Burnt Mountain (34 page)
Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
Tags: #Family Secrets, #Georgia, #Betrayal, #Contemporary, #North Carolina, #Fiction, #Romance, #Family Life, #Literary, #Marriage, #Camps, #General, #Domestic Fiction, #Love Stories
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….”
T
he 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 camp 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.
About the Author
Anne Rivers Siddons is the author of seventeen
New York Times
bestselling novels, including
Off Season, Sweetwater Creek, Islands, Nora Nora, Low Country, Up Island, Fault Lines, Downtown, Hill Towns, Colony, Outer
Banks, King’s Oak, Peachtree Road, Homeplace, Fox’s Earth, The House Next Door
, and
Heartbreak Hotel
. She is also the author of a work of nonfiction,
John Chancellor Makes Me Cry
. She and her husband, Heyward, split their time between their homes in Charleston, South Carolina and Maine.
LSO BY
A
NNE
R
IVERS
S
IDDONS
Fiction
Islands
Nora, Nora
Low Country
Up Island
Fault Lines
Downtown
Hill Towns
Colony
Outer Banks
King’s Oak
Peachtree Road
Homeplace
Fox’s Earth
The House Next Door
Heartbreak Hotel
Sweetwater Creek
Off Season
John Chancellor Makes Me Cry
Here
, the excerpts from the poem “Labysheedy” (“The Silken Bed”) by Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, are from her book entitled
Rogha Danta/Selected Poems
, published by New Island Dublin. Used by permission.
Yeats quotes throughout are reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from
The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems,
revised by W.B. Yeats. Copyright (c)1933 by The Macmillan Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2011 by Anne Rivers Siddons
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978-0-446-57219-4
