Wash (13 page)

Mena and Wash take care with where they put Thompson’s body, even though it’s just for the time being. No telling how long it will take for his boys to get word and it’s still full summer. They dig the old man a grave in the dip between two dunes where the sun hardly hits and the sand stays cool but does not seep wet.

As they step back to look at their work, Mena points to the crest of the biggest dune with its waving crown of sea grass and says it looks just like a camel. Wash isn’t sure he believes her but she looks at him like she’s not teasing then kneels to draw one in the wet sand with a stick.

After they line the hole with broad palmetto leaves, Mena heads back to the house to prepare the body. She makes Wash help her no matter how he tries to squirm away. Tells him she needs him to get ready for life to start closing in on him. When he balks, she steps toward him and he knows she means it.

Thompson had left his favorite pants hanging over the back of the chair next to his bed. After they get him washed and dressed, they stand together beside the old man. Wash stares at his face, mesmerized by death, while Mena looks out the window trying to picture what comes next. All she sees is a bright tangle of green.

A shaft of sunlight falls onto the earring Thompson kept in a clamshell on his bedside table. Silver with small pearly bluish stones dangling. Stones that disappeared into his wife’s thick dark hair or lay against her neck when she tipped her head to the side to tease him. He had told Mena about his wife and she had listened.

Mena puts this earring deep inside one of his pockets and the few small shells he had collected in the other. She sets aside both his gold watch that has not worked for years and the chalky white dolphin vertebra he loved to draw. She figures his boys will be hunting the watch and she can hide the bone in some tall grass near wherever they decide to bury him for good.

Then she has Wash help her wrap the old man in that red blanket he favored. Once the blanket is wrapped good and tight, she and Wash turn him from one side to the next so they can slide a sheet under him to carry him by. He’s still heavy, despite the weight he lost at the end, so they have to drag the sheet by its corners over the smooth places in the path and stop several times to rest before they make it down to the dunes.

After they sit for a while beside the grave with him and let the setting sun slide across his face one more time, Mena pins that last flap closed. They lower him into the hole. She sets more palmetto leaves crisscrossed on top of him and tells Wash to be careful when he shovels the sand back in. They use four big rocks to weigh down several old boards from under the cabin but she worries this will not be enough protection from being dug up by something, so she and Wash sleep beside him that night and the next until they can feel the old man sitting with them by their fire and glad to be gone, both at the same time.

His two boys arrive three days later. The morning flashes out with a hard glint, coming as a surprise after a calm succession of cloudy days. It’s already hot by midmorning when Paymore edges Thompson’s boat up to the dock. The light falls so sharp onto the bright water that his paddle breaks it into shards.

Mena had guessed the boys would arrive early on the third day after she’d sent word and the gulls had confirmed it by wheeling and calling. She and Wash stand together just beyond the far edge of the crooked dock. Each an echo of the other without realizing it. Tall and slender in their wrapped cloth, forearms crossed, hands cupping opposite elbows. Right on time. Waiting. Watching the shards of light off the water flash brightness into the faces of the old man’s sons.

Eli’s blond prettiness has hardened while Campbell’s remains soft and open despite his being the eldest. Each brother steps across the small rocking gap between the boat and the dock without looking at the water, the younger in the lead as always. Their heels ring hard against the planks then fall quiet as they step into the sand, heading for the house.

Mena and Wash woke early and have been busy. They have the house ready to close up with all the goods packed in two crates. They even brushed most of the sand off Thompson’s blanket before they laid his body out on the kitchen table. His rifle lies beside him, cradled on top of his few changes of clothes. His three books. Rousseau,
Robinson Crusoe
and a Bible. His watch and his spectacles hold down two small stacks of papers. The first stack is ink drawings. Mostly scenes of the island. Rocks clustered in a tumble at the point. The rise and fall of the dunes. The view from the porch across the meadow toward the sound with tall pines marking a jagged border.

The brothers march into the front room only to circle aimlessly around the table, sneaking glances at their father with his face fallen in. Eli pays no attention to the drawings but Campbell, holding this last drawing in his hand, looks out the open door at the same view of the sound shimmering behind the pines.

“This one’s nice, don’t you think?”

Eli’s eyes skitter over the drawing and out the door as he moves on to the second stack of papers. A few unsent letters. One to each of them and one to their sister. And, as always, one to his wife, no matter how long she had been dead. Thompson had also started a letter to his third son but the words taper out quickly, turning into a series of ink drawings. Mostly different views of the dolphin vertebra Mena has already hidden in her pack.

Eli crumples this last letter in his fist. Campbell pivots at the sound and stands staring until Eli hands it over. He bends to smooth the paper flat on the table but seems disappointed to find only last week’s date and the words
my dear boy
hovering over a scattering of small sketches. Campbell sets this last letter beside his father’s body and follows his brother out to the porch where Wash and Mena wait.

Wash is already a head taller than his mother and filling out. Eli steps close to him and takes hold of his chin, turning his face to the sun then lifting his top lip with one thumb to look at his teeth. Wash spins away from him shocked but Eli grabs his collar to jerk him back around. Mena steps close behind Wash, her fingers closing around his wrist before he can lift his arm to strike. He wrestles against her grip but only for a minute because he feels the iron in it.

It’s all different now, she tells him over and over in her old tongue. I told you. I told you and you promised me.

Wash holds himself still until Eli lets go. Paymore steps onto the porch to help the brothers carry their father’s body to the boat. Eli follows him inside and starts directing everybody which corner to take, how to distribute the weight properly and who should go through the door first.

Once they’ve disappeared down the path, Mena leads Wash back into the house, still holding him by the wrist like he’s a child. She looks at him hard until he nods that she can let go. She smooths the crumpled last letter full of drawings and slides it into her pack then pulls the shutters closed. Stands in the doorway, taking one last slow look around, then turns her back on it so sharp and quick it’s as if she’s daring the house to try calling out after her.

By the time they reach the dock, Thompson’s body lies longways in the belly of his boat. Mena can see Wash still has it in his mind to run. He’s thinking he can hide despite her swearing to him those Thompson boys would hunt him down and these roughnecks out here would turn him in for gold. Even if she had not seen it in a dream, she already knew by the way Eli had looked at Wash every time he came to visit his father.

Mena levels her eyes at Wash, herding him onto the boat by force of will. She gives the key to Campbell then puts her hand on Wash’s shoulder to steady herself as she climbs into the rocking boat to sit pressed close against him. His eyes keep jumping to the shore but she doesn’t care so long as he stays on that bench beside her. His breathing does not settle until the pines lining the path to the sound are out of sight.

Mad as Wash is at being manhandled by Eli on the porch and lost as he feels at being wrenched off the island, he is soon overwhelmed by the big Thompson place. Nine hundred acres wrapped around a lake stretching to the horizon, quarters full to bursting with nearly two hundred people and more girls than he has ever seen.

Some boys are still boys at fifteen but some are already young men like Wash, as physically graceful as he is shy, nodding yes or shaking his head no, with rivers of words damming up behind his lips as he walks in step with his mother through the quarters to the farthest cabin. Raising his eyes here and there, trying to make some sense of this place so as to better map his course.

He knows how to read the sky for storms. He knows how to hunt and track and trap, how to ride and cook and sew and swim and catch and bend to fit. But when he goes looking for answers inside himself about this place, they aren’t there. He misses the quiet of the island but he feels the pull of all this newness, even though it knocks him off balance.

And the girls turn his head till he’s flustered. All the longing that’s rising in those girls, they send it straight for Wash. The rest of these boys, the girls have grown up with them. Seen their mammas snatch them back when they made trouble and watched them squall like babies. But all they’ve seen Wash do is walk tall and dark and beautiful behind his mother. Holding himself to himself, with his voice and his lip darkening into smoky shadows even as he still carries the sweetness of a child.

Mena knows how it will be. It will be some girlwoman, a little bit older than the rest. She will dowse for Wash like water and she will find him. Draw him off to the side then draw him up into himself. Make him into a man. Her man. It’s hard on Mena, thinking about Wash no longer being hers alone, but she’d rather it happen with this girlwoman who knows how to look after herself than with one of these young girls so flighty they can’t stand still.

It’s nice when one of you is older and can take the other by the hand. She had put herself in Wash’s father’s hands like she knew he wasn’t going to drop her and he didn’t. But the women had been telling her all her life how it would be so she was prepared. They had told her how his fingers drumming on her skin would be his calling God up inside her, just like her feet drumming on the skin of the ground had always been her way of calling God up inside her.

She knew this to be true because she had felt it for herself through her whole childhood, with her bare feet drumming their small perfect patterns into the soft dust until she felt God start coming right up from underneath the hard dry ground to move through her and through all of them. So on that second night, when Wash’s father’s fingers first touched her skin, when she became the drum, and when she heard feelings like sounds being called up through the hollow middle of her, this new thing did not seem like a new thing at all. It was instead the one thing she knew for sure in this brand new, upside down world.

The women had told her how this would be, but the pieces don’t fall in place until they fall in place inside of you. Some people, this learning happens too early and some it happens too late but Mena was lucky in that it happened to her right on time. She only wants something close to the same for Wash.

He starts out trying to learn this new life by turning to his mother but the others tease him for it. Their calling him a mamma’s boy burns in him even though he’s unsure what they mean. Pot calling the kettle black is all Mena will say about it, but pretty soon Wash starts slipping away from her, sliding around the corner of their cabin even as she’s calling him, acting like he can’t hear her.

She has known best for so long and she has always been right. But now she does not seem so right to him anymore. He’s itching to know things on his own. And he has heard the others start to talk about her and it worries him. That she’s too serious and too dark too. Thinks she’s better than the rest. Might even be some kind of witch, with all that African.

Mena knows she’s being standoffish but she also knows there’s plenty of time to make herself indispensable. She’s using the time before they’re hooked in tight to see this new place clear so she will know how to survive it. She hasn’t stitched the two of them to anybody yet because she’s still deciding whom to choose.

But she can’t get too mad with Wash. She sees how it is for him to have real people right next to him instead of misty clouds of spirits chasing him across that windswept island, so she lets him run and play and fool around but she tries to watch sharp too.

What she’s given Wash seems so little compared to what she wanted him to have coming into this world. She wanted a group of men who could take him off to initiate him like they did the boys at home. She had loved watching those boys straggle away, looking so pitiful, only to come walking back into the village weeks later, no taller but somehow bigger, carrying such a knowing in their eyes. Now she wishes she had paid more attention to what little the boys would tell her
.

Mena thinks back to her father and grandfather and brothers and uncles. How they had acted, what they had said, and the meaning that lay behind those words. All she knows is that death must draw close. It must make sure you die to childhood before you can call yourself grown because everybody knows you can never become an ancestor without having gone through some kind of initiation. But how close must death come? And how do you meet it so it will pass on by?

Her mother had told her that a girl’s coming of age heads straight for her. When it comes time for that first baby to make his way from belly to out, that’s when she will stand on the brink between the worlds and be able to see across. She will be her own threshhold. And Mena had found that truth for herself. When she brought Wash into this world, she’d been carried to that place in the veil where it goes thin. But what about him?