Neverland

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

With thanks to Glenn Chadbourne, Matt Schwartz, M. J. Rose, Bentley Little, Francine LaSala, Amanda Ferber, Roger Cooper, Georgina Levitt, and everyone at Vanguard and the Perseus Group.

Be sure to drop by Douglas Clegg’s website at
DouglasClegg.com
for bonus content.

Among other words we wrote across the walls—some in chalk, some with spray paint—these two words were what my cousin Sumter believed in most.

There
were
other words.

Some of them were written in blood.

No child alive has a choice as to where he or she will go in the summer, so for every August after Grampa Lee died, our parents would drag us back to that small, as yet undeveloped peninsula off the coast of Georgia, mistakenly called an island.

Gull Island.

We would arrive just as its few summer residents were leaving. No one in their right mind ever vacationed off that section of the Georgia coastline
after August first, and Gull Island may have been the worst of any vacation spots along the ocean. Giant black flies would invade the shore, while jellyfish spread out across the dull brown beaches like a new coat of wax. It was not, as sarcastic Nonie would remark, “the armpit of the universe,” but often smelled like it.

The Jackson family could afford no better.

We were not rich, and we were not poor, but we were the kind of family that always stayed in Howard Johnson’s when we traveled together, and were the last on the block to have an air-conditioned car and a color television.

Daddy jumped from job to job, trying to succeed in sales while he also tried to overcome the bad stammer that had appeared when he’d attempted to sell his first piece of commercial property. We could not afford the more fashionable shores of the South, nor would my mother consent to go to the land of the carpetbaggers, as she called Virginia Beach. So we would go to what was called the “ancestral home” on Gull Island.

It was there—at the edge of my grandmother’s property—that we were first introduced to a clubhouse inside which my cousin, Sumter Monroe, ruled, and through which our greatest nightmare began.

The shack, really just a shed, was almost invisible were you to walk into the woods and look for it; it blended into the pines that edged the slight bluff rising out of the desolate beach.

There was a story that it had belonged to a dwarf who had been a ship’s mascot all his life and had built it there so he could watch the boats come in. Another story was that it had been built on the site of an old slave burial ground.

But my mother told me that it had just been the gardener’s shed and “don’t you kids make up stories to scare each other, I will not have my vacation ruined with nightmares and mindless chatter.”

Sumter was fascinated by the shack—and terrified, too.

The first three Augusts my family spent on the peninsula, my cousin Sumter would not go near that rundown old shack, nor would he allow any of us others to venture through its warped doorway.

He acted like it was his and his alone, and none of the rest of us cared enough about that moldy old place to cross him.

Aunt Cricket, wiping her Bisquick-powdered hands into her apron, would call after him from the front porch as we all trooped toward the woods, “Sunny, you be careful of snakes! You wearing your Off! spray? Don’t you give me that look young man, and don’t spoil your appetite for lunch. And Sunny, never, never let me catch you around that old shack! You hear me?
Never
!”

The fourth summer he entered the shed and he named it.

He called it
Neverland
.

All summer trips in the Jackson family began with one form of crisis or another.

The trip that last August to Gull Island was no exception. Our spirits had begun high enough: Nonie led us in singing “A Hundred Bottles of Ginger Beer on the Wall,” the Mom-approved version of the popular school-bus song, and Nonie herself drifted off to sleep by the time we’d crossed the North Carolina border. Governor, the baby, only screamed intermittently. I had brought along dog-eared copies of
The Martian Chronicles
and
My Side of the Mountain
, although my mother insisted I should be moving up in my reading to the classics. I had read both books a zillion times and could read them a zillion more times. We kept the windows down all the way, and when we stopped at a motel the first night, I think we all fell asleep without much fuss.

I had one of my dreams that night. I dreamed I was drowning in the sea with small fish nibbling at my skin. The next day in the car I said to Mama, “I had a dream.”

“Tell me it.”

“I was in the ocean. I couldn’t swim.”

She said, “Well, Beau, that must mean that you shouldn’t go in the water this summer. At least not past your knees.”

But I didn’t tell her the worst part of the dream.

In the dream, one of the nibbling fish was all scaly and silvery, but his eyes were large and round and human and belonged to my cousin Sumter.

 

RIDING in the station wagon all day, it was easy for us kids to alternate pouting. First Nonie, then me, then Nonie, then Missy—but Missy took the prize. She quickly became the malcontent of the trip, and it was over her hamster, which she had smuggled into the car. It was supposed to be left at home to be cared for by our usual babysitter, Lettie, who was going to water the plants and feed and walk our dog, Buster. But Missy, not wanting to part with her dear Missus Pogo, put it in an airhole-punched shoe box and thought it would survive the first day’s ride alongside the spare tire beneath the backseat of the station wagon.

Missy, two years older than me, had a rare lack of foresight for someone her age as well as an unlimited capacity for suffering. She said she didn’t think the spare-tire area would be any hotter than the rest of the station wagon, and she
had
jabbed holes in the shoe box with a ballpoint pen and left some lettuce and sunflower seeds in there for the hamster.

But Missus Pogo was dead on her back, her tiny ratlike feet curled into balls, dead as I’d ever seen any animal be dead before. Missy cried her eyes out, then pouted, then kicked her feet against the back of the seat, then wouldn’t talk to anyone. Daddy had wanted to bury Missus Pogo right there on the North Carolina border, but Missy screamed some and made ugly faces, so Daddy put the dead hamster and its Buster Brown coffin back in the car. I swore you could smell it every time we hit a bump. “Never liked that hamster,” I said, “not since she ate her babies.”

“Just shut up, Beau,” Missy muttered, “she didn’t eat them on purpose. Missus Pogo would’ve been a good mother.”

“Something sick about a mother who eats her babies, is all. I don’t exactly call that a good mother. Mama, you ever want to eat your babies?”

Mama shot me a look that meant she was about to turn and slap my knee if I said another word about the whole business, so I just clammed up for a while.