Colony (58 page)

That’s me, I thought.

And it
was
me: the child I could remember, at any rate. By that time I was not a popular child in Retreat. Not like the small spawn of the families who had summered there for generations. Oh, there were the Boston Chamblisses on one side of me, but one had only to look at my fiery hair and listen to my novenathickened speech to realize what was on the other side. And the children knew it and, unlike their elders, were not slow to tax me with it. Over my furious little head the raffish shade of my mad mother, Happy, hovered, and the loud Irish presence of my father, Tommy; and there was still the pale ghost of my Uncle Petie’s dead baby, for the colony still talked of that at their dinner tables all these years later, and their children talked of it with alacrity to me.

The weight of all those specters was too much for me.

Volatile by nature, I became fierce and truculent; I got into fights and blacked aristocratic blue eyes and

blooded aristocratic small noses when some child called me the grease monkey’s daughter or pointed out that my mother slept with anybody at all, and spent half her time in the crazy house, and had just the past winter tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists with the night nurse’s nail scissors.

I swore too, with a proficiency that only my mother could match and from whom I had learned it, and was given to long spells when I simply vanished into the woods or sneaked out in my older cousins’ Beetle Cat and could not be found for hours. The wildness and the solitude of Cape Rosier were its earliest and best gifts to me, and I went out into them like a wild thing and stayed until someone hunted me down. It was usually Grammaude.

I was a born tomboy; by the time I was six I could swim like a fish and was learning to sail like a native child under the tutelage of old Micah Willis, and there was not a tree in the colony I had not climbed, not a slanting roof, or a rock, or a cliff. I sassed old ladies who were syrupy to me, ignored old gentlemen who were debonair and charming, would not pass canapes at parties or go to square dances at the yacht club or wear anything but blue jeans. I was the only child in colony memory who hated Yaycamp. The children thought I was queer and unfeminine and common, and the adults thought the same, and in time it was decided that my manners, despite the best efforts of my grandmother, were nothing they wanted their offspring to emulate. If it had not been for Grammaude, who seemed simply not to notice that there was anything wrong with me or to hear any of the talk about me, and for Mike Willis, I would have spent all my time alone.

But there was Grammaude. And there was Mike.

I am told that I played with him the entire summer that I first came to Retreat; that even though he was

almost four and I was not quite one and a half, we were instantly and almost uncannily inseparable. I don’t remember that summer at Retreat, of course. But I remember the next one—or at least I remember one incident from it.

It was two summers before I came to Retreat again; my grandmother did not come the summer after my first one, and the next summer my mother was spending her last long stay at home and was savagely and crazily protective of me, letting no one near. So I was four and a half when I came the next time. After that, I never missed a summer again until the last one, when I was seventeen.

At four and a half, a child remembers the things that divide its life. What I remember is Mike Willis.

I think it must have been the first day he came to Liberty with his mother, Beth, who had taken care of me that first summer and had been persuaded by Grammaude to do it again. As he had that first summer, her son Mike came with her. She was always rather protective of him. It was far too early for him to help out in the family boatyard, and there was no one else to leave him with. Having him at Liberty was no problem; Grammaude always loved Mike. She has told me over and over that on the morning when he and Beth came into the kitchen, I looked up from my cereal and grinned as though I had seen him only the day before and said, “Where you been?”

I don’t remember that. But I remember something else. I remember something about the day that puzzled me; I could not figure it out, and then, at the end, when Grammaude was reading to us from
The Jungle Book
and his mother called to him that it was time to go home, I said, “Why are you going home with that lady?”

“I have to. She’s my mother,” he said.

“No, she’s not either,” I said, troubled and uneasy.

“Well, she is too. Who else would she be?” Mike said.

“I don’t know. But if she’s your mother, where does she go?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, go. Mothers go away. Where does yours go?”

“She doesn’t go nowhere,” Mike said, scowling. “She just comes here and goes home, and I go with her.”

“Well, then, where does your daddy go?”

“What’s the matter with you? He goes down to the boatyard and then comes home,” he said.

I began to cry. “You lie,” I sobbed. “You lie. They go away!”

My grandmother reached down and gathered me into her arms, and through my tears I saw Beth Willis lean down and whisper something to Mike, and he came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder, tentatively.

“I ain’t gon’ go off and leave you this summer,” he said gruffly. “I’ll come every day, if you want me to.”

“I don’t,” I sobbed. “I hate you, and I don’t want you to come over here any more.”

But I did want him to come. And he did, most days after that, for the entire summer, and all the summers that came afterward. From the very beginning, Mike Willis was with me. He even went into exile with me. If it cost him much, I never knew it.

He was not an outcast when I first remember him. He was a tough, cheerful, sweet-tempered little boy with a wide, gap-toothed white grin and his father and grandfather’s crow-black hair—like theirs, usually in his eyes. He did not boast or show off, but something about him drew the eye and commanded attention. I think it was his sheer competence and his innate self-confidence. Mike could do almost anything with his hands, play any sport, outswim and outsail even the older colony boys, hold his own in any fight. Even though he was a native—and that still mattered in Retreat then, and probably still does now—he was something of a leader for the young people. He was a native but with a difference: his grandfather was the confidant of one of the colony’s acknowledged doyennes, Maude Chambliss, and his father was not only a member of the yacht club but had been commandant only a year before. The Willises were village, but they were different too. I always heard that they had been thick with the Chamblisses since my grandmother and grandfather were young. It had something to do with the formidable old woman who had been my great-grandmother, but I could never remember what.

So Mike Willis was not, before I came back to Retreat, a pariah. He chose that role himself, and he did it for and with me, and I remember well the summer that he did it. Indeed, I remember the day and almost the hour.

I was seven that summer and he was nearing ten. He had watched my steady descent into disreputability with an equanimity uncommon for a boy his age, championing me when I got myself in too deep, consoling me gruffly and matter-of-factly when I was hurt or angry, spending more and more time with me alone because I refused to stay around the others on the beach or at the yacht club. But still, the other children flocked around him like chattering birds when he would let them, and on this day we were the center of a small flock, he and I, sitting on the dock of the Willises’

boatyard in sweaters and long pants because of the chill fog that had becalmed that morning’s Beetle Cat regatta. All of us were restive and cranky because of that and were playing a desultory game of mumblety-peg, strictly forbidden by all adults we knew, on the

soft silvery wood of the dock, simply because Mike’s father had gone to Ellsworth and his Grandfather Micah was inside caulking a Winslow dinghy. I thought sourly that there were too many Winslows in the colony; there were three in this group around Mike, and I liked none of them. They were handsome, autocratic, and uniformly mean.

One of them, Gretchen, named for her grandmother, who was keeping her that summer, cut her slanting green eyes at Mike Willis and said, “Let’s cut our wrists and be blood brothers and sisters. I bet you’re scared to do it, Mike Willis.”

She was a year older than he, but she followed him everywhere that summer with those eyes. I saw her do it; I watched her all summer, watching him.

“Not,” Mike said, deftly flipping the pocket knife off his ear and into the wood, where it quivered upright.

“Are,” Gretchen said.

“Not,” Mike said, and pulled the knife out of the deck and made a swift, deepish cut in the little blue delta of veins in his brown wrist. Blood welled up and spilled over, spattering on the gray wood. My stomach heaved and my head spun, but I did not look away. The others gasped and murmured, and Gretchen Winslow gave a little shriek of surprise. Mike stared at her levelly.

After that, of course, all of them cut their wrists. No one would dare not, after Mike had. Most only scratched the skin enough to produce a beading of blood with much squeezing, but everybody did it. Then Mike handed the knife to me.

“Want me to do it, or you want to do it?” he said.

“Wait a minute, I didn’t mean her,” Gretchen Winslow said. She was having a hard time keeping the bright little drops forming on her wrist. Mike’s still pumped blood right along.

“Naw, not with her.” Another of them took up the cry.

“Why not?” Mike’s voice was pleasant, and his hair was, as usual, in his eyes, so I could not see them. Queasiness warred in me with rage and despair. I wanted to be away from there more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, but I would not get up and run in front of them. And I would not cry.

“Because you’d get garage grease in your veins, not blood,”

said the oldest Winslow boy, grinning, and all the others except Mike laughed.

“Maybe she ought to cut hers, after all,” Gretchen said in the slow, rich voice that reminded me of her grandmother.

“Maybe the sickness would run out then. Maybe the craziness would just run right on out. But nobody better touch that blood, though. Yuck. Sick blood.”

Mike raised his head and looked at her. “You wanna tell us what you’re talking about, Gretch?” he said.

“Well, everybody knows her mother cut her wrists in the nuthouse last winter,” she said defensively, hearing in his voice something she did not often hear. “Everybody knows there’s sickness in her mother’s blood; hers too, probably.

Everybody talks about that. Sickness and craziness, it’s in the blood. My grandmother said so. They must have been trying to get it out of her in that hospital.”

Everybody laughed.

“Darcy, hold out your wrist,” Mike said.

I did, and he cut it, neatly and swiftly, and reached over and joined it to his own. I watched as if hypnotized as the blood mingled and washed over our wrists. I could not look away. I never did feel the pain of the cut.

“Now, you go on home, Gretchen, and take your little friends with you,” ten-year-old Mike Willis said in the voice of a man. “I wouldn’t have Winslow

blood in me, or any of the rest of yours, if I was bleeding to death in the desert.”

“I’m going to tell on you,” Gretchen said, furious, scrambling up from the dock and starting off.

The others followed her, mumbling uneasily. None of them would look at me.

“I’m going to tell my grandmother you tried to make me cut my wrist and all kinds of other awful things,” she shouted.

“I’m going to say you pulled a knife on me. You’re almost as bad as she is: Chamblisses and Willises, both trashy. My grandmother says so. She’ll make your mother and father punish you for the rest of your life.”

“I sincerely doubt that, young lady,” Micah Willis said, coming out of the boathouse and staring down the dock at her. “If I hear that you’ve said a word about Mike or Miss Darcy here I’ll tell your grandmother what
did
happen, and make no mistake, Mike won’t be the one gets his hide tanned.

Your grandmother knows which side her bread’s buttered on, believe me.”

Gretchen flounced away, and the others melted off into the birch wood that linked the boathouse with the Retreat tennis court. Micah Willis ambled over, hands in his pockets, and stood looking down at us. Mike looked steadily back at him, his finger pressed over the cut in his wrist. I stared down at the dock, watching slow drops of red splatter and dry.

“Know you’re not supposed to be playing that game, don’t you?” Micah said.

“Yes sir.”

“Know what your father said he’d do, next time he caught you doing it.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, don’t do it again.”

“No sir.”

“And go get Mrs. Chambliss to fix those wrists, both of you.”

Micah turned back toward the boathouse.

“Grandpa, you goin’ to tell?” Mike called after him.

“Reckon not,” his grandfather said, not looking back at us.

“You goin’ to tell on Gretchen?”

“Don’t need to. Just being a Winslow is punishment enough,” he said.

Mike and I began to laugh, there on the dock, with the fog gathering like smoke off in the birches, already whiting out the nearest islands.

“I now pronounce you an honorary Willis,” he said. After that, in the summers, we were not often apart.

There seemed little change in him for the next few years.

Oh, he went through a relatively trouble-free puberty, growing tall and lanky where he had been square and low to the earth before, the smooth brown of his thin arms and legs sliding into ropy muscle, his round face squaring up and taking on the high planes of his father and grandfather’s faces. And he was moody sometimes where he had been open and cheerful before, vanishing for an afternoon or even a day in his Beetle Cat or on foot into the woods or along the high, wild cliffs beyond the Aerie. But I did not mind; the essential Mike remained, and from early childhood I had done the same thing, spending long, suspended, timeless afternoons just lying on my back in the soft green moss of the birch thicket, staring into the canopy of leaves overhead or dreaming out to sea on the lower cliffs beyond Braebonnie, where, when she had first come to Retreat, my grandmother had tried to rescue a fawn trapped in the rocks of the ledge. Mike’s and my togetherness was the spine in the skeleton of those summers, but our twin needs for solitude were the sinews that supported it.