Neverland (30 page)

Grammy Weenie sat there in her chair. I didn’t immediately know what she was doing. She didn’t look up at me.

She kept her hand down in the blue gas flame.

Her hand was blackened.

“If thy left hand offend thee,” she said feebly.

I went over to the stove top and wrenched the dial around so the gas was turned off.

She took her charred palm and held it up to my face. “I feel no pain, child, none at all. It’s part of my inheritance. It is part of the Wandigaux family line. We have no pain. Pain and suffering are gifts we are denied.”

In her right hand was her silver brush. She reached up and began stroking her white hair gently. The brush was brilliant hard silver, and her hair was brilliant hard silver.

The front door slammed open and Uncle Ralph’s voice boomed like morning surf,
“You know what these bastards’ve been doing?”

Uncle Ralph waited until all of us had come into the living room. Mama came first, and then Nonie and Missy, who had gone back to watching television after the first outbreak. Finally Aunt Cricket came down. “Keep your voice down, you oaf. Sunny’s been through something terrible, and all you can think to do is throw your weight around like a two-hundred-pound gorilla.”

Grammy Weenie, covering her left hand with the crocheted throw that was across her lap, wheeled in behind me. “Now what’s in there?” She pointed to the crate.

“Oh,
wow
,” Missy gasped.

But Nonie was braver. “He’s got some animal in there.” She glanced about to the others. “Sumter does. He has some animal in there. I think it’s a snake.”

“It’s a dead one, you ask me, it stinks like an S.O.B. Ain’t no snake.” Uncle Ralph set the crate on the floor. He brought the heel of his shoe
down against the crate. To tear the thing completely apart, he dropped to his knees and, with his bare hands, pulled at the boards.

Like the breaking of an egg to find inside a half-formed bird, we beheld what we’d been worshiping.

“What I figured, you kids’re sick,” he said.

Aunt Cricket screamed, “Get those things out of this house!”

In the crate were the animals we had sacrificed, in various stages of decomposition, ricelike maggots frothing from their open wounds, the small human skull that Sumter had shown me on that first day, and the shell of a horseshoe crab. It was no mystery at all. He had just put the dead animals in there and they had rotted.

We had been worshiping a vat of decaying flesh.

Nonie let out a little laugh and nodded to me as if she’d known all along. But I had put my hand inside there, and something had grabbed me. What had it been?

“Lights out.” We heard a small voice at the top of the stairs. “Lights out. You let it out, you let it out.”

Sumter was standing there, clinging to the banister for support. He was drooling and naked, and when he had finished uttering these words, he thrust his thumb into his mouth and began sucking on it.

We heard a crack of lightning like a bomb exploding near the house, and the sky outside the front window lit up like dawn: A tree had burst into flame out on the bluff. Then another explosion closer to us cut through the night, as lightning hit near the house.

Above the roar of thunder came Sumter’s high-pitched, shrieking voice,
“Lights out! Lights out! Lights out!”

And the Retreat went completely dark.

A woman’s voice whispered to me, so close I could feel her breath on the back of my neck, “Because he is alive . . . ”

I didn’t know if I was dreaming again, and I bit down on my lower lip just to feel pain and know I was here and awake.
Hurts.

“Sacrifice,”
the woman said.

“Lucy,” I whispered. I reached with my hands and touched her shoulders, which were barely as high as my own. They were scrawny, bony shoulders, and the woman in the dark gasped as I clutched her. “Lucy,” I whispered, “Jesus, Jesus.” I began breathing more rapidly than my lungs could handle, and felt that I was going to faint.

“Beau, my child . . . my lovely, lovely boy . . . ” But it wasn’t Lucy, it was Grammy Weenie. “How did it get this far? I thought he was keeping it contained.” Her voice was distant and kind and full of hurt, as if she herself were a child. I could smell the burned flesh of her left hand as she brought it near my face.

“Grammy,” I said, “what does Sumter have?”

“A disease. He is contaminated. He needs to keep it. Somewhere safe. Too late,” she murmured, and then I heard the squeaking of her wheelchair as she drew away from me in the dark.

I was blinded by a white circle of light from a flashlight and heard one of my sisters giggling. Then the light drew away.

My eyes adjusted after a few minutes, although someone kept slashing flashlight beams across the room in zigzag patterns. I said, “Cut it out.” Every time the light hit my eyes, I had to wait another several seconds for my eyes to see again in the dark.

All the voices in the dark:

“Isn’t it spooky?”

“No. It’s just stupid. Missy, wouldn’t you know we’d get struck.”

“Huh?” I tried to see better in the dark.

“Beau.”
A lit shadow at the top of the stairs. Sumter holding his teddy bear.

“Sunny?” Aunt Cricket’s voice, and then the shape of her body moving in front of the picture window.

Missy said, “I never been struck by lightning before.”

“Not you, the
house.
No more TV tonight.”

The sound of quick, clodding footsteps on the stairs: Aunt Cricket shrieked and then laughed. “Almost tripped on the rug. Now Sunny, let’s go on back to bed for a little lie-down.”

Uncle Ralph fumbled around in the darkness for candles, but I knew he wouldn’t find any: They were melted down beneath the rubble of Neverland. When we were stealing candles for our clubhouse, none of us figured on them being missed.

“I’m scared,” Missy said.

“You would be.” Nonie was spinning the flashlight around on the ceiling like it was a spaceship. “The only thing to worry about is tripping on that crate. God, will someone get it out of here? It
stinks.”

Aunt Cricket said, as she cautiously descended the stairs, “We have to get Sunny to a doctor, he’s got an awful fever and he’s just talking baby talk.”

In the dark I began to make out everyone’s features, and the grown-ups looked tired, the way they did when they were waiting in line at the grocery checkout.

I went over to the couch, where my mother was sitting. Mama, in the darkness, seemed smaller than I’d ever seen her—a hunched shadow.

“You
tell me what went on in that place.”

“Just a bunch of stupid games,” I said.

Behind me Missy added, “We played pretend things.”

“It was all bad stuff,” came Nonie’s judgment. “Sumter made us.”

Missy sounded close to tears. “It was awful. Mama, just awful. But we didn’t kill the animals.
He
did.”

“We all did. I don’t know why, but we did,” I confessed.

My mother was silent, and it stung just like a hard pinch on the knee. “Well,” Mama sighed, “I wish your father were here, but I’m glad he’s not because I don’t think he could take this. I think it would kill him. His own children hurting small animals for fun. Isn’t that just evil? How would you like it if someone did that to you?”

“We didn’t mean to, Mama. It was like we didn’t have no choice.”

“You girls go on up to your bedroom, and Beau, you, too.”

Uncle Ralph began cussing from the top of the stairs as he clanged his way through the linen closet. “Goddamn it, I know we had candles in there.”

“I don’t mean to be such a wife, Ralph, but why don’t you try the buffet. I think we have those red ones I bought in Williamsburg.”

“No we don’t,” I said.

“Beau?”

“We used those up. We used all the candles up.”

“Snitch,” I heard Nonie whisper.

Through the darkness came Grammy Weenie’s voice as if just inside my ear, “Look at it burn, will you?”

She wheeled her chair up beside the couch at the front window. The tree that had been struck lit up the night with spears of white flame.

“It’s pretty,” Nonie said. “I betcha, though, somebody left the croquet set out in the rain. I hope it burns, too.”

“You think it’ll spread?” I asked.

Nonie sounded disappointed. “The rain’ll put it out. Fires don’t last long up here, not with everything wet. Three years ago, don’tcha remember that tree down the road got hit? It was bigger than this one. It really got going. But it’ll go out.”

Grammy Weenie said, “It’s a sign.”

Nonie went to the front door, opening it. The wind brushed through us. “Better view from the porch.”

Mama said, rising from the couch and brushing past me, “Shut it right now, young lady, and get upstairs to your room. All three of you. I have had enough for one night.”

I watched her shifting form move up the stairs. “I am so tired,” she said.

“Good night. Mama,” Missy said, following behind her.

Nonie huffed, but stepped back inside, slowly easing the door closed. She came over to the window. “Grammy? You feeling fine?”

“Child, I have never, ever been fine.”

“Grammy burned her hand,” I told her.

“She did? You did?”

“To bed,” my mother called from the top of the stairs.

“Grammy burned herself.”

“Mama? You got some cold cream? It’ll make it all better, Grammy. It won’t hurt.”

“It doesn’t hurt now, child. I can’t feel pain.”

“She really burn herself?”

“Look,” Grammy said, tapping at the window with her silver brush.

The tree was now smoking, the fire dead. The rain came down harder.

“Fire’s out.”

“No, Beauregard, I mean look
there.”

Grammy reached out, grabbing me by the nape of the neck and pulling me closer to the window. “That place . . . where you played.”

“I don’t see nothing.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“No.”

“Look, there.” She held me tight.

And then, when lightning lit the sky over the bluffs, I thought I saw a half a dozen figures or more, as if bound together in chains, moving forward on a tide of air; but then nothing but the straggly trees sweeping at the rain with their branches.

I could not move because my blood had stopped pumping; I could barely form words. “You’re scaring me.”

“You tell me precisely,
precisely
what you children did out there. And don’t lie. And don’t leave anything out. Nothing.”

So I completely broke my oath to Lucy, to Sumter, to Neverland. I told. Every last thing I could remember, from first going in and having something reach out of the crate at me, through flying above Gull Island, all the way past the sacrifices to what Sumter wanted to do with Governor. And nothing happened. My thumb did not burst with blood as Sumter had predicted. I felt relief wash through me like warm seawater. I could only see
Grammy’s face in flashes when the lightning lit up the sky, and she had a look of supreme terror on her face—she was not looking at me, but outside, out the window, out to the bluff.

“What’s out there?” I asked. “What’s
coming?
”

She made noises through her closed mouth like she had forgotten language, or like her tongue was cut out.

“Grammy, what is it? Is it Lucy? Is it really
Lucy?
You know, don’t you? You
know
. What is it?”

My grandmother was like a silver reflection of a human being as she brought her face near mine, like a mirror of fear that I could not quite make out in the darkness, but through which I could see the twisted image of the world surrounding me.

Her breath was like mold dust.

“Unspeakable,” she said, and I had to strain to hear her. “
Unnatural
.”

Lightning struck again, and her face was so white that I could not make out her eyes or nose. I only caught the wrinkled curve of her lips, glistening with saliva. “Dreadful.”

“What is it.” This was not a question.

“My child. . . .” Her eyes went back to the window, to the storm. “Nothing good has ever come from that place, but I thought it could be
contained
. Since he was a little baby, I thought it could be contained.”

“It?”

“That shed is the site of a great tragedy.”

“I know. The dead slaves.”

“What?”

“The dead slaves. It’s their burial place.”

Grammy Weenie let out the first laugh I had ever heard from her lips. “Is
that
what you think?
Slaves?
My Lord, Beauregard, you think the island slaves were buried up here? They were dumped down in the West Island without markers. My family has owned this property for the past one hundred years—they wouldn’t buy a graveyard, I can guarantee that, child. No, it’s where Babygirl . . . where she . . . died. I thought you knew that. Beau,
your mother’s sister, the first child. Babygirl, then Evvie, then Cricket. I had three daughters . . . your aunt. She lived up here the last years of her life. I thought you knew by what you said. I thought
you knew
. Babygirl, Beau.
You
know her
name
, for the love of God, I thought you knew.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re
talking
about—her name was Cindy.”

I thought Grammy was going to fly into a rage at my insolence. “It
was
short for Lucinda, Beau. But the Gullahs all called her
Lucy. Lucy Wandigaux Lee.”

“That’s why I never go out in those woods. She died in a bad way. She had what Sumter has, and she is as bad as Sumter. Your grandfather planted those trees out there, on the bluff, just to hide that place. How I loved her and feared her, Beau. But she let it get to her. She didn’t learn to contain it. She had no choice. But when it gets
in the blood
, dear God in Heaven, what must then be done?”