The Mermaid Chair (8 page)

T
hat morning when I changed the bandage on Mother's hand, I had to look away from the wound more than once. Mother sat in the brown wicker chair at her dressing table while I cleaned the skin around the sutures with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed antibiotic ointment on a sterile pad. The cut was just below her knuckle on the “pointing finger,” as she always referred to it. I kept thinking what a violent burst of energy it would've taken to bring the cleaver down with enough force to sever the bone. She winced when I placed the pad over the tender, swollen nub.

I glanced at the photograph of my father, wondering what he would've thought of her now, the dreadful turn she'd taken after his death. What he would have thought of her slicing off her finger. Mother turned and looked at the photo, too. “I know what I did seems crazy to you.”

Was she talking to him or to me? “I just wish you'd help me understand why you had to,” I said.

She tapped the glass on the frame with her fingernail. It made a clicking sound in the room. “This picture was made the day he started his charter business.”

I'd been five at the time. I didn't remember him as a shrimper, only as captain of the
Jes-Sea.
Before he'd bought the boat, he'd worked for Shem Watkins, “scrimping for shrimp,” he said. He would take one of Shem's trawlers out for a week at a time and come back with four thousand pounds of shrimp in the hold. But all he'd wanted was to run his own business, be his own boss, with the freedom to be out on the water when he wanted and home with his family when he wanted. He'd come up with an inshore fishing charter idea, saved and bought his Chris-Craft. Four years later it had exploded.

He said his religion was the sea. That it was his family. He'd told Mike and me stories about a sea kingdom ruled by a gang of ruthless mud snails and the brave keyhole limpets who tried to overthrow them. His imagination was ingenious. He told us we could make wands out of stingray barbs and, by waving them a certain way, cause the waves to sing “Dixie,” something that had occupied us for fruitless hours. If we dreamed of a great egret, he said, we would find its feathers beneath our pillow the next morning. I woke more than once to white feathers in my bed, though I could never recall the egret dream that had brought them. And of course the ne plus ultra of all his stories—how he'd seen an entire pod of mermaids one dawn, swimming to his boat.

I could not remember a single time he'd attended mass, but he was the one who'd first taken me to the monastery to see the mermaid chair, who'd told me the story behind it. I think he'd only pretended to be a reprobate.

Though he refused to share Mother's religion, he seemed to admire it. Back then she was not pathological about it. Sometimes I think he married her because of her boundless capacity for faith, how she could swallow every preposterous doctrine, dogma, and story the church came up with. Maybe her faith in the church made up for his lack of it. My mother and father made a peculiar couple—Walt Whitman and Joan of Arc—but it'd worked. They had adored each other. I was sure of that.

Mother turned away from his photograph and waited as I finished winding the gauze bandage around her hand. She was wearing her blue chenille robe, minus the belt. She gathered the collar up around her neck, then let her hand drift down to the drawer, the one with all the religious bilge. She fingered the handle. I wondered if the clipping about his death was still in there.

Why had I given him the pipe?

Dad and I had seen it one day in Caw Caw General, and he'd admired it. He'd picked it up and pretended to take a puff. “I've always wanted to be the kind of man who smoked a pipe,” he said. I'd taken every cent of my fiddler-crab money and bought it for him for Father's Day. Mother had told me not to, that she didn't want him smoking a pipe. I'd bought it anyway.

She'd never said a word to me about its being the cause of the fire.

I tore a piece of adhesive tape and fastened the end of the gauze to her wrist. She started to get up, but I knelt in front of her chair and placed my hands on her knees. I didn't know where to start. But I'd taken this on. I'd banished Hugh, and now it was all mine.

As I knelt there, my belief that I could handle it by myself was starting to break apart. Mother stared straight into my eyes. Her lower lids drooped down into deep curves, exposing their small pink linings. She looked timeless, older than her years.

I said, “Last night in the garden, you mentioned Father Dominic, remember?”

She shook her head. Her good hand lay in her lap, and I took it in mine, touching the tips of her fingers.

“I asked you why you did this to your finger, and you brought up Dad, and then you mentioned Father Dominic. Did he have something to do with your cutting off your finger?”

She gave me a blank look.

“Did he give you the idea that you should do some kind of penance, something like that?”

The blankness turned to exasperation. “No, of course not.”

“But cutting off your finger
was
penance, wasn't it?”

Her eyes darted away from my face.

“Please, Mother. We need to talk about it.”

She pressed her teeth into her bottom lip and seemed to consider my question. I watched her touch a strand of her hair and thought how yellowish it looked.

“I can't talk about Dominic,” she said finally.

“But why not?”

“I can't, that's all.”

She picked up a prescription bottle and walked to the door. “I need to take my pain pill,” she said, and vanished into the hall, leaving me on my knees beside her dresser.

I
spent the morning on a cleaning campaign, determined to be helpful. I changed the sheets on Mother's bed, did the laundry, and scrubbed things that hadn't been touched in years: the bathroom grout, the venetian blinds, the coils on the back of the refrigerator. I went into the pantry and threw away everything that had expired—two huge bags of stuff. I dragged her rusting golf cart out of the garage and cranked it up to see if it worked, and, eyeing the grimy bathtub grotto, I hooked up the garden hose and gave it a good spray-cleaning.

Through all of this, I thought about Mother's refusal to talk about my father's death, her strange mention of Father Dominic.

I thought on and off about Brother Thomas, too. I didn't mean to—he simply wormed his way in. At one point I'd found myself poised under the exposed lightbulb in the pantry, holding a twenty-eight-ounce can of tomatoes, and realized I'd been replaying some moment with him from the night before.

The day was warm, the sun bearing down with a throbbing winter brightness. Mother and I ate lunch on the front porch, balancing trays on our laps, eating the gumbo neither of us could face the night before. I tried to draw her out again about Dominic, but she sat there shuttered tightly.

Looking for some way, any way, to reach her, I asked if she'd like to call Dee at college, and she shook her head.

I gave up then. I listened to her spoon scratch the bottom of her bowl and knew I would have to find out about Dominic some other way. I doubted she would ever talk to me about anything, that we'd get to the “root of things,” as Hugh had called it. I hated that he was probably right. It made me determined.

After lunch she lay down on her bed and took a nap. It was as if she were making up now for all the lost sleep. While she dozed, I slipped into her room to get the name of her doctor from the prescription bottle, telling myself I should call him. But I never even copied it down.

I stood gazing at her dresser, the ceramic Mary with the plump Jesus planted on her hip. The drawer was right there. I pulled it out. The wood scraped, and I looked back at the bed. She didn't move.

The inside of the drawer brimmed with holy cards, rosaries, a prayer book, old photographs of Dee. I groped through all her cherished clutter as quietly as I could. Exactly the way I'd done when I was a child.
Was the clipping still here?
My heart was beating very fast.

Near the back my fingers bumped against something slender and hard. I knew what it was before I pulled it out. I froze for a second or two, the air bristling around me, bracing myself before I pulled it up.

It was the pipe I'd given my father.

I glanced again at Mother, then held it up to the light slanting through the window, and nothing made sense to me. My knees felt like sponges, wet and squishy—it was impossible to keep standing. I sat down on the chair.

How could the pipe be in the drawer? When had she put it here?
It should have been at the bottom of the ocean along with the
Jes-Sea,
along with my father. I'd played it out in my mind so many times—the way it must have happened.

Joseph Dubois, standing on his boat in the last stain of darkness, looking east to where the sun has just lifted its shiny forehead over the water. He often took his boat out then to “greet the dawn”—that was his phrase for it. Mike and I would come to breakfast, and Dad would not be there, and we would say, “Is Dad still greeting the dawn?” We thought it was a common thing people did, like getting their hair cut. He would go alone on these excursions, smoke his pipe unperturbed, and watch the sea become a membrane of rolling light.

I'd pictured him on the last morning of his life tapping his pipe on the rail. Have you ever seen how sparks fly from the bowl of a pipe, how far they travel? He taps his pipe, and, unknown to him, the fuel line is leaking. One ember, a hundred times smaller than a moth, flies onto a drop of gas in the well near the engine. There is a pop, a puff of flame. The fire leaps from puddle to puddle like a stone skipping water. It lunges and crackles, and I always imagine that this is the moment he turns, just as the flames slam into the gas tank, the moment when everything blazes and bursts apart.

I'd envisioned it this way so often that I couldn't fathom it happening any other way. And everyone had said as much—the police, the newspaper, the entire island.

I closed my eyes. I felt that the centerpiece of my history had been dug up and exposed as a complete and utter fiction. It left a gaping place I couldn't quite step over.

I was gripping the pipe almost painfully. I relaxed my hand. Bending over, I smelled the bowl of it, and it was like smelling him.

Everything began to rearrange itself then.
It wasn't the pipe that had caused the fire.
I sat at the dresser for several minutes while Mother slept across the room, and I let the knowledge pour over me:
I was not to blame.

I
took the pipe to my room. I doubted she would go through the drawer and miss it. As I tucked it inside my purse, the relief I felt became full-blooded anger. I began to pace. I had an overwhelming impulse to shake Mother awake and ask why she'd let me grow up believing that my pipe had been the cause of everything.

Mine had been a private blame, a heaviness no one sees, the kind that comes over you in dreams when you try to run but can barely move. I'd carried it like a weight in the shafts of my bones, and she'd let me.
She had let me.

Wait. That wasn't completely fair. Maybe Mother had thought I didn't
know
about the pipe. She'd tried to protect me from knowing—never speaking about it, hiding the clipping—and yet it didn't excuse her.
It didn't.
She would have to think in some small corner of her head that Mike and I would find out. The whole island had known about the pipe, for Christ's sake. How could she think
we
didn't?

I could hear her breathing, an accordion rhythm that moved through the house. I didn't want to be there when she woke up. I scribbled a message and propped it on the kitchen table, saying I needed exercise, some air.

Hepzibah's house was less than a mile away, down a crook of road that wound past the slave cemetery, toward the egret rookery, and then around to the beach. I could see it as I came around a curve, surrounded by wild tufts of evening primrose and seaside spurge. I knocked on her iridescent blue front door and waited.

She didn't answer.

I followed the path to the back of the house. The little screen porch was unlocked, so I stepped inside and rapped on the door to the kitchen, which was the same shiny indigo as the door in front. The blue was supposed to scare away the Booga Hag—a haunting spirit said to suck the soul out of you during the night. I doubted that Hepzibah believed in the Booga Hag, but she loved the old Gullah ways. And just in case the blue doors didn't deter the Hag, Hepzibah had planted a row of conch shells in her garden.

On the side of the porch she had the so-called show-and-tell table set up as always, heaped with the ragged island treasures she'd spent most of her life collecting.

I walked over to it, besieged by a sudden, potent nostalgia. Mike and I had spent hours huddled over this table. It was piled with stalks of coral, crab claws, sea sponges, lightning whelks, shark eyes, augers, jackknife clams. Every lowly shell was remembered here, even broken ones. I picked up several chipped sand dollars, a starfish with two arms. Egret, heron, and ibis feathers were wedged among the objects, some standing straight up as if they'd sprouted there.

In the center of the table, elevated on a wooden box, was the elongated jawbone of an alligator. Naturally this had been Mike's favorite object. Mine had been the chalk-white skull of a loggerhead turtle. In my imagination I'd swum with that turtle through boundless water, down to the floor of the ocean and back.

I poked around and discovered it stuffed among a pile of cockles.

The night Hepzibah had found the skull, we were having the All-Girls Picnic on the beach. At least that was how those occasions came to be known. I sat down now in an old rocker, holding the turtle skull in my hands, feeling the jolt of nostalgia again. I hadn't thought about the All-Girls Picnics in so long. Since I was a girl.

Kat had started them way back when both she and Mother were new brides, and Benne was only a toddler. Every May Day eve without fail, they'd gathered on Bone Yard Beach. If it was raining, they'd hold the picnic the first clear night after that, though I recall that one year Kat got tired of waiting and set up a tarp.

After Hepzibah hooked up with Mother and Kat, she joined the All-Girls Picnics, too, and then I got to come as soon as I could walk. They had stopped abruptly after Dad died.

I remembered the big feasts they made: Kat's crab cakes, Hepzibah's fine hoppin' John, lots of wine. Mother usually brought her raisin-bread pudding and a bag of benne wafers in honor of Benne, who'd been named for the sesame cracker, because Kat had eaten so many of them when she was pregnant. Everyone got May Day presents—usually bubble bath and Revlon nail polish—only flaming red allowed. But that wasn't what made me love those times. It was because on that one night of the year, Mother, Kat, and Hepzibah metamorphosed into completely different creatures.

After we ate, they made a bonfire out of beach wood and danced while Benne and I sat on the sand over in the shadows and watched. Hepzibah beat her Gullah drum, making a sound so old that after a while it seemed to be swelling up out of the earth and rolling in from the ocean, and Kat shook an old tambourine, filling the air with silver vibrations. At a certain point, something took them over, and they moved faster and faster, their shadows making inky smears in the firelight.

The last year they held the picnic, the three of them waded into the water fully clothed, each holding a piece of thread that they'd yanked out of Mother's embroidered sweater. Benne and I stood with our toes touching the edge of the ocean and begged to come, too, and Kat said, “No, this is just for us. Y'all stay back there.”

They walked out until the cold water creased their waists, and then they tied the three threads together. “Hurry up,” they kept saying to one another, squealing when the waves lapped against them.

I'd believed then, and I still believed now, that it was some ritual of friendship they'd concocted on the spot, thanks to the wine and the dizziness brought on by their dancing. And Mother's conveniently unraveling sweater.

Kat flung their tied threads into the darkness, onto the waves, and they laughed. It was a voluptuous laughter, and mischievous, like children laughing.

As they scampered back, Hepzibah found the turtle skull. She practically tripped over it coming out of the water. She stood above it with the waves foaming around her feet, Mother and Kat still giggling and carrying on. “Tie yuh mout',” Hepzibah said, switching into Gullah, and everyone fell instantly silent.

“Look what the ocean has sent,” she said, and raised the skull out of the water, the ivory bone smooth and dripping, immaculate against the black night.

I believe they all thought it was a sign of some kind. They had bound their lives together out there in the water, and suddenly a turtle skull miraculously washed up at their feet.

For a long time after that—years and years—they'd passed the skull back and forth among them. I remembered it perched on our mantel for a while before it would resurface on Kat's bookshelf or here on Hepzibah's table. It must have reminded them of those nights, of the knots in their threads.

Now, sitting in the porch rocker, I rubbed the porous bone with my thumb and looked back at the blue door. Hepzibah obviously wasn't home.

I got up and put the skull back on the table, and for a moment the table seemed like more than a distant slab of childhood memory. It felt like a living part of me.

I'd known since I was ten that I would leave the island. On the first Ash Wednesday after Dad's death, the moment the priest touched my forehead, I'd felt myself rise up out of that little smudge of ash with the determination of a phoenix.
I will leave here,
I told myself.
I will fly away.
After college, I'd rarely come back, and when I had, it'd been with a dissociating arrogance. I hadn't even gotten married to Hugh here. The wedding had been in somebody's generic backyard garden in Atlanta, somebody we didn't even know that well. I thought about Kat teasing me, saying I'd forgotten the pluff mud whence I'd come, and she'd been right. I'd done everything in my power to erase this place.

The last thing I'd expected was to stand on Hepzibah's porch and feel a seizure of love for Egret Island. And not just for the island but for the woman my mother had been, dancing around a fire.

Something struck me then: I'd never done any of those things my mother had done. Never danced on a beach. Never made a bonfire. Never waded into the ocean at night with laughing women and tied my life to theirs.