Burnt Mountain (18 page)

“Nothing much, Thay, okay?”

“Okay, but you’re going to have to tell me sometime.”

“I will. Sometime.”

He told me that night, after we had gotten back to the Domain and ordered a pizza and carried it up the widow’s immaculate
stairs to his room. The widow was at choir practice, which made the excursion easier. We’d stay, I knew, until after she went
to bed and then I would tiptoe downstairs in my socks. She knew we were there; she always did, but it seemed all right unless
she actually saw us.

“I think it’s the actual sight of our sin-raddled bodies creeping upstairs bent on more sin that would do her in,” Aengus
said. “This way, if we ever get caught at it, she can tell the choir she had no idea.”

We had just finished the pizza and were sprawled on his bed watching Jay Leno when Aengus told me.

“Thayer,” he said, pulling me into his shoulder. “Listen. Your mother told me about Nick Abrams tonight. She told me about…
the baby, and having to have it… you know…”

I stiffened against him and drew in a great, trembling breath.

“I can’t believe she did that,” I whispered on the breath that came out. “I absolutely cannot believe she would do that! I
was
going to tell you! It just… Aengus, it just didn’t seem important! I never even think about it now!”

He went still. Too still. And then he said, “You never think about not ever having any children?”

I jerked away from him and twisted around on the bed until I could see his face. I was panting so hard I could hardly get
my breath. There were tears on his face as he looked back at me. I had never seen tears on Aengus’s face before.

“What are you talking about?”

After a long while he dropped his head onto my shoulder. Against it, he said, “You didn’t know, did you?”

“Know what? Aengus, my God…”

“Thayer, you had a bad infection after the… operation. It got into your… tubes. You can’t have children. I had no idea on
earth you didn’t know about it.”

“Did you think I would know a thing like that and not tell you?”

I was on my feet and screaming. Literally screaming. Could this be true? This awful thing, could my mother know it and not
tell me? This thing that would smash my life, alter it completely and forever, and the life of anyone I loved…

Aengus stood up and pulled me to him and put his hand over my mouth. My tears ran down over his hands; I could feel them dropping
onto his forearms, my blouse.

“It isn’t true,” I wept into his shoulder. “She was telling you a lie! She just doesn’t want us to get married….”

“It’s true, baby. She showed me your doctor’s report. Just happened to have it lying around, I guess….”

I sagged until he picked me up and put me back on the bed and held me, rocking me, kissing me, kissing the sides of my face
and hair, until I had cried myself out. The sky outside was graying when I finally stopped. The sleepy twitter of a dawn bird
drifted in through the window screen.

“I want you to go to sleep, now,” he said. “I’ve got an early class, but I want you to snuggle in under the covers and sleep.
I’ll be back after class and we’ll go get some breakfast.”

“The widow…”

“Fuck the widow,” Aengus said. “Thay, listen. I know it has to be a huge, awful thing for you, but we’ll get through it. We
will. Don’t worry about me. I never really wanted children, to tell you the truth. I want to be your child, as well as… everything
else.”

Incredibly, I laughed, a watery, hiccupping laugh.

“As long as you stay grown-up about… other things,” I said.

“Always,” he said, reaching for me. “Always.”

I told my grandmother about my mother’s betrayal on the phone and she was as angry as I had ever heard her, but she promised
she would be at my wedding and would keep my mother away.

And she did. On the soft Saturday afternoon when we married in the little grove of silver birches on the Steep, the entire
faculty was there, and most of the student body, and my grandmother and Detritus, too. But not my mother. The mist from the
valley swirled almost to the very lip of the Steep, and we all looked as if we were rising out of it, grown
out of the mist as if from some magic medium. Aengus’s friend from Washington was radiant and tender, and read a lovely service
from a small black leather book that I assumed was a Bible. She was full of reverence for the day and the earth and the trees
and the sky and us and our union, and I remember that from somewhere in the crowd small silvery bells rang.

After the wedding, when almost everyone had gone, I saw that she had left her Bible on the small twig table we had used for
an altar, and I picked it up and gave it to Aengus. When I looked down on it, the gold letters on it said, not
Holy Bible
, but
The Book of Shadows.

After all these years, and until my last one, I will always love knowing that I was married under a tree on a mountain by
a witch.

O
n the first morning of our honeymoon we slept late. It was nearing noon when we woke fully, and for a long time we simply
lay entwined and still, tangled in Grand’s silky sheets.

“Porthault,” I said lazily. “At least one-thousand thread count. What a way to start a honeymoon.”

“I don’t know about thread counts,” Aengus said. “All I know about sheets is that the widow’s are made of something you could
strike a match on. Well, you know.”

“The higher the thread count the more expensive the sheets. Look, you can almost see through these. Fine French linen.”

“Well, then,” he said comfortably. “It’s almost lunchtime. Do you want to get some lunch at the Beach Club, or would you rather…”

We were in Grand’s big old house on the beach on Sea
Island, Georgia. Besides the residential homes that ran the length of the island, set in groves of live oaks and palms facing
the sea, there was only the fabled old Cloister hotel on Sea Island. I loved the Cloister. Every time we visited Grand’s house,
we took some of our meals there, eating huge breakfasts and listening at dinner to the string trio. I loved the spectacular
Spanish room, with its towering stained-glass windows and cages of singing birds. There were graham crackers and milk set
out for you in the entrance lobby at bedtime, and the vast green lawns were carpet smooth, bordered with blooming flowers
and overhung by ancient, twisted live oaks scarved in Spanish moss that sometimes touched the grass. There were stables, sailing,
outdoor Plantation Suppers, cycling, skeet shooting, tennis, deep-sea fishing, two ocean-side pools, and numerous small patios
tucked away for alfresco dining. The Cloister always seemed an enchanted kingdom to me. Grand’s house was almost as good.

It rose two stories of stucco above its emerald seaside lawn. In her second-floor bedroom we were in the treetops; you could
touch the Spanish moss from her balcony. A hedge of roses along the shorefront opened to the path down to the beach, and someone
had set up an umbrella table and little wrought-iron chairs on the highest shelf on the beach. The low dunes ran down to wet,
hard-packed beach and then into the water, slow and gentle and dark green, toy waves ruffling on the sand. Pelicans and gulls
rode the thermals over the water, but we saw no people. Most of them, I thought, would be at lunch, or perhaps swimming in
the pools that lay behind the dunes. We had had a midnight swim in Grand’s.
My hair still smelled of chlorine and sulfur. I could not imagine that it did not gag Aengus, but he buried his face deep
in it and said it had an exotic kind of beachy smell. Grand’s bedroom was papered in a soft peach satin-stripe wallpaper,
and in the glow from that and the flare of the June sun off the balcony his face, dark stubbled as it was, was lit like an
excited child’s.

“I’m not hungry right now,” I said. “I guess maybe I’d rather…”

He was reaching for me when the bedside telephone rang. He hesitated.

“Should I answer it?” he said. “Nobody but your folks knows we’re here, do they?”

“I don’t think so. You better answer it, though. I asked for a hair appointment; maybe that’s them….”

He picked it up and said hello. His face went still and he lay propped on one elbow for a long time, listening. I turned over
and looked at him curiously. He looked back at me and then said, “All right. Thank you. We’ll be ready.”

He hung up the phone slowly, but he did not speak. Sudden anxiety knifed me.

“Aengus…”

He shook his head. Tears filmed his eyes.

“Aengus…”

“Thayer, your grandmother died. She died very suddenly, early this morning. She hadn’t even gotten up yet. Juanita took her
breakfast up and found her. They think maybe a stroke. Your mother is sending a car for us; it’s picking us up at two. We
should be home by eight or nine tonight—”

“No, Aengus!” I cried. “She was okay yesterday! You remember how we laughed when she said she didn’t think Detritus had ever
driven twenty miles without her before…. You remember, don’t you?”

“Baby—”

“I don’t believe you!” I shrieked. “Mother’s just being mean! You know she’s been trying to spoil this wedding—”

“Thayer!” he said, shaking me a little with both hands. “We don’t have time for this right now. We have to get up and get
going. The car’s going to be here in less than an hour.”

I sat staring at his face. It was sleep creased and had paled; the sun had moved off the balcony and didn’t fall over us now.
The peach-striped wallpaper was dull and ordinary looking; it might have adorned the walls of any chain motel. The satiny
sheets looked gray. Our clothes lay in a pile in the middle of the Mexican tiled floor; they did not look film-noir erotic
but simply careless and sloppy. I began to cry.

“I want Grand,” I sobbed into my hands. “I want my grandmother.”

“They need us at home, darling,” he said, getting out of bed and pulling me gently behind him. “Your mother wants us to be
in on the planning, whatever that means. You know your grandmother would want you to do that. Lily and what’s-his-name are
already there.”

“I do not want Goose… in the same house with my grandmother’s…”

I could not say “body” and cried harder, but I got up and stumbled after Aengus into the bathroom and stood in the shower
while he adjusted it to spray warm, sulfurous water
over me. The soap he handed me smelled of Vetiver, Grand’s scent, and I could not lift my hand holding it. It was he who soaped
me gently all over and lifted the spray to rinse me off and then folded a huge, soft terry towel around me.

“I’ll bring you some underclothes and put out some things for you,” he said. “And I’ll put the bags outside on the veranda.
I’ll call when we’re under way, so they’ll know. I know how much you loved her, baby. So let’s do this for her, okay?”

I do not remember a longer ride in my life. The car, a big Chrysler driven by a taciturn woman named Mrs. Moore, had tinted
gray windows and air-conditioning turned to subarctic. I shivered, but when she turned it off I ran sweat, so we went back
to frigid. The flat South Georgia landscape, mainly peach orchards and peanuts and soybean fields, fled by all of a dun color.
By Valdosta I had stopped crying, and I fell asleep on Aengus’s shoulder somewhere near Macon and did not wake until the car
slowed and stopped and I looked up to see the front of River House blazing with light. I felt a smile start and then remembered
who was not in it anymore.

“I can’t go in there,” I said, beginning to cry again, but then the front door opened and my mother and sister came out onto
the portico, and I could see that there were other people in the house behind them.

“Do it for Grand,” Aengus whispered, and I got out of the car and stumbled up the walk and portico steps and let them sweep
me into their arms. My mother’s face was blanched and swollen and Lily was sobbing outright, but I did not cry any more that
night, and I don’t remember that I ever cried again for Grand.

I broke free from my mother and sister and dodged through the crowd, not responding to their murmurs of condolence. I did
not know them. I noticed as I went by that the dining room table was laden with platters and trays and the big silver candelabras
that Grand had given Mother held white, lit candles. What was my mother thinking? A party, when Grand had died this very morning
in this house? I jerked open the door to Grand’s room, thinking only that I had to,
must
, see her, that to do so would somehow mean that none of this dreadfulness was true. Surely she would put down her book and
smile and say, “Hi, darling,” as she so often did and hold out her arms. Surely her touch, and her fragrant, after-bath smell,
would cancel out the terrible day and we could laugh about it. Surely no one would remember it afterwards. Surely. Surely….

She was not in her room. Her four-poster rice bed, the one she had brought from Charleston, was made up with her ivory damask
linens and shell-pale satin comforter, and only one small lamp burned. Her beautiful old mahogany bedroom furniture shone
faintly in the dim room. There was a huge vase of white calla lilies on her desk. I was opening the door to her bathroom when
my mother came in. I spun around.