Burnt Mountain (21 page)

“Just on this side of the river?” Aengus asked with interest.

“Oh yes. The other side is far too chic and refined to put up with that sort of stuff. Their kids are practically perfect.
I kid you not. Little zombies is what I think. But they do have good manners. Better than their parents, by a long shot.”

“I gather you aren’t fond of the parents. What are they called?” I asked.

“Besides shits? ‘Scuse me; I have a bad mouth. They’re called Woodies. They live in a subdivision… only they’d kill you for
calling it that… called Riverwood. Fairly new, hideously overpriced, houses like bad copies of Versailles,
way
too much money. Nobody drives anything less than a Mercedes, including the perfect children. They’ve managed to start their
own perfect school, K through 12, kids have to live there to attend, and even their own camp, up on Burnt Mountain. God, if
any of them are your best friends I’ll cut my own tongue out—”

“Not likely,” Aengus said. “All our friends are left-wing sanitation workers and ladies of the evening.”

She laughed again. “Except you, I think. I think you teach.”

“Right. Most recently at Sewanee. I’m looking now. Know any schools that need a frightener of small children?”

“I bet somebody around here does. I’ll look,” Carol said. “And Thayer? Do you teach, too?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Only kindergarten level, though.”

“Oh, God, one of the teachers at Bummer’s kindergarten just left. I mean the one he was in two years ago. I’ll bet they’d
love to have you! I know just who to call—”

“I don’t want you to go to any trouble,” I said. “I haven’t even thought much about it.”

“No trouble. Are you kidding? They’d kill to get Mrs. Wentworth’s granddaughter on the faculty. Everybody knew and loved her.
Oh, I didn’t even tell you how sorry I was—”

“Thank you. We are, too. But I feel like we’ll always have her, what with the house and all—”

“Then so will we. Well, come on, Bummer. We’ve done enough damage for one day. I ought to make you pay for that window out
of your allowance.”

“I don’t get an allowance, Mama,” he said. “But I want to stay. I want to hear some more about the goat—”

“Come on now, or Dr. O’Neill will turn you into a goat,” Carol said. “Thanks for putting up with us. When you get settled
I’d love it if you’d come to dinner.”

She towed her son out of sight around the house, and Aengus and I sat grinning at each other.

“I like her,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Aengus. “She’s very… real. Oh, look, they forgot the basketball.”

“I’ll run and catch them,” I said.

“Don’t bother. I have the feeling we’ve by no means seen the last of Bummer.”

“I hope not,” I said, still smiling. “He’s just the kind of little boy I’d…”

I let it trail off.

Aengus reached over from his chair and squeezed my hand.

O
n the Tuesday morning after our first night in the Bell’s Ferry Road house, Aengus took a phone call in the library and came
into the kitchen where I was making breakfast, grinning hugely.

“Don’t call them; they’ll call you,” he said.

“What?”

“I just got a call from the president of Coltrane College. You know, the little one over at Oxford? The good one?”

“Well, of course I know Coltrane. Grand’s sister went there, Aunt Courtney. I never knew her really, though she was my great-aunt.
But Grand talked about Coltrane a lot. It’s supposed to be kind of a little gem of a liberal arts place, isn’t it?”

“Correct. Well, thanks to Grand’s sister, or her sister’s family, or somebody, I just got asked to interview for the chairmanship
of the English department. Seems that whoever it was called the college painted a pretty glowing portrait
of me. I’d love to thank whoever’s responsible, but I have a feeling she’s dead. He said we’d discuss who the caller was at
the interview.”

“It’s something you’re interested in, then?”

“My God, of course. Head of the department? It’s only about half an hour’s drive from here. I could be home for dinner every
night. Not to mention that the salary is, shall we say, attractive? Well, to an academic, anyway.”

“Oh, Aengus!” I cried, hugging him hard. “I’m so happy for you! All of this… this stuff: the house, this call… it just seems
as though it’s meant to be, doesn’t it? I wonder where Coltrane got our number.”

“Oh, I’m sure they called Sewanee to check me out. Probably from there. Listen, you want some champagne with that omelet?
I’ve got a bottle of Mumm’s around here someplace.”

“I put it in the refrigerator last night. Just like I knew we’d be wanting it. Oh yes, let’s do!”

We sat on the veranda and drank the silky, frothing Mumm’s and never did get around to the omelet. I raised my first glass
to him and said, “Congratulations, Your Headship.”

He put his glass down. “No. Seriously. Don’t congratulate me yet. I haven’t got it yet. Say ‘Good luck’ or ‘Way to go,’ but
don’t say ‘Congratulations.’ ”

He looked serious and a little agitated.

I put my glass down, too. “But you will get it. I don’t have any doubt of that.”

“No. Maybe. Probably. But to assume it before it happens is to… sort of curse it.”

“Aengus…”

He held one hand up. “Okay. So it’s stupid. Just don’t do it anyway.”

“Well, then… way to go,” I said lamely. He couldn’t possibly believe such a childish superstition; he dealt in superstitions
every day. They only amused and energized him.

I did not know what to say next but felt vaguely that I should pursue this. I was saved by the telephone bell.

“I’ll get it,” I said, and went in and picked up the kitchen telephone. It was Carol Partridge. Somehow her rapid-fire New
England honk brought normalcy back to the world.

“Can you come to dinner Saturday night?” she said. In the background I could hear rock music thumping and blaring.

“Love to,” I said. “Can I bring anything?”

She said something I could not hear, and I said, “I’m sorry?”

“Benjamin, turn off that stuff!” she yelled. “I’m on the phone.”

There was a mumbled reply and the music blared on.

“… because I said so!” she yelled, and the music stopped.

“God,” she breathed. “It’s only midmorning and I’m ready to call Juvie and tell them to come get them…. No, you can’t bring
a thing. I’m making gazpacho. Found some gorgeous tomatoes at the farmer’s market. Only they’ll probably be as hard as rocks
and I’ll end up using canned. I’m glad you can come. I promise to have tamed the savage beasts by then.”

“Not on our account, I hope,” I said. “Aengus has been knee-deep in kids for the last ten years, and I like little boys.”

“I’ll check with you on that again after Saturday,” she said, and I hung up, laughing.

It was a good week. Aengus had his interview on Thursday and was indeed offered the chairmanship of the Coltrane English department
and did indeed accept it.

“Now you can say congratulations,” he said that evening, producing another bottle of cold Mumm’s. I congratulated him and
more; after we had finished the champagne we simply rolled over in our bed, which I had indeed put on the third floor, where
it floated in all that sunny and/or starry space like a barge, and went to sleep.

Family by family our new neighbors dropped by, with flowers or pots of soup or freshly baked sweets, and we found them all
agreeable. Most of them were older, than me, anyway, but many were Aengus’s age, with a sprinkling of seniors. All of them
had children, whether or not they were in residence on Bell’s Ferry, and all of them had the same half-mystic, almost fierce
feeling about the river and the forest. All of them had the same feeling about the Woodies across the river, too.

“Barbarians at our gate,” a gray-thatched older man with a stiff brush mustache said. “Come thundering up this road like an
invading army. Drive chariots if they could. Never say hello, never even wave. One of them ran over the Hendersons’ corgi
a month or so ago and didn’t even stop. Several of us called the police, but of course they all look alike and drive the same
things… Jaguars, BMWs, Hummers… and they’d never admit it anyway. There’s a back way out of here that could get them up to
the freeway, but they’d have to slow
down. So Bell’s is their own personal speedway. I’ve clocked them at ninety and over.”

We couldn’t argue with that. In the short week we’d been in the house, we’d seen strings of speeding luxury cars and heard
growling engines but never seen a wave or heard a honk. So far it did not bother me. Riverwood might have been in another
country entirely.

On Saturday we worked in our overburgeoning garden most of the day, cutting back Grand’s towering camellia bushes and weeding
the flowering borders. They were spectacular; I had no idea what many of them were. Aengus was no help.

“If it’s not four-leaf clovers or roses of Killarney I can’t help you,” he said. He was sweaty and disheveled, with smears
of dirt on his face and thorn scratches on his arms. I could see that Aengus was going to be no gardener. In truth, I wasn’t
wild about it, either. Score one for my mother’s genes, I thought; she loathed gardening. We had always had a gardener.

“I wonder what gardeners go for in this neighborhood,” I said.

“More than I make,” Aengus said, savagely swatting a mosquito. “I could maybe curse one into taking us on, though.”

We stopped for a while and sat under the shade of the portico lattice, drinking lemonade. The late afternoon was green and
still.

“That’s the second time in a couple of days you’ve said
something about cursing,” I said. “You’re not buying into your own myths, are you?”

“No, but don’t I wish,” he said. “Make things a lot simpler. Think of all the things you’d never have to do if you could curse
somebody into doing them for you.”

“What do you do that you don’t want to do?” I said, honestly curious. I would have said our life so far was full to the brim
of sweetness.

“Oh, nothing, really,” he said, smiling at me. “Not about us anyway. Well, gardening, maybe. Tying my shoelaces. Driving in
five o’clock Buckhead traffic. Getting old…”

I laughed. He did not.

“Are you serious? You’re only thirty-three. You have the body of… well, I won’t say it out loud, but it ain’t bad.”

“I found a gray hair yesterday.”

“For God’s sake, Aengus, I have gray hairs. I’ve had them since I was a teenager.”

I peered closely at his temple, and he moved his head away. I saw no gray, only the lustrous crow black I had always seen.

“I don’t see it, but if it bothers you, just yank it out when you get dressed for Carol’s dinner party. Speaking of which…”

“Yeah. You want the first shower? I’ve got to polish my shoes.”

It was about six thirty when we walked through our hedge into Carol’s backyard. It was much the same as ours; there were flower
borders and masses of mature shrubbery, and a
veranda that ran the length of the house, as ours did. But the grass was uncut and the borders had not been planted for spring
and the paint on the veranda railing was peeling in spots. The house was a yellow Dutch Colonial, badly in need of re-yellowing.
The backyard was littered with the stigmata of children: a basketball hoop nailed on a tree, two bicycles lying on their sides
at the edge of the driveway, a small red wagon with scarred paint and one wheel missing. An oval pool took up half the yard,
full of detritus and floating water toys. Still, it was a nice house and a nice yard and Carol was, after all, a single mother
with three active boys. Suddenly I liked Carol Partridge even more for her backyard. Obviously, to her the important things
were the ones inside the house, not outside it.

“Faith and begorra,” Aengus said mildly.

“Can it,” I said. “It’s how the other three-fourths of the world live.”

Carol let us in the back door. She wore a flowered sundress that displayed her nicely shaped and tanned arms and shoulders,
and there were gold hoops in her ears. She smiled and gave us both hugs. But her fine blond hair was exploding around her
head like a dandelion again, and two hectic red spots burned on her cheeks. Moreover, I could have sworn that her eyes were
puffed and red from crying.

“Is this a bad time?” I said.

“Absolutely not,” she said over her shoulder, taking an armful of yellow lilies I had cut for her and plunging them into a
pitcher that sat on the counter.

“These will be perfect on the table. Everything I own
seems to be yellow. No, it’s just a little hectic around here. The boys’ father dropped in unexpectedly for a little visit
and that always rouses the rabble. I didn’t even know he was in town.”

“If you need to be with him…,” I began, and she shook her head vehemently.

“He’s the last person on earth we need to be with. Besides, he’s gone. Probably on the way back to the airport right now.
It’s just… hard on the boys, the older ones especially… when he flies in and out like this. Of course they want him to stay,
and that’s not going to happen, or they want to go with him, and that’s not going to happen, either. You-all are the best
antidote I could have right now. Come in and let me get you a drink.”