Up Island (45 page)

I did not see the other swan. I did not know which one this was. I do know that my blood ran cold and thick, an icy sludge in my veins.

388 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“Daddy…” I whispered.

He did not turn.

“It’s Charles,” he said. His voice was small and dry. “Diana is…gone. I found some feathers and a few splashes of blood in the reeds, but she’s gone. I looked everywhere. Something got her in the night, fox or something. I don’t know what their predators are. She couldn’t have flown away with that wing. He’s been doing this since I got here. It’s been almost two hours.”

Grief and pity for the two bereaved old creatures at the pond nearly brought me to my knees.

“Daddy, come up to the house now,” I said, forcing my voice not to break. “How can it help him if you freeze to death? Let me fix you some breakfast. Maybe she’s just hurt somewhere, and she’ll come out when you’re gone; don’t animals hide when they’re hurt? Later we’ll look for her. Laz has a great finding nose…”

“No. She’s not here. He would know. Don’t you see? He knows she’s gone; he doesn’t know where she is; he’s calling her. I didn’t know they could do that.”

“Daddy, come on.”

He turned and looked at me. His face was absolutely gray and still. There was nothing in his eyes.

“Don’t natter at me, Molly,” he said, and I heard, incredibly, irritation in his voice. I could not ever remember hearing it before. It was a weak, peeved,
old
kind of irritation.

“But you’re going to get sick…”

“Then I get sick! Can’t you stop hovering for once in your life?”

Hurt flooded me. My eyes filled. I turned and stumbled back up the path. But by the time I had UP ISLAND / 389

gained the porch, the hurt had receded and pain and dread had taken its place. He had simply had too much; this last hurt was past enduring. He loved those swans; this was too much; this was not right; this had gone over into the realm of pure cosmic malice. Besides, maybe he was wrong. Maybe Diana would come back. Maybe in a little while he would come up and tell me she was back and did not seem too badly hurt…

But he did not come back. I went up and got Dennis Ponder and we went back to the pond, he limping and holding on to my arm and Lazarus’s head. My father was still sitting there. Charles had stopped the circling and crying, and was riding flaccidly on the water, his head down as if he were about to plunge it under the surface in search of food.

He was drifting in idle circles, one black foot sheltered in the sweep of his wing, as I had often seen them both do. He looked like a ship with its rudder broken.

“Will you come up to the house with us now, Tim?” Dennis said quietly. “You need some food and something to drink.

After we’ve had both, I’ll come back down here with you and we’ll build a fire and wait with him.”

My father looked at him.

“Do you know how it feels?” he said. “I do. I know how it feels. I don’t know how else I can help him, but I can be here with him.”

“Tim…just for half an hour. That’s all. Just for that.”

In the end my father went with him. Somehow I knew that I must not join them. It might have hurt my feelings once, but it did not now. I made coffee and put it into a thermos, and made sandwiches and wrapped

390 / Anne Rivers Siddons

them in foil, so that when they went back to their vigil they would at least have some sustenance.

But they did not need the coffee or the sandwiches, and I found them days later, cold and beginning to mold, in the pantry where I had left them. When they went back to the pond, scarcely half an hour later, Charles was gone, and he did not come back.

F
OR A WHILE AFTER THAT, my father went to the pond several times a day to look for Charles. He did not say that was why he went, but of course it was—in the hope of seeing, yet knowing he would not see, that frigate of white sailing mulishly in the tiny circle left of clear black water.

I went, too, in between trips to Dennis’s camp and down to the farmhouse and into town for supplies. I went, as my father did, hoping, but knowing it was a futile hope. Somehow I knew that the silent whiteness that had swallowed Diana could not sustain Charles’s life.

Dennis went, too; every now and then when I went, I saw the tracks of his one good foot and the holes made by the crutch, and the paw prints of Lazarus beside them, deeper from taking Dennis’s weight.

None of us spoke to the other about going to the pond. It was as if to speak of it would open a gate to more pain than we could bear, any of us.

When my father went, he stayed a while. I know he kept the ice broken up, because when he came back the stick was always black and wet. But I do not know what else he did there. At the very beginning he was

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obsessed with how Charles had managed to get himself airborne.

“He wouldn’t have had enough open water,” he said over and over. “He’d have needed the whole pond to get his mo-mentum up, and there was almost no clear water. But I know he did, somehow, because I’d have found him if something had happened to him around the pond. I’ve been everywhere.

I’d have found him.”

Each time he came back, my father was duller and sadder and quieter. I would have given anything I had to take some of the pain, but I knew that I could not. It was not only Diana that he mourned.

“Let him be,” Dennis said when I voiced my worry to him.

“He’s coming to terms with your mother being gone now. I don’t think he’s really stopped to do that before.”

“Do you think Charles flew away?”

“I don’t know. No. I think whatever got her, got him. But I’m not going to tell Tim that. This godforsaken place is going to leave him something, anyway.”

After a week or so my father went less and less often. One evening toward the end of February, another great storm came down on us on its battering crystal wings, and I watched as he looked up from his newspaper toward the rack where his coat and hat always hung by the front door, hard by the black hat of my mother’s that I had moved there. He always put them on before he went down to the pond. I saw him decide, saw his eyes drop to his paper and then lift to the fire, watched as he sat still. He did not seem to see the fire or the room around him; soon he got up and went upstairs to his bedroom. He did not go to the pond again.

UP ISLAND / 393

I knew that he was not sleeping much in those days. I would wake in the night in my cave under the stairs and hear his footsteps over my head as he wandered around his room.

I heard him go into the bathroom, heard the bed creak as he got back into it and creak as he got up again. Sometimes, not very often, I heard him come downstairs to the kitchen and go back up again, and once or twice I found a coffee cup on his bedside table, but more often I found the bottle of Scotch.

Lazarus heard him, too, and would lift his head and look at me and whine softly, and I would pat his head and say, “Go back to sleep. He wouldn’t want to think he’d waked us.”

I asked him about it, finally.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m fine. I guess I’ve just slept myself out. You know how good the sleeping is up here; it’s almost all I’ve done since I came. And I’m getting some reading done that I’ve been wanting to do for years. You ever read Thoreau? ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.’ Now that’s a fine thing. Maybe I can do that up here. I never could at home.”

He began to sleep later and later in the mornings, and I let him. Often I would hear no sound from his room by the time I was ready to go up and work on Dennis’s library, and would tiptoe up the stairs and look in on him, and he would still be sleeping, a motionless mound in a cool, dark room, only the soft rise and fall of the quilt over him speaking of life. In those moments, I did not feel as if it were my father I stood looking at, but Caroline or Teddy, a child loved but strange and somehow imperiled in sleep. The uneasiness of that would stay with me through my day.

394 / Anne Rivers Siddons

He would be up when I came back in the early afternoon, of course, and would have done this or that around the cottage; we would talk desultorily of his day’s occupation. More and more often he fell asleep in the late afternoons before the fire, and I could not bear to waken him to go and read to the old ladies, so I began to take that task back over, too.

Perhaps it was just as well that I did. Bella and Luzia seemed to me terribly diminished, possessed by winter and illness and fretfulness, steeped in old age and darkness. The acute stage of Bella’s flu, or whatever it was, had passed, but the horrific cough lingered, and she was unable to get up and down the stairs, so she had made a bed for herself on the sofa across from Luz’s bed, and there she stayed most of the time, a great, bad-tempered, musty black crow in a slatternly nest. In addition to the reading, I now began to air and straighten the bedding and the room when I went in the afternoons, and wash the stale dishes piled in the sink in the cold kitchen, and put on pots of soup and stew for their dinner, and bring wood and build up the fire, and clean out and light the stove against the coming night. The feral winter still held the island in its talons; I would think, as I watched the sleet or snow beginning yet once more to spill from the soiled, stretched gut of the sky overhead, of the first flush of lemon-icing forsythia and the red flowering quince at home, of the frail shoots of daffodils green against the wet, black earth. Bella and Luzia both had told me how transcendentally lovely the Vineyard’s spring was, and Patricia Norton had spoken of it, but in those evenings in the dark farmhouse on the lush moor, with only firelight and the dim-watted bulbs in the old lamps for light, spring seemed simply unreal, a fever dream, a madman’s sad hallucination. We would, I felt, UP ISLAND / 395

be stricken into this tableau of cold and lightlessness forever.

Dennis had drawn back inside himself. As if the death of Diana and the disappearance of Charles had severed some tender new cord connecting him to the world, he retreated into his room, working silently and feverishly on his book.

I heard the sounds of industry as I worked at the shelves in the living room: the riffling of pages and occasionally the furious tearing as he jerked a page from his legal pad and crumpled it; the slide and splash of pages as one of his tottering piles of reference books fell over; his under-the-breath exclamations of impatience; the constant accompaniment of Mozart or Verdi thrumming away under the muted bustle.

But he no longer came out and sat and talked as I worked, or called out to me from his bedroom, and even Lazarus often gave up on him and came clicking out to where I worked, sighing greatly and collapsing against my legs in boredom and abandonment.

“Any old port in the storm, huh?” I would say to him, and he would sigh again, and slide into his disjointed, doggy sleep. But presently he would jerk awake, and look accusingly at me as if I had kidnapped him, and get up and pad back into Dennis’s bedroom. Aside from leaving groceries, I did not bother Dennis. It was as if he were engaged in some fierce contest, a race against some immutable deadline, to finish his book. I could not dwell on that. I did not think he felt worse, or any differently than he had for a while; I got no sense of that. It was just that for a little while he had been present to me, and now he was not. I did not know if he saw my father during the times I was in Chilmark or West Tisbury or

396 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Vineyard Haven, if Dad came across the snowy glade and sat with him as he once had. If they met, neither spoke of it.

It was as if winter had stopped time in its last days, and our life and community had stopped with it.

Tired, my God, I was tired in those bleak, low-ceilinged days. I was so tired that I did not even recognize the feeling as such, just that I seemed mired in a lethargy born of this strange, dingy, gray stasis that held us fast. It did not even occur to me that I needed surcease and could probably have it by calling Patricia Norton or someone for help with the old ladies. Looking back, it seems incredible that I did not realize that our situations were uncomfortable and rapidly growing untenable, but at that time I didn’t. It simply seemed that the one important thing was to keep going forward as I had been. Just to keep the minimal routine of our days spinning slowly without their sagging and toppling. Just that. I still do not quite know what malign alchemy held the glade in its grip in those days. I only know that it came with the soft-footed thing that took away Diana, and there seemed at the time to be nothing that could lift it.

Trouble boiled like hot water in the lengthening days. Luz developed bedsores of such ferocious suppuration that I finally had to call the visiting nurse. I had not even known she had them; she had turned as coy and fussy as a two-year-old about letting me help her change her clothing and take her sponge baths, and Bella had backed her up, saying belligerently that of course she could still bathe Luz; she did so every morning. What did I think she was? I only found the sores when I lifted Luz to put clean cases on the pillow UP ISLAND / 397

behind her and smelled the sick, sweet odor of putrefaction under her clothing.

When I pulled away her nightgown she shrieked and I nearly vomited, and went that instant and called the nurse.

When I got back Bella was sheltering Luz in her great arms, glaring at me for making her cry, and when the nurse arrived, Luz’s shrieks reached such a crescendo of noise and hysteria, and Bella’s shouts of protective rage were so terrible, that the poor, weary woman simply put out some medical supplies on the porch and told me how to clean the wounds, saying that Luz should be seen by a doctor. And she left. Bella finally let me clean Luz’s sores as best I could, holding the tiny woman in her arms and crooning to her as I worked, trying not to gag, and watched me as I applied the antibiotic salve and bandaged the wounds.

“But you’re going to have to let me get a doctor up here to look at them,” I said. “And let the nurse come and change these bandages every day. Otherwise she’ll have to go to the hospital.”