Up Island (30 page)

There were a couple of place settings of age-bleached Fiesta ware, yellow and blue, on the open shelves, and a coffeepot and a tea kettle on the stove, and a new tin of coffee stood ready with a can opener beside it. I opened the refrigerator; it was tiny and stained, but it smelled sweetly of baking soda, and inside it sat a carton of cream and a paper plate with four sweet rolls on it. Crocks on the counter held some odds and ends of table and cooking ware, and there was a big iron cooking pot, an old iron skillet, and a battered baking sheet on an ancient but sturdy little butcher-block table that I had not seen before. A bottle of dish-washing liquid and a tin of scouring powder stood beside them. Even before I went upstairs to reconnoiter, I made coffee in the pot, old but serviceable and electric, and plugged it in. Then I saw, on a top shelf, the little plastic radio, and turned it on. It was set to a classical station, and Pachelbel’s
Canon
spilled out into the sunny room. I smiled again.

“Thank you, Bella,” I said aloud.

UP ISLAND / 257

Upstairs was transformed, too. It was largely a matter of cleaning, I saw, but the difference soap and water and wax made was enormous. The long windows were framed in the same white priscillas, and gleamed from a scrubbing with, I thought, ammonia; the sharp, clean smell lingered. Beyond them the pond lay quiet and the sea beyond it glittered like still, silver satin. I could not see the swans from here. Pale, watery light lay in patches on the old pine boards of the floor, which had also been scoured and polished, and a faded rag rug stood in the middle of the room. The narrow iron bed had been replaced by an elaborate maple one, like something out of a turn-of-the-century bedroom, and it was made up with fresh old linen and piled high with quilts. Another bureau had been moved in, this one painted white, and on it stood another jar of the wildflowers that I had seen downstairs. There was now a small, white wicker desk under one of the windows, with a chair, and the two straight-backed chairs had been joined by an old-fashioned slipper chair covered in faded cretonne. The closet curtain was clean and ironed, and the footlocker had been replaced by a big old trunk with a cornucopia of grapes carved on it. It stood at the foot of the bed with a bulbous old black-and-white RCA television set on it. I grinned. There had been one like it in my grandmother Bell’s house, before she had come to live with us. I had watched rudimentary cartoons on it for hours.

The other, smaller bedroom was similarly refurbished, and the bath gleamed as much as was possible, given the condition of the enamel. The remnants of old linoleum had been pried up and the floor scrubbed and left bare, and another faded rag rug was laid down

258 / Anne Rivers Siddons

beside the shiplike old bathtub. The disreputable shower curtain had been replaced with a new one, a stiff, shining sheet of virulent aqua that smelled of new plastic. Clean blue towels were piled on a table beside the washbasin. A little potted geranium sat on the windowsill, and there was new Ivory soap in the soap dish and an aerosol can of room de-odorizer. I squirted experimentally and coughed. Country Lilac exploded violently into the little room. No natural smell could survive here.

I looked out the little window that overlooked a small backyard cleared out of the forest. Beside a tarpaulin-covered woodpile an old blue pickup truck stood, high and bulbous like the bathtub. The promised vehicle. Grinning, I went downstairs to have my coffee. I would stop on my way to take the Jeep back, I thought, and thank Bella Ponder. She had done far more than had been called for. Even the old pickup shone. She must have hired a small army; there was no way she could have done any of this herself.

“I’m going to do just fine here,” I told Mozart, who had replaced Pachelbel on the radio. “This is definitely a doable thing.”

I drank my coffee and ate a sweet roll; it was buttery and tender and obviously homemade. Then I started out the door to the Jeep. An explosion of hissing white met me on the porch steps. Charles and Diana, obviously not accustomed to waiting, had decided to march on the house and demand their breakfast. I ran back inside and slammed the door in their black-knobbed faces. Exasperation joined the alarm that jolted my heart. I had not taken this enormous step, left all that I knew and come to this wild place, to let a couple of spoiled old birds confine me to

UP ISLAND / 259

quarters every day. Even if they were the size of ostriches and had been known to break forearms.

I stumped into the kitchen and looked around for something to feed them; perhaps they would settle for the rest of the sweet rolls. And then, in a tiny cubicle of a pantry beside the water heater that I had not noticed before, I found two big sacks of the cracked barley that Bella fed them, and a stout stick that must have begun life as a broom handle. I poured the barley into the old tin pail that sat beside the sacks, picked up the stick, and went out to discharge my primary duty. Slowly, like a native bearer beating my way through a dense jungle, I advanced toward the pond, the swans surging and flapping and hissing and grunting around me, keeping always just a step beyond my swishing stick.

When I had reached the pond and dumped the barley, and they had snaked their heads out to attack it and abandoned me for the moment, I went back to the camp, my steps measured, my spine very straight, the stick at the ready, refusing to look back. I was both amazed and horrified at myself.

The temptation to whack the elegant necks had been almost overpowering.

When I got into the Jeep and started out of the glade, they were both gliding on the pond, looking like an enchanted woodcut out of Sir Thomas Malory.

“Shitheads,” I muttered. “Maybe you can beat me up, but I can starve you. You do not have a level playing field here.

The sooner you get that through your mean little heads the better.”

Bella and Luzia were obviously waiting for me. When I got to the big house, the front door was open and they both called to me to come in. When I did, I found them dressed in fresh, flowery cotton and sitting
260 / Anne Rivers Siddons

erect, Luz in the little yellow bed and Bella in a chair beside her, their hands folded in their laps, smiling hugely. A tray with a steaming teapot and more of the sweet rolls stood on Luz’s bedside table. The flowers in the room were fresh. The piles of books had been neatened. They stared at me, word-less, waiting, barely able to contain their glee. Even Bella’s dark face looked like a huge, expectant child’s.

“Well? What do you think? Isn’t it pretty? Aren’t you pleased?” Luz piped, unable to contain herself.

“I am utterly dumbfounded, and totally pleased,” I said, laughing at them. “I never would have thought it was possible. It must have taken some powerful magic.”

“No, but it took almost all the money we had for the month. Bella hired six men and a lady,” Luz said happily, and I winced and Bella frowned.

“Luz,” she said quietly, and the little old woman fell silent, looking from Bella to me in shamed confusion.

“Then I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope that one day I can find a way to do something just as splendid for you,” I said, and the little brown face lightened again.

“What will it be?” she cried.

“It’ll be a surprise,” I said, and she clapped her hands.

Bella poured tea and urged another sweet roll on me.

“They’re the only thing I could do for you myself,” she said.

“The cleaning crew took them down when they went. Is everything all right? Did they forget anything?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I said honestly. “I can’t UP ISLAND / 261

imagine wanting or needing anything else. It’s miraculous. I love it.”

“We knew you would,” Luz said. “Bella said it was a good investment. And,” she smiled slyly, “I know about Denny.”

Bella Ponder rolled her black eyes, and I smiled at Luz.

“I hope we all still feel that way when the winter’s over,”

I said.

“What happens then?” Luz said, and Bella said quickly, “I know I said I wouldn’t pry, but can you tell me just a little about Denny? I thought maybe he’d give you a note for me, but I guess not…”

I was torn between pity and irritation. Pity won.

“He seems a good bit better this morning,” I said. “He was up and dressed and working, and he gave me a list of things he’d like to have when I go shopping. I’ll take your list, too, if you have one. Oh, and thank you so much for the truck; I’ll be able to take my friend’s Jeep back to her house now.

And the radio and the TV…”

“Phone will be in by the end of the week,” Bella said, waving a large, impatient hand. “What about the cancer?

Did he tell you about that? Is he hurting? What do the doctors say about it? What do you know about the kind that he has?”

“Not much,” I said honestly. “I usually worked with the incurables. He doesn’t know…no one has apparently said that his was incurable by any means. He goes back for a checkup in a month, but he’s through with his chemo. And he says there isn’t any pain. Just some phantom discomfort where the missing leg was. On the whole, I think he’s doing as well as he could. He seems eager to go on with his work.

I’m

262 / Anne Rivers Siddons

to pick up his lists from the living room; he’s working in the bedroom for now. I don’t want to disturb him, but I will insist on seeing him with my own eyes at least once a day. I don’t think he’s terribly pleased about that.”

I did not tell them any more about the carcinoma, or what I knew about it. I saw no reason to alarm these old women yet, even though I knew that eventually they would have to know the worst. As it was, Luz’s little chin was quivering.

“You didn’t say it was cancer, Bella,” she said, her voice thin and trembling. “You didn’t say Denny just had one leg now.”

“Well, now you know everything, and it’s not so bad, is it? Molly says he’s doing just fine, and she should know.”

Luzia set her mouth.

“So when will we see him?”

“Well,” his mother said, looking away, “he can’t get around much yet. He’s still learning how to use the crutches. And he takes some medicine that makes him real tired. So I expect it will be a while.”

“Can he come for Christmas?”

“We’ll see. Hush now.”

Bella looked at me.

“Did he say anything about his wife and daughter? Are they still out West, does he see them…”

“You know we agreed that I wasn’t going to get into that,”

I said as gently as I could, but firmly. “Really, Bella, I just can’t. I have a lot of things I’ve got to work through myself.”

I thought of the shining camp, and the old car, and the appliances. She had done so much, even if it was in the nature of a bribe.

UP ISLAND / 263

“I tell you what, though,” I said. “If he tells me anything on his own, and I don’t think it’s confidential, I’ll tell you.”

I knew I was safe. Dennis Ponder was not going to surrender one more iota of himself to me than was necessary to sustain life.

“Well, I’ll appreciate that,” she said, apparently giving up.

I rose to go, but she said, “Stay just a minute. Luz has been looking forward to company for days. Luz, do you remember that you said you were going to tell Molly how it was when we were growing up back home, in West Bedford? About the music and the songs, and the wonderful things we had to eat, and the old stories?”

And the little old woman in the bed sat up straighter and, like a good child and with joy in her dark eyes, spun me a glittering story of a life lived, as nearly as was possible, as a Portuguese king’s kin among the alien corn of a blue-collar American neighborhood. It was full of exotic color and smells and odd, dark music, and old chants and gilded pageantry, and heroes and saints and bittersweet, perfumed things to eat and drink, and of a provenance so enchanted that even a child could have told it was fantasy; I knew that I would never know what Luz’s childhood had really been like, or Bella’s, for that matter. I wondered if either of them knew, really. It did not matter. The stories were enthralling. When Luz’s head began to droop toward the pillows and I got up to leave, I realized from Bella Ponder’s sly smile that I had been as deliberately and skillfully mesmerized as the listeners to Scheherazade’s wonderful stories, and for much the same reason: so that Bella’s only link to her son would stay alive.

264 / Anne Rivers Siddons

I smiled back at her. My smile said that it was all right, she and Luz might spin their web at will, so long as they knew that I knew. She nodded.

As I went out the door, she called after me.

“Was he more polite this time? Did he treat you better?”

“He was fine,” I said over my shoulder. I wasn’t going to get into that, either. “And I did fine with the swans, too, although I thought I was going to have to whack them.”

“Wish you had,” she said, closing the door. “Save somebody the trouble.”

I drove Livvy’s Cherokee back to Chappaquiddick under the low, gray sky, left it in the garage, and called the Edgartown taxi. Waiting for it, I walked down to the edge of Katama Bay and looked over at the little town, shining like a child’s toy village in the shafts of iridescent light that shot occasionally down from the clouds. It looked no more real than a doll’s village, either, and I was not sorry, when the taxi finally came, to leave it behind and start back on the Edgartown—West Tisbury Road, up island. I did not look back toward the town or the sea.

The Ford sputtered obediently into life when I started it, and I drove it gingerly down the rutted, overgrown little lane toward Middle Road. It was tall and ponderous and had, apparently, no springs left; it was like wrestling a tank through the undergrowth. I did not care. This shiplike old truck could, I thought, get me through any kind of weather the Vineyard could throw at me. I felt tough and competent; I whistled experimentally through my teeth, to see if I could still do it.

I could.

I went all the way to Vineyard Haven for supplies, UP ISLAND / 265

hoping not to have to go out again for a week or so. The first of Tee’s checks had been duly waiting at Livvy’s Edgartown bank, and the first thing I did was to open an account at the Compass Bank on Main Street. I withdrew a reckless amount of cash and bought more pots and pans, cleaning supplies, propane for the lanterns I had found in the pantry, a pin-up reading lamp and a floor lamp, and a score of lightbulbs. All of a sudden it seemed imperative that I not lose the light. At the A&P, crowded even off-season, I bought food and sundries. I would, I thought, look in the want ad pages of the Vineyard
Gazette
for a used freezer; the old refrigerator in the camp had none.