Bummer yawned hugely and stretched, and then looked at me across the comforter.
“Thayer,” he said. “Am I at your house?”
“Yep. You’ve been sawing wood for a few hours. Are you hungry?”
“Yep. What is ‘sawing wood’? Do you have any French fries?”
” ‘Sawing wood’ is snoring. You’re a great snorer. Olympic material. I’ve got a few French fries, but they’re frozen. They wouldn’t be as good as fresh ones.”
“That’s okay. I put ketchup all over them anyway. Is my mother back yet?”
“No. She hasn’t had time to get there and back yet.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. I went and nuked the frozen fries and brought them to him on a plate with a glass of milk and the ketchup bottle. I walked stiffly, feeling trapped under thick ice where no light penetrated, nor any feeling.
Just before the last French fry disappeared he said guiltily, “I almost forgot. Would you like some?”
“No, thanks. I’ve already had a bite.”
“Mama says I have the manners of a warthog. I’m not quite sure what a warthog is….”
“Not very pretty. But I never heard they had bad manners.”
I was silent for a little while as he finished his milk. Then I said, “Bummer?”
“Yeah?” He looked up at me milkily.
“Do you think you could tell me about what scared you so up at camp? I can’t reach anybody up there, and your mother left her cell phone here, and I can’t think who else to call who might know if things are okay. I guess I could call Mr. Mabry….”
“Nah, I heard Mrs. Mabry say that Big… Mr. Mabry was taking her out to Hollywood, California, with him when he went on business. She said she wasn’t going to do a thing but lie around the pool at the Bel Air Hotel with all the starlets, and Mother said Mrs. Mabry would fit the Bel Air like socks on a rooster…. Well, she didn’t say it to Mrs. Mabry, you know. She said it later.”
“I bet she did,” I said, biting back a grin. “But about camp…”
He drew in a long breath and exhaled it slowly. It was such an adult gesture that my heart squeezed. I put my arm around him, and once more he leaned against me.
“Late at night when we’re all supposed to be asleep the bus driver—you know, Mr. Tir Na Nog—comes to our bunks and he… stoops down and sings this kind of song, real low, and then he puts his mouth down on somebody’s mouth and he… sucks. You can hear him sucking. Then he goes on to the next person, and the next, until he’s done it to everybody in a cabin. And in the morning they’re all different. They’re all polite and nerdy like. My brothers are different now. I think I was supposed to be soon. He hasn’t gotten as far as my bunk yet.”
“Bummer… why don’t they wake up?” I breathed in shocked disbelief. Oh, dear God…
“I think they put stuff in our dessert,” he said. “I always take mine back to my bunk, but I don’t eat it. I don’t like anything but vanilla, and we don’t ever have that.”
He would say no more. I simply sat and held him, rocking him back and forth, my stomach roiling with the poison that had leached into this summer night. It couldn’t be true, of course. It could not be true.
But how could a seven-year-old make up something like that? And hitchhike eighty miles on a mountain road to escape it?
Bummer slept again. I could seem to do nothing but rock him.
Near ten he lifted his head.
“I want my mother,” he said.
“I do, too,” I said. “Let’s go get her.”
Ordinarily I never in the world would have said such a thing to this frightened, sleepy child whose mother had not come back down the mountain. But this was not an ordinary time, and I was not the ordinary me. I did not even know who I was. I knew what I needed to do, though. I reached for the phone to call Nick, and then I stopped. I would not call anyone to tell them I was going to see my own husband, as if I was afraid of him. Nor to tell them that Carol Partridge had gone there and not come back. We were grown women. And especially, I would not call Nick. Set Nick against Aengus? The thought was unbearable.
I put Bummer into the front seat of the Mustang and belted him in and wrapped him in a thick sweater and laid the comforter over him. Then I got in and started the car. It growled deeply and happily: Road trip! Going up a mountain!
“It’s a long way,” Bummer said drowsily.
“I know. I know most of the way, but you’ll have to help me later. I’ll wake you up when it’s time. Go back to sleep, Bummer. The dynamic duo is on the job.”
I saw the flash of his teeth, and then his head dropped into the comforter and he was asleep before I turned the Mustang onto the interstate heading north.
The road up Burnt Mountain was familiar to me, though I could not remember the last time I had been on it. Even in the darkness my hands on the wheel made the necessary turns almost without thought. There were fewer and fewer cars, and then, higher up into the thinner air, there were none. All around us was a surrealistic moonscape; I could not quite comprehend the fact that I was driving through it in a car with only a sleeping child beside me. It was not like driving in the world. It was as if we had somehow drifted into a magical, dark forever. Well. That would be fitting on a night like this, wouldn’t it?
I passed an old sign set into the woods beside an overgrown trail that led deep into the limitless woods: Camp Edgewood: 3 Mi., it said. I didn’t look down the old camp road, overgrown now with young mountain trees. But my heart raced down to the summer camp I imagined there and found again the days at Sherwood Forest—of cold, sun-dancing water; long afternoon shadows; crowded, clamorous evening meals; dark magic beside the leaping campfire.
And Nick. And Nick.
I knew that I would never turn down that road.
Near the very top of the mountain, I slowed the car and Bummer woke.
“I don’t know the way from here on,” I said.
“Go all the way to the top and take the little road to the left that goes down the other side,” he mumbled, yawning.
I had never been all the way to the top of Burnt Mountain. When we reached it, I paused a moment at the scenic overlook and looked out. The whole of the valley that stretched all the way down to Atlanta lay bathed in light from the iron moon. In the far distance the city lights prickled like fireworks.
“That’s the Sturgeon Moon,” Bummer muttered sleepily. “I learned that at camp. They’re big old fish. I don’t think we have any of them down here. Take that road up there and it goes all the way down to camp. There’s a sign.”
A little way down on the other side I saw it, a neat white sign on a stone post that read: Camp Forever. I turned onto the gravel road. Bummer slept again. I drove, breathing hard, thinking nothing at all.
Far down the little road there was a large clearing where a sprawling log building sat. Beyond it I could see more small log structures… bunkhouses, a pavilion, a boathouse… and the moon-burnt sheet of the lake. I stopped at the clearing edge and, leaving Bummer in the car, got out and walked on dead feet toward the buildings. All the other buildings were dark, but a dim porch light burned on this one, that pale-urine light on pines that spoke of every camp in the woods everywhere. Aengus stood under it, his arms folded across his chest, leaning against the porch railing. His black hair shone like a helmet in the faded yellow light, and he was smiling his puckish, V-shaped smile. He wore shorts and a tee shirt that read Camp Forever and flip-flops and looked so like a teenager that I drew in my breath sharply. All around me unreality hummed like electricity.
“Aengus?” I whispered.
“I thought you might come,” he said. His voice was light and full of a kind of suppressed glee. His was a voice I did not know, somehow a piece of this forest.
“I’m looking for Carol Partridge,” I said, feeling as if I was speaking to someone I had never met. “Bummer and Ben and Chris’s mother; you know Carol. She… she said she was coming up here. She said there was something wron
g. She left Bummer with me, but that was hours ago and she hasn’t come back…. Aengus, what’s wrong up here? Bummer needs his mother….”
The night was wild and cold on the back of my neck.
Aengus didn’t move, or stop smiling.
“Well, she was here, Thayer,” he said. It was kind of a drawl. “A few hours ago, I think. She was half-crazy, spouting all kinds of nonsense about things her kid told her, the little one. About people stealing kid’s childhoods, I think it was… sucking their childhoods out of their mouths. Real imagination that Bummer has. He ran off earlier today. I was glad to hear he got home okay. I told her he’d be just fine with you. Told her you’d have made as good a mother as she was, probably.”
Aengus shook his head smiling ruefully. “I never saw that side of her. A real hysteric. When I wouldn’t unlock the dormitory where her kids were she said she was going to the police. I told her to go right ahead, the only police with jurisdiction over this camp are the ones in Terrell County, barracks right down the road. Chief is our caretaker’s cousin. That seemed to upset her even more.”
“Aengus… where is Carol now?” I whispered. Nothing about this silent, moon-drowned place was right. Nothing about the man I had married was right.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Like I said, she was here, but she’s gone. I never saw her leave. The other guy told me, the bus driver, old Nog. She said some god-awful things to him, said she’d come back up here and shoot him if she had to. Upset him so his son had to come get him. I don’t think he’ll be coming back. Said his heart was hurting him. Probably had a heart attack, old guy like that. She probably killed our bus driver, if you want to know what I think.”
I could make no sense of this. I shook my head. My husband smiled and smiled.
“Aengus… I’ve seen that bus driver. He’s not a day over thirty. What do you mean, ‘old guy’?”
“Looks young, doesn’t he?” Aengus smiled. “Some of those old Irish families have the knack. Tir Na Nog, remember? The Land of Forever Young? Celt-Irish, that is. Some say they stay so young they never die. Naturally, anyway. Feed off kids’ childhoods, they do.”
He shone in the faded light like a candle.
“The children…,” I whispered.
“Oh, everybody’s okay. Sleeping like babies. Never heard a thing. Counselors, too. I called her husband and told him what she said, and he’s coming to get the two older ones tomorrow. I told him he shouldn’t worry about Bummer, that you probably had him. He said he’d call you in the morning. I doubt if he will, though. I guess he figured somebody or other would look after him. I don’t think he cares who, as long as it isn’t him. You could just tell he doesn’t like the kid. He’s right. Kid’s a menace.”
“Carol went back home, then?”
“Well, of course,” he said, widening his eyes at me. The moon danced in them. “Where else would she go? Went screeching out of here like a bat out of hell when I wouldn’t let her take the boys.”
Cold flooded me. I did not feel, on this haunted night, that Carol Partridge would be coming home. I could not have said why, but I was suddenly terrified for her. This place called Forever had swallowed her.
“Do you do it, too?” I whispered.
“What on earth are you talking about, baby?” he said.
The smile never wavered. His whole being radiated joy. A mad sort of joy. I turned and ran for the car, stumbling and slipping on fallen pine needles.
“If you’ve got Bummer, I need him!” Aengus called after me. “He ought to be here. He’s got almost two weeks to go yet. She paid for him. He’s not done yet!”
I ran faster. I reached the car and threw myself into it and turned on the ignition.
Behind my eyes I saw my grandmother sitting on our porch at home, smiling up at a young Irishman I had just introduced her to.
“Oh, Grand! I let him go too far after all,” I whispered. It was only when Bummer spoke that I realized I was crying.
“Why are you crying?” he said. “Where’s my mother?”
“I’m not crying,” I said fiercely. “We’ll find your mother.”
I jerked the car around and roared off up the gravel road toward the main road over the mountain. Behind me I could hear Aengus calling, “I need that kid, Thayer!…”
At the top of the mountain, at the overlook, I stopped and pulled the car down behind the tree line.
“Where are we going?” Bummer said. He was crying, too.
“We’re going to wait here a little while; then we’re going to a place where we’ll be safe. There’s a man there who will take care of both of us. His name is Nick; he’s a very old friend of mine. You’ll like him. He’ll like you, too.”
“But my mama?”
“He’ll know what to do,” I said. “He’ll know exactly what to do.”
I heard the bus then. I heard the grinding as the gears changed and the growl of the big motor climbing as it neared us. It was coming fast up the mountain.
“Mrs. O’Neill…,” Bummer began. I clapped my hands over his mouth and drew him down beside me on the seat. I crouched low. It was dark behind the tree line, but the moon was bleeding light, and I could see clearly up to the road. I saw the bus with Camp Forever scripted on its side careen past us. I saw the man who had been my husband, but who was now wedded eternally to older, darker things, in the driver’s seat. His black head was thrown back, and his face was suffused with rapture. He was singing, singing as the bus flew past on the summit of Burnt Mountain.
I fancied that I could hear the song, and perhaps I did. Perhaps I would hear it forever.
“The Cannibal King with the big nose ring fell in love with a dusky maid….”
Epilogue
The beaches on the coast of Georgia are broad and gentle, the sand not Caribbean sugar white but a mild, soft gray like the breast of a dove. The beach on which Nick had built our house was a perfect semi-circle of shell-strewn sand. High dunes shielded it on either side from the other houses on East Beach. It was a beautiful site. It had been in his family a long time, he said. He had always known his home would be here.
I lay in the high sun of autumn and looked out to sea. At its edge Bummer splashed, throwing a Frisbee to a Labrador puppy he had named, for some reason, Walmart.
Bummer came up and sat beside me, dripping seawater. Walmart shook himself all over and rolled in the sand.
“When’s lunch?” Bummer said. “Walmart’s hungry.”
“Soon as Nick gets home,” I said. “He’s out at the Frederica site now.”
Bummer leaned into me and I put my arm around him. There was a good bit more flesh over his ribs now, and his tanned body was warm. Two years had carried him out of small-boyhood. He had been with us here for three weeks. He came to us more and more often. His father, busy with his older boys, had little time for Bummer. I knew that his time with his mother was strictly circumscribed by the new custody decree his father had filed for and won. Aengus had testified well. My heart hurt for Carol, but I heard nothing from her. When Walter had taken her to court and gotten custody of the children, she had moved back to her mother’s home in upper Montclair.
She had been back at home next door when Bummer and I got home from Burnt Mountain that night, but she would not speak of Camp Forever and what went on there. She never did. Indeed, we spoke little at all. She did not return my calls, nor answer my knocks when I went next door to see her. I don’t know if she felt I was still too deeply connected to Aengus for her to trust me or if some essential Carol-ness had simply been burned out of her on that night and she did not know me anymore. In a very short time there was a custody hearing and the boys were gone, and finally she was, too.
We did not see her again. Calls arranging Bummer’s visits to us came from Walter. I had started to call her several times at her mother’s home, but always Nick said, “Let it be.”
“But Nick, it’s Carol….”
“Let it be, Thay. Anything to do with that damned c
amp is poison for her.”
We talked of it very little.
“Did Big Jim know all that, do you think?”
“God, no. He’d have had apoplexy. And of course he’d have closed the camp.”
“And the boys—did they stay, you know, like that? Perfect?”
“No. Two or three of them have ended up in Juvie. They’re just boys. It’s all they ever were. The rest was just moonbeams.”
Oh, Grand. I did not know if Camp Forever was still there now. I did not know where Aengus was. He was still up in those empty woods when our divorce was finalized that winter; he did not contest it and I did not see him again. He was wherever there was magic, I thought sometimes. If there’s any magic left. The hole he left in my heart will always be there. Magic, for me, had largely slid into it and was lost.
Bummer and I were both silent. I looked out to sea once more. There was magic here, perhaps, where earth, air, and water, those three great elements, came together. This beach was a wonderful spot for looking. You could see the empty blue horizon to the east. You could see the thick island forest to the west. To the south you could see the small curve of the St. Simons Island pier and, beyond it, the breast of the island as it slid out of sight into the sea toward Jekyll Island.
But you could not see north. And in any case, I never looked, not north. Not toward the first abrupt green peak that marked the dying of the Appalachian chain.
Not toward Burnt Mountain.
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Burnt Mountain Page 25
