Colony (16 page)

When I shut the screen door, man and boy stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

“I wanted to thank you for the other day,” I said, hearing in my own ears the cloying syrup of the Low Country and thinking it must sound torturous to ears accustomed to crispness. “I should have sooner, but no one would let me outside. I feel like a runaway prisoner out here now.”

He looked at me politely, the shears at the ready. The little boy came to stand solemnly at his knee, staring at me with his father’s black eyes.

“Anyone would have done the same,” he said. His voice was as low as I remembered, flat and uninflected.

“I hope you didn’t…catch cold or anything,” I said, knowing in despair that I was going to chatter. “That water is like nothing I’ve ever felt.”

“Reckon it would take more than a dunkin’ in the bay to give me a cold,” he said, and the little boy giggled. I looked down at him and smiled.

“I’m Mrs. Chambliss,” I said. “Who are you?”

“No, you ain’t, then,” the child piped, and Micah Willis did smile then, a flicker of white in the brown skin.

“The only Mrs. Chambliss he knows is your mother-in-law,”

he said. “Seems to him there’s a mite of difference. This is Caleb Willis, my youngest and so far only. Say good morning to Mrs. Chambliss, Caleb.”

“Good morning,” the little boy said, staring at me. His eyes widened. “Daddy, she’s the lady with the fawn, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the lady with the fawn.”

I asked Micah Willis with my eyes if his small son knew about the fawn, and he nodded.

“Caleb knows I had to put the fawn down,” he said. “He’s as sorry as I am about it. You too, I expect. I told him you fell in tryin’ to get her out.”

“Her…?”

“Little doe,” he said.

He said no more, only stood there holding his shears, with his other hand on the top of his son’s head, obviously waiting for me to go back inside and let him get on with his task.

Instead, I said, “What are you going to do with all those lilacs?” and pointed to the truck bed.

His face froze. Not a muscle moved, but somehow it seemed to harden as concrete will.

“Mrs. Chambliss senior said it was all right to take them,”

he said.

“We gon’ put ’em on the ’cesters,” Caleb said helpfully.

He looked from his father to me.

“Oh, please, I didn’t mean I thought you were…taking them,” I cried, reddening. “I just wondered what you would do with them—”

I stopped, miserable. Not only had I as good as accused him of stealing lilacs, I had intimated that I thought the natives had no need of gratuitous loveliness.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He did not smile again, but his face unfroze a bit.

“Caleb and I always take an armful to the cemetery when we trim Mrs. Chambliss’s lilacs,” he said. “All our people are there from the year one. Caleb knows almost every one of his ancestors by now.”

“How lovely,” I said. “How nice to be where all your people have always been. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Thank you again, and please go on with your trimming.”

I turned and went back into the house. Presently I heard the metallic snipping start again. Still hotfaced, I went back to Mother Hannah’s Blueberry Bombe.

An hour must have passed before I heard the scream. It was the child; I knew that instantly, but the terror and anguish in it was electrifying, and I was on my feet and out the front door before it fairly ended. Micah Willis knelt on the grass beside his son, who was stretched out on his back, writhing and shrieking, while a fountain of bright blood arced through the air and spattered on the snowfall of lilacs around them.

I saw that Micah had his pocket handkerchief pressed hard around the child’s instep, but it had bloodied to slick limp-ness, and the fountain pumped on. I turned and flew to the linen closet and grabbed an armful of clean towels and ran back. Micah was just gathering the little boy into his arms, and the blood was still pumping.

“Here, hold it hard over the cut and don’t let up on the pressure,” I gasped, falling on my knees beside him. He grabbed the towels and wrapped the little foot in them, his face white under the tan. The boy screamed on.

“Who can I call?” I cried. “Is there a doctor in the village?

I’ll run down to the Thorne girls’ and telephone—”

“It needs sewing,” he said. “He needs the doctor over in Brooksville. It’ll be faster to take him. Tell his mother where we’ve gone when she comes back.”

He scooped the child up and ran for the truck, and when he did the awful bleeding started again.

“Wait!” I ran after him. “Somebody’s got to hold that towel firm. Give him to me and you drive. I know first aid; we had to, in the woods back home.”

He put the child into my arms in the truck and slammed it into gear. The old car coughed and wallowed up the lane and swayed out onto the dirt road toward the mainland. I held Caleb hard against me on my lap, a wad of towels wrapped tight around his little foot and held there with one hand. With the other I smoothed his hair and cheeks.

“Now,” I whispered. “Now, then. It’s stopping already, and we’ll get you all fixed up, and maybe, if you’re really, really lucky, you’ll have a scar.”

The child stopped some of his writhing and all of the sobbing and looked up at me. His face and blue denim clothing were spattered dark with his blood, and his eyes were huge in his bone-white face.

“A scar? You reckon, really?”

“Shoot, yes,” I said, kissing the top of his head. “I can almost promise you a scar. Probably the best scar on Cape Rosier. You can charge people a penny to look at it.”

“Aw, g’wan,” he said, but he did not begin crying again.

He slumped against me and closed his eyes. His father looked worriedly at him and then at me, but I could feel the strong beat of the little heart and the steady breaths on my arm.

“It’s hard work making a scar,” I said, more to the boy than his father. Both smiled, small smiles.

“Is it stopping?” Micah Willis said, and I nodded yes. Blood still seeped through the top towel, but it did not pump.

“What happened?”

“He stepped on the shears. I put ’em down to pull some witch grass and the next thing I knew he was screaming and bleeding like a stuck pig. I was some scared; I never saw him hurt like that before. His mother will kill me.”

“It’s not going to be so bad,” I said. “There’s an artery there, is all. That’s why it bled so. It’s close to the top; I’m almost sure it didn’t go deep enough to cut a tendon. He couldn’t move his foot like that if it had.”

“Were you a nurse?” he said. He was still driving fast, the truck bouncing over the dusty corrugated ruts, but he was not literally flying now.

“No, but we lived in the middle of a river swamp miles from town, and my father made sure I knew what to do about cuts and snakes and things. I stayed out by myself a lot. And then I’ve read a lot of biology too. At least enough to know Caleb’s going to be fine.”

“We’re beholden to you,” he said formally. “I don’t know that I could have managed without somebody to hold him.

You’re all over blood. Going to scare the bejesus out of your mum-in-law.”

“Well, it may scare her, but it sure won’t surprise her,” I said. “After what I’ve put her through the last week, a little blood of somebody else’s isn’t going to bother her a bit.

She’ll probably wish it was mine, at that.”

I looked at him sheepishly. This man was, after all, a virtual stranger, and the employee of my mother-in-law to boot.

“That was an ungrateful and ungracious thing to say, and I apologize,” I muttered.

“Never mind,” he said, and grinned outright. It softened the sharp, dark face extraordinarily. “I heard about your outing with Parker Potter. Surprised you didn’t knock him overboard. Good thing if you had.”

I smiled too, suddenly shy, and said, “How much farther?”

“Through South Brooksville and on to Brooksville, about five miles,” he said. “There’s a full-time doctor with a surgery there.”

“Oh—I plain forgot,” I cried. “Dr. Lincoln was right there in the colony; he wouldn’t be out sailing, and I don’t think they leave the cottage until after lunch. We could have saved all this time—”

“This is better,” he said. He did not look around at me.

Something in his tone told me not to ask why. I was silent, holding the nodding child against my breast, until we pulled up at the doctor’s gleaming white miniature Greek Revival, some twenty minutes later, and he did not speak either.

When he came out of the surgery carrying Caleb, washed and bandaged and drowsy with relief and anodyne, the little boy held his arms out to me as automatically as he might have to his mother, and I took him and held him against my shoulder and carried him back out to the truck. In the back, the mound of white lilacs looked incongruous, exotic, like a cargo of snow. They had scarcely wilted. We were halfway back to Retreat, Caleb sleeping limply, when I said, “It’s a shame to let the lilacs die. Is there somewhere you can put them until you can get them to the cemetery?”

“Well,” he said, “the cemetery’s right on the way, just before we get to the general store. If you’ve got a little more time, I might drop them off there. Caleb’s going to be disappointed if we don’t. There’s a spring and well there, too; might not be a bad idea if you cleaned up a tad.”

I looked down at my hands and arms and the hem of my dress. They looked as if I had been assisting in an abbatoir.

“I’d like to see the cemetery,” I said.

We turned into the little Cove Harbor cemetery through two leaning rusty-white marble pillars, long since naked of whatever arch they had supported. There was a dark screen of spruce and fir between the area of the graves and the road, but once past it you could see the tumbled old monuments, most blackened with age and weather and covered with moss, marching in irregular rows down to the saltwater meadow that fringed the bay. Wild grasses and flowers waved in the little wind off the sea, and the smell of salt hay drying down at the water’s edge, and kelp, and lilacs, and the clean spruce smell of Cape Rosier itself was wonderful after the choking dust of the road. Butterflies danced above the grasses, and birds sang, and gulls mewled and wheeled overhead, and the dark fingers of the pointed firs scratched against the ringing blue of the midday sky. Without the racketing motor it was very quiet. The salt wind was damp on my hot face and neck.

“What a beautiful place,” I said. “And what a lot of people are here. Is it very old?”

He paused from unloading armfuls of lilacs. We had laid the sleeping boy down on the front seat and covered him with the last of the clean towels.

“Goes back to about 1680. These up here are the newest,”

he said, indicating the nearest row of stones. “These are Allens; they got here in the late 1800s and had to take the slots nearest the road. The oldest are back down there, closest to the sea. My folks are back there. Christina’s too. And the Murrays and the Bartletts and the Goodens. Got here first, got the best pews, so to speak.”

“Your people have been here since sixteen something?”

I said. “I didn’t think anybody was here then but Indians.

That’s forever.”

“Not really,” he said, amused. “There’ve been people here since about three thousand B.C. Came from Spain and France. From what’s been found of their artifacts, they were the same folks as the ones who did the paintings in the caves in Lascaux. Pretty stuff, very modern-looking. Then there were several ages of Indians, mainly the Abenakis, the Dawn People. Then old Leif Erickson brought his Vikings here and looked around; there are carvings on the rocks over on Monhegan and a couple of other places that they’re pretty sure are Viking, and a paved highway buried deep at Pema-quid they’re sure is. Then after that we had the English, and the Spanish, and the French, and the Italians—though they were mostly hired hands—and the English again, under Sir Walter Raleigh and his brother, and so forth and so on. The first permanent settlement was at Kittery, in 1616. My folks came over from Massachussets as soon as anybody knew about Maine. Never could stand not having our own piece of dirt, could the Willises. Christina’s folks were Duschesnes, descendants of the French, the coureurs de bois, wild young rapscallions sent over here to live with the Indians and learn their ways. Wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some Jesuit blood in the Duschesne family, either. Those old guys really got around in the name of God.”

I looked at him, humbled. “I don’t think many people know as much about their state or their family as you do,” I said.

“We do in Charleston, but only about our families. The rest of South Carolina might as well not be there. Do they teach you much history in the schools here?”

“Not too many of us go to school,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Most of us go to haul, or to apprentice with sails, or to the lumber camps or the land when we’re

old enough to wear long pants. There are precious few schools this far Down East. But we manage to learn. My family, now, is a great one for reading, so we learn that when we’re tykes. That’s what we do in the long dark winters, when it’s too bad to get out. Others make music, or weave, or paint, or carve. Not many of us just sit there. And all of us tell stories to the rest of us. But there are formal educated people among us. Christina’s brother is a biologist over in Bar Harbor, and her uncle plays a concert violin in Portsmouth. My own grandfather was a sea captain and my other one a teacher in Nova Scotia. I was set to go on to school and study, but Daddy lost the fingers of his right hand to frostbite and couldn’t haul anymore, and he started a little old boatyard, and I’ve helped him, and now it’s a right good little country boatyard, all told. Make nice wooden boats, if I do say so myself.”

We reached the area where the Willises lay in their weathered ranks, and laid our armfuls of blossoms on their graves. We had enough left over for the Duschesnes too, and one or two more bunches for some of the neighboring graves.

By the time he had shown me the little stone cistern over the spring, at the edge of the meadow under a great twisted spruce, and I had dabbed most of the blood off my face and my clothes, the sun was high overhead. We started back to the truck.