Islands (26 page)

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 bumble. We had spoken very little. I was nearly mindless with contentment.

He cut the motor, and pointed across the shell 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. Shell mounds, I knew; or middens, thought to be the garbage dumps of the Indians who had taken the sweet shellfish 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 shell 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, shells 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, nobody has ever dug it seriously. Get Lewis to take you over there sometime.”

We sat in silence. A little wind smelling of brine and pluff mud and the faraway sea (Oh, the island! The island and the sea!) rose and riffled the water’s surface, cooling the sweat that had popped out on our faces.

“It makes me sound like some kind of spoiled brat,” I said presently, “but I don’t think I could live anywhere that wasn’t beautiful. The Low Country spoils us.”

Henry was silent. And then he said, in a faraway voice, “When I took Fairlie back to Kentucky, I thought that, well, at least she’d be in that beautiful green place she’d loved all her life, with the farm, and the horses, and all. There was a big chestnut tree on a hill overlooking the house and barns that somehow survived the blight, and she wanted to be…under it. But when I got there, the pastures had all gone to seed, and the buildings hadn’t been maintained, and there was red mud and sagging outbuildings everywhere. Her brother obviously hadn’t lifted a finger to maintain it. He lives fifty miles away, and the horses had been sold years before. He never told her that.”

He turned to look at me.

“Anny, God help me, the first thing I thought was, ‘Thank God I don’t have to come and live here now.’ I would have, you know; I’d promised Fairlie, and I would have done it. But it would have killed me. It was all right to leave her there; her childhood Kentucky was the only world she would ever know. But I couldn’t wait to back that car around and screech out of there. I’ve hated myself ever since, but I haven’t changed my mind about that.”

He was silent again. I had a great lump in my throat, but around it I said, “We love what we love, Henry. There’s no reason on earth to give it up unless we have to.”

He smiled, but it was a crooked smile, and I could tell by the twitching of the muscles in the corner of his mouth that it was difficult to maintain.

“Well, I do love this land. I always have,” he said. “Maybe I took it for granted, but it was always my place. But, Anny, right now I don’t have anywhere in it to…be. I can’t go back to Bedon’s Alley. I don’t know if I ever can. The beach house…well. I even tried a shack on the edge of a river a thousand miles away, with a lot of tequila and a sweet little prostitute for company. None of it was a place for me. I can’t leave the Low Country and I can’t find a place in it.”

There was so much pain in his voice that I reached over and laid my hand on his, and he squeezed it.

“What’s wrong with here?” I said. “These are real houses. This is a beautiful place. People can live here comfortably just as well as in town. Maybe not forever, but for right now, why not let this be home? Camilla’s almost always here now. The rest of us are here every weekend. I know there’s nothing of…your old life here…”

He laughed, shortly. “That’s the main reason it could work,” he said. “Nothing and nobody haunts me here. You know, I came home partly to see if I could find Fairlie anywhere, but it’s turning out that what I’m looking for is me.”

“Well, when you find you, let us know. Meanwhile, we’re all just happy to have whoever it is who says he’s Henry back. It was awful, not knowing where you were….”

“You’re a sweetheart, Anny Aiken,” he said, squeezing my hand and reaching to start the engine again. “I always told Lewis he wasn’t good enough for you.”

It was well after noon when we came putting up to the dock, and Camilla stood on the end of it, clasping and unclasping her hands, and smiling a forced smile.

“I wish you children would tell me when you go out,” she said. “I worry about you. I imagine the most awful things when you’re gone….” She turned and started back up the walkway, leaning heavily on the blackthorn cane that she carried everywhere now. She seemed more stooped than I had seen her in a long time.

“I should have told her,” I said guiltily. “It would be so easy for her to fall now. Somebody needs to be here when she is. I’m glad you’re around during the week.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Listen, Anny, maybe it would be better if you didn’t mention anything about our conversation to her. She’s seemed kind of distracted lately. I don’t want to worry her.”

“You haven’t talked to her about all that? I was sure you had. You ought to, Henry. She’s the only one who can really know what you’re going through. You know how strong she was after Charlie. She’s always been our port in a storm.”

He laughed. “Cammy is the consummate survivor. But she’d try to fix me,” he said. “She can’t stand hurt and pain without trying to fix it. She always did that. I don’t need fixing. I just need listening to. Thanks for that.”

When we got back to the house, Lewis was there, and Lila and Simms’s SUV, and the momentum of that beautiful bronze day flowed on.

We sat late at dinner that night. The cool, winesap air held, and the stars burned like the stars of winter. The weather forecast was for rain, followed by returning heat and humidity, and we all held on to this night almost fiercely. The sense of change was strong. I remembered other days and nights at the beach house, when change had hung in the air as palpable as fog. I shivered in my skin, and poured myself another glass of wine.

We were in Simms and Lila’s dining room, which, with its dark plantation furniture and standing candleholders, had always seemed more a winter room to me, and though it was not yet cool enough, they had turned on the air-conditioning and built a fire. We teased them about the sheer decadence of that, but I think we all loved the living flame that danced on crystal and polished wood. We had had quail and hominy—“I’ll choke on one more crab,” Lila said—and sat now drinking wine and talking quietly. Gladys had come with Henry and lay under his chair, snoring noisily. Pachelbel poured from the little CD player. Outside, the autumnal croaking of a thousand frogs rose on the cool air, clearer now than it had been all summer.

Henry leaned forward and put his elbows on the table and said, “I made a few calls today. I thought I might find something to do with myself. I can’t sit out here in the sun forever. I don’t think I’ll reopen the office, but maybe some on-call work, or even a few days a week at a medical center somewhere. The John’s Island center is new. They were interested.”

“Will you go back with the traveling doctors?” I said. I realized that I did not want Henry to go anywhere, but it was purely a selfish wish. Of course, sooner or later, Henry would need to feel useful again. He had been useful all his life. That wouldn’t stop with Fairlie.

He laughed. “I don’t think they’d have me on a silver platter after the last time. I am a legend among the docs of the air.”

We all laughed, too, relieved. It was the first time he had spoken of those terrible weeks in the Yucatán, at least to us as a group. Another step on the journey, I thought.

“You don’t want to push it,” Lewis said. “A month or two more might be good. You need to get some weight on you.”

“And you need to get some off you,” Henry replied, and we all laughed again. Lewis’s stocky frame was thickening, no doubt about it. It bothered him not at all.

“A little exercise will do it,” he said.

Camilla was silent, studying Henry.

“Speaking of exercise,” Simms said, “I think I’ve found just the boat for you, Lewis. Guy I know in Fort Lauderdale told me about it when I mentioned I might be looking. It’s a Hinckley sloop, Pilot 35. Got four berths and wheel steering, and a tile fireplace. She was built in 1966, but she’s been totally renovated. I know how you feel about Hinckleys, and the Pilot has one of the prettiest hulls I’ve ever seen. The price seems right. I thought if you were interested we might fly down sometime next week and take a look at her. He said he could get someone to bring her up the waterway for you, if you liked her.”

I looked at Lewis. He had said nothing about being in the market for a boat. I knew he was loving the sailing he did with Simms, but it was odd that he had not mentioned it.

“A Hinckley,” he said reverently. “I’ve always wanted one. I love the old ones. I went to the Hinckley boatyard in Southwest Harbor one summer, when I went to visit Mike Stewart in Maine. It was awesome. I still remember those beautiful hulls, and the smell of teak and varnish.” He turned to me.

“Want to be a sailing wife, Anny?” he said, grinning.

I was obscurely annoyed, without knowing why.

“You had one of those,” I said. “Surely that was enough.”

Everyone laughed aloud, and Lewis waggled his eyebrows at me.

“One day out on the harbor in a Hinckley and I’ll change your mind,” he said. “Sure, Simms, let’s go look at her. Is next week good for you?”

They settled on flying down the next Wednesday, and coming back on Saturday. That would, Simms said, give them time to sail the Pilot in many different weather conditions.

“Have a feast ready,” Lewis said happily. “A home-is-the-sailor-from-the-sea feast. Lay in the champagne. Slaughter the fatted calf.”

Camilla still had not spoken. Her face was grave and beautiful in the candlelight.

We went back to Sweetgrass on Sunday afternoon, and spent the late afternoon and evening swimming off the dock in the river. We had a thousand things that needed doing, but the sense of impending change was still queer and heavy on us, and I for one wanted simply to drift in the blood-warm waters of home. Water is eternal, immutable.

We swam until the last light faded, and then crawled out on the dock. The boards were still warm from the day, but a little wind was chilling the thick air. For some reason the mosquitoes were taking a sabbatical elsewhere. We lay, wrapped in damp towels, watching the ghost moon rise in the lavender sky.

“Do you remember?” Lewis said. And I did. The night, that first night I saw Sweetgrass, when we had made love on this dock under the yellow eyes of a bobcat. “Want to give it a try, old lady?” Lewis said.

“Wait ten minutes and tell me if ‘old lady’ still applies,” I said, dropping my towel and reaching out to him. His body was firm and sweet and damp, as it had been under my hands for many, many nights. It still made my body burn.

Afterward we lay in each other’s arms, our breathing slowing, our limbs heavy with lassitude and completion.

“It’s still good, isn’t it?” I said into his neck.

“It’s the best.”

“It always will be.”

“Damn straight,” he said.

I got up early the next morning. Lewis was still asleep, deep under the bleached old coverlet that had been his grandmother’s. I made myself coffee and an English muffin, and reluctantly pulled on my office clothes. I was flying to the University of Richmond later in the morning, to speak with the dean of the school of nursing about the possibility of making our program one of the school’s elective specialties. Ordinarily I would have sent Allie, my young assistant, but this could, if effective, open up an entirely new direction for us. I needed to be there in person. I was set to stay until Wednesday night, and fly home on Thursday. In the green morning gloom of our bedroom, I thought that I had never wanted to go anywhere less than this trip.

I kissed Lewis on his forehead and he opened his eyes and blinked up at me.

“I’m going now,” I said. “I’m sorry I won’t be here to see you off.”

“As long as you’re here to see us home,” he said, and kissed my knuckles, and went back to sleep.

The session at the university was profitable, but fully as tedious as all things academic, and took about a day and a half longer than it should have. I was tired when I got to my motel room on my last night there, and whispered, “Shit,” softly, when I saw my message light blinking. It had blinked off and on for three days with “academic input.” I almost did not pick it up, and then I did.

It was Lewis, with a message to call his hotel in Fort Lauderdale no matter how late I got in. Heart thundering, I dialed.

“What?” I said when he picked up. “What is it?”

“Bad news, babe. Double dose. Henry just called and told us. Camilla fell this morning and sprained her ankle really badly. She can’t walk a step. And, Anny…Gladys died last night.”

“Oh,
Lewis
!” I wailed, feeling tears gather in my eyes. “How? What happened? How is Henry?”

“Apparently, she just slipped away in her sleep. He found her at the foot of his bed, all curled up, her nose on her paws. He said it must have been very peaceful.”