Up Island (26 page)

“It’s just that I didn’t count on having anybody so near…”

“Well, he’s a nice boy. He wouldn’t be a bad neighbor to have, even if you had to see him every now and then; he really minds his own business, always has. Real polite, though. Listen, I’ve brought him a few things to tide him over; I’ve got them in the tote. Why don’t you just take them in to him, and meet him, and tell him who you are? See for yourself how easy it would be. He knows somebody will likely be coming…”

I wondered how he could possibly know that unless she had called him from the big house before we had left. But I said nothing, only looked at her helplessly.

UP ISLAND / 221

It did not, in fact, seem like a great deal to ask; I could get his groceries on the same days that I did Bella and Luzia’s, and maybe even take him to his doctor’s appointments at the same time they had theirs. And it might, after all, be rather nice to look out into the winter nights and see the warm yellow of a lit lamp, smell the smoke of a fire nearby.

“Well…all right,” I said. “If you’re sure he knows I’m coming.”

“He knows,” she said.

I started toward the larger camp and then stopped and looked back. She had her head in her hands, but she lifted it and looked at me, perhaps feeling my eyes on her.

“What’s his name?” I called.

“Dennis,” she called back. “I call him Denny.”

I went on up the path and the steps, gray stone like the smaller one’s, but scrubbed and lined with late geraniums in pots. The porch floor had been scrubbed, too, and big earthenware jugs of chrysanthemums sat on either side of the door. In spite of the smoke coming from the chimney the day was warm, and the white front door was ajar so that only a screened door separated the inside from the out. I peered in, but could see nothing for the dazzle of sunlight behind me.

There was no sound. I rapped my knuckles lightly and waited.

No one answered, so I rapped again, and then called out,

“Hello? Is anyone here? I’ve brought some things from Mrs.

Ponder…”

There was still no response, and so, tentatively, I pushed the screen open and went in. Like the living room in the big farmhouse, this one was all murk and shadows, but it smelled of lemon polish and freshly

222 / Anne Rivers Siddons

ironed linen. I stood, waiting for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I saw first that a large chair was overturned and lay in the middle of the wooden floor, and then that beside it a little table was upended, and had spilled books and a pitcher holding wildflowers down beside the chair. Wrongness flooded the room and lifted the hairs at my nape again, and I began to back out on to the porch. And then I saw the man who lay behind the chair, and my heart and breath stopped.

I had no doubt in that instant that he was dead. His face had the silvery-yellow sheen of the few dead I had seen, and he lay utterly, totally still, on his back, with his arms flung out to his sides. His eyes were closed and looked as if they had been closed for hours; their lids were dark and bruised-looking, and in the pallor of his face the circles under them stood out like paint smudges. His hair was a dusty, lightless black streaked with iron gray and fell over his forehead, and he had that pinched and shrunken look at the base of his nostrils that I had noticed during my duties in the oncology ward at Grady: the look of a tool that is no longer needed.

His mouth was bloodless and a little open. Even in my shock and fright I could have told that he was Bella Ponder’s son.

The carved, attenuated features were the same, except that his were no longer informed by life.

I made a small, strangled sound and took as deep a breath as I could manage, and my heart lurched forward. How could I go out and tell that old woman that her son was dead?

Perhaps I should call someone else, a hospital, the rescue squad; hadn’t she said there was a phone in this cottage? I took a tentative step farther and looked around for it.

“And who the fuck might you be?” a voice said, UP ISLAND / 223

with no force behind it, but clear nevertheless, and deep.

I gave a small scream and looked again: His eyes were open and his head was turned toward me. His eyes were a strange light gray, the color of clear winter ice, and I saw that his face was so thin that the ridges of his brow and cheekbones stood out like rock under depleted soil. He still had no color but the dreadful, translucent ivory.

“Lie still,” I whispered. “I’m going to call someone to help you, and then I’ll get your mother…”

“You’ll call nobody and you will not get my mother,” he said, and his voice grew a bit stronger. He was struggling to sit up. I started toward him to help and he made a violent gesture at me: Get back. I stopped. It was only then that I noticed that he had only one leg. He was wearing khaki knee-length shorts, and one long, spidery leg was stretched out before him. The other shorts leg was empty. Whatever had happened to him had taken it at least at midthigh.

“I guess you’re the handmaiden my mother has hired or bribed or otherwise charmed to look after me,” he said, and his voice was cold and level, though still weak. “Who are you? Another royal Coimbran cousin-in-exile? Or is your name maybe Rakestraw or Fowler or Phipps? Or even Ponder? If so, how much did she pay you? If not, are you a bona-fide, official sister of charity come to fill your quota of one-legged gimps? Do tell, pray do, and end my poor befuddle-ment.”

There was such venom in his voice that I could not think of anything to say. He was obviously not in immediate ex-tremis and even more obviously did not want me in his house, but on the other hand, his pallor

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was truly appalling and I
had
found him lying on the floor, looking quite dead. And he did indeed have, as he himself said, only one leg. Conditioned by years of volunteer work and even more years of my mother’s maxims about my place in the world, I went over to him and held out my hand.

“My name is Molly Redwine,” I said. “I’m not anybody’s handmaiden. I came about the camp your mother advertised, and she just now told me about you, and asked me if I’d consider doing a few errands for you until you recuperated, and if I’d come bring you some things she has for you. She can’t walk far herself; I’m sure you know that. She said nothing at all about your having…about the seriousness of your illness or your operation or whatever it is, and she has offered me no money at all, nor would I take any if she had.

I’m sorry if I startled you. You scared me to death. I thought you were dead. I have no intention of bothering you and I will leave the instant I can get you on your feet again, or whatever it is that you need, but I’m not going to leave until then because your mother can’t help you and it doesn’t look to me as if you can help yourself.”

He looked away, lying still, and then said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d help me up. I was trying to get situated in the chair and I missed it and fell. I still can’t get up very well when I fall. I’ve been taking…treatments that make me weak. I shouldn’t have talked to you like that. But I don’t need any help, and she knows that I don’t want any, and still she…Well. If you’ll give me a hand you can be on your way, and I hope you’ll tell her for me to stay the fuck out of my business and my house. No offense, of course.”

I tightened my mouth and went over and held my UP ISLAND / 225

hand down to him. Leaning on me heavily, and with me pulling, he eventually made it to his feet—or, rather, his foot—and I pulled the chair up behind him and he sank into it, whiter than ever and breathing shallowly.

When he did not speak, I said, “You’ve been taking chemo, haven’t you? I’ve done a lot of work with oncology patients.

I know the look. It’s none of my business, but it doesn’t look to me as if you’re nearly ready to be out of the hospital, to say nothing of way out here, without anyone with you full-time. I don’t want it to be me any more than you do, but you really do need somebody. I’m going back and tell your mother that, and tell her to go on back home and call you and work it out with you if she can’t get up here herself. It’s suicidal for you to be here like this by yourself.”

I turned to go, and he said after me, “You’re right. It’s none of your business. Tell her whatever you like; I’m not talking to her and I’m not having anybody gawking and groping around here every day, helping me pee and wash myself and eat. You can tell her that, as long as you’re telling her things.

Oh, and thank you very much for your concern, Molly…ah, Redwine, was it? You’re not from around here, are you, Molly? I have to hand it to her; I never thought she’d try it with somebody from America.”

He closed his eyes and turned his head away, looking dead once more. I stood still, my heart hammering with the malice and sheer sickness of him, and then I turned and strode toward the Jeep to tell Bella Ponder that I would not, after all, be taking her up on her offer.

I
T COULDN’T HAVE BEEN more than a minute’s walk back to the smaller camp and the Cherokee, but it felt as if it took a very long time. I seemed to be walking in slow motion, as against a heavy current. There was a clarity to the air that snapped details into sharp focus, as if every leaf, blade of grass, stone, glimpse of water had been edged in light. I could see a ladybug on a leaf, a scaldingly red miniature, and make out the whorls and slivers, the velvety green algae beard, of the pilings of the old dock. I felt dully sad and terribly tired. I had been up and down with this place so often in this short morning, so suffused with hope and rightness one moment and doubt and regret the next. But now there was only the sense of possibilities lost to me.

For this situation was impossible. I could not care for the sick and virulent man in the larger cabin and I could not accommodate the sly old colossus who sought to bring us together. I was repelled by the one and mortally weary of the other. I could, I knew, look for a house somewhere else up island, but I knew also that none would ever suit me after this one. Anything else would have holes in its magic, belong to a duller and more dangerous world.

226

UP ISLAND / 227

I thought that I would simply go home. There would, surely, be apartments that did not require enormous deposits.

I might not like them, but I could manage. Nothing, as my mother used to say, is cast in stone.

But anger at the old woman and her son lay deep under grief for the haven that had been dangled and then snatched back.

I did not look at Bella Ponder until I reached the Jeep.

When I did, she was smiling at me, a smile that exposed her pale gums and was somehow unpleasantly false and slyly propitiatory. I would have bet a lot that this old woman did not often propitiate. I knew that she knew I was angry with her; how could she not?

“I hung your mother’s pretty hat on your door,” she said, pointing, and I looked; it was there. I looked back, saying nothing, waiting.

“People seem to be doing that all over the place these days,”

she said chattily. “Down island, I mean. Only hats you see much up here are Landry’s Fish Camp hats and a few Red Sox things. Look kind of silly on your front door, wouldn’t they? But I thought it might be sort of nice for you, to have your mama’s hat hanging on your own new door. It looks pretty against that white, don’t you think?”

I did not look at the hat on the door again. I took a deep breath.

“Mrs. Ponder,” I said, “you have not been straight with me from the very beginning. Everything, all the stuff about fixing up the camp and putting in a phone and giving me a car and a TV…it was all for that, wasn’t it? That back there?”

I gestured toward the larger camp. She did not
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speak. She dropped the brilliant black eyes and looked at her lap.

“You knew your son had more wrong with him than just a little operation on his leg; you knew he was an amputee, and that he had…a malignancy. I’ve done volunteer work with cancer patients for half my life; I know what it looks like. I know what it
is
like. I know what it requires in the way of caretaking. Your son was lying on the floor stock-still and as white as a sheet; I thought he was dead. He’d been trying to sit in a chair, and fell and couldn’t get up. Just trying to sit in a chair. When I tried to get help for him, he said…well, you wouldn’t believe what he said. Or maybe you would. I can’t and won’t take care of a man in the shape he’s in, and I can’t and won’t have anyone talking to me like that. He should be in a hospital or a rehabilitation facility, or maybe even a hospice; at the very least he needs a full-time nurse with him. If he won’t see you, surely you should be looking for somebody who could live in and take proper professional care of him. It’s absolutely suicidal for him to stay alone, and it’s absolutely out of the question for me to look after him.”

I had been looking at the ground while I delivered myself of the speech; I have always had a hard time with confronta-tion and ultimatums. When there was no answer, I looked into the Jeep at Bella Ponder.

She was crying. Incredibly, her eyes closed and her mouth struggling with itself not to distort, Bella Ponder sat in Livvy’s Cherokee and wept. I knew that they were not crocodile tears; they were as grudging and painful to her as if she wept blood.

It was like watching a monolith, a great statue, suddenly begin to cry. I knew that it would be nearly unbearable to her; UP ISLAND / 229

she might inveigle and cajole and lie and even, ponderously, flirt, but to weep in front of a stranger would be more than her awful dignity would permit her.

Under my righteous little spurt of anger I felt embarrass-ment and a sympathy that was entirely unwanted and nearly excruciating. I turned away so that she could compose herself, my heart pounding, tears stinging my own eyes, hating both the heartbeat and the easy wetness.

Behind me, Bella Ponder’s heavy, defeated voice said, “He won’t let me help him. He hasn’t spoken to me since he left this island, practically. He said he’d shoot at the visiting nurse if I sent her. He won’t have his Ponder kin, not that they’d come if I asked them, which I wouldn’t. He’d only agree to have somebody who didn’t know any of us, somebody from off island, and then only if he could pay them. I couldn’t find anybody like that; there’s not anybody like that up island in the winter. And then you came along and it was like somebody sent you to us; you were all those things he said, and you even looked like…you seemed kind of like one of us in the bargain. Luz was right; you have the look of a Portuguese about you, somehow. She thought it was a sign, and I didn’t know but what it was, too. I knew you wouldn’t take any money to look after Denny, so I offered you everything else I had, that I could think of. I was going to let him think I was giving you his money, not that he’s got much. His wife and his girl get most of it, I hear, and he’ll have had to quit his job. He couldn’t have anything to speak of or he wouldn’t have come out here. I didn’t…I haven’t seen him in over forty years. I knew it was cancer, but I guess I didn’t know it was so bad. He said…the only thing he said on the phone was
230 / Anne Rivers Siddons