Colony (49 page)

“I wish we could stay on awhile this year,” I said.

“Me too, but it’s just not possible. Next year, after the book’s out and I’ve found a new assistant, we’ll stay. That’s a promise.”

The Humboldt current cut very little ice with Andrea. The hurricane ground its way inexorably up the coast; we watched as blurry black and white images of spuming storm waves and thrashing trees flickered on the screen of the disreputable old television set Peter refused to replace. It dealt Long Island a smart but glancing blow, flattened portions of the seafront on Cape Cod, took a swirling feint at York Beach far to our south, and then veered right and headed vaguely for Nova Scotia.

“Looks like Tina’s kinfolks are going to get a little taste of Andrea,” I said to Micah, when he came in with a double load of wood the morning before Labor Day. It was gray and misty, and the wind was behaving queerly: running spiderlike along the surface of the bay and dropping to a dead calm and then doubling back on itself and eddying around the chimneys

of Retreat. There was a hollow moaning high in the tops of the firs that I had never heard before, but it was low and not particularly ominous. The buoys off Head of the Cape and Little Deer called, and flocks of silvery seabirds, gulls mostly, wheeled overhead and then headed inland in clouds.

But still, the earnest weatherman from Bangor asserted that morning, Hurricane Andrea would miss the Maine coast and glance off Nova Scotia before blowing itself out over open water.

“I’m not worried about Tina’s tribe,” Micah said, dumping the wood into the bin beside the fireplace. “They can roost in trees like the gulls; started out that way, I reckon. I wouldn’t mind seeing you folks head on out of here, though.”

“But the TV said it’s going to miss us,” I said, troubled.

“Might be right, might not,” Micah said. “I don’t fancy the feel and smell of that wind, and those gulls know a dite more than that pegpants little fella over in Bangor. Peter button up the
Hannah
good?”

“That’s where he is now,” I said. “I’ll tell him you think we ought to go. But Micah, it takes me two days to close up Liberty—”

“Go on and leave Liberty open,” he said. “Tina and I’ll close her up later. It isn’t as if we hadn’t done it before.”

“I just don’t think I can get Peter to budge,” I said. “He’s ridden out his share of blows all these summers, Micah.”

“Didn’t figure you could persuade him,” Micah said. “That’s why I brought you a double load. We’ll likely lose power, but you can cook on the fireplace, if you have to, and heat water. I’d get those kids of yours up here from off the beach, though.”

By noon the sky had darkened to a kind of white twilight, and spume rose off the surface of the bay like smoke. The moan of the wind had risen to a

shriek. Rain blew in sheets across the harbor, stopped, and sheeted in again. Peter went to the phone, to call Petie and Sarah and tell them to bring the children and come on up the cliff path to Liberty, but got no tone.

“Line’s down somewhere,” he said. “I’ll go get them. Back in a minute. Why don’t you heat up the clam chowder we had last night? Mother always had it for lunch on storm days.”

He vanished out into the flying gray day in his yellow foul-weather gear, and I went into the kitchen and put the iron pot of clam chowder on the stove to heat. On impulse, I poured myself a glass of tawny port. I don’t know why; I’ve never liked it, particularly.

“Here’s to you, Mother Hannah,” I said, raising the glass.

“Clam chowder for a storm lunch it shall be. And any old port in a storm.”

I giggled at my own cleverness, and at that moment the lights flickered, sank, flared up again, and died out.

“Shit,” I said, and went to throw another log on the fire Micah had lit. We lost power fairly regularly out on the cape; almost any sizable wind could topple a rotting pole or snap one of the ancient lines that Bangor Hydroelectric kept promising to replace and never did. I had coped with meals in the dark, sometimes for a day or two, and could certainly do it again. But I did not like the moan of this wind; it prowled the sky like a mad thing, and the pointed firs just outside were thrashing nearly to the ground and back, and I could not even see the little birch thicket off behind the tennis court. I hung the iron pot on the old swinging arm in the fireplace and got out candles and oil lamps and sat down and waited for Peter and the children.

They came in presently, in a swirl of rain and a howling of wind, soaked through and pinched-looking. I found towels and blankets and they went off to change

into dry clothes from the trunk of assorted castoffs and left-behinds we kept in the pantry, and Peter came and sat down on the sofa and looked at me.

“The bay down there looks like Thunder Hole,” he said.

“And the water was up on the porch. I never saw it like this.

I think we may really be in for something, Maude.”

“Could we make a dash for it in the big car, do you think?”

I said. “Get into the village, at least, off the water?”

“No,” he said. “There’s a monster spruce down across the lane. That’s what took out the power, I think. We couldn’t get out, except on foot, and nobody can get in until it’s over and the county gets a crew in here. I think we’ll be safe enough; you can tell a big difference in the wind up here from down on the beach. It’s lots stronger down there. Braebonnie is shielding us directly, and the trees look like they’re holding.

The old spruce that’s down has been dying for two years now. There’s lamplight in most of the cottages, and smoke from the chimneys, so nobody much has left. We’ll just keep the fire going and maybe play some parcheesi or something.

There’s a whole box of old games around here somewhere.

Who knows, maybe we’ll sing. The one thing I wish we had is a battery radio; I kept meaning to get one, and I just never did.”

“Well, if it doesn’t get any worse than this, I think we can manage,” I said. “It’s almost an adventure, isn’t it? At least it is until the roof flies off.”

“This old pile has stood for a hundred years,” Peter said.

“It’s not going anywhere now. That chowder getting hot?”

It was not an unpleasant afternoon and evening, looking back. The dark fell early and was total, and the wind prowled and howled, and smoke blew back down the chimney, and once or twice we heard a

heartbreaking creaking and snapping and then the long dying crash of a tree going down, but that was mainly in the birch grove, among the fragile silver army I had always loved. The larger trees held, and the wind did not seem to get any higher, and by six o’clock that evening its keening had become a kind of white noise to us, a sort of wild lullaby that underlay the waterfall rush of the rain.

I fried bacon and eggs on the iron griddle over the fire for supper, and Sarah made toast on the old toasting fork, and we made what Petie called Pioneer Coffee, and in the lamplight, with the flickering of the firelight and the shadows playing over the old living room and the faces of the five people on earth closest to me, I felt a sudden surge of love and gratitude so strong that it was almost an epiphany. There seemed more of us in the room than there were, and my love reached out and overpoured them, too. I saw the brace of heavy old crystal decanters in their silver cradles that had been Big Peter’s; Petie was pouring brandy for us from them.

Peter sat on the swaybacked old sofa that his grandmother had brought from Boston by packet, with a cracked leather volume of fairy tales that had been his as a child; he was reading them to Sally. Maude Caroline wore the vivid Spanish shawl that had been Mother Hannah’s, which she had wrapped me in that first summer when I had received the colony on the sun porch, after the incident with the fawn.

Sarah poured coffee from the old blue speckled pot Peter’s grandmother’s housekeeper had brought from Boston, refusing to use the heavy silver one that so quickly went black in the damp. Over the mantelpiece, on the brick chimney breast, the firelight danced on the varnished transom from Sean’s
Osprey.
Peter had hung it there in silence before we had left last summer, and I knew it would remain there until Liberty itself was no more.

Thank you, Mother Hannah, I thought. It was for this, wasn’t it? So that all of us could come together in Liberty and ride out the storms—all of us, the living and the dead.

Somebody has to know how to do it, don’t they? And they have to teach the next ones, and they in their turn teach the next….

“I love you all,” I said into the fire-shot darkness.

Everybody laughed, and Petie said, “We look pretty good by firelight, don’t we?”

And we laughed some more.

“Mother.” Maude Caroline’s voice came from the back of the house, where she had ventured to the bathroom. “Come here a minute. There’s smoke coming out of Braebonnie, and a kind of light…I think maybe it’s on fire!”

We looked at each other for an instant, and then Peter and Petie leaped to their feet and grabbed oilskins from the coat rack and dashed out into the storm, pulling them on. Sarah and I and the children ran to the back windows that overlooked Braebonnie; we could see it ourselves, the smoke pouring through the slanting rain and the leaping shadows in an upstairs window that meant a flame. Dear God, I thought, there’s no way to call the volunteer fire department, and they couldn’t get in anyway; why doesn’t the damned rain put it out? How in the name of God could it have started? There’s been no lightning—

The front door opened and banged shut, and I ran into the living room. Peter and Petie stood there, dripping on the rug, their faces white as death.

“Peter?” I whispered.

“Get your rain things and come, Maude,” he said. His voice was very low and even. There was white around the base of his nose. Petie looked like a dead man propped on his feet.

My heart froze.

“What? What is it?”

“Come. For God’s sake, just come. Hurry,” Peter said, and he and Petie turned and went out again, into the screaming dark.

I scrambled into my own foul-weather gear and shouted for Sarah. She came running.

“Is it a fire?”

“No, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not dangerous to us.

Peter wants me to come. Please, Sarah, stay with the children and don’t let them be frightened. Keep them away from the back windows. I’ll come tell you all about it when I can.”

“I can’t stand not knowing—” she began.

“You damned well can, if you care anything about your children,” I shouted. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s nothing that could hurt any of us or Peter wouldn’t have called me over. Just do what I say this one time and don’t
whine,
Sarah!

We don’t have time for that.”

“Yes, Grammaude,” she said in a level voice, and I knew that in that moment she hated me as I had hated Mother Hannah, and though I might try the rest of my life to make it up to her, I would not entirely succeed. I ran out into the wind and rain, my heart dead as a stone. I knew as if Peter had told me what I would find in Braebonnie.

Elizabeth lay in the upstairs bedroom that had been Amy and Parker’s. She was as white as paper; even her eyelids looked bleached, even her lips. The room was cold; the fire she had tried to get going spat and billowed smoke into the room, and there was only the light from that and one guttering candle, on the table beside her bed. But even in the flickering low light I could see that the sheets beneath and over her were soaked with blood, and that the baby she held against her breast was blood-dappled too, and whiter and more transparent than the petals of a narcissus. The baby was, I thought in a curious calm, almost surely dead; it was simply too small and too still to be anything else. It might have been a tiny china doll.

Peter and Petie stood side by side across the room, simply looking at me, and Elizabeth raised her head and smiled.

“Dreadful weather for a call, isn’t it?” she said, and her voice sounded as if there was not enough breath to push the words out. The white baby made a sound like a seagull, very far away. I moved then, fast.

“Peter, go downstairs and build a fire and heat me some water and find a hot water bottle, and do it fast,” I said, and he turned and strode from the room. “Petie, go get all the blankets you can find in the house, and find the whiskey and bring it up here,” and he, too, vanished. Neither he nor his father had said a word.

I went over to Elizabeth and looked down at the baby. It was premature, even I could tell that, so small it would have had little chance even in a hospital. Here, in this dark, cold house, in this storm? I pulled the bloody blanket back from the tiny face, and the mewling wail rose a bit higher. My blood turned to ice in my veins, and I really think that for a moment my heart stopped.

There was the unmistakable arched nose that I had looked down upon in the face of my own newborn son and the tiny delicate cleft in the chin that was unmistakable Chambliss.

They looked as if they had been carved in that waxen little face by a miniaturist.

“Oh, Petie,” I said to my son, who had come in with a load of blankets and was looking down in horror a twin to mine at the fading baby. “Oh, Petie. What have you done?”

“I didn’t know,” he said, and his voice was none that I had ever heard. “I didn’t know.”

Tears welled in my eyes and spilled over and ran down my cheeks. I took the baby and wrapped it in one of the clean blankets—so light, so very light, so little—and laid it on the bed and lifted Elizabeth’s

head up from the pillow. It lolled in my arms as if there was no spinal cord. She winced.

“Are you still bleeding?” I said urgently.

“No. That stopped a while ago. I’m just so…sleepy, Maude.

So very sleepy. The baby…it’s too early, isn’t it? I know it is…. I didn’t know it was coming when I left Boston. It wasn’t until I was nearly to South Brooksville that…it started. I thought I could make it here and get somebody…maybe Frank Stallings or somebody from the village who’s a midwife…but it came by the time I got upstairs. It was real fast.

I almost didn’t feel it, it’s so small, you see. Only there was all this blood….”