stubbed out his half-smoked cigar on the veranda floor. “Sometimes I have kept a promise, simply because I, Hoadley, have made it, when it would be better to break it. This point in time in which we find ourselves is no hour for either impulse or blind loyalty, any more than it was when Mado came to this country as a young bride and could not understand why she should not upset applecarts.”
It was quite clear that Uncle Hoadley was warning me: ‘Do not try to be clever, Stella; do not ask questions; do not go back to the War Room or the map on the wall; there are secrets there which only Tron Zenumin and I know. Do not try to find out too much about the hooded riders, either the white or the black.’ But all he actually said was, “I loved my Aunt Mado too, you know, Stella. But I am not under the illusion, as the aunties are, that her lofty idealism was a virtue, or her imaginary angels a safeguard. We live in a world of extraordinary complexity and very little light, and I have spent far too much of my life cleaning up the chaos made by the idealists to have any illusions about them.”
The warning was in his voice again.
He said, “I will add one more thing. I agree with my Uncle Theron and my Cousin James that we were wrong to bring the slaves over from Africa and that we must pay for this wrong. What I am trying to do, right now, is to make this payment in a realistic way, so that perhaps your children will not suffer for the sins of their forebears. My plan may seem extreme, but when one is dealing with malignancy only extreme methods are possible. And I am not alone. I am being backed in high places. Now, good night, my dear.”
I accepted my dismissal. I no longer had the slightest desire to ask questions. I did not want to know what Uncle Hoadley was going to do.
3
In the morning after breakfast I went out to the kitchen.
Ron was there, and so were the twins, come to be fed, corn bread and love. They brought in the little tame lizard and let him run about the kitchen table, climb up onto our arms and shoulders. It clung to the soft stuff of my dress with its little cool claws, and rolled its jeweled eyes at me, and the twins clapped their hands in joy. But I understood that the lizard was to be brought out of the hanging basket only by Willy; this was his great and special privilege.
Minou pranced into the kitchen, tail twitching, paws lifted high; followed by Finbarr, elderly, creaky, tail pluming; followed by Aunt Olivia, leaning heavily on her silver-handled cane.
“Miss Olivia—” Ron went to her.
“You said I could start moving about, and I knew you were all in here, and I’m tired of being left out.”
“All right, then. Sit with us for a spell.”
“I want a cup of coffee.”
“No, Miss Olivia. Too acid. I’d rather you take tea in the morning for a while longer.”
Finbarr circled the kitchen table, sniffing ecstatically. Willy surreptitiously slipped a bit of corn bread to him. Minou jumped onto the windowsill and watched us condescendingly, his sides pulsing with the bliss of his purr as he absorbed the warmth of old wood, of the slanting rays of the morning sun. The breeze lifted and ruffled his fur, the breeze which always stirred about Illyria, brooding over the face of the waters.
“Honoria,” Aunt Olivia said, “do you think you have time to rub my back with witch hazel this morning?”
“We’ll see.”
“I love the smell of witch hazel. Only of course it shouldn’t be spelled witch at all. It should be w-y-c-h, as in wych elm. ‘Wych’ means wild. So it’s only wild hazel, that’s all. It has nothing to do with witches. I’m glad. Ronnie, when can I go back into the water? It does ease my joints.”
“Next week, Miss Livvy, if you keep on doing this well.”
The old lady leaned lightly on her elbows, always slightly lemon-scented. “To feel the sharpness of the shells—oh, Ronnie, the pleasure of feeling is worth the small discomfort. To feel the shells and sand, to relax in the warmth, to know the sun … it means … it means …”
Ron’s voice was gentle. “What, Miss Livvy?”
Aunt Olivia drew in her breath sharply. “You’re a doctor, Ron, don’t you know? Life. That I am alive.”
Willy took the little lizard and laid it on the table by her hand.
She smiled at him, stroking it. “I wish I still believed the way I used to before Nyssa burned. It was all tidy: heaven and earth and hell. Now I can’t tell them apart. What do you think, Stella? When I die, will there be any more me?”
In the kitchen of Illyria, here with Honoria and Clive, the twins, here with Ron, there was no place for evasion. “I don’t know. My father didn’t—didn’t believe in the things the Church teaches. And I just took it for granted that he was right. Until he died.”
“And then?”
“It didn’t make sense, the idea that my father was not, that death had stopped his being. But that’s as far as I’ve got. I think he was right about the Church, you see. We can’t turn our backs on science.”
Aunt Olivia giggled. “Man and monkey: now why does the Church go into a panic about things like that? Why should it make God any less God if we’re descended from monkeys? Any more than it made him less God when Galileo said the world wasn’t the center of the universe? It just puts us in our place, that’s all. God’s already in his. Oh, my loves, my loves, I blow hot and cold. Sometimes I’m all scientific and dust to dust and ashes to ashes and that’s the end.”
“Ashes, ashes …” Willy whispered.
“We all fall down,” Harry said, and blew his nose.
Aunt Olivia returned the lizard. “If I could die like Mado …”
“How did she die?” I asked.
“The way she lived. She went into death the way she went into every new morning. She had a great deal of pain, but she never complained. We knew when it was very bad because she got white around the mouth. Honoria made her some kind of herb tea, and that helped, didn’t it?”
“Some,” Honoria said.
“Every day she got weaker, but it never stopped her laughter. The day she died she called me in and said she had one last request to make of me—” Again the little girl’s giggle. “I’m not sure what I expected. Something cosmic, I suppose. But what she asked was that I find something each day to laugh at. She said, ‘Cry as much as you like, Livvy. Grief is part of life, and a good part. But you must balance it with laughter.’ I’ve tried, and mostly I’ve succeeded. Some days it’s been hard to find anything funny. But looking at myself looking for something funny can be funny itself. Then she asked for Honoria, and they were alone for a long time. I’ve often wondered what they said.” She looked at Honoria and smiled.
Honoria did not smile. “She asked me to make her ice cream.”
“I heard her ask you that,” Aunt Olivia said. “When the ice cream was ready she said it was the best you�
��d ever made. She ate a whole bowlful. Then she smiled and said that it was time, and she gave a little gasp, and she was dead.”
Minou jumped down from the windowsill and pounced on an invisible enemy. Finbarr rose creakily and stood leaning against Aunt Olivia. She fondled his ears. “Thank you, my dears.”
“You’re all right, Miss Olivia,” Ron said.
“I’m afraid of the dark. Do you know how frightened I am? Well, of course you do. I tell you, not only with my words, but with all of me … To go willingly. That’s important, isn’t it? To give all this up freely, not holding on.”
Ron said, “You’re not going to die yet, Miss Livvy.”
“Someone is. Someone from Illyria. One of us.” Aunt Olivia accented her words with her cane. “Irene was in hysterics this morning because Belle told her someone in Illyria is going to die, and she’s scared out of her wits. She’s even more afraid than I am. But I doubt if it will be Irene. Irene said that when she went swimming this morning there was a dark shadow hovering over the ramp, a buzzard moving in slow, even circles, his wings almost motionless, gliding around. Waiting for death. I’m with Irene in hating buzzards.”
I, too, had seen the buzzard, had stood on the beach and been caught in the shadow of its circling.
Aunt Olivia banged with her cane, and said, too brightly, “Who can identify: If we begin with certainties we will end in doubt. But if we begin with doubts, and bear with them patiently, we may end in certainty.”
None of us could.
“Bacon. De Augmentis. Did I begin in certainty? Is that my trouble? I don’t think so. Being certain has never been one of my virtues—or vices. And it doesn’t take second sight to predict death in a house full of old people. Stella, will you and Ronnie help me back to bed? I think I’m a little tired.”
I felt a string pulling me, an invisible string, tugging, drawing me to the unused wing of Illyria where there was a used room, a War Room, a room used by Uncle Hoadley and Tron.
I pushed the revolving bookcase in the library. The door creaked itself around so that I could slip into the ballroom. Finbarr tried to follow me, but I pushed the bookshelves back and tiptoed softly across the sandy floor. Behind me I could hear Finbarr whining and scratching at the bookcase.
I did not listen. Would not. I was drawn through the empty rooms, upstairs and down.
Tron was at the desk in the War Room. I had known he would be. Yet I had come. I wanted to see the map. I looked across the desk, past Tron, who blocked half the map. But it was Africa. The colored pins marked Kairogi.
Tron spoke in his rather frightening parody of Uncle Hoadley. “What are you looking for, Mrs. Renier?”
I protested too loudly, “I’m not looking for anything. I’m just exploring.” There was no longer any doubt that the War Room had something to do with Kairogi. I had to go to Cousin James.
I turned to leave, but Tron stopped me. “Explorers don’t explore for nothing. Explore for something. You looking for what? Tell Tron.”
“Terry, I suppose.”
Tron was very still, as though everything in him had stopped, the blood in his veins, his heart. He had taken me literally.
“No, no, not really, not here in this room—”
“Then why you say it?”
“I just meant—I need to find out about him, his background, his home—the way I was doing the other day when I came here. He told me—”
Tron leaned across the desk. I thought he was going to grab me as his mother had done. “What he tell you?”
“Just about Illyria, and how much he loves it—”
“And?”
“That’s all.”
I knew that Tron knew that I was lying. “Miss Stella.” He was very gentle, very courteous, very Uncle Hoadley. “I did suggest to you, didn’t I, that it would be wiser for you not to come up here?”
“But why?”
“Miss Stella, why don’t you trust me?”
“Why should I? Your mother pretended to be my friend, and then she hurt me.”
“Now, Miss Stella.” A small-bodied, long-legged spider was crawling across the big green blotter on the desk. I watched it approaching Tron, scuttling along as though in a hurry. Tron picked it up. “You just don’t understand my mother. She didn’t want for to hurt you. The Granddam had her all upset and angry. If you’d just been nice to her and done what she asked and not gone running off with the twins that way—that was very wrong, Mrs. Renier, ma’am, very foolish.” Slowly, absently, Tron pulled one leg off the spider, then another and another, one by one, then dropped the mutilated blob of its body to the floor. “You listen to me, and to my mother, and everything be all right.” A mosquito shrilled past my ear, louder than Tron. “Mrs. Renier, ma’am, you sweet and pretty and young. Don’t take it amiss if little old Tron give you a warning. You don’t want to get hurt, you do what Tron tell you to do.” He reached up and clapped his hands against the mosquito, rubbed the blood on the blotter.
I shivered. Suddenly and at last I understood. I understood that nothing times three equals nothing. Nothing. I had seen his nothing annihilate a spider, a mosquito. I could easily see in my mind’s eye this nothing taking a magnifying glass and gently roasting ants to death.
If zero is nothing, so is hate. Not the hate of passion, but the hate I felt from Tron, freezing the warmth of his politeness. This hate can destroy something.
Take three apples and multiply them by this kind of cold nothingness and they will disappear.
Willy and Harry knew that. This was why they had reacted as they did.
I ran from the room.
Out of the House, down the ramp, onto the beach, forgetting the straw hat. I had to get to Cousin James.
The sun hit me like molten brass. Even with one of the shading hats I could never make it all the way in the heat of the sun.
But I started up the beach.
I had not gone far when I came upon the twins with a bucket of crabs. They waved their arms in greeting.
I felt a shadow, a movement behind me. I turned in panic. But it was Finbarr, come to guard me.
“Go home, pretty lady,” Willy said. “Too hot. Boys used to sun.”
“Too hot for lady.” Harry nodded.
Willy held out his cupped hands, opening them slightly, and the lizard poked its head out, weaving it inquisitively back and forth, jeweled eyes gleaming. “Go home pretty lady. Bad nothings is out.”
“Bad, bad nothings.” Harry wrinkled his face anxiously.
The sun was indeed battering me. I reached my forefinger towards the lizard, and Willy held him out so that I could stroke his head. I felt the strange coolness of the green-gold scales. “Boys, is Ronnie at your cottage?”
Willy shook his head. “In scrub.”
I tried to think what I ought to do. They were quite right. It was too hot for me to walk to Little Nyssa. “Boys, could you get a message to Cousin James for me?” They nodded. What kind of message would they be able to carry in their short-circuited minds? If I could put it into numbers, into a mathematical formula, they would manage with no difficulty. But I didn’t know how. So I made an inept and, I hoped, cryptic rhyme.
“Stranger than a potion
Is my news for ’cross the ocean.
If you can come with Dapple
I’ll give you both an apple.”
They repeated it several times. Then Willy gave me the lizard. “Put in basket. Boys go now.”
“Stella! Stella!” Aunt Des beckoned from the veranda.
“Boys go now.” They trotted off.
I returned to the house, holding the little lizard carefully. Aunt Des had one of the big straw gardening hats in her hand.
“Stella, you know you oughtn’t to go bareheaded in the heat of the sun. You’ll get heat prostration.” She held out the hat.
“I’m coming in now, Aunt Des. I just have to put the lizard back. Then I want to write Terry.”
“Come to Olivia’s room, then. She’s fe
eling lonely. We have all the writing materials in there.”
But what could I say to Terry? If a map of Kairogi in Illyria were really important, he would hear of it long before a letter could get to him. Nevertheless I wrote. The great-aunts’ voices plashed about my head; and through my written words, which pinned down and made real a danger I did not want to admit, came the safety of Aunt Des chattering gently about the old days and the billy goat and wagon Theron had when they were children. The billy goat ate everything he could find and teased the little girls—which little girls? The great-aunts, of course. Though I had finished my letter I was only half listening.
“Do you remember the walk in back of Grampa’s house where the garden went down to Legare Street? It was made of octagonal stone blocks, white and grey. One of our games was to catch the large grasshoppers with bright black and yellow legs, harness them with thread, and then race them over the flagstones. If the grasshopper balked or dropped off a leg, that race was lost. But all we had to do was catch another one.”
Aunt Olivia looked over the top of her book. “It occurs to me that that game was no better than Tron roasting ants to death.”
“But Tron did it on purpose, to hurt, to kill.”
“We killed the grasshoppers sometimes.”
“Yes, but we didn’t enjoy it, we didn’t do it on purpose, we didn’t even think about it.”
“Does that make it any better—not thinking about it?”
There was no comfort anywhere. I left them.
All day I waited for Cousin James.
When I went up to rest, I spent more time on the balcony than on the bed. I had tied a white petticoat to the rail, but surely the twins would have reached him long before this?
I opened Mado’s journals, my fingers unsteady. Mado had a passion for joy, a passion for justice, a passion for compassion, beyond anything I could yet comprehend, though I realized now that she had brought them with her to her new country only embryonically, that it was in the climate of Nyssa and Illyria that they had been nurtured and developed. Would something of the same kind happen to me? Did I even want it?
The Other Side of the Sun Page 30
