Up Island (41 page)

I laughed uproariously. No one else did.

“Don’t you think that’s funny?” I demanded, leaning over to peer into first my father’s eyes, then Dennis’s. I had to lean quite close; their eyes kept blurring.

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“Oh, baby,” my father said, softly and soberly, and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. I squinted; was I seeing correctly?

“I think he was a goddamned fool,” Dennis Ponder said.

He was not laughing, either.

“Yeah, but see, here’s this really, really
big
lady with this wild black hair and a psycho-something rash on her butt, wrapped up in three rolls of Saran Wrap, like a big old Christmas present…”

“I think I’d like to kill Theron Redwine,” my father said tightly.

“I think you’re beautiful,” Dennis said. “I’d love to see you wrapped up in Saran Wrap.”

“Now I know you’re drunk,” I chortled, pointing a finger at him and almost falling over on the rug.

“Guilty as charged,” Dennis said, and we all laughed some more.

“Okay, now you,” I said to him, and he closed his eyes as if in thought and finally said, “I stole all my cousin Luzia’s underwear once, when I was about seven, and buried it in the Peaks’ sheep corral under a pile of dung. Their ram dug it up. Mr. Peak took a photo of him with her brassiere on his horns.”

We roared.

“Why did you do that?” my father said.

Dennis looked startled. “I forget,” he said. “I think it was something I saw…” He stopped laughing and his voice trailed off. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. Something…”

“It’ll come,” I said. “Now, Daddy. What about you?”

“Well, once when you kids were little I took you down to Tenth Street to see an adult movie,” he said. “I didn’t know it was when we went in, but I caught on
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pretty soon, and I didn’t take you out. Your mother washed your mouths out with soap for weeks, the questions you were asking. I should have confessed, but I never did.”

We laughed again, and then I said, “It’s all such tame stuff.

Now we have to tell something really big. Something that changed things. Dennis, you start; Daddy doesn’t have any secrets. I’ll tell you what I want to know. I want to know why you don’t speak to your mother and Luz.”

I paused and grinned around the room slyly, pleased with my daring. I did not see my father’s frown, or the cold stillness that ran like a shadow over Dennis Ponder’s face.

“I don’t remember,” he said levelly. I should have dropped it, but I did not.

“Come on, it’s New Year’s Eve. Of course you remember.

You have to tell. No secrets allowed between us.”

He looked up at me; I was capering around the living room, too full of bourbon and my own cleverness to sit still.

“It was something I saw. That’s all that’s your business, Molly. I owe you a lot, but I don’t owe you that.”

It penetrated even my drunken fog then: I had gone too far. I was not so drunk that I could not feel my cheeks flame.

“I’m sorry. That was really out of line. I apologize. Look, I’ve got some champagne on ice; let’s uncork it. By the time midnight comes there’ll still be enough for a toast.”

I could tell that he did not want to stay, but my father’s face was so stricken by my gaffe that apparently Dennis could not bring himself to leave. He nodded. My father nodded. I raced off to get the champagne, my

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cheeks and chest and forehead still burning. I knew that I would loathe myself in the morning.

But the champagne did the trick. By the time the little or-molu clock I had found at a flea market chimed twelve, we were laughing again, and we toasted the New Year and hugged each other and threw our hardware-store glasses into the fireplace. Outside the circle of firelight and liquor and hilarity, the world howled, and dark shapes slunk through it. But inside it, just for this one night, we were safe and warm. I would have done anything to keep that circle un-broken, but eventually sleep took me.

I remember that my father helped me to bed, and Dennis Ponder kissed me on the forehead and said, “Good night, Cinderella. I’m going to remind you in the morning of every dance you danced and every song you sang.”

I woke sometime later, and heard them still talking before the fire, still laughing, but quietly, now. Sometime even later, I heard a kind of fussing, scurrying noise under the porch and sat up, blinking, and then realized fuzzily that the swans had made their way up from the pond and settled themselves into the nest my father and Dennis had made them. I was trying to rouse myself to get up and tell them about it when sleep took me down for good.

In the morning Dennis was gone, and my father was bustling around the kitchen cleaning up. He grinned at me when I crept into the room, my head pounding, my mouth and throat furry with thirst.

“If you feel like you look, you should go back to bed,” he said.

“Was I just unbearably awful? Never mind. I know I was.

I’ve never done that before,” I said. And then, remembering,

“Oh, God, I’ve got to go up and apologize
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to Dennis. That was just a shitawful…sorry, Daddy…thing to ask him.”

“No. Let him be,” my father said. “I put him to bed on the sofa and he woke up awfully sick. I had to literally carry him over to his place. We should never have let him drink. I fault myself on that.”

The pain and alarm I felt was quite different from the cringing guilt over my insensitive question the night before.

The depth of it surprised me. I was suddenly terrified for Dennis Ponder.

Sometime in the night before, everything had changed. I could not remember much of what we had said to each other, but I thought of him differently now, in a new way. He was not simply the sick man across the way for whom I had contracted to care. He was someone who had poured out a liter of his very essence to me, as I had to him. He was real now. He was a living, funny, gifted, difficult, suffering, perhaps dying person who for one moment had reached out to me. I could have pulled away, as I had done all the weeks before, but I had not, and so I could never again think of him as I had before. For a moment I wanted that back desperately, more than anything. I did not want this whole, real, wounded new Dennis Ponder in my life. But there he was, and there, I knew, he would remain.

I wonder how I seem to him now? I thought. I wonder if I’m different to him? What’s happening to us? Are we changing into other people up here, or just into whoever we were meant to be to begin with?

Maybe that’s the magic of this place, I thought, going upstairs to take my shower. I stood under the hot water, eyes closed, surrendered to it, until it began to run cool, and then cold, but the strange new reality of Dennis Ponder and me would not wash away.

T
HE CATERPILLARS AND THE old men at Alley’s General Store were right about that winter. Conceived, the delighted weatherpeople said, of El Niño and the lingering ash clouds from Mount Pinatubo, great storms rolled east week after week, borne along on the jet stream, which clung to New England like a lover. Snowstorm followed snowstorm or, if conditions were just right, ice blanketed the Vineyard. The snows soon lost the luster of novelty and began to be hardships, but they never lost their power to enchant.

A hushed white, perfectly still morning in the glade was still the stuff of held breath. Daily the blue-white yard was crisscrossed with the delicate traceries of whatever hungry animals had come foraging during the nights: skunk, raccoon, deer, an occasional opossum, the lacy evidence of a hundred birds around the bird feeder. Often, at the edge of the front porch overhang, there would be the furious, swooping snow angels made by the swans’ wings as they protested the intrusion of their hungry neighbors. We saw, too, the wide, deep spraddle of their webbed feet as they waddled flat-footedly back to the pond. In those bitter early days of January, my father went down almost hourly to break 357

358 / Anne Rivers Siddons

up the ice on the pond so that the indignant Charles and Di could paddle.

“You’d think they’d be glad to give it up till spring,” I said, fretting about my father’s habit of going out in the bitterest weather in only his flannel jacket and tweed hat. “They don’t need to drink it; they’ve got the water you put out under the porch. I think they just insist on it to jerk you around. Why don’t you try leaving it frozen for one night, and see what happens?”

“It’s their job,” he said mildly. “It’s what they do. I don’t mind whacking ice. It could get old if this doesn’t let up for a while, though.”

It didn’t. As I said, the snows were tolerable because of their beauty. But the ice was different. Oh, it was beautiful, all right; the rare glitter of sun off the crystal branches along the lanes, the incredible sight of entire forests of curly scrub oak blazing and clicking under an iron-blue sky; the bone-chilling morning when we skidded down to the docks in Menemsha to buy scallops and found the Bight a solid sheet of steel-gray ice—I will never forget those sights.

But the ice brought cold and danger along with the extravagant chandeliers it hung up island. Branches and wires came down and it was often days before crews could get to them. Cold darkness prevailed. People could not flee to the little towns for light and warmth because the roads were treacherous; each storm brought news of an accident that harmed, and once or twice, killed. More than once the gov-ernor declared the Vineyard a disaster area, and National Guard trucks rolled ponderously off the ferries with supplies for farm animals and people in the worst-hit areas, only to skid helplessly off the roads and end up, UP ISLAND / 359

turtlelike, on their sides. In the end, it was neighbor slogging and sliding across fields and down lanes to neighbor with food and firewood or propane that saw up island through.

On one of my rare, perilous, crawling trips to the store I heard an old man telling a child, “Maybe the folks up here ain’t so kissy-kissy most of the time, but by God they make good neighbors in hard times.”

I had not thought that many people knew I was there, in the little camp at the end of the lane, or that Dennis Ponder had come back. But twice, when I went out in the morning to stock the bird feeder, I found that someone had been down the lane with a small plow mounted on the front of a vehicle, and once there was a paper sack full of scallop chowder, crackers and bread, milk, and a bag of apples. There was no note on the bag, and no name. I came very close to tears that morning. My father smiled.

That same morning, because of the plowed lane, I was able to get to Middle Road and down to the lane that led to the farmhouse. I had thought I would have to leave the truck and walk up, but the lane, too, had been plowed. I carried my bag of provisions into the kitchen and found that a paper sack similar to the one left at my door sat on the kitchen table.

“Who’s the Good Samaritan who brought your food?” I said to Luz, who was nodding by the smoldering fire. Bella, she said, was still upstairs.

“I don’t know. We knew it wasn’t you because you’d come in. Bella says we’re not going to eat it. We don’t take charity.

I wish we did. I can smell scallop soup. I don’t think I had any breakfast.”

I was appalled, and furious with Bella.

“Luz, how often do you miss your breakfast?” I
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said gently. “Does Bella always stay upstairs this late in the morning?”

“Yes, but I don’t mind. I always save my bread from supper. She comes down by lunchtime. It’s just that she needs to sleep; I don’t think she sleeps much at night. I hear her coughing almost all night long.”

I went into the kitchen and heated the scallop chowder and brought it in with a chunk of bread I found under a white dishcloth; there was little else in the kitchen. I had not been able to get there with food for several days. The anonymous offering of soup and crackers would have seen them through two more days if I could not have made it today. I was very angry. I wanted to shake Bella Ponder until her fat jowls quivered. Her arrogant pride was going to kill them both.

At first Luz hesitated over the soup.

“Eat the damned soup,” I snapped. “You can always pretend that the peasants brought it as an act of homage.”

I was immediately sorry for the sarcasm, but Luz’s little face brightened and she tucked into the soup hungrily. She did not speak until the bowl was empty.

“I’m glad you thought of that. The soup was wonderful,”

she said. “I’m glad you thought of that about the peasants.

I’m going to tell Bella, I’ll bet she never thought of it.”

“You do that,” I said grimly. “And you tell her I’ll stop by this afternoon if I can still get up the hill. I’ll bring some more soup, and part of an apple pie I made.”

I kissed her cheek, put another blanket on her bed, and built up the fire.

“Can you believe it?” I fumed to my father when I UP ISLAND / 361

got home. “She can’t even get down the steps to feed Luz; they’re cold and they’re hungry, and they won’t eat hot chowder somebody brings them because they don’t take charity! I swear, it’s getting to be time to do something about them. Get them into a home, or get a full-time nurse in, or something. I can’t let them starve and freeze, and I can’t count on getting over there until this weather lets up.”

“It doesn’t look like their neighbors are going to let them starve or freeze,” he said.

“Well, but they won’t eat the food. I told you what Luz said Bella said about that. Who should I call? The visiting nurse? It’s the only number I’ve got. Isn’t there some kind of organization for the elderly on the island? It seems like I’ve seen something on a sign in West Tisbury…”

“There are a couple of organizations for us old farts, I think,” he said. “It seems to me I’ve heard they deliver hot meals and health care and all kinds of stuff to shut-ins, and I know they’ve got people who’ll take you to the doctor or to the senior center for a meal. The senior center’s a nice place; I’ve dropped by there a few times and played some Scrabble and shot a little pool. Got the pants beat off me the first few times, but I’m getting my game back. I don’t think there’s much for Bella and Luz if they won’t ask, though. As for getting them into some kind of residential place, you’re probably right, but that’s not your job to do. Only someone connected to the family could do it legally. That’s Dennis, I guess. I wouldn’t imagine he’s up to it right now, and probably not inclined to tackle the old ladies if he was. I think the best and only thing we can do is what we’re already doing.