So they don’t know where she is, Emily thought dully. They didn’t when Grand wrote this…
She read the rest of the note.
I’ve sent you a book of poetry that I found for Lulu, but on reading it over, I believe you might like it, too. These poems are raw and powerful and very sensual, but they speak so eloquently of love and loss and the sheer beauty of the world, things I imagine you are quite familiar with by now. Many people would think they are too adult for a thirteen-year-old—you had your birthday at New Year’s, didn’t you?—but I think they just might comfort you. You have had to grow up fast, I think, and believe some of the passages will have meaning for you. I marked many of them for Lulu, but there are some that call out especially to you; you will know them when you see them. I believe poetry is at its best when it gives you something that knows what you know, that will walk beside you always.
You have lost, one by one, many of the people you loved. I don’t know how or if you can fill those empty places. But I’ve found that with poetry you are never truly alone. I hope you might find the same thing. Call me and let me know what you think.
And, below the signature:
I’ve sent you the old book of Foxworth family receipts Lulu brought to Sweetwater. She said you’d loved cooking from them. Maybe you’ll continue to make them for your family. Old-fashioned cooking, I’ve always thought, is very healing. And incidentally, did you ever read the entire poem Buddy’s inscription to you in your Yeats book is from? It’s called “When You Are Old.” I think you will understand what he meant. Buddy had an uncanny way of knowing what people would need, and when. —G.
Emily got up and put on her blue jeans and an old sweater of Buddy’s that she had stolen from his closet after he died, and curled up on her bed with the book of poems. It was by a woman named Anne Michaels, called, simply, Poems.
She riffled through the book until she came to the first marked passage: “The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.”
She sat very still, feeling the line flower inside her until she could feel its heat out to the ends of her fingers, the roots of her hair. Mother. Buddy. Lulu.
She paged on until she found the next passage:
There are things that brothers and sisters know—
the kinds of detail a spy uses
to prove his identity—
fears that slide through childhood’s long grass,
things that dart out later; and pleasures like toucans,
their brightness weighing down the boughs.
Who but a brother calls from another hemisphere
to read a passage describing the strange
blip in evolution, when reptiles looked like
“alligator-covered coffee tables.”
Buddy would do that, Emily thought. It’s just what he would do. Comfort like hot chocolate began to uncurl in the pit of her stomach.
And the next:
Language is how ghosts enter the world.
They twist into awkward positions to squeeze through the black spaces.
The dead read backwards, as in a mirror.
They gather in the white field and look up, waiting for someone to write their names.
“I will write your names,” she whispered to her mother and Buddy. But not to Lulu. Not yet.
The next:
Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes
follow her across the field, stepping
from her clothes, strewn silk
glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves to be looked at, swimming all night across the river.
“Yes! I’ve loved the moon in the river and the creek all my life,” Emily thought, smiling without knowing that she did. “From these very windows. From the dolphin slide at Sweetwater Creek. This woman can see inside my head.”
And:
Colette said, when one we love dies
there’s no reason to stop
writing them letters.
“I’ve written you letters every day since you left,” she said to Buddy, deep down.
And finally:
If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars,
you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold.
With feathers and scales.
Emily knew that this passage had been marked for Lulu. She closed her eyes, feeling tears burning behind her lids. Could Grand have known about the dark man after all?
She pulled her comforter up over her and read the entire book, face and heart burning. She did not go down to supper; she told Anisha that she thought she was catching a cold, and could she please have a plate in her bedroom. Anisha brought chicken pot pie and green peas and ice cream, and a bowl of Eukanuba for Elvis. Emily filled her ice cream bowl with water for him, and drew him close to her, and read on. She read and read and read.
She did not think that she slept, but she must have, for all of a sudden it was midmorning on Saturday, and Elvis was whining to go out. Emily stumbled down the stairs and let him into the yard. Waiting for him, she listened to the house. It was silent. She remembered then: her father and brothers had gone early over to south Georgia, to some huge, famous plantation there, to deliver four finished Boykins to the owner. They would not be back until after dark. Neither Cleta nor Anisha came in on weekends. Anisha always left enough food to last, that could be eaten cold, or warmed up, and Cleta usually called each morning to check in with Walter or Emily. Emily stretched exultantly, her head swimming pleasantly with the lack of sleep and the burning poetry. A whole day. A whole day to read…
Elvis came clicking back in, and she took a sandwich from the plate in the refrigerator and his kibble bag and went back upstairs. She was still in her jeans and Buddy’s sweater; they felt warm and sticky and smelled faintly of her sweat. She took a quick shower and put on the long white flannel nightgown Aunt Jenny had bought her the year before, tied up her damp hair in a pony tail, and crawled back into the warm, tumbled bed. She picked up Anne Michaels’ poems, and read on.
When she finished them it was nearly dark, and she called down to her father and brothers, who had come in stamping red spring Georgia mud from their boots, that she had a cold and would stay in bed, and there was cold ham and potato salad in the refrigerator.
Presently she heard the low, mindless voice of the television set in the library, and knew that they were settled for the night. She crept down and got cold ham and milk and took it back upstairs, and dived back into bed and into poetry. Beside her, Elvis slept. But he waked and looked up into her eyes occasionally, and whined.
“What are we doing? Why do we stay up here?”
“We’re reading poetry. We need to do this. It’s very, very important.”
And he sighed, and turned around, and slept again.
That night, and early into the morning, and all the next day Emily read poetry and Elvis lay still beside her, not sleeping now, but head up, alert, looking up at her now and then. Guarding.
Her father and the boys were gone again, the boys to watch Bike Week in Daytona on the big plasma television set down at Sandy Don’s on Folly Beach, her father to Columbia to talk to a breeder there about a new bitch. The house was dark and still and beginning to go dusty; Emily was crumpled and sweaty and dry-eyed from lack of sleep. But she did not go downstairs, except to get food from the kitchen and let Elvis out. Upstairs, poetry was burning life into her like a branding iron.
She read from Lulu’s old Contemporary Poetry textbook: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…” Keats, who might have been writing of every Lowcountry autumn Emily had ever seen. She found books of poetry in Buddy’s dark, shuttered room, still smelling of old fires and dusty pages and, somehow him, and took them back to her bed. She found Thomas Hardy:
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say,
>
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?
Written, surely, for and about Buddy.
And later, simply for the salt-burning, throat-filling loveliness of the language, Gerard Manly Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim…
And Hart Crane:
And onward, as bells of San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
in these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands…
The telephone rang and rang in the empty house.
Late that Sunday afternoon she found Lawrence Durrell, and read:
Something died out by this river,
but it seems less than a nightingale ago.
The dead, cold breath of the abyss stank suddenly in her nostrils.
“I can never go back there,” she whispered to Elvis, and began to cry for Lulu.
She was still crying, silently, when she remembered Grand’s question about the inscription in Buddy’s birthday gift of Yeats to her, and found the book and riffled until she found When You Are Old. Tracing down the lines with her finger, she found it:
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face…
She put her face down into her pillow and sobbed. Beside her, Elvis licked her cheek frantically.
How could he have known that sorrow would write its words on her face so soon?
“I see,” she whispered into the pillow.
“It’s about time,” Buddy said.
She slept then, slept until after nightfall, when Elvis’s peremptory barking woke her. Her room was dark and stale, and her mouth so dry it cut her throat to swallow. She did not know quite where she was. As she lay there, her bedside lamp bloomed yellow, and a soft weight settled on the bed beside her, and her Aunt Jenny was there, pushing tumbled hair off her forehead with one hand and stroking Elvis with the other.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Emily heard him distinctly. “I couldn’t find anybody. Something’s wrong. We’ve been up here way too long.”
He spoke, Emily knew, not to her, but to her aunt.
“Emily,” Jenny Raiford said, “what in the name of God are you doing up here? Cleta said nobody had answered the phone for two days. Are you sick, sweetie?”
Emily sat up and put her arms around her aunt’s neck and her face into it. Not until she felt the remembered hollow there, where her cheek just fit, and smelled her aunt’s lemony, cleanlinen scent, did she realize that much of the dull ache inside her had been loneliness for Jenny.
“No,” she quavered. “I’ve been reading poetry.”
By ten o’clock her aunt had heard it all. She stood at Emily’s dark windows, back to the room, looking out. She had been there for a long time.
“Can she see the river?” Emily wondered. “Can she see the moon on the river? Is there a moon? I don’t remember…. ‘Feeling loved, the moon loves to be looked at, swimming all night across the river.’”
Jenny had sent Emily to bathe and change into clean pajamas, and gone downstairs to let Elvis out and bring up Anisha’s okra soup and cold milk. Emily ate the soup so fast it burned her throat all the way down into her stomach. She gulped cold milk; she had been starving. When had she last eaten? When had Elvis?
“All right,” her aunt said, when Emily had scraped the bowl clean and set it aside. “Let’s have it.”
A dam broke inside Emily, and words burst out of her in a waterfall, tumbling over and over.
She could not have stopped if she had wanted to. Behind them was a force as elemental as the earth, the sea. On its crest pain rode. When the flow had abated, much of the pain had gone away from Emily, perhaps into her aunt’s ears, perhaps into the very air. Emily knew only that she could begin to breathe deeply again.
Jenny had sat still beside her on the bed, her hand on Emily’s forehead, for most of the story. Emily started with the ridiculous, brined-turkey Thanksgiving, went on through the soft, misted days that led to the magical Christmas, and on still through the spell-wrapped days just before the hunt: piled featherbeds on rough bunks; cold, fresh trees garlanded from the woods; the parade of china and crystal and silver and damask and servants from Maybud; dressing before Lulu’s grandmother’s old cheval mirror in green velvet and emeralds, black velvet and pearls. Her father, a different man, a golden one, in an English tuxedo, welcoming at last the planters of the Lowcountry to his home. Walking with Lulu through the readied house, learning how one came to be a daughter of the house. Then, the monstrous dark man, and the tossed-aside birthday party, and finally the goblin-haunted run through the dark woods to the dolphin slide on Sweetwater Creek, to the small tree they had decorated for the wood and marsh creatures, where Lulu lay, drunk and despoiled under the dark man’s body. What he said to Emily, laughing, what Lulu cried to her, weakly. What Buddy said, urgently, into her ears. And the blind, terrible run back to the open field and, far in the distance, the lights of Sweetwater.
“There was something behind me,” she said. Her voice was rough and rasped with talking and tears, and her throat was so dry that swallowing felt as though it was cutting her. Her lips trembled.
“It wasn’t him, but I thought it sort of came out of him. It was like…black smoke boiling after me. I knew that if it touched me I would die.”
Jenny Raiford had gotten up and gone to the windows when Emily got to the part about the dark man appearing in the door of Sweetwater behind Lulu’s father. Emily did not think her aunt had moved since then.
Emily fell silent. The silence seemed to spin out for a very long time. Downstairs she could faintly hear the idiot muttering of the television set in the den. At last Jenny Raiford turned to look at her. Her face was bleached white, and her nose and mouth were pinched, and her voice shook with fury.
“What in the name of God was that girl thinking?” she whispered, as if she could not get enough air into her lungs. “How could she dump all that…dirtiness, that ugliness, on you. You were twelve, for Christ’s sake! You don’t tell a child that…filth. You don’t tell anybody, unless there’s something really wrong with you, something just left out of you…”
“I’m not a child,” was all Emily could think to say. Somehow she had never imagined that the story could generate such anger. Pity, she had thought, pity for both her and Lulu.
“I’m sorry, Lulu,” she whispered.
“No,” her aunt said slowly. “No, you’re not. In fact, you’re far less of a child than you should be. But you’re not grown-up, either. It should be years and years before you have to handle that kind of thing—if ever. Just hearing about it, not to mention seeing it—And then blowing off your birthday party. And begging you not to tell anybody about the drinking! I can’t wish her ill, but I’m glad she’s gone from here. There’s no telling how badly she would have damaged you—and everybody else in this house if she’d stayed.”
Emily began to shake her head, and Jenny came to sit once more on the side of her bed. This time she did not touch Emily, though. She simply sat, listening, an empty vessel to be filled up.
“It wasn’t like that,” Emily said heatedly. “She told me because she wanted me to understand why she got drunk. She needed me to help her not do it again. She’d been fighting it so hard, ever since she came. Her own folks wouldn’t listen to her, and she didn’t think she could tell her grandmother because she thought it would hurt her too badly to know. And I did help her, Aunt Jenny! I stayed with her every minute after that, until that awful man came. If you’d seen her when he came in, seen her face, you’d understand. She couldn’t help…what he did to her.”
“Probably not,” her aunt said after a long moment. “She’s not the first, and she won’t be the last. It’s an obsession, sick and addictive. But she could help dragging you into it. What did she thin
k a twelve-year-old could do to help her when she couldn’t help herself? That’s what I’ll never forgive, never.”
“What was she supposed to do?” Emily said desperately. She needed, above all things, to make her aunt understand.
“She’d have died if Elvis hadn’t come and gotten me. She was choking. I couldn’t just leave her….”
“No, baby. You did just the right thing. But there were a lot of things she could have done beside drag you into her mess. She could have simply thanked you, when she sobered up, and gone on about her business. She could have trained more dogs. Or for God’s sake, she could have gone home and faced her parents and stopped bewitching this family. You’re all just so…vulnerable to that kind of glitter and glamor. You’ve never seen it, and your father hasn’t in so long that he’s forgotten how seductive it is. She played on that. I watched her do it. Cleta saw it, too. We should have done something.”
“You make her sound like a witch of some kind. She wasn’t—she isn’t. She made us laugh, she cared about us, we were all together for the first time I can remember—and she needed me. We went everywhere together, we talked about everything. She never once treated me like a child.”
“Well, she should have,” Jenny Raiford snapped. “You were twelve years old, no matter how smart and supportive you were to her. You should be young for a long time yet. Nobody has the right to take that away from you. But then, nobody’s ever really let you be young, have they? Not in this house. They just…leave you. Of course you adored her. Who else has ever really talked to you?”
“I talk to Cleta,” Emily mumbled. “I talk to Buddy all the time; he talks to me, too. So does Elvis….”
Her aunt reached out and pulled Emily to her. Emily could feel her lips making words on her cheek, her breath on her neck.
“Baby, what kind of life is it if your only friends are a dead boy and a dog?”
They were quiet. Jenny rocked her back and forth, back and forth. A slow warmth began to seep into Emily; she felt nearly boneless with it.
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