Islands (14 page)

Creighton Mills had been a childhood friend of Camilla and Lewis and Henry’s, and he smiled when we walked into the surf and stopped in a ragged line. Camilla stood in the center, and Creighton gave her a little salute.

“I still can’t get used to the idea that Creigh Mills can save my soul,” Lewis whispered to me.

“Better one of our own,” Henry said under his voice.

Creighton looked at Camilla for a long moment, and then read in a quiet voice, from the Book of Common Prayer, “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

“ ‘I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.’ ”

There was a pause, and I heard an old lady say in the loud, flat voice of the nearly deaf, “Well, at least it’s the 1928 one, and not that dreadful hippie thing they’re doing everywhere now.”

Beside me, I heard Lewis snort.

“Shut up,” I hissed.

Creighton Mills gave a barely perceptible nod and Henry clicked on the small cassette player he carried. I had not seen it before. Over the soft hush of the surf, Bobby Darin’s voice lifted up: “Somewhere, beyond the sea…”

I knew that Charlie had loved the song, and felt my eyes sting. Lewis squeezed my hand. Then the music segued into “Long Tall Sally,” “Little Darlin’,” “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On,” the Shirelles’s “Foolish Little Girl,” Charlie’s personal favorite, and finally, “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” to which we had all danced on the sand and the rough planks over the water, and the beach house’s tired grass matting.

It was just right. Even as I felt tears start down my cheeks, laughter rose in my throat. I looked over at Camilla, who, with Lewis and Henry, I learned later, picked the songs, and nodded. She nodded back, smiling, her eyes wet.

Creighton Mills looked at Camilla again, and she inclined her head, and from behind us we heard the scuffle and scrabble of paws, and the chink of chains. We turned to see Simms leading Boy and Girl, exuberant and stretching their leashes taut, down to the surf’s edge. They strained to get into the water, and looked up at Camilla in bewilderment when they were not allowed to run free.

“Stay, sweeties,” she said softly. “Stay and say good-bye to Daddy.”

I did begin to cry then, and so did Lila. Fairlie stared fiercely out to sea, her throat working. I did not dare look at Henry and Lewis. Gladys did not come down to the beach; she stayed on the porch, from which she never strayed now, along with Sugar, whose muffled yips rose over the sound of the waves and the seabirds. But they were with us. Our whole family was here.

Then down the steps from the boardwalk four women came, black women in long skirts and bright blouses and jewelry and feathers, women who walked like queens and sang as they walked. As they sang, they shook small tambourines and one carried a curious little drum with a voice like faraway thunder. I recognized Linda Cousins, Lewis’s housekeeper, at the head of the procession. As she passed, she grinned over at us. Lewis gave her a great, leering wink.

Around Charleston and the Low Country, there are groups, mainly black women, who preserve and perform the old songs and shouts of the Gullah slaves who brought them from Africa long ago. They are magnificent; people travel many miles to hear them. I remembered that Charlie had been entranced by them, and often dragged whoever he could corral out to the old Moving Star Hall on John’s Island, where, he said, the best of the Gullah praise singing could be heard. He was right. To hear them is to fly back on a dark wind to a time when fires burn in forests and drums speak, and magic walks. I did not know that Linda Cousins was a member of one of the groups, but I knew without being told that Lewis had arranged this for Charlie, and pressed his hand hard. He squeezed back.

At the water’s edge the women sang, “Oh, hallelujah, hallelujah, glory hallelujah, you know the storm passing over, hallelu. The tallest tree in paradise Christians call the tree of life, you know the storm is passing over, hallelu.”

And they sang, swaying and clapping, “Reborn again, reborn again, oh, reborn again. Can’t get to heaven less you reborn again. Oh, Satan is mad, and I’m so glad, oh, reborn again. Lost the soul he thought he had, oh, reborn again.”

After several more shouts and songs, some exuberant, some solemn and poignant, they slid sweetly into “Deep River.” When the last notes faded away, the silence rang like a bell. It seemed to me that even the sea paused, and the wind that marked the turn of the tide.

Creighton held his hands out to Camilla, and she waded into the water, her eyes fastened on his face, bearing Charlie’s urn, until she stood beside him. The slow, heaving green water broke around their legs, hers pearl white, his tanned. He took her free hand in his, and closed his eyes, and said something so softly that only Camilla could hear him. Her lips moved with his. I still do not know what Charlie’s final prayer was.

He lifted his voice and said, “ ‘Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother, Charles Curry, departed, and we commit his body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.’ ”

He nodded to Camilla. She lifted the urn slowly to chin level, and pressed it against her cheek, and then she cast Charlie’s ashes into the ocean. A band of jagged, running shadows flew over us just at the moment the ashes settled, before they were whirled away, and we looked up to see a flock of pelicans, perfect pterodactyls, flying so closely over the surface of the sea that we might have reached up and touched them. They were not afraid of us; the pelicans of Sullivan’s Island have been here far longer than we have, and with far less intrusion. Charlie had loved pelicans. Camilla turned around to us, her face running with tears, and smiled.

“ ‘The Lord be with you,’ ” Creighton Mills said.

“ ‘And with thy spirit,’ ” we all murmured. Most of us were crying openly now.

Simms let Boy and Girl go then, and they dashed into the still-warm, creaming surf and raised their doggy voices into the sky in praise of water.

That evening I went up to the widow’s walk atop the house. I don’t really know why; somehow we had never gone there very often. From that height you could see the entire island, and over to the Isle of Palms, and back to Charleston, and the port docks and gas tanks, and the inland waterway. It was a remarkable view, but I think that we did not often want to be reminded that the beach house was part of a teeming, sprawling whole. Up here, that fact was inescapable.

But there was almost always a spectacular sunset, especially in the late autumn, and the post-Hugo ones had been breathtaking. The men often sailed at sunset, coming in out of the sinking sun to the dock on the inland waterway, and I think, looking back, that I went up to see if they, with Charlie, would come gliding in. The sun was a great dying conflagration, vermilion and purple, shot through with gold, and empty of humanity. No sails broke its skin, no Scrubs, no Charlie. The wind picked up, with, finally, late November hidden in it. I turned to go back down, but then Camilla’s head appeared at the top of the spiral staircase and I waited.

She came out onto the little railed space and put her arm around my waist and laid her head on my shoulder. She had to lean down to do it. She wore a thick Fair Isle sweater of Charlie’s, and had brought one for me. It was tattered and pilled and smelled of salt and smoke and Charlie. I put it on gratefully.

“Did you come up to see him off?” she said, smiling a little. I nodded. To try and speak just then would have been a disaster. She squeezed my waist.

“I guess they don’t call it a widow’s walk for nothing,” she said.

Very clearly, and for the first time, I thought, Charlie isn’t coming back. He died and I’m never going to see him again.

A great void opened inside me, and I felt myself sliding into it. My knees buckled and I sat down abruptly on the rough boards of the widow’s walk. I cried; I cried so hard that for a space of time I could not get my breath, and thought that I would choke. Through the great salt tide of grief, I thought, stupidly, This has got to stop. I never cry. Not like this. What will Camilla think?

“I want him back,” I gasped. “I want him back.”

“So do I,” Camilla said.

She sat down beside me and pulled my head down to her shoulder, and rocked me gently back and forth. After a while I could catch my breath, and the tears slowed and then stopped. Still, Camilla held me.

“I’ve never seen you really cry,” she said, and her voice was serene. “Charlie would be honored, I think, but he’d hate to think he caused you such grief. It’s right to mourn him now, but I hope you’ll come to think of laughter and foolishness when you think of him. I hope we all will. It’s a better legacy than tears.”

She kissed me on the cheek and straightened up.

“Let’s go down and I’ll make you some tea and put a good splash of rum in it. And I’ll have some myself. We’ll all have some.”

I hugged her. Her bones felt as light as balsa wood.

“I should be comforting you,” I said. “What was I thinking of?”

“You were thinking of Charlie, and that’s a great comfort,” she said.

The sunset was graying out and the air was chilling, and I got up to follow her downstairs, to where light and warmth and safety waited. Just then Lewis and Henry poked their heads out into the twilight, and came up onto the widow’s walk. I pressed Lewis’s hand.

“I’m going on down,” I said. “You all stay with Camilla for a while.”

I stopped on the third step down and looked back up. They stood together, Lewis and Henry and Camilla, as they had stood so often from childhood on, and the men had their arms around her. She was looking into their faces, one and then the other, and talking softly. Comforting them, as she had always done. We had all been greedy for her comfort, and careless with it. I wondered if she would ever accept succor from us. We would have to think of ways to offer it obliquely.

She was staying at the beach house until Thursday, the day after Charlie’s memorial service and the reception at Lila and Simms’s. No one could move her on that, nor would she let any of us stay the night with her.

“It gives me a breather,” she said. “It’s the last time in a long time I’ll be able to just…be. There’s too much to be done when I do come back to town. You can all come out in the daytime, if you want to, but not at night. I’m doing some writing, and that’s when I write best.”

When we pressed her to tell us what she was writing, she would say only, “Remembrances. Notes to people. Lists of stuff. The life stories of the Scrubs. Dark tales of passion and sin and redemption. Let me be or I’ll make some of the great villains of literature out of all of you.”

So we let her be. I do not think there was a one of us who, caught in the web of our everyday “outside” lives, did not think of her often that week, seeing her, perhaps, in sunlight and firelight and in the close black of night, writing, writing, writing, always with the sound of the sea in her ears. For myself, I could not see her doing anything at all, merely sitting in the wicker rocker beside the fire, her hands folded in her lap, waiting, as if to be filled up.

On the day of Charlie’s memorial service at St. Michael’s, cold rain lashed the city. Downtowners accustomed to walking to St. Michael’s drove or had themselves driven, and traffic around the intersection of Meeting and Broad Streets, always slow, was at a near standstill. It is seldom that you hear a car horn in downtown Charleston, unless the car has an out-of-state tag, much less in the vicinity of St. Michael’s. But Charlie’s big day got under way to an anthem of exasperated horns.

“What can you expect from an outsider?” Lewis grinned, as we ran through the rain from an illegal parking space on King Street. Lewis had brazenly put his physician’s permit on the windshield. We were sheltered by an immense green-and-yellow golf umbrella that had been left in the Range Rover by a forgotten guest. It was all I could find as we left the house. Somehow it seemed all of a piece with the blaring horns.

Many Charlestonians, particularly downtowners, have had their coming ins and goings out and all their great life rituals in between at St. Michael’s since 1752. It is a graceful and dignified building, reminiscent of and perhaps inspired by the London city churches of Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbes. Its glowing paneling and simple leaded windows let in a light that is warming and somehow exalting. I have been to many services there, although we attend church, when we do, at Grace Episcopal, which is a short walk from our house. Weddings, christenings, funerals, and sometimes the chamber music concerts during the two weeks of Spoleto…I have sat many times with Lewis in the red-cedar box pew that his family has occupied for two hundred years.

“Who sits in it now that none of you come here much?” I asked him once.

“Tourists from Newark and Scranton,” he said. “I specified it in writing. Costs them a bundle.”

But in all the times I have been in St. Michael’s, I have seldom seen anyone remotely resembling a tourist. Not at a service. If there are unfamiliar faces in the congregation, they are apt to be relatives or guests of the communicants. There are no rules about it, of course. That is simply the way it is. The few visitors who venture in for a service or a concert are generally viewed as the sort of people who will appreciate the beauty and resonance of the old church. The shorts and halters and flip-flops that are the hallmark of the wandering downtown tourist, even in St. Michael’s churchyard adjacent to the church, are not often seen in the sanctuary. I think that St. Michael himself, who is depicted in a great Tiffany window slaying the dragon, would step down and smite them smartly.