Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Why on earth would that be bad?”

  “You tell me, Miss Thayer Wentworth. She of the mahogany hair and eyes like amber. Do you have a fly in your eye, Miss Thayer Wentworth? Do you have a middle name?”

  “Antonia,” I said gloomily.

  “Are you kidding? It was my mother’s name! Antonia Maeve Murphy O’Neill! My grandfather first fell in love with an Antonia before he married my grandma, and so my mother got stuck with the name of Granddad’s old flame. How did you come by it?”

  “My father fell in love with Willa Cather.”

  He laughed again.

  “Literature will do you in every time,” he said.

  “Literature or the teachers thereof,” I said, looking up at him from the corners of my eyes.

  “I shan’t do you in, I promise,” he said. “Do you? Now that’s another matter entirely.”

  “Dr. O’Neill! Aengus! If you think that’s funny…”

  “I apologize,” he said ruefully. “Entirely inappropriate.”

  He fell silent beside me on the bench.

  “Actually…,” I said. “When did you have in mind?”

  He stood up and wriggled a small leather book out of the hip pocket of his tight-fitting jeans. I watched him in the long shadows of the late winter afternoon. It was not cold; winter sometimes allows you a breath from long-dead summer on the Mountain. He had on a blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled midway up his arms; like his face, they were tanned dark and peppered slightly with black freckles. His hands were long and well shaped. Aengus always had beautiful hands. I wondered how they would feel on my flesh and felt my face scald. I looked down so that he would not see the blush.

  He thumbed through the little book.

  “Teaching tonight and tomorrow night,” he said. “I seem to have Friday night free, though. Does that work for you?”

  “It works fine,” I whispered. I could not seem to get any breath behind my words.

  “Friday it is, then,” he said, swinging me up from the bench and giving me a light kiss on my flaming cheek. He grinned, whether at my hot skin or at the sheer audacity of arranging an assignation on the steps of a girls’ dormitory I do not know. He touched the comma of dark hair over his eye and swung off into the rapidly falling dusk toward the English department. I stood in green shadow for a long moment, every inch of me seeming to quiver as if he had already touched me. Midway up the stairs my legs buckled and I sat down hard. I buried my face in my hands and laughed helplessly. I think I cried a little, too. So this was what it was to want a man. I had loved what Nick and I had done together, but this was entirely new and uncharted territory.

  I could scarcely look at Aengus in class the next day, nor the day after. He did not look at me, either. He concluded the class with another of Yeats’s poems. It ended:

  O hiding hair and dewy eyes,

  I am no more with life and death.

  My heart upon his warm heart lies,

  My breath is mixed into his breath.

  Still he did not look at me, but I knew that he had read the poem for me. When I left my room that night to meet him at the end of the Steep, I was trembling so hard all over that my roommate said, “Are you coming down with something? You don’t look so hot.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m coming down with something,” I said, and ran from the room so that she could not see me laughing.

  “Or somebody,” I added aloud, letting the door swing shut behind me and giving myself to the high January night wind.

  The Mountain was a font of winds. Tonight’s seemed to howl and swirl and bite from all directions at once. When I reached the lip of the Steep there was no one there, but the wind was a living presence, seeming to roar straight up from the valley. It almost lifted me from my feet.

  “We can’t do this!” I cried into its teeth.

  “No question,” Aengus said from behind me, wrapping his arms around me. The wind could not sway me, pressed hard against him, but I knew that if we broke apart it would have us both on the ground.

  “Don’t you have a room or something?” I shouted.

  “I do, in the home of an iron widow with all the virtues stamped on her face and a sitting room beside the front door. It smells of cat pee and canned English peas. We may go there later, but I want this first time to be on the side of a mountain with all the stars in heaven above us. Come on; I know a place….”

  I’ll just bet you do, I thought, but I let him pull me along to the edge of the Steep and into a small, dense grove of birch trees. It glowed in the dark like a little citadel. Inside the grove there was a floor of emerald moss scalloped with ferns, and on the moss lay a rose-flowered quilt and a hamper with the necks of two bottles poking out of its lid.

  “The widow’s grandmother’s prized Leicestershire quilt,” he said. “When she lies under it again, she won’t know where the little tickle came from. And two bottles of champagne. Not bad stuff. Not great, but pretty good for a teacher’s salary….”

  The wind could not reach us here, and there was a cold, fresh silence like you sometimes hear among winter trees. He sat down on the quilt and reached for the hamper.

  “A little nip, for before?” he said.

  “No,” I whispered, almost choking on my own audacity. “For after.”

  I sank to my knees and held my arms out to him and he came into them, murmuring something under his breath that I thought to be Celtic. He never did tell me what he was saying. For a long space of time there was only dark fire, and the earth under my hips and the fierce fullness and rocking, and the cries, soft and then louder, and the great slamming explosion, and then only our breathing again, fast and hard, and the old, sly laughter of the wind.

  After a much longer time we did drink some of the champagne, but we did not finish the first bottle, and Aengus left it and the unopened second one at the foot of the largest birch “for whatever gods tend this grove. By rights I should be burning an offering. But I’ve nothing precious enough to leave here.”

  “Nor do I,” I said, “but I wish I did.”

  “And I’ll be asking about the one who took that precious thing one day, but whoever he is, he doesn’t matter this night,” Aengus said softly.

  After a long time, I said, “No. He doesn’t.”

  Student-faculty relationships are frowned upon on the Mountain, but Aengus was so charmingly correct about ours that little was said. He knew how, among other things, to be perfectly discreet and intimate at the same time. Oddly, I never learned a great deal about him before he came to America. His parents were both dead. He promised to take me back to Ireland one day. In the meantime, my family was, he said, all we needed.

  They soon turned out to be more.

  The second time we visited my mother and Grand in Lytton, it was mid-April and by then Aengus and I knew that we would marry at the end of the spring quarter. Grand was delighted.

  My mother was patently not. My sister, Lily, was back home without Goose for the first of what would be many times, her face puffed with tears and her underlip far out with injury at whatever misdeed Goose had perpetrated upon her. During all Aengus’s and my talk of a June wedding, my mother looked pointedly at Lily and then at me.

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to jump into it if I were you, Thayer,” she said. “Not many marriages turn out the way you expect them to.”

  Lily burst into tears and fled, and Aengus grinned his wolf’s grin at my mother.

  “We expect nothing from ours, Mrs. Wentworth, except that it will make us both very happy,” he said. It was rather sweet. Even if I hadn’t known him well I would have been captivated by it. I think Grand was; she laughed softly. Mother was not.

  “I suppose you’ll have it in that chapel,” she said. “It’s a pretty enough little place, but it looks like Church of Rome to me.”

  I stared at my mother. I had never heard her say “Church of Rome” before. I still don’t think she ever had, or has since.

  “More
like Church of England,” Aengus said. “But no. It will be an outdoor wedding. There’s a little grove of silver birch trees on the lip of the Steep; it’s a place that means a lot to us.” He slewed me a wink.

  “Under a tree,” my mother snapped. “How like Thayer. So will your canon or priest or whatever do the honors?”

  “No, a friend of mine from Ireland. She’s just come over to work in Washington. She’s ordained. She said she’d love to do it.”

  “Ordained in what? Not one of those newfangled tree-worshiping sects, I hope?”

  “Oh no. It’s a very old and respected religion. You’ll see. It should be a very… gentle ceremony.”

  My mother did not answer. She got up and followed Lily to the kitchen, from whence we could hear fresh sobs. My grandmother sighed.

  “You might as well be married on elephants with fireworks,” she said. “She isn’t going to approve, no matter what. But she’ll behave at the wedding. I promise you that.”

  Just then my mother called to Aengus from inside the house, and he got up and excused himself and went off to find her.

  “Now what?” I said, exhaling a long breath.

  “Who knows?” Grand said. “But she sounded pleasant enough. She’d like him if she let herself. It’s almost impossible not to.”

  “Is it that he’s Irish?” I said. “Or a schoolteacher? Or both? If not him, what on earth did she want for me?”

  “The incoming president of the Piedmont Driving Club,” Grand said lazily, and we both laughed.

  I’m glad I have that moment. I did not laugh often with Grand again.

  My mother and Aengus came back out onto the porch. She was carrying fresh iced tea and smiling winsomely. He was carrying a plate of cookies and looking as though he had swallowed something large.

  On the way back to Sewanee I begged him to tell me why she had called him into the kitchen.

  “Nothing much.”

  ” ‘Nothing’ crap, Aengus! She was grinning like a Cheshire cat and you looked like you’d swallowed a bug.”

  “Nothing much, Thay, okay?”

  “Okay, but you’re going to have to tell me sometime.”

  “I will. Sometime.”

  He told me that night, after we had gotten back to the Domain and ordered a pizza and carried it up the widow’s immaculate stairs to his room. The widow was at choir practice, which made the excursion easier. We’d stay, I knew, until after she went to bed and then I would tiptoe downstairs in my socks. She knew we were there; she always did, but it seemed all right unless she actually saw us.

  “I think it’s the actual sight of our sin-raddled bodies creeping upstairs bent on more sin that would do her in,” Aengus said. “This way, if we ever get caught at it, she can tell the choir she had no idea.”

  We had just finished the pizza and were sprawled on his bed watching Jay Leno when Aengus told me.

  “Thayer,” he said, pulling me into his shoulder. “Listen. Your mother told me about Nick Abrams tonight. She told me about… the baby, and having to have it… you know…”

  I stiffened against him and drew in a great, trembling breath.

  “I can’t believe she did that,” I whispered on the breath that came out. “I absolutely cannot believe she would do that! I was going to tell you! It just… Aengus, it just didn’t seem important! I never even think about it now!”

  He went still. Too still. And then he said, “You never think about not ever having any children?”

  I jerked away from him and twisted around on the bed until I could see his face. I was panting so hard I could hardly get my breath. There were tears on his face as he looked back at me. I had never seen tears on Aengus’s face before.

  “What are you talking about?”

  After a long while he dropped his head onto my shoulder. Against it, he said, “You didn’t know, did you?”

  “Know what? Aengus, my God…”

  “Thayer, you had a bad infection after the… operation. It got into your… tubes. You can’t have children. I had no idea on earth you didn’t know about it.”

  “Did you think I would know a thing like that and not tell you?”

  I was on my feet and screaming. Literally screaming. Could this be true? This awful thing, could my mother know it and not tell me? This thing that would smash my life, alter it completely and forever, and the life of anyone I loved…

  Aengus stood up and pulled me to him and put his hand over my mouth. My tears ran down over his hands; I could feel them dropping onto his forearms, my blouse.

  “It isn’t true,” I wept into his shoulder. “She was telling you a lie! She just doesn’t want us to get married….”

  “It’s true, baby. She showed me your doctor’s report. Just happened to have it lying around, I guess….”

  I sagged until he picked me up and put me back on the bed and held me, rocking me, kissing me, kissing the sides of my face and hair, until I had cried myself out. The sky outside was graying when I finally stopped. The sleepy twitter of a dawn bird drifted in through the window screen.

  “I want you to go to sleep, now,” he said. “I’ve got an early class, but I want you to snuggle in under the covers and sleep. I’ll be back after class and we’ll go get some breakfast.”

  “The widow…”

  “Fuck the widow,” Aengus said. “Thay, listen. I know it has to be a huge, awful thing for you, but we’ll get through it. We will. Don’t worry about me. I never really wanted children, to tell you the truth. I want to be your child, as well as… everything else.”

  Incredibly, I laughed, a watery, hiccupping laugh.

  “As long as you stay grown-up about… other things,” I said.

  “Always,” he said, reaching for me. “Always.”

  I told my grandmother about my mother’s betrayal on the phone and she was as angry as I had ever heard her, but she promised she would be at my wedding and would keep my mother away.

  And she did. On the soft Saturday afternoon when we married in the little grove of silver birches on the Steep, the entire faculty was there, and most of the student body, and my grandmother and Detritus, too. But not my mother. The mist from the valley swirled almost to the very lip of the Steep, and we all looked as if we were rising out of it, grown out of the mist as if from some magic medium. Aengus’s friend from Washington was radiant and tender, and read a lovely service from a small black leather book that I assumed was a Bible. She was full of reverence for the day and the earth and the trees and the sky and us and our union, and I remember that from somewhere in the crowd small silvery bells rang.

  After the wedding, when almost everyone had gone, I saw that she had left her Bible on the small twig table we had used for an altar, and I picked it up and gave it to Aengus. When I looked down on it, the gold letters on it said, not Holy Bible, but The Book of Shadows.

  After all these years, and until my last one, I will always love knowing that I was married under a tree on a mountain by a witch.

  CHAPTER 10

  On the first morning of our honeymoon we slept late. It was nearing noon when we woke fully, and for a long time we simply lay entwined and still, tangled in Grand’s silky sheets.

  “Porthault,” I said lazily. “At least one-thousand thread count. What a way to start a honeymoon.”

  “I don’t know about thread counts,” Aengus said. “All I know about sheets is that the widow’s are made of something you could strike a match on. Well, you know.”

  “The higher the thread count the more expensive the sheets. Look, you can almost see through these. Fine French linen.”

  “Well, then,” he said comfortably. “It’s almost lunchtime. Do you want to get some lunch at the Beach Club, or would you rather…”

  We were in Grand’s big old house on the beach on Sea Island, Georgia. Besides the residential homes that ran the length of the island, set in groves of live oaks and palms facing the sea, there was only the fabled old Cloister hotel on Sea Island. I loved
the Cloister. Every time we visited Grand’s house, we took some of our meals there, eating huge breakfasts and listening at dinner to the string trio. I loved the spectacular Spanish room, with its towering stained-glass windows and cages of singing birds. There were graham crackers and milk set out for you in the entrance lobby at bedtime, and the vast green lawns were carpet smooth, bordered with blooming flowers and overhung by ancient, twisted live oaks scarved in Spanish moss that sometimes touched the grass. There were stables, sailing, outdoor Plantation Suppers, cycling, skeet shooting, tennis, deep-sea fishing, two ocean-side pools, and numerous small patios tucked away for alfresco dining. The Cloister always seemed an enchanted kingdom to me. Grand’s house was almost as good.

  It rose two stories of stucco above its emerald seaside lawn. In her second-floor bedroom we were in the treetops; you could touch the Spanish moss from her balcony. A hedge of roses along the shorefront opened to the path down to the beach, and someone had set up an umbrella table and little wrought-iron chairs on the highest shelf on the beach. The low dunes ran down to wet, hard-packed beach and then into the water, slow and gentle and dark green, toy waves ruffling on the sand. Pelicans and gulls rode the thermals over the water, but we saw no people. Most of them, I thought, would be at lunch, or perhaps swimming in the pools that lay behind the dunes. We had had a midnight swim in Grand’s. My hair still smelled of chlorine and sulfur. I could not imagine that it did not gag Aengus, but he buried his face deep in it and said it had an exotic kind of beachy smell. Grand’s bedroom was papered in a soft peach satin-stripe wallpaper, and in the glow from that and the flare of the June sun off the balcony his face, dark stubbled as it was, was lit like an excited child’s.

  “I’m not hungry right now,” I said. “I guess maybe I’d rather…”

  He was reaching for me when the bedside telephone rang. He hesitated.

  “Should I answer it?” he said. “Nobody but your folks knows we’re here, do they?”

  “I don’t think so. You better answer it, though. I asked for a hair appointment; maybe that’s them….”