Colony (72 page)

Grammaude took a deep breath and let it out.

“Oh, the sheer, ignorant tyranny of the young,” she said as if to someone else. “Just listen to you! ’You should have stopped him. Be my mama. Be only what you can be to me and nothing else. Have no life and no reality but the part
I
can understand, the tiny bit that applies to me. Me, me, me.

Be a fraction of a woman, or I will not love you.’ God. You know nothing of me. None of you do.”

I put my hot face into my hands once more and cried. Her words called out a grief so old and simple and pure that I knew instantly it was the heart, the crux of everything. She was right. I had fought and

flailed my way through the world, demanding a parent from it, a parent of her, and had found only…people. And except for her, that was all I ever would find. I cried and cried. After a long time, I felt Grammaude get up and come around the bed and sit down beside me and put her arms around me.

Without looking up I turned into them and laid my head on her shoulder. I had to lean over to do it. Still I cried; the tears would not stop. Who would have thought the human body could hold so many tears?

After a long time, Grammaude said, in a different voice, her own again, “You’re right, of course. Men have always had the overt power in Retreat, but it was we who gave it to them. So it was really ours all along. I think I must have always known that. Look at us, a world ruled by old women for men children. And our daughters die for lack of love.”

She raised my chin with her hand and kissed me on my wet cheek.

“I love you, my dear Darcy, with all my heart,” she said.

“I always did. I always will. You owe me nothing and you owe this place nothing. I will not make you pay with any more of your life for my loving you.”

I held on to her as hard as I could, unable to stop the child’s tears.

“I love you too, Grammaude,” I sobbed. “I wish I could have helped.”

“You have,” she whispered. “You will.”

Neither of us wanted supper. Neither of us wanted to talk any more. I did not even want to think about the next day.

I simply wanted to sleep. She must have known that, for she came back up after I had had my bath and pulled the old thin-worn Princeton blanket up over me and turned off my light.

“Go to sleep now,” she said. “Are you old enough to know that things always look better in the morning? I think you are. I hope so. It will get you through

a lot of nights. This will look better too. You’ll see. Go to sleep.”

And I did. As swiftly and weightlessly as a very small child, I fell into bottomless blackness, unlit by dreams. I don’t think I even turned over until near dawn.

I dreamed she was calling me. I dreamed that I was very small and lost somewhere down on the shore—for I could hear wind, and water moving—and she was looking for me, calling me over and over from far away: “Darcy! Darcy!”

I struggled up through the heavy layers of sleep and still she called: “Darcy…”

I sat still in the lightless darkness for a long moment, breath held, and then leaped out of bed and ran downstairs toward her voice, switching on the overhead stair light as I ran.

She lay at the bottom of the first stair, her arm thrown up over it as if she had been trying to pull herself up. She wore only her long white cotton nightgown, and her white-streaked black hair was wild around her head. The gown had pulled up around her legs, and I could see that she was still moving them feebly, still trying to climb. Zoot circled her, trilling low in his throat. Her flesh was blue and white and threaded with veins and knots, and the old bones showed through as if she were lit from inside. Birds’ bones, dry sticks. She did not seem to be able to move her head, but her eyes found mine and held them. Her face was as white as old snow. When she saw me she smiled, very faintly.

“Can you help me?” she whispered.

I knelt down beside her, feeling for her pulse. My own seemed to be trying to shake my flesh apart at my throat and wrists and temples.

“What hurts? Can you tell me?” I said, my voice trembling.

“Chest,” she said, on a shallow little sigh. “The elephant.

A big one this time. Listen, I want you to light the fire…”

“Hush, Grammaude,” I said, whimpering with fear. “Lie very still; I’m going to call the ambulance. Just lie still.”

“Darling, the fire…”

I pulled blankets and throws from the couch and threw them over her, and then ran to the phone and dialed the South Brooksville rescue squad. When they had assured me they were on their way, I went back and knelt by her again.

Zoot had dug himself into the blankets beside her.

She stared up at me, the whole force of her being in her eyes.

“Make a fire, Darcy, and turn me so I can see it, and do it quickly,” she said, gasping a little with each word, and I stumbled obediently to the dead fireplace and fumbled with the matches, beginning to cry again, silently. The flame finally caught, and the fire leaped up. I watched its shadows prowl on the old smoke-blackened, gold cedar planks of the walls, thinking suddenly that they looked like the walls of firelit caves. Even through my terror, even in my stupid haste, I thought, Fire is the medium. Fire is the element that passes everything on. Not blood and bone, not the pages of history books, but fire. All those stories, all those lives, all those
truths,
down through all of history from the caves to Retreat, borne on fire.

I went back to Grammaude.

“Lift me up a little,” she said.

“Please be still—”

“Lift me up! I need to talk to you….”

I lifted her head and put it in my lap and looked down into her face. I could see her heart, bucking like a wild thing in her chest. Oh, dear God, would they never come?

“Do it for me,” Grammaude whispered, looking into my face. “I said I wouldn’t beg, but I can now, and I will. Do it for me. Take Liberty. Fight for Retreat. Retreat needs you.

Liberty needs you. You’re the only one I have now.”

“Uncle Petie—”

She shook her head slightly, weakly. “Only you.”

I began to cry again, harder. I saw my tears fall on her face, and brushed them away. They kept falling. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t, without you.”

“You
can!
” It came out on a long, trembling sigh. “You only have to love it enough. The power of love is everything.

Everything.
And you do love it enough. You always have. I know.”

“Oh, God, Grammaude, the power of love almost killed me up here twelve years ago!”

She smiled and shook her head again and then coughed.

It was a deep sound, dreadful. Her thin fingers worked against her chest. I put my fingers against her lips, but she turned her head.

“You know absolutely nothing about the power of love,”

she said presently. Her voice was weaker. The thrashing of her heart against her chest wall was threadier. “Listen. I’ll tell you about the power of love. I’ll tell you…what I did for love. You remember. We both liked that song. Do you remember?”

“I remember. Oh, Grammaude, please don’t talk any more.

Tell me later. I’ll stay, you know I’ll stay; I won’t leave you.

I’ll keep the cottage, of course I will, if you’ll just be quiet now, and be still….”

She reached her hand up and touched my wet face, very gently, and then let it fall back.

“Hush and listen,” she said softly. “I don’t think I have a whole lot of time….”

F
rom where I sit in this September dawn—on the dock of the yacht club, looking out toward Osprey Head—the whole world seems frosted with autumn. The old clubhouse and the deep spruce and birch woods behind it are blurred and dreamlike in the white salt fog. I can hear the soft little slappings on the pebble beach as the morning tide turns toward the full, but I can’t see the water. It is a ground fog. Only the delicate tips of the pointed firs pierce it. It lies over the bay and shrouds all but the fierce cock’s comb of Osprey, lying like a prehistoric water beast half a mile out. But the sun will burn it off by midmorning. Then I will see the buoys, bobbing gently in the pink-foil water. Most of them are empty now.

Was it only three weeks ago that tanned families worked to decant their boats from the nourishing sea and ready them for the boatyard or the long trip home behind station wagons and big sedans? I suppose it was. It seems only an eye blink, a heartbeat, since Labor Day. But it is irrevocably past and gone. I have never been here so late. Summer is long over.

I think about the boats, especially the Beetle Cats. They will hibernate in dim garages, and little boys, rushing through the black weight of the coming cold

to the haven of warm kitchens, will catch from their fiberglass pores the salt sweat of this northern sea and stop for a moment, hands on the dried-out flanks of catboats, and be plummeted again into endless summer.

Remember, I say silently to them. Remember. It will not last long. Nothing is forever. I was one of you once, and I know.

It is now, on these black, lengthening nights, the dark unbroken by cottage lights except the ones from Liberty, that we might get the aurora borealis. I have not seen it for a very long time, but I remember that occasionally we did, late in the summer. I remember that the word seemed to fly from cottage to firelit cottage, and sweatered families would stream out into yards and look up, pointing the faces of us children to those great flickering washes of fire in the sky. Green, viol-et, pure white, tender lapis blue…. What are they? I asked Grammaude when I first saw them.

“Promises,” she said.

Perhaps they are. Promises of the long sweet summer kept, promises of the slow bronze autumn to come. The dot over the “i” of summer, the final covenant to those of us who watch. Oh, if that could be true; if there could be promises kept and covenants in this place….

Even after everything, all the anguish and pain and worry, I am not sorry I stayed on. The cottagers who leave after Labor Day miss the absolute pinnacle of the year here, the supernal quintessential moment of pure being and beauty.

Mornings are brilliant, sharp-edged, fizzing with diamond light on the water. In the long afternoons some of the heat will come stealing back, but the red bite is gone from it, and the drone of the cicadas in the birch woods lulls me when I drowse on the sun porch. The barberry hedge has gone pure scarlet, and the mountain ash trees burn like wildfire at the fringes of the pine forests. Along the roadside and in the salt meadows and beside the gray piled-stone walls, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace shimmer. Windfall apples are sweet in the long grass along the road to the general store.

Collards in farm gardens stand like great silver-green sea anemones. Almost every time Mike and I came back from the hospital along the coast road during the last weeks our headlights would cast up white-tailed deer, bounding ghostlike across in front of us. I never saw many in the summers. Occasionally, a porcupine or red fox froze in the wheeling lights and then was gone. We have already seen the wild geese sweeping out of Canada toward the south, an epiphany against the hanging white moon.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” I said once to Mike.

“We never tell the summer complaints about it,” he said.

“What if they decided to stay on through the fall?”

“So what does this make me?”

“That’s for you to figure out, Darcy,” he said.

I sit here, trying to do just that.

The fog silence is broken now by the muffled chugging of a lobster boat putting out. The little deep-water harbor begins to emerge from the whiteness like a photograph in developing solution. There are the buoys, like seals’ heads in the water.

Suddenly I miss the bustle and confabulation of hard, brown, knee-scabbed little boys pounding down the dock and thumping down the rickety stairs to the dinghies, to row out to their Beetles. I miss their yelps and laughter. The jeers of the gulls sound lost and metallic, like winter. I suddenly feel the cold of this morning through my sweat pants and heavy socks, and get up reluctantly, and walk back along the dock and up the fern-fringed lane toward Liberty. Cold dew and cobwebs sparkle icily in the birch grove. The
twang-thud
of tennis balls from the court is stilled, and so is the banging of screen doors. Somewhere off beyond the woods a dog barks, but it does not sound like one of the summer spaniels and retrievers I know. They have gone, gone with the caravan of cars and boats and children back to the cities.

Retreat is empty, and sleeps.

I turn into our lane and see white smoke climbing into the deepening blue vault of the sky, and I know that Grammaude has lit the logs from last night’s fire and put the coffee on to perk and will be frying bacon and scrambling eggs. Mike brought new brown ones last night. I begged her not to bother; she is still terribly weak from the hospital and so frail as to be almost transparent. We brought her home only yesterday. She slept most of the rest of the day and through the night, and I had hoped she would sleep in today. But she insisted about breakfast.

“Who knows who’ll cook the next batch of brown eggs here?” she smiled.

Oh, my Grammaude….

She told me, finally, while she lay swaddled in blankets on the floor and we waited for the ambulance that night. I don’t suppose they were any longer than they had to be, but it seemed to me, clutching her icy hands and trying to stop crying, that they took forever. It was, at any rate, long enough. I know it all now: about Elizabeth’s baby, about that whole awful storm-wrecked night and what happened then and after. My God, what a woman she is, this dark little grandmother of mine. What a love affair it was, hers and Granddaddy’s. I simply had no idea, and am ashamed that I did not. Now she has shown me the whole of her life, I see how true it was that, as she said, I never knew her. I hate that. She was right, too, when she said some kinds of love have an awful power to diminish. A child’s does; mine for her did. I spent so much of my life, and hers, demanding that she be…only my grandmother. And all the while, she was this other magnificent woman.