Up Island (25 page)

212 / Anne Rivers Siddons

The Jeep horn began to blare, and I looked back. Bella Ponder’s black head was thrust out the window.

“Stand your ground!” she rasped. “Don’t run. He’ll stop in a minute. It’s all show.”

I stood still, and soon the marauding cob stopped his furious lunging and hissing, and settled his great wings to his side again. With a final, baleful glare at me, he turned and waddled awkwardly back to the water and glided silently across it to where the barley lay on the bank. The pen followed him, serene in her settling white feathers. When she began to peck at the grain, he did, too, and soon both were feeding greedily, backs to me. I tiptoed off the dock and back to the Jeep, feeling sheepish and cowardly. In my head I could hear Livvy: “You didn’t take it because a
swan
chased you?”

“I didn’t realize they were so big,” I said aloud in a small voice.

Bella was panting from the effort of shouting.

“I should have brought the swan stick. It’s an old walking cane of my husband’s grandfather’s, made of black oak, as hard as iron. I never feed those savages that I don’t bring it along. Luzia hates it, but it works like a charm.”

“You don’t hit them?” I said, horrified.

“Of course not. Luzia would leave on the next ferry. I just shake it at them. At him, really. They may be mean, but they’re not stupid. They’ll back off every time. Like I said, it’s all show. They know where their meals come from. Lord, but I’ll be glad when somebody can take over for me. I don’t know if I can keep up the room service much longer.”

“Is that what they eat, grain?”

“No. They eat submerged water plants and sometimes UP ISLAND / 213

the gleanings left in the fields. Barley is what the royal Europeans used to feed them to fatten them for the table. If one of them ever gets too far out of line, at least he won’t taste like old shoe leather.”

I laughed, and she grinned fleetingly. I found myself liking this rude old woman without quite knowing why.

“So shall we do the cottage now?” I said.

“I think I’ll send you ahead after all,” she said, “and tell you what you need to know after you’ve seen it. My heart’s still fluttering a little.”

She did look white and tired, and so I nodded. “Will I need a key?”

“No. They’re never locked,” she said, and I started off toward the larger cabin.

“No,” she said. “That’s not for let. It’s the other one, the smaller one.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just thought, with the fire lit and the windows and the flowers and all…”

“I’ll tell you about that one when you get back. The little one is cozier in the winter, and it needs a lot less care. It’s a little out of shape right now, but I can get it ready for you at a moment’s notice, if you like it. It’s where Luz and I always stayed.”

So I walked past the Hansel and Gretel cottage and went up the stone steps of the little two-story cottage and across the sagging porch and pushed the ancient white-painted door open.

The little house was indeed little; it was tiny. The downstairs consisted of one large room with tiny, diamond-paned windows so scrimmed with dirt and overgrown with outside vines that it was nearly impossible to see; when I flicked on a lone brass lamp on a rickety table, nothing happened. I made out a

214 / Anne Rivers Siddons

huge, age-and-smoke-blackened fireplace that dominated one wall, and a spavined old sofa covered with a filthy quilt facing it, and a couple of what looked like wooden kitchen chairs circa 1900. The ceiling was low and beamed and black with the smoke of years, and at one end a faded cretonne curtain was drawn back to expose a kitchen so rudimentary that I literally shuddered at the thought of trying to put a meal together in it. There was an iron stove with the flue leading out a tiny, high window; a pitted, old, white gas range; a sink on pipe legs; and a refrigerator that had its motor sitting sadly atop it. There was one linoleum-covered counter, and open shelves above it held a few tins so weary and dim that it was impossible to tell what they contained.

At the other end of the room, a cramped staircase rose into the gloom of the second floor. I climbed it, my heart sinking steadily toward my stomach. The risers were so narrow that I had to go up sideways, and the pitch was so steep that I clung to the rough pine wall as I climbed. I did not think I would spend a week here before I tumbled down it and broke something vital to my well-being. Up here were two cubicles obviously used as bedrooms, one slightly larger than the other, with tiny closets closed off by curtains and narrow iron bedsteads in each. Thin, stained mattresses sat atop them. Both had dirty old footlockers, chests of drawers that might have housed a Barbie doll’s wardrobe, and a straight chair apiece. Both had long, floor-to-ceiling windows scummed with grime and cobwebs, but when I went to one and rubbed a space in the dirt, I saw that they overlooked the whole sweep of glade and pond and the sea beyond, and that from up here you had a panoramic view of Vineyard Sound.

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It was blue now instead of the morning’s restless pewter, and dotted with white sails. It was lovely: This vast seascape would be the first thing you saw when you raised your head from your pillow, providing you kept the windows clean. I thought of the dancing stipple of sea light on the ceiling in the summer, and the flickering white snow light of winter. I thought of curtains and deep comforters and plaids and copper lamps and banked fires, and piles of books on bedside tables, and pottery bowls of apples, and maybe a little radio spilling out Brahms….

You would not be cold here. Each bedroom had an iron stove like the kitchen’s, with a solid wooden box to hold wood or whatever they burned, and I had noticed that in a corner of the dim kitchen a big, if ancient, hot-water heater held court. There was a tiny bathroom opposite the bedrooms, but I had not yet had the heart to look in it. When I did, I winced at the dirt, but saw that it had a big, old-fashioned clawfoot bathtub with a shower curtain, so there must be a shower, and a bulbous toilet and washbasin that spoke of 1920s Sears Roebuck. The floor was wide-planked wood, and I pictured rag rugs and copper pots of chrysanthemums, even though it was now an inch deep in grime and had the leprous remnants of old linoleum in peeling patches across it.

I thought, also, of my huge sea-green bathroom at home, of the shining glass blocks and hanging plants and the Jacuzzi we had put in two years before, and the soft, incandescent lighting, and the double sinks and view of the park, of the bentwood rocker where I sometimes sat with a glass of wine while Tee bathed….

I shook my head briskly and felt my way back
216 / Anne Rivers Siddons

downstairs and across the dark living room and porch, back to the Jeep. She sat looking at me stolidly, and said nothing.

“I’m afraid it’s out of the question,” I said rapidly. “It’s just too…primitive. I mean, I’ve never even tried to start a woodstove before, and if one of the appliances broke down I wouldn’t know what to do, and then if anyone should want to visit me, I have no idea where I’d put them, and it’s just so far away from everything…and I do have to take the Jeep back to my friend’s house; I’d have to buy a car, and I didn’t see a phone…”

She took a deep breath.

“I apologize for the shape it’s in. I don’t blame you for worrying about that. I thought it would be the bigger one that I’d be offering, but…it didn’t turn out that I could, and I didn’t have enough notice to get this one cleaned up. But I promise you that I can have it shining for you whenever you’d like me to, and as for the phone, I’ll be glad to have one put in; there’s a line in here anyway, for the other one.

And there’s an old four-wheel-drive truck in my shed you could use; I’ll never drive it again, nor will Luzia. You know, when it’s all clean, and the sheets and curtains are fresh and up, and there’s a fire in the fireplace and something cooking on the stove and music playing—I’ve got an old radio you can have, too, and a little TV set we’ve never even watched—it’s one of the coziest places you’ll ever see. And the sunsets…well, the Menemsha sunsets are famous all over the world, and from the porch of this one you have the best view of the sunsets on the entire island. On a fall or winter night it’s really something special. We used to stay down here until the snow literally ran us out, Luz and I; I put in UP ISLAND / 217

the stoves so we could stay on in the winters, and we did that until she fell. Those were good nights, I can tell you.

Once or twice we saw the northern lights out over the water…”

Her voice was hypnotic. I saw them, too.

“Why don’t you try it and see, oh, until April, maybe?”

she said. “If you really wanted to go home for a little while over Christmas or something, I could always find somebody to do for us for a few days, I guess. Of course, you’d be surprised how nice Christmas is out here in the woods. We spent several here before Luz fell, once with company, and it was like an old-fashioned Christmas out of a picture book. There was fresh snow, and the deer came right up to be fed, and the birds all came for the suet, and there’s all kinds of wild holly around, and we put us up a little spruce from the woods, and cooked a turkey…we both still talk about that Christmas. I’ll bet your boy would get a kick out of an old-fashioned New England Christmas like that, and your dad and your daughter and her family, too. I’ve got several single beds in the barn I could move in, and there’s a sleeping alcove under the stairs that’ll hold a double. If you could see your way to stay through the winter and help us out, I can get this place fixed up so you won’t know it in no time at all.”

Snow, holly, deer, a fire, a little tree beside the fireplace—the scene unrolled in my head like a home movie, a happy one. And the money…Until April. Eight months. Forty thousand dollars saved…I could live a very good while indeed on that, back in Atlanta. I could plan a life in that amount of time.

I turned to her. “Why aren’t you talking to your family?”

I said. “I don’t want to pry, but I don’t understand
218 / Anne Rivers Siddons

why you want me so badly. There must be so many of you…”

“Like I said. I won’t ask them for help,” she said. “I don’t need to bore and burden you with the reasons. If you really can’t see your way clear to do it, I can find somebody else.

I don’t mean to distress you by appearing to beg.”

She looked defeated. Simply that. Proud, old, sour—and defeated. Her life in this enchanted wood was already over, and soon it would be over entirely. I, on the other hand, was seeking a place to plan the rest of mine. I felt a powerful turn of empathy and remorse. It could so easily be me in a few years, trying in the midst of the wreckage of a failing body to secure a future for myself and perhaps some faithful, ailing companion. What, to me, were a few months? What waited at home for me, anyway?

“If you can really get it livable, I’ll stay until April,” I heard myself say. My voice rang in my own ears.

“Thank you,” she said, and dropped her eyelashes, but not before I saw the wash of tears there. They were gone when she raised her head, though.

“When would you like to come?”

“Well…when could you get it ready?”

“Day after tomorrow?” she said.

“Really? So soon?”

“There’ll be no problem. You’ll see,” she said strongly.

“Would you want me to sign anything? A letter of agreement, or something?”

“No. I think you honor your word,” she said.

“Well, then…it’s a deal,” I said, and gave her my hand, wondering if I had truly lost my mind. Probably.

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But, on the other hand, if I had signed nothing and it turned out that she could not, after all, get the camp livable, there was surely nothing to prevent me from going elsewhere. What could I lose?

She took my hand in her large old one. It felt cold and dry and rough, like the skin of a long-dead animal. I knew that hand; I had held others like it in my days as a volunteer at Grady Hospital, Atlanta’s huge charity medical facility. It was the feeling of failing life systems: heart, lungs, circulation.

I knew that I was holding mortality in my hand.

“Deal,” she said.

I got into the Jeep and put the key in the ignition, and she said, “There’s something else.”

I turned to look at her. She was looking over at the other house. I don’t know why, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“What?”

She spoke without looking at me.

“It’s my son. He’s had to come home for a little while; he had an operation on his leg, and he needed somewhere to convalesce, and he asked if he could come here. It used to be his favorite place in the world, these old camps. I couldn’t say no. It happened after I’d put the notice up on the road, and I just didn’t get around to taking it down. I’d have put him in the smaller one, but he can’t manage the stairs yet, and somehow I just didn’t think anybody would really ask about the camps. We can’t have him at the big house; I can’t even take good care of Luz. Of course she’d want him; she’d cry and tease for him to come up there until she drove me crazy, so I just haven’t told her he’s here yet. He only came a couple of days ago; a friend from his school brought him, and he won’t be here long, I

220 / Anne Rivers Siddons

don’t think. Just maybe till late winter. It shouldn’t take a lot of time. But he’s going to need just a little bit of looking after…”

“And you want me to do a little bit of caretaking for him, too,” I said, my heart sinking again. “Mrs. Ponder, I’m not a nurse. I can’t take care of an invalid…”

“He doesn’t need a nurse,” she said. “He wouldn’t have a nurse. He insists on doing for himself, and he’s such a con-trary loner, he wouldn’t want anybody around helping him even if he needed it. All he needs is for somebody to get him in some groceries a couple of times a week, and maybe take him over to the hospital in Oak Bluffs once a month or so for the doctor to see how he’s coming along. I don’t think you’d be seeing enough of him to even know he was over there. He’s got trunks and trunks full of books, and he had his big old stereo shipped over, and he’s working on some kind of book of his own. You wouldn’t have to go in, even, just leave the groceries on the porch. He could put you out a list…”