Islands: A Novel Part 19

"So where's Lila?"

"She's gone to get groceries and stuff. I stayed here because it would be easier for me to lift Camilla if she fell. Although she can't weigh ninety-five pounds. G.o.d, when did she get so thin?"

Presently Lila came back with sacks of groceries and boxes of wine and other liquor, and we helped her carry them into her house.

"If I'm going to be stuck out here, I'm not going to be without the necessities," she said. "I'm glad you're here, Anny. Maybe she'll listen to you about the doctor. I don't know what's gotten into her."

Camilla appeared at dinnertime, leaning on her crutch with one arm and on Henry with the other. She was paper white, almost translucent, and under the Ace bandage on her ankle lurid blue bruising stained her entire foot and ran up her leg. She was obviously in pain, but she had put on a bright Mexican print skirt and blouse, and lipstick and a little blush. On her waxen face the blush stood out like circles of color on a clown's face.

But she smiled.

"Is this c.r.a.p, or what?" she said. "I have the grace of a dancing beaver."

Henry settled her at the dinner table and Lila brought out our meal. It was a cold one, light against the heat that had come seeping back: shrimp salad and avocado, and some of the last of the wonderful John's Island tomatoes. We drank a flowery Chablis with it.

After dinner we moved to the porch, and sat in the soft, black night of the Low Country. It was so dark I could hardly make out the others' shapes; only the creak of the rocking chairs told me we were all there.

"Okay, now that we have a quorum, we're going to take up this business of the doctor again," Lila said firmly. I could hear annoyance in her honeyed voice.

"You need to go, Camilla," I said. "It would only take maybe a morning; Henry can get you in to see a good orthopedic man with one phone call. Chances are, all you'd need is a walking cast. It would make you a lot more stable, and you'd get well a whole lot quicker. Much as we love you, it would be hard for Lila or me to stay with you full-time. And you remember that Henry said he needs to get back to work pretty soon. You know Henry; he'll stay as long as you need him. But a doctor could cut the time in half."

She was silent. Then, from the dark, she said, "I'll go. Of course I will. I can't bear having all of you mad at me. And of course Henry must get back into the world; I don't think he's had that truck off John's Island since he got here. It's just that...I haven't been back in a hospital since Charlie..."

My heart smote me.

"I'll take you in," I said. "And I'll stay with you every minute."

"No," Lila said. "I'll do it. Henry wants to put a ramp over Camilla's front steps, and you need to start getting things ready for the big homecoming party. Simms says the boat is a beauty. They'll have pictures to show us Sat.u.r.day night."

The next morning, Lila and Camilla drove away toward the appointment Henry did indeed make for her with a top orthopedist, and he brought out lumber and a handsaw while I sat under the pavilion on the end of the dock making a grocery list.

The morning was soft and blue, and spiderwebs sparkled with dew in the marsh gra.s.ses. It would, I knew, be hot by noon, but there was that telltale riffle of wind out on the creek, and the tide was in full. I yearned, suddenly, for the Whaler. And then I thought of Gladys, and my eyes misted over.

Henry appeared at my side and thumped himself down on the bench seat beside me.

"I just plain don't want to work this morning," he said. "Let's run away. I know, I'll take you down and show you the sh.e.l.l ring. You really should see it, and Lewis is going to be out sailing from now on until we all fall over. You good for that?"

My heart leaped up. To be out on the morning water, perhaps to laugh, perhaps to see Henry laugh...

"I'll go make us some sandwiches," I said, getting up.

"Bring some wine!" he called after me.

In half an hour we were out in mid-channel, facing into the freshening wind, bubbling down the October-blue creek.

We did not speak until we were in sight of the hummock that held the sh.e.l.l ring. To get to it, we had to cut the engine and glide the Whaler as close to the bank as possible, then anchor it and climb over the side and wade in. Where we went ash.o.r.e, the creek floor was soft and slick and plushy, and the water was a dark, thick soup. I stepped as lightly as possible, dreading what, in those old, secret waters, I might step on. Henry had said there were no sharp oyster or clam sh.e.l.ls here, but once, out in the Whaler with Gladys, I had seen the dark, triangular shape of a great skate float beneath the boat, and my blood had run cold. It was no use for Lewis to tell me that our creek skates were harmless and even shy, nor that they made sweet, wonderful eating. Whenever I see dark, opaque water, I people it with primordial skates. I was glad indeed when we slipped and slid up the bank and trudged through the deep gra.s.ses to the shade of the sh.e.l.l ring.

The hummock was large enough to harbor a grove of live oaks, ancient and gnarled, with ground-skimming beards of Spanish moss. Even this late in the year they were a vivid green with resurrection ferns and interspersed with the swords of palmettos. Under the canopy of oaks, a level green-mossed floor looked as landscaped as a suburban yard. It had been, Henry said, the site of the Indian village that had made the sh.e.l.l ring, built there for the secluded shade and the rich creek waters and the little freshwater spring that bubbled on the far side of the green. It was as hushed as a cathedral. You wanted to whisper under those trees.

We plunged the wine bottle into the spring and set out for the sh.e.l.l ring. It was tall, twice our height, and Henry said that if you climbed it, you would see, in its middle, a crater, like that of a volcano.

"But we never climbed it," he said. "n.o.body told us not to; it just seemed wrong. We always felt like they were watching us."

" 'They'?"

"Whoever first started that ring. Whoever kept it going. I've never known. Some geologists around here reckon that this creek and the others around here are at least six thousand years old. They formed when the oceans stopped rising. The first people who lived here could be a tribe n.o.body's ever heard of."

I looked up at the big, sheer wall of sh.e.l.ls and detritus, covered now with scrubby gra.s.s and ferns and sediment laid down over uncounted ages. It was dark in the shade of the ring, and cool. We rummaged desultorily along the edge of the ring, and found sh.e.l.ls and pottery shards, arrowheads, fragments of bowls and cups, strings of broken beads. We found one gigantic prehistoric shark's tooth; Henry said it would have been used as money, and been worth a great deal of it. We left the tooth where we found it, and the other things, too. Henry was right. There was a great and silent sense of other beings around the ring and under the live oaks. When I looked back into the green shade under them, the dappling sunlight could easily be mistaken for shadowy brown people going about the ancient, everyday business of wresting a living from the creek and the hummocks. I shivered.

"I'm hungry," I said. "Are you ready for lunch?"

He smiled down at me. "You feel it, too, don't you? That whoever was here is still here somehow."

I thought of something that I had not remembered since college.

"Did you ever read The Golden Bough? Sir James Frazer's huge book about myths and magic throughout the world?"

Henry shook his head.

"Well, one thing he said I've never forgotten. It goes, 'The second rule of magic: Things that were once in contact with each other continue to act on each other after the physical contact has been broken.' "

Henry looked at me and smiled.

"I hope so," he said. "So far as I know, he's right."

Did he mean Fairlie? I thought he did. I smiled back.

"Well, then, we'll always have Gladys," I said.

"So we will. And a lot of other things."

While we were eating our sandwiches and drinking the wine, the sky to the west had darkened to a deep violet. I did not notice it until the wind on the creek picked up in short, violent bursts, then fell still again. It sounded as if the creek was breathing hard.

"That doesn't look so good," I said to Henry. "You think we can beat it home?"

"Fifty-fifty, I'd say," Henry said. We gathered up our paper bags and the wine bottle and ran down the squidgy, slippery bank and into the water, and scrambled into the Whaler.

Henry laid the throttle full open and we ran for home, always just ahead of the advancing dark and the eerie wind. On the sea side of the creek, the air was yellow. As we had been on the trip downstream, we were silent. I could smell the neck-p.r.i.c.kling stench of ozone on the cooling wind. Lightning on open water in a metal boat was not a thing to be trifled with.

The storm broke just as we were halfway down the dock, running full out for the houses. There was a tremendous flash of light, and all my arm and neck hair p.r.i.c.kled, and then a great boom of thunder that sounded as if it was just on our heels. The planks rattled under our feet. Huge, cold raindrops began to splatter the dock, and by the time we came off it and were heading up the path to the porches, we were drenched to the skin, and laughing with the sheer relief of not being dead.

We burst, dripping, into our living room, still laughing. Brushing the wet hair off my face, I saw that the others were there: Lila and Camilla. And Simms. Only Simms. Everyone stared at us. No one spoke.

Wrongness frizzled in the air like ozone. I could not catch the sense of it. I shook my head stupidly.

"What on earth are you doing here, Simms?" I said. "Did you all come back early? Where's Lewis?"

Still n.o.body spoke. The room flared into brightness. Later I read somewhere that the pupil of the eye expands in times of danger, so that no detail will go unnoticed. I was blinded with fear.

Simms started to speak, but I could not hear him through the sh.e.l.l-like roaring in my ears, or the drowning brightness. But by then I did not need to hear his words. I knew. The s.p.a.ce in the world that had always been Lewis's was empty, and was filling with fog and darkness. Behind me I felt Henry's hands take hold of my shoulders, hard.

They were all talking at once now, softly, faces terrible with pain, but I could not hear them. There was only the sealike roaring. The fog and darkness from Lewis's empty s.p.a.ce were rolling toward me.

Blindly, I half-turned to Henry and said, in a small, fretful voice I did not recognize, "I don't know how to do this. Please help me. I don't know how."

I turned back toward Camilla, and thought, through the whirling darkness, that she reached her hands out to me.

"Show me how to do this, Camilla," I whispered. The darkness took me and spun me then, and it was Henry's arms, not Camilla's, that were the last thing I felt.

11.

HER NAME WAS MISS CHARITY SNOW, after the wife of the down-easter who had had her built in 1966. I remembered what Lewis had said once about visiting the Hinckley boatyard in Maine, and thought of that first owner-in my mind, brown and crosshatched with wrinkles and the look of the sea in his eyes; a sailing man-as he stood and watched her being brought into the boatyard by the great hydraulic lift. I smelled the teak shavings and marine varnish. I thought of his joy and near reverence for this simple, perfect thing, and I wished that he had died before he had ever asked Hinckley to build him a boat.

It's strange about the death of someone you love: for the longest time it doesn't matter how they died. Or at least, that was so for me. It was days before I thought to ask what had happened to Lewis, though I knew that he must have died on the water. I found that I simply was not interested in details. It was not that I was afraid to hear them; though I knew it would be terrible to do so. It was just that I did not care. What difference could it possibly make?

Finally, after helping me stumble though the endless web of seemly arrangements for the genteel dead, Henry sat me down and told me how it had happened.

"You need to know, Anny," he said, his face blanched with new grief, this for his oldest and best friend. "You've been walking around like a zombie the past few days. You aren't going to be able to get past it if you don't know. It will never seem real. Trust me on this."

"Get past it?" I said in simple disbelief. "How can you possibly think I'll ever get past it?"

We were sitting on the pool ap.r.o.n in late afternoon. The slanted light had the patina of old gold and a hint of chill lay under the little light wind off the creek. I was wrapped in an old sweater of Lewis's, both for the leftover warmth of his body and the smell of him trapped in the mothy wool. Still, I was cold. I was always cold in those first days.

Henry had brought me a gla.s.s of wine, but I did not finish it. It made me feel sick and dull. At that moment, I would have done anything in the world to feel better. Just a little better, just for a moment. If I could do that, I thought, perhaps I could get a deep breath and go on living with the pain until it began to dull. Both Camilla and Henry had said that it would. I did not believe them; this choking thing with tentacles around my heart and its teeth in my throat seemed sentient, with an eternal life, bled from me. But they had gone through it, both of them, and though they were scarred-or at least Henry was-still, here they were. I understood, dimly, that I could learn from them. But I had no strength and no will. It seemed the most I could manage was simply to breathe in and breathe out.

But I sat still and let Henry tell me how my husband had died-or how they thought he had. It was much later that it occurred to me that perhaps I would never really know. They found Lewis's boat, and the next day they found Lewis, but there was no one to tell his story. It seemed to bother the others a great deal, but it never did me, not even now.

Simms had had a business dinner, Henry said, not looking at me as he said it, and I knew that we were both wondering if it had been with one of his women.

What bathroom was it this time, Simms? I thought, without heat. Just a mild curiosity. Again, what did it matter? Later Lila would shout at him, in our hearing, "What kind of G.o.dd.a.m.ned business dinner could be so important that you left him to go out on that boat alone, with night coming? You knew he wasn't the sailor you are. You knew he didn't know the boat yet...."

Simms had said nothing. He seemed to have aged a decade since that Friday afternoon. On the Sat.u.r.day that they found Lewis, he had gone back to the Battery house and had been there ever since. It was Camilla and Lila and Henry who made Lewis's final arrangements. Lost in my sick, dense fog, I simply could not seem to make a decision.

"I'm sorry," I said once to Camilla, as she sat with her ever-present notebook, making notes and telephone calls. "This isn't at all like me. I run a complicated business. I've been taking care of people all my life. I was strictly on my own until I met Lewis, and it didn't bother me a bit."

"It's the shock," she said. "It's nature's way of getting you through the first and worst of it. It's a kind of novocaine. Don't fight it. You've got us to help, and when the pain hits, you'll need all your energy just to live."

"It didn't hit you this way, after Charlie."

She smiled, not looking up.

"None of you knew how it hit me," she said.

So I sat in my dumb torpor that afternoon by the pool, and let Henry tell me what he knew about how Lewis died.

It was late when Simms got back to his hotel room. He called Lewis's room, but got no answer. He did not worry at first; Lewis had said that he might see how the boat handled at night, but that he didn't plan to leave the well-lit marina harbor. But time pa.s.sed, and Lewis did not appear. After checking the bar downstairs, Simms drove over to the marina. Lewis had taken Miss Charity Snow out about six P.M., the dockmaster said, and she hadn't come back. He was about to call Simms himself. Lewis had been out far too long for just a shakedown sail.

At first light the Coast Guard found Miss Charity Snow floating on her side, sails still taut. Lewis was nowhere to be found. The Coast Guard towed the boat in after radioing ahead to the marina. Simms got the next plane home. He had wanted to get there before I heard of it another way, Henry said.

That night, they found Lewis at the edge of the flat surf in the John U. Lloyd State Park, not a mile below the Coast Guard and navy stations. He had, they thought, been dead at least eighteen hours. I never asked how they knew.

When the call came, Simms broke down and sobbed.

Why? I thought. It's not as if they could bring him back to life.

But I soon realized that it would have been terrible past enduring if Lewis had never been found. I don't think I would have been one of those brave, cheerful, simpleminded widows who insist that someday the lost one will return; I did not believe that. But on the night after he was found, I dreamed about the lines I had always thought so lovely from The Tempest: "Full fathom five thy father lies.... Those are pearls that were his eyes...."

And in my dream Lewis rose slowly from dark water and broke the surface near where I stood and looked at me with eyes that were made of flat, nacreous pearl. Blind, dead eyes.

I woke sobbing, knowing that if I had had to contain that image within myself forever, I would have gone mad or died.

Once again downtown missed getting one of us properly planted in Magnolia Cemetery. Henry met Lewis's coffin at the airport and drove it straight to Sweetgra.s.s, and he and Robert Cousins and the Cousins's son, Tommy, a tall young man now, dug the grave in the old family cemetery in a grove of live oaks behind the house. Ornate mossy old gravestones were tumbled about here and there, and behind them the smaller white crosses of the slaves and then the markers for the beloved dogs of Sweetgra.s.s. The pearly gray moss made a great tent for all the Aiken dead, and I thought that the plain, beautiful slab of native marble I had chosen for Lewis would look well in the gossamer pavilion.

I had been almost physically nauseated by the thought of everyone staring at Lewis's coffin as it rode hydraulically down into the sandy earth, so Lewis and Henry and Tommy lowered it in themselves, with help from Tommy's College of Charleston fraternity brothers. They spaded fresh earth over it, and Linda and Lila laid fronds of fan palms and curly willow on the gentle mound.

Except for us and a few close doctor friends and Lewis's daughters, who had come down from the East to stand, erect and removed, under this alien curtain of moss, with pluff mud heavy in their nostrils, there were few other people at the grave-side ceremony. I had asked Robert Cousins, who was a lay preacher at the little Methodist church about a mile from the road into Sweetgra.s.s, if he would say a few words, and he did, gentle, dignified words about Lewis and this land and house and how they had been friends and workers together literally all of their lives, and how Lewis's stewardship of the land would be his abiding legacy.

He told a few stories of their boyhood here, and even as tears streaked our cheeks, we laughed at the exuberant antics of the two young wild things, one black and one white, running barefoot on the marshes, and swimming buck naked in the river. In his measured words I could hear the boy Lewis laugh, and see the man as I had first seen him, so alive that his skin could scarcely contain him. Robert spoke of how Lewis used to dance "like the devil got in his pants," and I remembered the night at Booter's oyster shack, and for the first time felt a small wisp of happiness that was gone almost before it formed. But I learned something from it. I learned that there might-just might-come a far-distant day when I would think of Lewis and smile with joy.

We bowed our heads then, and Robert led us quietly in the Lord's Prayer, and then Linda Cousins and the women who had come to sing Charlie into the sea on Sullivan's Island stepped forward and sang for Lewis, too: I know moonlight, I know starlight; I lay dis body down.

I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight, I lay dis body down.

I know de graveyard, I know de graveyard, When I lay dis body down.

I go to judgment in de evenin' of de day When I lay dis body down.

And my soul an' your soul will meet in de day When we lay our bodies down.

There was a much larger reception in the house, with many more people who came to nibble Linda Cousins's glorious food and drink Lewis's grandfather's blinding rum punch, and, Lewis being Lewis, there was far more laughter than tears. But I did not stay very long in the big living room. I felt my knees buckle under me in midsentence to an old lady who had known Lewis's mother and often visited Sweetgra.s.s for house parties ("You just don't know, my dear, what gracious parties we gave for each other back then. Every little detail perfect. Adelie was a famous hostess.").

Camilla, holding herself steady in spite of her crutch and the walking cast, saw me waver and motioned to Lila, who was beside me in an instant, and led me upstairs and tucked me into the old rice bed and drew the curtains. I was asleep in a heartbeat, far too quickly to feel the agony of lying in this bed without Lewis, and Lila sat with me until long after dark, when I woke. By then everyone had polished off the food and drink and gone back to Charleston, and Henry had gone to take the twin daughters of Lewis Aiken back to their suite at Charleston Place.

"Oh, Lord, I never said good-bye," I whispered blearily, when Henry got back.

"Don't worry about it," Henry said. "Neither did they."

I had thought I would spend a few days at Sweetgra.s.s, to see if I could find any sense of Lewis and get my bearings, but as the time for Lila and Simms and Henry and Camilla to go back to the creek neared, I felt a swift, rising tide of panic that startled me badly, and knew that I could not stay alone. Not, at least, on this night.

"No earthly reason why you should," Lila said. "You're coming back with us, and we're going to put you in the guest room for a few nights."