Islands: A Novel Part 17

"Don't tell me this isn't better than that phony screened pool," I said, and she grinned at me around her lolling tongue.

We followed the small wind down the creek for about an hour, until we reached the bend that I knew sheltered one of the great prehistoric sh.e.l.l mounds that dot the Low Country marshes. The wind began to drop and I could feel sweat popping out at my hairline.

"Enough for one day," I told Gladys. "By the time we get back, it'll be lunchtime, and then naptime. But aren't you glad we came?"

I turned the boat in a tight arc and we chugged slowly back up the creek, toward the dock. The tide was coming in, and the creek was slowly widening, spreading as infinitesimally through the marsh gra.s.s as a glacier. There was virtually no sound from the forest: no birdsong, no plop of mullet, no rustle of gra.s.s or small splash as a turtle or water snake slid into the slow water. Not even the whine of mosquitoes or the dry burr of cicada. In another month, the creek and woods would be alive with the comings and goings of its villagers, but today it was an underwater place, totally stopped and still. Gladys nodded in the sun and barked at nothing.

We were not far from the dock when her head snapped up and she raised her muzzle and sniffed feverishly. I could not imagine what she was searching the wind for. I heard nothing but the low rumble of our motor. As I cut it and glided the Whaler in toward the dock, she sprang up on the seat with a vigor that I had not seen for years, and began to bark: urgent, full-throated bronze barks that I could imagine coming from her throat years before, in the fields and woods of autumn. I hardly had us stopped, wallowing, beside the dock when she was out of the boat and running down the walkway as if she had never been stiff or lame or old. I scrambled out and sprinted after her, calling. It crossed my mind that she was having some sort of seizure, or fit.

Halfway down she misstepped, and skidded off the planks and fell headlong into the marshy black water. I did not know how deep it was here; probably not very, but the mud was thick and deep and sticky, and the gra.s.ses obscured vision. Gladys began to thrash and whine. I went off the dock after her.

The water came up only to my waist, but it was over her head. My feet sank deep into the silky, sucking mud. I could not see Gladys, only the frantic thrashing, but I grabbed for her and got her, and lifted her, still struggling, into my arms, and heaved her up onto the dock. She was coated from nose to tail with the foul-smelling mud, and I was slimed with it, too. Before I could wipe it out of my eyes, she was gone again down the dock, barking and falling, getting up, running, falling again. I caught her and grabbed her up in my arms and headed up the bank with her, trying hard to hold her still. I could feel her heart, like a trip-hammer. A vet; I would have to get her to a vet....

She broke free once more and bolted toward Camilla's house. I started to follow her and then stopped.

A dusty old pickup truck stood in the center of the driveway circle, and on Camilla's porch a tall, stooped, wire-thin old man was just raising his hand to knock. He turned toward us, and my knees almost gave way with shock. Henry. It was Henry.

He saw Gladys struggling toward him, and reached her with two steps and gathered her up into his arms. She wriggled and whined and yipped with delirious joy, and lapped at his gaunt face with a frantic tongue. He held her, burying his face in her filthy coat. He raised it when I reached them. His face was as filthy with mud as Gladys and I were, and tears cut pale tracks through it on both cheeks.

"Henry," I whispered, and began to cry, too, and threw my arms around him and Gladys. We tumbled together onto the gravel drive, man, woman, and dog, a tableau of homecoming sculpted of primal Low Country clay.

"You're the dirtiest girls I ever hugged," Henry said in a faded ghost of his old slow, sweet voice, and then we simply sat and held each other, and cried.

Presently the hammering of my heart slowed, and I lifted my head and looked at Henry. His face was white and mud stained, but he was clean shaven, and his sunken blue eyes were clear. His silvery hair fell in a tangled sheaf over his eyes. It was longer than I had ever seen it. I could feel his bones, sharp as dead branches, through the faded, mud-stained old denim workshirt that he wore. You could have counted every rib. There were still tear tracks in the mud on his face, but he was not crying anymore. His eyes had a look of great distances; I had never seen that before. Henry had always been so totally with you, so absolutely in the moment. Who was this man?

"Henry," I began, but he touched my lips with his fingers and I fell silent. Gladys was attempting to burrow herself under his arm, and he patted her absently.

"I can't, now, Anny," he said, in the cracked new voice. "I just can't. Later on, maybe, we'll talk about it, but not yet. It's like I've been living in some kind of nightmare, and everything after the fire is beginning all over again. I need to know you all are around me, but I have to start over with all this, and I need to do it alone. I need to feel it all, now. I've been drunk for a long time."

He was trembling, a fine shivering all over. I had seen it before. My mother used to do it, in the claws of a savage hangover. Many of my little clients' parents did. But his eyes were clear, and there was not that sweet, yeasty smell about him that spoke of advanced alcoholism. If he had been a drinker, he was not now a drunk. Just a frail wreck of a man.

I nodded silently, with my arms still on his shoulders. Gladys settled herself under his arm and fell silent. We were still sitting like that on the gravel drive, holding lightly to each other and not speaking, when a screen door banged and I looked up to see Camilla running down the steps of her house. I had not seen her run in years; she moved very carefully now. But on this day she ran as lightly as a girl, her pigtail flying out behind her. She wore a light, sheer flowered cotton skirt that drifted around her ankles, and a white sleeveless blouse. She was entirely the young Camilla who had laughed and danced with Lewis and Henry on the hot summer sand of the Sullivan's Island beach, long ago. Before she reached us, Henry climbed painfully to his feet and stood still, with his arms open, and she ran into them.

She held him hard. I could not see her face.

"I've been waiting for you," I heard her say. "I thought you'd come about now. I've had a pot of gumbo in the freezer for days. You can tell us about the odyssey of Henry McKenzie over a feast tonight. I'll call Lila and Simms."

Her voice was fluting with happiness, and a sort of joyful certainty. She was not, I thought, surprised to see him. With the delicate radar she seemed to employ as far as Henry went, and to an extent, Lewis, she had known he was coming, and almost when. Well, I thought, it was the three of them almost since they could walk. That kind of bond can't be broken.

She stepped back from Henry, still holding his hands, and made as if to pull him gently toward the steps, but he stood still, shaking his head.

"Cammy, no," he said in the frail voice. "Later, but not now. Right now I just need to get clean and sleep. It's been a long time since I've slept. I heard from Nancy that you all were staying out at some marsh place that Simms owned, and I remembered that he'd bought Booter's place, and I took a chance. I'm sorry to just bust in on you like this, but right now I...don't have any place to go. I can't go back to Bedon's Alley...."

"Of course not. You've come home. We have a place waiting for you; it's been ready almost since we first came out here. It's back behind the pool. I'll show you. You take a long shower and hop in bed and we'll let you sleep till you wake up. You can't hear us from there."

"Gladys..."

Camilla smiled. "Of course, Gladys. We couldn't keep her out with six feet of barbed wire. Come on, now. I'll take your clothes and wash them while you're asleep, and there's plenty of food in your fridge. Did you bring any other clothes?"

"A few, in a duffle in the back of the truck. They're in pretty bad shape. I don't know what happened to all my clothes...."

His voice began to fade, and the distance came back into his eyes.

"No matter. I'll sort them out," Camilla said firmly. "Come on. When you feel up to it, the rest of us will probably be around one or another porch tonight and in the morning."

She began to bustle him toward the little guest house in the palmetto forest behind the pool. I knew now why she had insisted on furnishing and decorating it just so, and stocking it with linens and silverware and dishes. She had had a window air-conditioning unit put in, too. The little house waited there all summer in the deep shade of the palms and live oaks, perfect and inviting, for guests who never came.

Instead, Henry had come. I knew that Camilla had meant it to be the home that he came to.

He held back under her gently urging hand, and looked at me.

"I've missed you," he said limply, and I began to cry again.

"You'll never know how we've missed you," I whispered. "You'll just never know."

"I hope I will, someday," Henry said, and turned to follow Camilla up the path toward a bath and food and sleep.

I called Lewis at Sweetgra.s.s and he called Simms and Lila, and by late afternoon we were all gathered at the creek, having drinks on Camilla's front porch and talking of Henry.

"How was he?" "How did he seem?" they asked me over and over, and I could only shake my head helplessly.

"Old. Half sick. Weak. I don't know," I said. "He's not really Henry. How could he be, after what he's been through? Let's wait and see how he is when he gets his bearings."

"But did he say where...?" "Did he talk about Fairlie?" "Will he be staying here?" "Is he going back to medicine?"

"I don't know," I said. "I just don't know. We really didn't talk."

"Then what did you do?" Lila said impatiently.

"Sat in the driveway with our arms around each other and Gladys and cried," I said.

"Henry cried?" Simms was shocked.

"If he hadn't cried, I'd cart him straight off to a shrink," Camilla said crisply. "Anny's right. We need to let him be, let him call the shots."

"But what will we talk to him about?" Lila wailed, and all at once I wanted to shake her.

"What did you ever talk about?" I said.

"Well, you know. Just stuff."

"Just stuff will do fine."

Henry slept for the rest of that day and night and most of the next day. Or at least, if he did not sleep, neither did he leave the guest house, and we saw no lights and heard no sounds. A couple of times Gladys came clicking out the slightly open front door and wandered into Lewis's and my kitchen and had a bite and a drink, but she looked at me, startled and half guilty, wagged her tail, and padded back toward the guest house.

"It's okay," I said the first time she did it. "I know he's back. He'll want you there when he wakes up." And off she went.

In the morning Camilla tiptoed into the guest house with a pile of newly ironed clothes and a pitcher of fresh orange juice, but she did not stay.

"Still sleeping," she said. "I could hear him snoring."

"I think that's Gladys," I said. "She can blow you out of bed."

"Well, whoever, they're really sawing wood. I know you all wanted to see him, but I think it would be better, if he doesn't come out by midafternoon, if everybody went back to their own place in town. Maybe he should just ease into the group one at a time."

"That one being you," Lila said.

"You know I always stay out here part of Monday," Camilla said. "I just want to see if he needs anything. Then I'll leave him be. But I'm not going to leave him totally alone out here. Not for a while. He's going to start remembering in earnest now, and I want to be here if he wants to talk."

But apparently Henry did not want to talk. At least, not about Fairlie, or the fire, or his lost time in the Yucatan. Camilla reported at midweek that he had caught up on his sleep and was eating like a sailor on sh.o.r.e leave, and had begun to lose the terrible skeletal look in his face and arms. He spent a lot of time dozing in the sun or reading in the pool cage, Gladys stuck to his side like a c.o.c.klebur, and he took the little kayak that Simms had brought out into the creek and vanished out of sight in the marshes for hours at a time.

"Does he talk?" I asked, when she called.

"Oh, yes. But not about...all that. He talks about the land around here-apparently he and Lewis used to hang around here with somebody named Booter-and he talks about Gladys, and dogs in general, and the state of medicine today, and what's happening to downtown with the tourists and all. And he talks a lot about the old days."

"At the beach house?"

"No. Earlier. When he and Lewis and I were kids out on the island. I'd forgotten how awful he and Lewis were. He laughs a lot about that."

"So we shouldn't mention the other stuff...."

"You can talk about anything else under the sun, but he's obviously not ready for that. Let him set the pace."

We all got to the creek about the same time the next Friday, at sunset, and Henry uncoiled himself from Camilla's porch swing and came loping down the steps to meet us.

"Well, if it's not the estimable Scrubs of Charleston, South Carolina, and Booter's Creek," he drawled, grinning hugely, and we all hugged and cried a little, and pounded him on the back and Lila and I kissed him. He smelled like sun and freshly ironed cotton, and, faintly, of salt and pluff mud, and his face and arms and legs were lightly tanned under a coating of new sunburn. His silvery hair was neat again, if still a little longish; somebody, Camilla, no doubt, had trimmed it. He wore crisp khaki shorts and a blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms, and if you did not look too long into his eyes, he was fully and truly Henry again.

"You look good, man," Lewis said, clearing his throat. "You really do. And my G.o.d, Gladys! Look at you! We ought to enter you in the Miss Charleston contest."

Gladys, capering with manic glee beside Henry and barking up at us, shone as if she had spent a day at an exclusive spa, and wore around her neck a beautiful brown and black and white cotton scarf tied like a bandanna.

"I swore I'd never do that to a dog," Henry said, "but I brought it back from Mexico for Nancy, and it was just the color Gladys is, so I gave it to her instead. Looks a million times better on Gladys. Really brings out the cheerleader in her, doesn't it? Bath didn't hurt, either."

In a way, that first conversation set the tone for the rest of the summer. We found that, after an initial awkwardness, we could talk almost naturally among ourselves and around Henry without mentioning Fairlie or the fire. Henry helped by saying, that first night at dinner, "I know you all want to know, and I want to tell you. But not yet. I've got way too much to sort out. And you'll understand that there are things I just can't talk about, and maybe never will."

We nodded, looking at him in the light of Camilla's tall white tapers. But we did not know, not really. Only Camilla knows, I thought, looking at her. She was smiling and nodding her head very slightly. When he's ready, she'll be there, I thought, and was comforted. Camilla would understand a great deal without Henry's having to say it. But Fairlie and the fire and the years at the beach house were always with him, we knew, and always with us.

For the rest of the summer, Henry stayed in the guest house, and Camilla stayed in her house. We came on weekends. It was not dissimilar to the way things had been at the beach house, except now, of course, Henry lived on the creek. Or did for the time being, anyway. He made no effort to look for a place in Charleston, and said nothing about continuing his practice, or flying with his doctors' group. I wasn't sure what he did with his weekdays; Camilla said he was out on the water a great deal, usually with Gladys, and spent a lot of time walking the fields and woods bordering the marsh. She thought that the days of solitude were when he wrestled with his demons; his eyes were often red when he came in for supper, as he always did. But at the meal, he was easy and soft-spoken, as he had always been, and often talked long to her over coffee, in the candlelight. But never of Fairlie. And never of the fire.

"He'll get around to it," she said tranquilly. "I think he's a lot nearer to it now."

He went to bed early and read late into the night, or at least Camilla thought that he did. Piles and piles of books lay about the living room when she went in to straighten up and take him his clothes and food. And his bedroom light burned late. She did not know where the books came from.

"Camilla, you've turned into Henry's maid and cook," Lila said early in September. "He ought to kick in, or help you find somebody to do for you."

"He helps me more than anyone knows," she said, smiling. "Including him."

On weekends he was agreeable and funny and as sweet tempered as ever, and often came with us when we sailed or swam. But never with just one of us. Henry that early autumn was everyone's friend and no one's confidant. If Lewis, with whom he had always been closest, missed the lazy, bone-deep bond that the years had forged between them, he did not say so. I thought that he was simply glad to have Henry back, on any terms, as was I. In those muted bronze days of September, when the monarch b.u.t.terflies came drifting in from the north and settled in shivering clumps on the trees and shrubs, and the great autumn writing spiders wove their fables in the early mornings, Henry was alone only with Gladys and Camilla.

Often, on those mornings, I would get up early and they would be sitting around the pool, dripping and bundled in towels, talking quietly. In the late afternoons, before we all gathered for drinks, Camilla and Henry and Gladys all stretched themselves in the lowering sun on Camilla's front porch. Talking, talking. Once I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and looked out the kitchen window, and saw Camilla letting herself quietly out of Henry's front door, and starting down the path to her house. I did not speak of it, except to say to Lewis once, "Wouldn't it be something if they got together? They both know what this pain is like. They might be a great comfort to each other. And they've been together so long...."

Lewis looked at me oddly.

"Too much history," he said. "Way too much."

And as the slow days burned toward October, Henry seemed to me to have achieved a fragile peace that I thought might be the beginning of healing. Camilla has done this for him, I thought. He's finally talked it out to her. It was just the right thing to do. Even if the rest of us never heard the particulars of Henry's terrible odyssey, the one who could truly help him had.

Bless her, I thought. Without her he could have simply died of the infection of grief.

In late September there came a day so blue and bronze and heavy with the smell of ripening wild muscadines that I awoke with autumn literally itching under my skin. It was a Sat.u.r.day morning, and Lewis had stayed at Sweetgra.s.s to talk to an agricultural agent about his longleaf pines. I knew that the day was an anomaly; the thick heat and buzzing insects would come back with a vengeance. In the Low Country, cool weather often does not come until Thanksgiving. This day was a token, a promise to wilting souls.

It was still early when I took my bagel and marmalade out onto our porch. The sky was a brilliant cobalt vault overhead, but wisps of icy white mist clung to the sh.o.r.eline of the creek. Tags of it drifted among the still-green gra.s.ses. Sound, muted and thick all summer, had a ringing new clarity; I could hear someone's boat engine far down the creek as clearly as if it had been at the end of our dock, and the thumping helicopter sound of a rising flock of wood storks far across the water was crisp and clear. I stretched luxuriously, and started to amble, barefoot, down to the dock, simply to wrap myself totally in the morning.

Behind me there was a soft, mechanical whining, and I turned. Henry and Gladys were b.u.mping down the path to the dock in the golf cart. Henry raised his hand and smiled and Gladys wagged her whole back end.

"Is this a day, or what?" I said.

"This is a day," Henry said. "Gladys woke me up begging to go out in the Whaler, so I thought I'd indulge her."

"She's a good sailor," I said, rubbing the thin hair on the top of Gladys's domed head.

"Has she been in the Whaler much?" he said.

"I used to take her a lot. It's better for her than the rowboat, because she can see out."

"Well," Henry said, getting out of the cart and lifting Gladys down, "I'm glad it isn't her maiden voyage." They started down the dock, the tall, thin man and the limping old dog. Henry did not ask me to go with them. I was obscurely hurt; I don't know why.

I settled onto the bench seat in the pavilion and watched as Henry jumped down into the Boston Whaler. He reached up for Gladys, but she pulled back, turning her head from him to me and back again. You could read the confusion on her face. Finally she simply sat down.

Henry began to laugh.

"She's not about to get into this boat without you," he said. "Come on, hop in. I won't keep us out long."

"Oh, Henry, three's a crowd...."

"Get in the boat, woman," he growled, and I laughed and jumped down into the Whaler and picked up Gladys, who had come to the edge of the dock, waiting to be lifted in.

We went far down the creek, toward the place where it swirled into the larger creek, and then into the slow, dark river that went eventually to the sea. Along its path eastward the banks grew high with oyster-sh.e.l.l bluffs and slick clay banks riddled with fiddler holes. If you were still and silent enough, you could see the crabs in their thousands, busily cleaning their burrows and waving their great claws about. But the softest splash and the bank was empty in an eyeblink. Gladys barked dutifully, but she knew by now that she would never get her teeth and paws on a fiddler.

It was midmorning before the sun climbed high enough to touch the water. It was deep here, and opaque with the boiling, teeming strata of life that reached fathoms deep into the mud beneath its surface. It was sometimes dizzying to me to think, when I was drifting silently on the sun-dappled surface, that the creek was as close to the primal, generative stew as you could find on this present earth. Henry had slowed the motor to a soft, subterranean b.u.mble. We had spoken very little. I was nearly mindless with contentment.

He cut the motor, and pointed across the sh.e.l.l banks to the marsh on the other side of the creek. It was unbroken green here, except for small islands of palmetto and elderberry brush here and there, almost to the wooded horizon line. Sh.e.l.l mounds, I knew; or middens, thought to be the garbage dumps of the Indians who had taken the sweet sh.e.l.lfish from this creek for centuries before the first white man came. Each epoch had a favorite dish, Lewis had said; some strata were oysters, some crabs, some clams and periwinkles, some river fish. I had never explored one closely.

"See that big one out in the middle of the marsh?" Henry said, and I did. It was high and rounded like a deep bowl, instead of a slightly conical hill, and larger than all the others. I had never seen it before. I had never been this far down the creek.

"Boy, the eating here must have been great," I said.

"It's not a midden. It's a sh.e.l.l ring. Kind of an epochal calendar, you might say. If you excavated, you'd find all sorts of things that defined the culture of the moment. Pottery shards, sh.e.l.ls and sharks' teeth that were used for money, household artifacts, sometimes shamanistic totems. There was some big magic on these marshes. The College of Charleston has been dying to get an archeological team in here for decades, but Booter wouldn't allow it, and Simms hasn't either, so far. Lewis and Booter and I used to climb around it, and we found some pretty wonderful things, but as far as I know, n.o.body has ever dug it seriously. Get Lewis to take you over there sometime."