Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “It’s something you’re interested in, then?”

  “My God, of course. Head of the department? It’s only about half an hour’s drive from here. I could be home for dinner every night. Not to mention that the salary is, shall we say, attractive? Well, to an academic, anyway.”

  “Oh, Aengus!” I cried, hugging him hard. “I’m so happy for you! All of this… this stuff: the house, this call… it just seems as though it’s meant to be, doesn’t it? I wonder where Coltrane got our number.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they called Sewanee to check me out. Probably from there. Listen, you want some champagne with that omelet? I’ve got a bottle of Mumm’s around here someplace.”

  “I put it in the refrigerator last night. Just like I knew we’d be wanting it. Oh yes, let’s do!”

  We sat on the veranda and drank the silky, frothing Mumm’s and never did get around to the omelet. I raised my first glass to him and said, “Congratulations, Your Headship.”

  He put his glass down. “No. Seriously. Don’t congratulate me yet. I haven’t got it yet. Say ‘Good luck’ or ‘Way to go,’ but don’t say ‘Congratulations.’ ”

  He looked serious and a little agitated.

  I put my glass down, too. “But you will get it. I don’t have any doubt of that.”

  “No. Maybe. Probably. But to assume it before it happens is to… sort of curse it.”

  “Aengus…”

  He held one hand up. “Okay. So it’s stupid. Just don’t do it anyway.”

  “Well, then… way to go,” I said lamely. He couldn’t possibly believe such a childish superstition; he dealt in superstitions every day. They only amused and energized him.

  I did not know what to say next but felt vaguely that I should pursue this. I was saved by the telephone bell.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, and went in and picked up the kitchen telephone. It was Carol Partridge. Somehow her rapid-fire New England honk brought normalcy back to the world.

  “Can you come to dinner Saturday night?” she said. In the background I could hear rock music thumping and blaring.

  “Love to,” I said. “Can I bring anything?”

  She said something I could not hear, and I said, “I’m sorry?”

  “Benjamin, turn off that stuff!” she yelled. “I’m on the phone.”

  There was a mumbled reply and the music blared on.

  “… because I said so!” she yelled, and the music stopped.

  “God,” she breathed. “It’s only midmorning and I’m ready to call Juvie and tell them to come get them…. No, you can’t bring a thing. I’m making gazpacho. Found some gorgeous tomatoes at the farmer’s market. Only they’ll probably be as hard as rocks and I’ll end up using canned. I’m glad you can come. I promise to have tamed the savage beasts by then.”

  “Not on our account, I hope,” I said. “Aengus has been knee-deep in kids for the last ten years, and I like little boys.”

  “I’ll check with you on that again after Saturday,” she said, and I hung up, laughing.

  It was a good week. Aengus had his interview on Thursday and was indeed offered the chairmanship of the Coltrane English department and did indeed accept it.

  “Now you can say congratulations,” he said that evening, producing another bottle of cold Mumm’s. I congratulated him and more; after we had finished the champagne we simply rolled over in our bed, which I had indeed put on the third floor, where it floated in all that sunny and/or starry space like a barge, and went to sleep.

  Family by family our new neighbors dropped by, with flowers or pots of soup or freshly baked sweets, and we found them all agreeable. Most of them were older, than me, anyway, but many were Aengus’s age, with a sprinkling of seniors. All of them had children, whether or not they were in residence on Bell’s Ferry, and all of them had the same half-mystic, almost fierce feeling about the river and the forest. All of them had the same feeling about the Woodies across the river, too.

  “Barbarians at our gate,” a gray-thatched older man with a stiff brush mustache said. “Come thundering up this road like an invading army. Drive chariots if they could. Never say hello, never even wave. One of them ran over the Hendersons’ corgi a month or so ago and didn’t even stop. Several of us called the police, but of course they all look alike and drive the same things… Jaguars, BMWs, Hummers… and they’d never admit it anyway. There’s a back way out of here that could get them up to the freeway, but they’d have to slow down. So Bell’s is their own personal speedway. I’ve clocked them at ninety and over.”

  We couldn’t argue with that. In the short week we’d been in the house, we’d seen strings of speeding luxury cars and heard growling engines but never seen a wave or heard a honk. So far it did not bother me. Riverwood might have been in another country entirely.

  On Saturday we worked in our overburgeoning garden most of the day, cutting back Grand’s towering camellia bushes and weeding the flowering borders. They were spectacular; I had no idea what many of them were. Aengus was no help.

  “If it’s not four-leaf clovers or roses of Killarney I can’t help you,” he said. He was sweaty and disheveled, with smears of dirt on his face and thorn scratches on his arms. I could see that Aengus was going to be no gardener. In truth, I wasn’t wild about it, either. Score one for my mother’s genes, I thought; she loathed gardening. We had always had a gardener.

  “I wonder what gardeners go for in this neighborhood,” I said.

  “More than I make,” Aengus said, savagely swatting a mosquito. “I could maybe curse one into taking us on, though.”

  We stopped for a while and sat under the shade of the portico lattice, drinking lemonade. The late afternoon was green and still.

  “That’s the second time in a couple of days you’ve said something about cursing,” I said. “You’re not buying into your own myths, are you?”

  “No, but don’t I wish,” he said. “Make things a lot simpler. Think of all the things you’d never have to do if you could curse somebody into doing them for you.”

  “What do you do that you don’t want to do?” I said, honestly curious. I would have said our life so far was full to the brim of sweetness.

  “Oh, nothing, really,” he said, smiling at me. “Not about us anyway. Well, gardening, maybe. Tying my shoelaces. Driving in five o’clock Buckhead traffic. Getting old…”

  I laughed. He did not.

  “Are you serious? You’re only thirty-three. You have the body of… well, I won’t say it out loud, but it ain’t bad.”

  “I found a gray hair yesterday.”

  “For God’s sake, Aengus, I have gray hairs. I’ve had them since I was a teenager.”

  I peered closely at his temple, and he moved his head away. I saw no gray, only the lustrous crow black I had always seen.

  “I don’t see it, but if it bothers you, just yank it out when you get dressed for Carol’s dinner party. Speaking of which…”

  “Yeah. You want the first shower? I’ve got to polish my shoes.”

  It was about six thirty when we walked through our hedge into Carol’s backyard. It was much the same as ours; there were flower borders and masses of mature shrubbery, and a veranda that ran the length of the house, as ours did. But the grass was uncut and the borders had not been planted for spring and the paint on the veranda railing was peeling in spots. The house was a yellow Dutch Colonial, badly in need of re-yellowing. The backyard was littered with the stigmata of children: a basketball hoop nailed on a tree, two bicycles lying on their sides at the edge of the driveway, a small red wagon with scarred paint and one wheel missing. An oval pool took up half the yard, full of detritus and floating water toys. Still, it was a nice house and a nice yard and Carol was, after all, a single mother with three active boys. Suddenly I liked Carol Partridge even more for her backyard. Obviously, to her the important things were the ones inside the house, not outside it.

  “Faith and begorra,” Aengus said mildly.

  “
Can it,” I said. “It’s how the other three-fourths of the world live.”

  Carol let us in the back door. She wore a flowered sundress that displayed her nicely shaped and tanned arms and shoulders, and there were gold hoops in her ears. She smiled and gave us both hugs. But her fine blond hair was exploding around her head like a dandelion again, and two hectic red spots burned on her cheeks. Moreover, I could have sworn that her eyes were puffed and red from crying.

  “Is this a bad time?” I said.

  “Absolutely not,” she said over her shoulder, taking an armful of yellow lilies I had cut for her and plunging them into a pitcher that sat on the counter.

  “These will be perfect on the table. Everything I own seems to be yellow. No, it’s just a little hectic around here. The boys’ father dropped in unexpectedly for a little visit and that always rouses the rabble. I didn’t even know he was in town.”

  “If you need to be with him…,” I began, and she shook her head vehemently.

  “He’s the last person on earth we need to be with. Besides, he’s gone. Probably on the way back to the airport right now. It’s just… hard on the boys, the older ones especially… when he flies in and out like this. Of course they want him to stay, and that’s not going to happen, or they want to go with him, and that’s not going to happen, either. You-all are the best antidote I could have right now. Come in and let me get you a drink.”

  We went, not back out onto the veranda but into the front room that served, I supposed, as the living room. It was immaculate and filled with air and light; the tall windows were open and the furniture gleamed with polish and scented the air with lemon. It was somehow a pure room; there were few bibelots around on the polished surfaces and no plants or flowers except an exploding bower of white hydrangeas that sat in the fireplace, so huge and perfect that they were obviously fake.

  Carol saw my glance and grinned ruefully. “Faux, of course. I’ll bet I’m the only house on Bell’s Ferry Road with fake flowers in my house. Chris and Benjamin and Bummer gave them to me for my birthday. I made a huge fuss over them and put them in here where living feet seldom fall.”

  “I think they look lovely,” I said. Somehow, they did. “It’s a beautiful house. I’ve always loved Dutch Colonial.”

  “It is indeed,” Aengus said. “Although coming from one who grew up in a peat hut with a straw roof—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Carol and I said together, and we all laughed. The night was suddenly good.

  We had, surprisingly, mint juleps. They tasted wonderful.

  “The secret is to make your own simple syrup,” Carol said, only she said “shimple” and I realized she’d had a couple before we arrived. “Mint’s out of my garden, too. Isn’t it funny? You can’t kill mint even where nothing else will grow.”

  She fixed us another and got up to see to dinner. I offered to help, but she said there was really nothing left to do. As we raised our second drinks, Bummer came into the room.

  “Hey, Aengus! I mean Dr. O’Neill,” he said in a froggy voice that somehow went with the chipmunk teeth and the yellow hair, now slicked to his head and showing comb tracks.

  “Hey, Mrs. O’Neill.”

  “Hello, Bummer,” I said, smiling. He had pink cheeks dotted with tawny freckles; I would have liked to pinch them lightly.

  “Hallo, Bummer. Cen chaoi a bhfuil tu?” Aengus said.

  Bummer looked at him suspiciously. Aengus laughed.

  “It’s Gaelic,” he said. “It’s a very old language that they spoke in Ireland and Scotland and so on. It’s Celtic language. You remember me telling you about the Celts the other day?”

  “Those guys that cut off people’s heads? Is that what they said?”

  “Well, not exactly when they cut people’s heads off.” Aengus grinned. ” ‘Cen chaoi a bhfuil tu?‘ means ‘How are you?’ ”

  “Well, I’m pretty good except I have a boil on my—”

  “Bummer!” Carol exclaimed, coming back into the room. “Enough about the boil. Go call your brothers; dinner’s ready.”

  “Okay, but I don’t think they’ll come. They’re still mad about having to go to camp.”

  “Oh, God,” Carol sighed, gesturing for us to follow her into the dining room. We sat down at her table, set with yellow flowered pottery and with my lilies resplendent in a blue bowl in the center.

  “Chalk up another one for dear old Dad. I almost had them talked into going to camp somewhere this summer; I don’t know if I can handle all three of them just running loose, and he comes along and says he thinks camp is for fags, and so of course the rebellion has been mounted. They’ll go, of course, because I’ll cut off their allowance if they don’t, but now it’s going to be such a damn battle, and it just didn’t have to be.”

  “I’d like to go to camp,” Bummer said. He began to sing, “The Cabbal King with the big old ring fell in love with the dusty maid…” He ran up the stairs after his brothers and out of sight.

  ” ‘The Cannibal King with the big nose ring,’ ” I said, laughing. “He ‘fell in love with a dusky maid,’ and so forth…. It’s a classic camp song. I sang it at my camp.”

  “Is it ever. That damned bus from Riverwood goes by at dawn every morning with all the little Woodies on it singing about the Cannibal King at the tops of their lungs. I’d like to shoot out the tires.”

  Bummer came back in, followed by two older boys. They walked straight and stiffly, and they were neatly dressed in clean jeans and striped long-sleeved oxford shirts, but you could tell they would rather be anyplace on earth than that dining room. They were handsome boys, both dark haired and dark eyed with mellow swimming pool tans, but their brows were drawn into straight lines and their mouths were pressed thin lipped and shut, without looking at any of us as they dropped into their chairs.

  “Chris, Benjamin,” Carol said tightly. “Please say hello to Mrs. O’Neill, our next-door neighbor.”

  The oldest, who was seated next to me, turned slowly in his seat and looked at me. Or rather, leered at me. His eyes raked me all over, up and down, lingering on my breasts under a white cotton tank, and he licked his lips slowly. Then the wet lips curled up in a smile that seemed to scrape my underwear off beneath my clothes. It should have been a young boy’s parody of lust, but it wasn’t; on this boy it looked disturbing and corrupt. I felt myself flush. Across the table from me I saw Aengus make a small movement in his chair.

  “Next door’s lookin’ pretty fine,” the boy drawled.

  “This is her husband, Dr. O’Neill,” Carol said, her voice like ice.

  The boy did not take his eyes off me. “Are you really married to that old geezer?” he said. “What a waste.”

  “Chris!” Carol cried.

  Aengus was out of his seat and around the table in an eyeblink. The boy turned his face to him, startled, and Aengus took both his shoulders in his hands and leaned close to his face and spat out a long string of words; they sounded guttural and dangerous, rather like a snake hissing. I knew he was speaking Gaelic. When he stopped the boy sat still for a moment and then jumped to his feet. His face was pale under the tan and his eyes were wide with fright. He turned and ran out of the dining room, followed by his brother Benjamin. No one spoke. Aengus walked back to the table and sat down. Bummer began to cry.

  It took a long time to get it sorted out. Carol was appalled and apologetic for her son; she was near tears. Bummer nestled in her shoulder and cried quietly. Aengus apologized, too, but it was fairly obvious that he did not mean it. There was no question of dinner. I finally kissed Carol on the cheek and said, “Bring dinner to our house tomorrow night and let’s start fresh. There was no harm done. I can’t imagine what Aengus—”

  “I’ve never seen Chris behave like that before,” Carol said dully. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. He’s not a bad boy, but sometimes after his father—”

  “I’ll even make dessert,” Aengus said, kissing Carol Partridge on the cheek. “How about humb
le pie?”

  “Done deal,” she said, managing a weary smile. “Dinner will keep. It was only gazpacho and eggplant parmigiana.”

  “Can’t wait,” said Aengus, who loathed eggplant more than he did war or famine.

  Outside in the cool darkness, walking through our backyard, I said to Aengus, “What did you say to him? Was it a curse? It sounded like one!”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just Yeats. You know, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’?”

  ” ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,/And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;/Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,/And live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ ”

  I began to laugh.

  “I wonder how he’s going to feel when he grows up and finds out that he was cursed by William Butler Yeats.”

  “Very badly, I hope,” Aengus said. “Nobody looks at my wife like that. Not even a snot-nosed twelve-year-old.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Aengus did not like his new job. I was surprised and somehow frightened. I had never seen him discontented or unhappy before. Annoyed, yes; angry, certainly. But never this dull, diminished apathy.

  He himself could not really explain it.

  “It’s just that almost all I do now is supervise. Just… supervise…. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to give up the direct contact with… oh, mythology. Stories. The sense of the Celts as real, brave, bloodthirsty, stinking men.”

  “But you can still read about them, can’t you? I mean, there can’t be many people who know as much about them as you do. Can’t you just sort of… be with them in your head?”

  “No. I guess I can’t. I never even thought about it before, but what I really need is to be giving them to people. Making them come alive in other people’s minds.”

  “Can’t you teach just one course? Surely they’d agree to that. They know what your specialty is. They must have liked it or they wouldn’t have hired you.”