Up Island (33 page)

I wondered if I could fit a double bed here, and thought perhaps if I gave up a bedside table I might, just. I would ask Bella Ponder if she had another in her resourceful attic. If not, perhaps I could find a used one in the Vineyard
Gazette
want ads. They seemed to harbor everything else.

I fed Lazarus and ate a bagel, then took the bucket of barley and the swan stick and started for the pond to feed Charles and Di. Get it done early, I thought, so they would not storm the porch and start an ongoing territorial war with Lazarus.

Somehow I did not think he would win it. I thought I had shut the screen door firmly behind me, but before I was halfway to the water a brindle bullet passed me, nose to the earth, at the speed of a heat-seeking missile. I broke into a run, calling him, but before I reached the reeds that sheltered the verge of the pond I heard contact being made
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and slowed my steps. What transpired next was in the lap of the beast gods.

The grunting, hissing, barking, and thrashing reached fever pitch, and then I heard a great splashing and thought, Well, what do you know? He’s driven them back into the pond.

From now on I can leave the stick at home and just take Lazarus. And then I reached the spot where I could see past the reeds and saw, on the bank, the patrolling swans, their great wings spread over their backs in the classic busking display of outrage and choler I had become used to, their serpents’ necks darting back and forward, their black-knobbed, orange bills open and hissing like monstrous teakettles.

Lazarus stood, knee deep in the water, head down, growling at them.

“Oh, shit,” I said tiredly, and hoisted the stick and went to rescue my dog.

He disappeared into the reeds while I beat the enraged Charles and Di back and scattered their barley, and I thought perhaps he had retreated to the house. I did not see him anywhere, in fact, and so I went on up to the larger camp to check on Dennis Ponder and get his grocery list. I would, I thought, have to warn him about Lazarus, otherwise the barking might alarm him.

I had reached the porch steps when I heard a hoarse shout and a thud from inside, and then a sharp yelp, and a kind of shuddering moaning that chilled my heart. Then I saw that the unlocked door had been pushed open, and I lunged up the steps and into the living room. I saw no one, but I could still hear the odd moaning, and a kind of viscid slurping that could only mean Lazarus, eating or drinking something. Dear UP ISLAND / 285

God, what had he done to Dennis Ponder? I was so terrified that I could not even speak when I gained the doorway to the kitchen.

Dennis Ponder lay on his back, his hands up to his face, my dog crouched over him, snuffling nose to his exposed throat. Dry cereal was scattered everywhere, and a kettle had shrieked itself dry on the stove. Dennis Ponder was weeping and pushing feebly at Lazarus. I stood still for an awful moment, unsure whether to run for the phone and dial 911 or grab my dog by his collar. I had never seen him go for anyone’s throat before, and the thought flashed through my roiling mind that he had gone mad, or berserk.

“Lazarus!” I screamed, and lunged for his collar. “Don’t move,” I yelled to Dennis Ponder in the same breath. “I’ll call for help in a second.”

I had the whining, protesting dog dragged out of the kitchen and into the living room and was reaching to shut the kitchen door when I heard Dennis Ponder take a great, gulping breath of air, and say, “No, don’t, wait, he’s not hurting me,” and realized that he was not weeping at all. He was laughing. The wet shine on his face was Lazarus’s endors-ing slobber; he had been licking Dennis’s face with the love-at-first-sight fervor I had seen him display only once before, when he was a puppy and we first brought him home and introduced him to Teddy. I let go of his collar and he skidded back into the kitchen and resumed his licking.

“Jesus Christ, dog, if you don’t stop, you’ll have to marry me,” Dennis Ponder said, choking on his laughter, and I dropped my arms to my side and began to laugh, too, shakily.

“I thought he’d knocked you down and half-killed you,” I said weakly. “I thought he’d gone crazy,
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or something. I’m so sorry, Dennis. I’ve never seen him behave so badly with a stranger before. Are you okay? Let me help you up…”

He sat up, shaking his head. Lazarus sat, too, close beside him, grinning his weak-witted grin and lolling his tongue.

“I can do it,” he said to me, and to Lazarus, “Since you knocked me down, you can just help me up, buddy. Sit!”

Lazarus sat, while I goggled. We had been gently asked to leave obedience school, he and I, before he mastered “sit” or much of anything else. Dennis put one arm around the dog and used the other to push himself up. Slowly, with sweat beading his white forehead, he inched his way to a kneeling position, using Lazarus for leverage. Finally he stood erect.

Lazarus had not moved. When Dennis Ponder transferred his weight to the kitchen counter, Laz gave a great sigh and lay down on the floor beside him. “There,” you could almost hear him say. I simply stared.

“I meant to warn you about him,” I said to Dennis. “He just got here yesterday. I was going to keep him at home until he got used to things. He’s not a bad dog, but he’s as big as an ox, and he never did have any manners. He got away from me while I was feeding the swans, and I never even saw him start up here. I’ll make sure he’s locked in from now on…”

“Don’t lock him up on my account,” Dennis said. “Just ask him to knock or something before he busts in here. I thought a werewolf had me. Lazarus; is that his name?”

“Yes. He was one step away from the tomb when we got him. He’s been grateful ever since,” I said. “Look, I can’t have him knocking you down every

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time he gets in here; we’ll have to think of another way for me to get in so you can lock your door. Is there a spare key?

Never mind, I’ll ask your mother if she has one…”

“I can’t imagine that she doesn’t have an extra key to any structure on the island by now,” he said neutrally. “No, I’m not going to lock this guy out. He’s welcome any time. I had a big dog like him back home. Commander, his name was.

I think he was part wolf. I’ve missed him a lot.”

I did not ask what had happened to Commander. Either he was dead or the vanished wife and child had taken him.

Either way, it was not anything I wanted to get into.

I pulled Lazarus’s leash out of my pocket, snapped it to his collar, and pulled him away from Dennis. He backed up, rolling his eyes at me.

“Where are you going with him?” Dennis said.

“I was going to take him with me while I did the shopping,”

I said.

“Why don’t you leave him with me?” Dennis said. “If he gets loose he’s bound to make somebody mad at him, and that’s no way to start out on this island. It doesn’t take much.”

“I see dogs out with their owners all the time,” I said.

“There’s one in every truck I pass.”

“Yeah, well, wait a day or two. He doesn’t even have his bandanna yet.”

I laughed. He did, too.

“I sort of wanted to introduce him to your mother and Luzia. I don’t even think I told them about him, and I should have,” I said.

His face closed. The laugh was gone.

“You’d do better leaving him here, then,” he said. “If
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I recall correctly, Cousin Luzia is deathly afraid of dogs. I know I could never have one when I was little…”

The way he said “Cousin” was neither familiar nor gentle.

It spoke of contempt, almost of animosity. Whatever the estrangement between him and his mother, then, it included Luz Ferreira. For the first time, a faint tendril of curiosity prickled at me.

“I will, then, this one time,” I said, reaching for the grocery list that lay on the counter. “But from now on he stays with me or at home. I can’t have him creating havoc in this heavenly place.”

He smiled grimly.

“We certainly can’t have that,” he said. Then, almost casually: “What do you talk about, you and the Virgin Queen and her consort?”

I looked sharply at him, but he was not looking at me. His fingers were curled in Lazarus’s ruff.

I was certainly not going to say, “You,” so I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Everything and nothing. Mostly they talk and I listen. Luz has been telling me about your family, and about the old days in Portugal, and about growing up in West Bedford, only she calls it ‘in America.’ What a wonderful heritage you have, all full of kings and knights and soldiers and crusades. King Dinis the Troubadour, he of the thousands of castles…”

He snorted.

“My family is no more descended from King Dinis the Troubadour than we are from Vlad the Impaler,” he said.

“That old charlatan; she’s been blathering about King Dinis since I can remember. Our people were probably fishermen, and on other people’s boats, at that. Most Portuguese came over here as hired hands on the whalers out of the Vineyard and

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Nantucket that stopped in the Azores, and we’ve been hired hands ever since. But my mother can’t handle that notion.

Her family—and mine—ran a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Cambridge or worked at the air force base in West Bedford; my mother met my father while she was slinging linguica in Cambridge and he was at Harvard. She’s a fake, but at least she knows she is. I don’t know if Luz has the sense to know it or not. You ought to call them on it.”

I felt a wash of sadness. I hoped old Luzia Ferreira did not know that she was not the spawn of kings; I hoped that she never knew it. Bella, either, for that matter. I thought that they had very little else. I, for one, was not going to take their blue blood away from them.

I unsnapped Lazarus and he loped back to Dennis Ponder and began to lick his hand.

“You must smell like his daddy,” I said.

“Your departed husband? That could be a problem,” he said nastily, and I looked at him sharply. His face was pinched and shuttered, a kind of fastidious distaste in his eyes. It was as if he were already regretting the moment of shared laughter. The poison in his mother’s name ran deep.

“My son,” I said briefly, and turned to go.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he did not sound as if he was. He sounded so sarcastic that I said, “Maybe I should lick your face.”

He only looked at me, cold and distant and untouchable in the fortress of his illness.

“Or maybe I should just kick your gimpy behind,” I muttered under my breath as I walked out to the truck. I was suddenly very tired of the Ponders and all their complicated, shape-shifting kin. I regretted leaving
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Lazarus behind. I did not want to have to go back into Dennis Ponder’s house for him.

When I did go back, letting myself as quietly into the front door as I could, Dennis Ponder was asleep on the sofa in front of his dying fire, and Lazarus lay on the floor beside him. I stood for a moment, looking down at man and dog.

Dennis looked so white and depleted that I thought I might have imagined the morning’s brief moment of rallying laughter. With sentience gone from his long, carved face he looked very near to death, and I wondered once more if he was. I did not know anything about his kind of sarcoma, and did not want to know. But perhaps I should learn more. How awful it would be to come and find him dead, or to have to attend that dying…

Fear and anguish stabbed at me and I bid it be gone, down to the place where my other wounds and terrors lay. It went, but slowly. I stood, breathing shallowly, until it was gone.

“Come on, Laz,” I whispered, and Lazarus thumped the floor with his tail and got up. He looked for a long time down at Dennis Ponder, sniffing him, and then trotted over to me and sat still for his leash. But when I got him to the door, he looked back at the sleeping man and whined slightly.

“No,” I said. “You’ve got your own walking wounded to look after. This guy doesn’t need us.”

That night, after dinner, Lazarus and I sat for a while in front of our own fire. I listened to a cassette of
Turandot
I had treated myself to, and he dozed and twitched and sighed and trembled with dreams, and woke and stretched and dozed again. I lay suspended between sleep and waking, swung in a hammock of

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music and firelight, my hand lying loosely in my dog’s rough coat.

“So far so good,” I thought drowsily. “I can do this. This really is a doable thing.”

With the coming of Lazarus, up island became a different place to me in more ways than one. Without being at all conscious of it, I began to reach out, to venture farther and farther from the camp and the glade, to extend my path past the two small cabins, the big house on the ridge in Chilmark, and my shopping trajectory. My trade route, I had laughingly called it to Teddy during one of our rare phone conversations.

Only after Lazarus arrived did I see how constricted was the path I had allowed myself. With his hairy, grinning presence in the truck, I felt empowered to go almost anywhere up island I wanted. It was as if, in some very real way, Lazarus was my permission to roam.

That I needed one was a disturbing notion, when it finally occurred to me. I had spent two or three days forging with him into places I had only wondered about before: wild, boulder-strewn Lucy Vincent Beach, where the wind straight out of Spain nearly knocked us both off our feet; the slick, odorous, time-stopped docks of Menemsha, where Lazarus’s busy nose cast him straight up into dog heaven; the breath-stopping cliffs of Gay Head, striped in the sun like a child’s cross section of an enchanted earth; the little chapel at Christiantown, deep in the thinning, burning forest, where Thomas Mayhew, bearer of another of the oldest family names, had his early mission to the Wampanoag Indians; the wonderful field of great, cavorting white statues in West Tisbury;

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Beetlebung Corners, afire now with the thousand scarlets of autumn; down the tiny lanes of West Tisbury, named for what they were in the beginning: Music Street, Old Court House Road, New Lane; down tracks so small and rutted that they seemed impassable, only to find weathered gates barring the way before I could reach the ends.