Up Island (42 page)

The weather can’t last forever; I hear from the old-timers around Alley’s and

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the senior center that the Vineyard winters aren’t usually much worse than Atlanta’s.”

I knew he was right. I looked at him with interest. I could no more imagine my father playing Scrabble and pool with the elderly men of Chilmark and West Tisbury than I could imagine doing it myself, but there was no good reason for my surprise. He had always had two or three close friends with whom he had done things; it stood to reason that he must miss that. On reflection, the fact that he had quietly moved to find companionship for himself, instead of clinging to Dennis Ponder, said much about his adjustment, and the lifting of the terrible depression.

“I’m proud of you,” I said, giving him a quick hug. “You’ve done what I should have been doing all along: getting to know some of the other people up island. I think I’ve just assumed that they were what Bella and Luz and Dennis said they were: tight-knit old families who don’t want any truck with anybody else. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

“No,” he said. “But you needed some time to heal and some space to do it on your own terms. I always thought when it was time, you’d stick your nose out and get to know a few folks. If you’re ready for that, I could take you with me to the senior center next time I go. Having you around would probably jump-start a lot of pacemakers.”

I grinned.

“You got a deal. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to rattle a chain.”

“Pity,” my father said. “You need to remember how that feels. And some folks I know need to remember how it feels to get ’em rattled.”

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“If you’re referring to Dennis, that’s ridiculous. That’s almost obscene.”

“Hell, Molly, the man’s a long way from dead,” he said ir-ritably. “If you hadn’t been so squiffed New Year’s Eve you’d have seen that Dennis was acting like a rooster in the hen-house around you. You’ve got to stop burying your men folks before their time. Makes them cranky.”

I just rolled my eyes at him. But the conversation lingered.

Before I went up to check on Dennis that afternoon, I put on some lipstick and brushed my skunk-striped hair until it shone. I had not done either for a long time. It felt good. By the time I gained the porch of the larger camp, there was a spring in my step that had not been there since the siege of bitter cold had started.

He was lying on the sofa in front of the fire, Lazarus sighing and twitching on the rug beside him. I had only seen him once or twice since New Year’s Eve. While he was so desperately ill from the chemo he had seemed to want only my father, and with my new, skin-prickling awareness of him, I was willing to give him that. But by now I found that I wanted to see him; needed to see for myself that he was still there, still alive. Simply that. I knew that he had only two more chemo sessions, and I found that I had been thinking of the time beyond them as a time when I would have back the man who had laughed and sung on New Year’s Eve. But now, looking at him, I thought, with a surge of desolation, that I might have seen the last of that man in that first glimpse.

He looked terrible. He was white and still and the thick hair was lusterless and dry now, hanging messily around his collar. His face was sunken and yellow.

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During the long spells of nausea, he had lost a lot of the weight he had regained, and even his hands, lying still on the blanket that covered him, were thin to bone and white to transparency. I stood staring intently until I saw the blanket rise and fall shallowly over his chest, then I tiptoed into the room.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said, his eyes still closed.

They were ringed in gray-blue, and his beard was thick and blue on his jaw.

“I’m not asleep. Just listening to the tick of ice on the roof.

Doesn’t sound a damned bit cozy, does it?”

“I brought you some scallop chowder,” I said. “I’m going to heat it up and we’re both going to have some. It’s colder than a well-digger’s butt in Arkansas out there, as my dad says, although I could never understand why a well digger would have a cold butt in Arkansas. And then I think I’m going to cut your hair. You’ll feel a lot better without it straggling down your neck. I might even shave you.”

He opened his eyes and rolled his head on his neck until he could see me. It was a weak gesture, sick and resigned.

“I’ll let you cut my hair and shave me if you’ll make that Scotch instead of chowder,” he said. “I’d just throw it up. For some reason, booze stays down. Maybe we could get drunk again. What do you say? Sing a little? Dance a bit?”

The rictus on his white lips frightened me until I realized he was smiling, or trying to. It was dreadful to see, heart-wrenching. I found myself wishing that he would snap at me as he would have before.

I went and got the Scotch and poured us both some, and handed his to him. When he raised the glass to his lips, his hand was trembling so that some of the UP ISLAND / 365

amber liquid spilled down his chin. I took the glass and held it while he sipped, and presently his hand was steadier, and he took the glass back.

“Where’s Tim?” he said, struggling to sit up. I started to help him, then sat still.

“He’s down cracking the ice for those damned swans for the thousandth time,” I said. “Then he’s going to take some soup over to the farmhouse. He needed to go now, before it starts to ice up too badly. He’ll stop by on his way back, he said.”

He was silent for a while, sipping Scotch. I watched the fire and the sleet ticking on the windows, and, when I thought I was unobserved, his face. It looked, in the firelight, a bit like Roualt’s head of Christ, stark and tortured and finished.

My fingers itched to get at the hair and beard.

“So what’s going on at the farmhouse?” he said finally.

There was reluctance in his voice, but something else, too.

A kind of slackening, a loosening of something that had held tight, like a vise. I knew he was not simply making conversation. He was too sick and weak for that. I wondered whether to put a bright face on the two old women’s plight or to tell him the truth.

“It’s not very good,” I said. “They’ve gotten to the point where they can’t really take care of each other. Your mother doesn’t come downstairs until midday; I think she’s coughing so badly at night that she simply has to sleep in the mornings.

It leaves Luz on her own, with no food and no heat. I’m going to start going first thing, and Daddy’s going to take the afternoon trip. That is, if the weather ever lets up. It’s getting almost impossible to get up that hill to the farmhouse. I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but I’m afraid the
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time is coming when they need more care than Daddy and I can give them, and you’re the one who would have to make the arrangements about a nursing home, or something. Or, at least, okay, whatever we can arrange. I’d spare you this if I could, but I’m afraid for them. They won’t take help.”

And I told him about the food that was left but uneaten.

He shut his eyes again, and let his head roll to the side.

His face was pinched and colorless.

“Goddamn that stupid Portuguese pride,” he said. “She never would take what people offered her. She never would.

People tried to help when Daddy left; I remember the pies and cakes and covered dishes that came into the house, even if I don’t remember him. She dumped them all out and washed out the dishes they came in and made Luz take them back. God knows that bigoted old Gorgon, my Ponder grandmother, made her life miserable enough over being Portuguese, but she did reach out to her after he left. Mother did everything but spit in her face. I don’t know if I blame her, but it would have been a start toward some healing. It could have meant a different life for her, and for me, too. But she had King Dinis. What else did she need? Now they’re up there freezing and choking on their precious pride. Well, let King Dinis come save them. I don’t give a shit. I’m only sorry you and Tim have gotten stuck with them. Let them go. Call the county and dump them.”

“I haven’t minded until now,” I said. “I like your mother.

I’m truly fond of Luz. And they gave me the start of a life back when they let me have the camp. I’m not going to just abandon them. But I promise I won’t mention them to you again.”

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He shook his head weakly, and sighed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve got enough problems of your own. I’ll try not to add my natural sweetness and generosity to them. Keep me posted on the old babes. If it comes right down to it, I’ll figure out what to do about them. Provided, of course, I’m still around by then.”

My heart flopped in my chest like a fish. He had never come so close to the subject that hovered always in the air over our heads.

“Dennis,” I said, “if I can hold your head while you barf, I think I deserve to know what’s going on with you and the leg. I’m not going to run on about it, and I’m not going to tell anybody—who would I tell?
People
magazine? I don’t talk about you to your mother, if that’s what bothers you.

But I want to know. I…we care about you and the way you feel, Daddy and I. It’s hard to think about you over here going through God knows what when we’re right over there not doing anything to help…”

He turned his head to look at me again. He did that for quite a long time. Finally he said, “I don’t know myself. They found some more…involvement with the bone in my thigh, that’s why the chemo. It was hurting a good bit. It hasn’t done that until now, not really. They’re going to check after this course of chemo is over, and then they may want to take some more of the leg. I’ve already told them that’s out. I’ve got some painkillers. I don’t use them much, but they’re here if I need them. And I’ve got some stuff to help me sleep. I don’t use that, either. But it’s here…if I need it. So far, scotch is better. I’m not going back after the last chemo treatment.

I’m not going to give them any more of my leg. If it gets too bad, I’ll decide

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then what to do. Who knows, this round may do the trick.

Either way, I should know before spring. It’s not going to prolong your tour of duty. I’m not asking you to re-up.”

My eyes stung and I shook my head mutely. He saw it, and said, “I’m sorry again. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m not used to nice women.”

It was such a matter-of-fact pronouncement that I laughed, startled. He smiled, too.

“Thus spake Zarathustra.’ It’s true, though. I seem drawn to your basic Grendel’s mother type. The nice ones I manage to run off before they can apply for sainthood.”

“You sound like the hero in a bad romance novel,” I said.

“A wild, bad boy until he’s redeemed by a good woman’s love. What decent long-suffering women have you managed to run off?”

“Two wives,” he said. “One daughter.” He was not smiling now.

“Why is that, Dennis?” I said quietly. It seemed to me that I was very close to seeing past the wall of illness and rudeness now.

“I grew up knowing only one thing about women, and that was that they will leave you,” he said. “I made up my mind early on to be the one who did the leaving. I don’t think I ever knew that consciously, until I got sick and had to stop and look inside. By that time, it seemed too much trouble to try and change things. I don’t think there’s that much time left, even if this leg turns out to be okay. I don’t have the staying gene in me. I couldn’t have. Neither of my parents had it…”

“Your father may have left you. But your mother didn’t,”

I said. “She’s still here. Right up there where UP ISLAND / 369

she’s always been, still waiting. All it would take is one word from you…”

He laughed, shortly and bitterly. “Is that what she told you? That she’s waited for me all these years? That old bitch.

She doesn’t even know what’s true and what isn’t anymore.”

I said nothing. I wanted, suddenly, no more of this. I was tired of the stubborn, senseless little drama of mother and son that had played around my head since the first day I had come up island. I stood up to go, snapping my fingers for Lazarus.

“Wait a minute,” he said, and I stopped.

“Could you do one thing for me?”

“Of course.”

“There used to be a sled in the woodshed out there. A blue Flexible Flyer. I wondered if it was still there. Would you mind looking?”

“Of course not.”

I went out into the deepening blue of the January night.

An early moon was rising, huge and white and low. It looked like a disk cut from bone, and polished. It would light the night almost like daylight, I knew. The Wolf Moon, my father said the old men at Alley’s called it.

The sled was at the back of the woodshed, covered with a filthy old tarpaulin.

“Still there,” I reported. Dennis smiled.

“I got that sled for Christmas the year before I went to America,” he said. “It was a winter like this one, cold, with lots of snow. I don’t remember any ice, though. We had our Christmas at the little camp, where you and Tim are. After dinner we went out on that hill that goes down to the water on the other side of the dock, and tried it out. I still remember my

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mother running like a deer, pushing that sled and belly-flopping down on it, shooting down the hill yelling like a Wampanoag. If they yell. I’ve never heard one. Her hair was in braids down to her waist, and they stood straight out behind her…”

I saw it in my mind, a tall, slim woman and a dark little boy, lifted off the earth on a snowy Christmas Day, literally, for a moment, hung between heaven and earth.

“Is she dying?” he said.

“I think so.”

“How long?”

“I have no idea. It’s congestive heart failure. I don’t know much about that. I think the danger would be pneumonia, or something like it. I can find out…”

He shook his head.

“No.”

And then, “She’s very fat now, I know. Tim told me. I wish you could have seen her when she was young. She was…very beautiful.”