Leon Uris (45 page)

Beyond Wyman’s Creek Landing, Zachary O’Hara pulled Jeff Templeton’s livery van off the road and gazed at the mournful loveliness of the place.

The road was slushy and every tree crackled and dripped, animal tracks scrambled and disappeared, and the bare threads of the farmlands pocked out of its dusting of snow.

“It’s enchanting,” Zach said.

“It isn’t too kind to visitors this time of year. We sure glad Laveda built her lodge here. Willow and I come over often as we can. Amanda is going to scream and faint dead away when she sees you. She wasn’t expecting you for five more days.”

“I got a grace period. Why don’t I jump into the back and change into some easy clothes.”

“Well now, nobody in Nebo ever seen a Marine in officer’s uniform. They would be mighty pleased.”

“I’ll be a mess from the mud.”

“Oh, Pearly and the ladies will clean your uniform, sparkling.”

“Okay, buddy, you’ve got a deal.”

“All right! Amanda’s going to fly right through the roof.”

The trip was a spellbinding grind.

A first touch of Nebo reached them, scent of peat and a moment, voices in song.

They entered a churchyard filled with headstones, all leaning south, bent by the north winds.

Oh, sweet rose of Galilee,

Send thy precious love to me,

Lay me down, oh, lay me down,

On thy bosom,

On thy crown.

“That be Sister Sugar, Ulysses’s wife. She sure sounds nice when she’s just singing.”

Jeff hitched the horse, then gripped Zach’s arms, gave him an affectionate little shake to steady him up, and led him to the church door. When it opened a cold blast bolted in, causing everyone to turn around and look.

My God, what a handsome-looking white man! Shining head to toe like one of Jesus’ saints.

Pearly stopped playing. Sister Sugar stopped singing. The place froze like a tableau.

Zach took off his hat and nodded.

Amanda, in gingham, arose and came to the center aisle, each moving toward the other until they met. He lifted her into his arms and carried her out and set her down.

The church emptied. They were surrounded by celebrants. Amanda grabbed Zach’s hand, tugged him free of the welcomers, and pointed out their direction.

She turned and waved and everyone cheered and they ran off. Past Ned and Pearly’s cottage to a tiny pier. The duckwalk over to Veda’s was slippery and flooded from the ice storm. A small raft with a handline took them across the few feet of marsh.

With the voices zinging after them, Amanda opened the door. The lodge room was stunning with Laveda Fancy’s fine tastes, acquired as the matron of Inverness. Pewter plates and mugs set on the table and a giant beaten copper kettle at the fire and a grandmother’s clock of ancient vintage, and fine-cut crystal in an open cabinet, and furnishings hewn so long ago by some master Yankee craftsman, and large hand-wrought tongs that had lifted ten thousand logs.

There was a sleeping alcove with a four-poster bed covered by a Quaker quilt and a comfortable little reading nook alongside.

And Amanda’s touches to make her man warm in January. By the fireplace, feather beds had been laid out and were waiting for them to crawl under and there were enough candles to light a cathedral, and arrangements of rusted leaves, some scarlet, mostly brown.

Wine from France by way of Baltimore.

A sudden awkwardness closed in, and strangely, they seemed to hold each other off at arm’s length.

Zach tried to conjure up the words. “This is the most wonderful moment I’ve ever come upon or will ever know,” he said. “I want to love you perfect. If we savage each other, it could linger bad. I don’t want to screw it up.”

“You’re going to make me cry, Zach.”

“Slow and soft,” he said, “and we’ll whisper to each other and stay together.”

She nodded. “After their debuts, a lot of my girlfriends became engaged and married and some of them had very bad experiences, untidy and painful.”

“There’s something else I’d like to get over with, now. I can be here till mid-February, then I report to my new assignment. For the first several months, my whereabouts are to remain secret. I cannot tell you where and I am committed for up to two years.”

She had braced for such words and now took them staunchly. Her eyes grew wide. “Are you wearing captain’s bars?”

“Yes.”

They held each other lightly, like dancers, and swayed together. She whirled out of his arms.

“And I’ve saved up something to tell you as well. I know my lover loves me dearly. We are going to be glorious together.” Now she became nervous. “I have many friends among the artists, some very close, and some who have collections of salacious literature . . . often illustrated. I have devoured every piece of filth I could get my hands on and you are about to collect a curious and daring woman.”

Well, vintage Amanda. She rambled on.

“At first I thought I’d make a list of things to explore, then I began to realize it could be never-ending, so I thought about keeping a diary to recall every detail, but I’ll remember what is to be remembered and until such time as I can give and receive with equal skill and ardor. I am at peace with the fact that you are expe
rienced in these matters . . . and so forth and that you can introduce special pleasures you have experienced, but I don’t want details of with whom you discovered them and I have read the Marquis de Sade, and although I want no part of pain I want you to know I have been a sophisticated reader . . .”

Zach bolted the door and she drew the curtains.

“Undress, Captain,” she commanded. “I will see you buck naked now. I wish to see your cock.”

“Well, it’s really nothing, Amanda.”

He unbuttoned and undressed down to bedrock.

“You call that nothing!”

“It’s pretty much a standard issue.”

“Can I touch it?”

“Well, sure, but you see these things have a mind of their own and no matter how willful a man may be, he may not be able to suppress, I mean—did your girlfriends tell you about—”

“Premature ejaculations!”

“In a situation like this”—his voice went squeaky—“if the Marine finds relief once or twice, then he should be able to settle into the same . . . mode of his lover . . . girl.”

“We will go wild from time to time?”

“Depend on it.”

“And new things?”

“I don’t think we’re going to run out of ideas.”

Each square inch of the body gives off a different song. And their lips and fingers discovered them all, touching and feeling until the lover’s fingernails came alive with sensation . . . lips counting eyelashes.

. . . slow it down

You gaze, so sweetly dazed. Minutes, then hours of staring, until they could read each other’s prints and everything opened and welcomed them to hallelujah land.

All that night they floated on a pond of incredible calm. And became ready before daylight.

With exquisite care they mated, and even the pain of it was a hurt gladly acquired.

They were total lovers!

. . . good-bye, world . . .

“Your tummy’s churning,” Amanda said.

“It’s just the tide changing.”

Footsteps outside. They sat up in the feather beds. A firm knock.

“Who’s there?”

“Ned Green.”

Ned could hear them scurrying about. In a few moments they opened the door sheepishly. They could see Pearly on the other side of the creek.

“I been putting your plates at the door for four days now like you was in a zoo. You get over to the house and get some nourishment.”

Ned poked his head inside and called to Pearly. “Just what I thought. There was a shipwreck and two white people was washed up on the shore. They seem in terrible shape!”

“Leave them children alone!” Pearly called.

“Notice he ain’t carrying her around no more. Hell, he’d fall in the creek.”

Light-headed and wobbly, the lovers faced daylight, hanging on to each other for balance. Though lust was undimmed, it was overtaken, for the moment, by hunger.

Zach devoured four slabs of ribs smothered in enough beans for a squad and a quart of apple cider and corn bread troweled with strawberry jam, and Amanda wasn’t all that dainty, either. They waddled to the fireplace and curled up and cooed and listened to its crackling and heard distant voices come and go. “So they finally come out.” “Sure are powerful for white folk.” “Don’t you be getting no fancy ideas, Ulysses Green.”

By the end of the week they found themselves lured to Pearly’s table at main mealtime. Folks visited them and they took walks about the fields of Nebo. Amanda taught in the classroom for a
time each day, or hung about the kitchen, or brightened up Veda’s cabin, or sat in the back of the Abyssinian Baptist Church holding hands with Zach and listening to choir practice.

Zach earned his keep at the boat shed, where the men repaired clam rakes and oyster diggers and mended nets and sails, sanding, caulking, and painting the hulls of the skipjacks.

Here Zach got drawn into the Nebo soft sport of arm wrestling. Everyone wanted a chance to pin that smiling white boy. Up and up the ladder the challengers came as Zach won supporters who bet their pennies on him.

Zach moved into serious competition, challenged one by one by the Nebo team (who were mighty fine baseball players in the spring and summer).

With Ulysses Green the anchor for Nebo’s arm-wrestling squad, they’d not lost in years. Well, this was as far as Mr. Zachary Captain O’Hara would go. First left-handed. Then right-handed. Fourteen to nothing.

Nebo seized Zach. The church seized him. A man and a woman holding the wee hands of a child between them.

. . . one day as a little boy he stood beside his da at a pond in Central Park where a papa swan led a squad of cygnets and the mama swan tended the rear. “That’s a family,” Zach had said to his da, and Paddy choked up . . . even at Onde la Mer, there was a distance between Zach and the Barjacs, who were overlords at play. Not totally real, was it?

. . . Nebo was real, with the boys walking alongside Daddy, guns on shoulders, in from the hunt, slim pickings.

Women so black and beautiful that the movement of their hands with needle and thread was dance.

Well, hell, the United States Marine Corps supplied him with brothers, dozens of brothers. But not one brother of his own. It only gave him men to emulate.

Life began with a cursed bugle and cold-water shower by day and a lonely taps by night in a cot not known by anyone but himself.

Aunt Brigid gave him a place to sleep and took him to a place to kneel.

Now Amanda, now Nebo. It rushed into him and filled that barren space, this village which had taken over Amanda as a young girl.

How can lovers compare? Any two lovers who have discovered the ultimate intensity, then gone beyond, believe that they are the first lovers since time and no one has ever felt such remarkable love.

Their lovemaking, from fierce to subtle glance across the room, did not begin or end but was in motion all the time. Sometimes, barely breathing, sometimes, tied to a post, shrieking.

. . . until each knew every print . . . every scent . . every detour . . . and sight . . . and anticipation . . . and taste . . . and sweet voice and vulgar voice and places wandered into that suddenly opened a new flood of sensations.

. . . until such exhaustion left their only half-opened eyes to gaze and their ears able to hear the birds jabber.

And sleep easily.

Bold and shy, they answered the curiosities of rich minds. Bold and shy, they loved each other’s raw naked beauty. Wisely, they probed not of each other’s past encounters because they were not disturbed by them.

The weather had been fine for a few days. They put on mud boots and walked beyond the fences, along a creek where there was no road and it seemed that no one had ever been this way before.

An eagle graced their view, hovering on a dead limb intensely, gathering up for a swoop into a movement of trout.

Amanda and Willow had gathered mushrooms in the summer, and at times, Ned would let them on one of the skipjacks to go rock fishing. They weren’t too good with the lines, but they stayed out of the way, and after a time, Ned let them steer the craft.

“That big rock over there is filled with mussels in late springtime. We’d wade out and cut them off for bait.”

Amanda’s eyes opened widely, suddenly. She froze and put her finger to her lips for him to be still. A low, mysterious grunting:
bup-bup, bup-bup, bupbup.
She knelt, trying to stifle the sound of her breaths darting into the cold air.

The grass moved. Snake? Frog? Turtle?

As deftly as she could manage, she moved the matted grass and gasped! A henlike creature, a bird all rusty-feathered with a long beak, was startled.

It was gone!

“Did you see it?”

“Yes.”

Her heart was racing as she grabbed his hand. “Did you see it? It’s a king rail. Willow and I spent hours looking for one. We began to think Ned was playing a trick on us. During my last summer here, we found a nest. Ned’s only seen three of them since he was born. They live deep in the marsh grass.”

She said “Oh my God” several times, caught her breath, and let out a “Wow!”

“Any profound meanings?”

“I don’t know. Only that it’s always hidden away like a secret.”

“And all secrets are found?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s kind of the way the people in Nebo live. They don’t want to be discovered.”

As they walked away she looked back several times and got a perfect bearing because she had something to talk about at the dinner table.

Back at Veda’s, Amanda drew a map of the location and a somewhat drawing of the bird and extracted a promise from Zach to back up her discovery later, at dinner.

He stroked her face and wondered what the rail bird had told her.

One of Willow’s paintings near the stairs seemed to have the same distinctive features of the field they had walked. Was that where she and Willow had found the nest earlier?

Every time Zach had looked at Willow’s gauzy brushstrokes, he thought he saw a white shading in the tall grass, perhaps a figure of a woman.