Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Wait a minute, I didn’t mean her,” Gretchen Winslow said. She was having a hard time keeping the bright little drops forming on her wrist. Mike’s still pumped blood right along.

  “Naw, not with her.” Another of them took up the cry.

  “Why not?” Mike’s voice was pleasant, and his hair was, as usual, in his eyes, so I could not see them. Queasiness warred in me with rage and despair. I wanted to be away from there more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, but I would not get up and run in front of them. And I would not cry.

  “Because you’d get garage grease in your veins, not blood,” said the oldest Winslow boy, grinning, and all the others except Mike laughed.

  “Maybe she ought to cut hers, after all,” Gretchen said in the slow, rich voice that reminded me of her grandmother. “Maybe the sickness would run out then. Maybe the craziness would just run right on out. But nobody better touch that blood, though. Yuck. Sick blood.”

  Mike raised his head and looked at her. “You wanna tell us what you’re talking about, Gretch?” he said.

  “Well, everybody knows her mother cut her wrists in the nuthouse last winter,” she said defensively, hearing in his voice something she did not often hear. “Everybody knows there’s sickness in her mother’s blood; hers too, probably. Everybody talks about that. Sickness and craziness, it’s in the blood. My grandmother said so. They must have been trying to get it out of her in that hospital.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Darcy, hold out your wrist,” Mike said.

  I did, and he cut it, neatly and swiftly, and reached over and joined it to his own. I watched as if hypnotized as the blood mingled and washed over our wrists. I could not look away. I never did feel the pain of the cut.

  “Now, you go on home, Gretchen, and take your little friends with you,” ten-year-old Mike Willis said in the voice of a man. “I wouldn’t have Winslow blood in me, or any of the rest of yours, if I was bleeding to death in the desert.”

  “I’m going to tell on you,” Gretchen said, furious, scrambling up from the dock and starting off.

  The others followed her, mumbling uneasily. None of them would look at me.

  “I’m going to tell my grandmother you tried to make me cut my wrist and all kinds of other awful things,” she shouted. “I’m going to say you pulled a knife on me. You’re almost as bad as she is: Chamblisses and Willises, both trashy. My grandmother says so. She’ll make your mother and father punish you for the rest of your life.”

  “I sincerely doubt that, young lady,” Micah Willis said, coming out of the boathouse and staring down the dock at her. “If I hear that you’ve said a word about Mike or Miss Darcy here I’ll tell your grandmother what did happen, and make no mistake, Mike won’t be the one gets his hide tanned. Your grandmother knows which side her bread’s buttered on, believe me.”

  Gretchen flounced away, and the others melted off into the birch wood that linked the boathouse with the Retreat tennis court. Micah Willis ambled over, hands in his pockets, and stood looking down at us. Mike looked steadily back at him, his finger pressed over the cut in his wrist. I stared down at the dock, watching slow drops of red splatter and dry.

  “Know you’re not supposed to be playing that game, don’t you?” Micah said.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Know what your father said he’d do, next time he caught you doing it.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, don’t do it again.”

  “No sir.”

  “And go get Mrs. Chambliss to fix those wrists, both of you.”

  Micah turned back toward the boathouse.

  “Grandpa, you goin’ to tell?” Mike called after him.

  “Reckon not,” his grandfather said, not looking back at us.

  “You goin’ to tell on Gretchen?”

  “Don’t need to. Just being a Winslow is punishment enough,” he said.

  Mike and I began to laugh, there on the dock, with the fog gathering like smoke off in the birches, already whiting out the nearest islands.

  “I now pronounce you an honorary Willis,” he said. After that, in the summers, we were not often apart.

  There seemed little change in him for the next few years. Oh, he went through a relatively trouble-free puberty, growing tall and lanky where he had been square and low to the earth before, the smooth brown of his thin arms and legs sliding into ropy muscle, his round face squaring up and taking on the high planes of his father and grandfather’s faces. And he was moody sometimes where he had been open and cheerful before, vanishing for an afternoon or even a day in his Beetle Cat or on foot into the woods or along the high, wild cliffs beyond the Aerie. But I did not mind; the essential Mike remained, and from early childhood I had done the same thing, spending long, suspended, timeless afternoons just lying on my back in the soft green moss of the birch thicket, staring into the canopy of leaves overhead or dreaming out to sea on the lower cliffs beyond Braebonnie, where, when she had first come to Retreat, my grandmother had tried to rescue a fawn trapped in the rocks of the ledge. Mike’s and my togetherness was the spine in the skeleton of those summers, but our twin needs for solitude were the sinews that supported it.

  I changed though, or at least the outside of me did, and I hated it. At ten I had a spurt of growth that brought me to just below five feet and lengthened my wiry body into budding curves and softness. I loathed both the new body and the height, thinking despairingly that if I had been conspicuous before among my peers in Retreat, I was downright grotesque now: taller by half a head than many of them and shaped like a miniature woman, the whole sorry edifice crowned with a mane of burning red ringlets. That summer, after enduring a spate of clumsy innuendo from most of the boys and one or two of the girls, I took Grammaude’s sewing scissors and cut off my hair. After that there was no doubt about it: I was as conspicuous as a balding female midget among all the shoulder-brushing, ironed-straight hairdos of those post-Woodstock days. I literally hid from everyone, even Mike, until late summer, when my hair had grown back enough to feather around my face in a cap of curls.

  “It’s sort of nice,” Mike said. “It looks French.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “You don’t know anything about French people.”

  “Well, I do too,” he said. “My grandmother’s people are French, aren’t they, Mrs. Chambliss?”

  “Indeed they are. Duschesnes from Nova Scotia and before that, I think your grandmother said, from Brittany. A wild coast something like this one. They were seafaring people even back in France.”

  We were sitting around the fire in Liberty in the early morning, dressed in sweaters and heavy socks against the chill white fog that refused to burn off. Mike had been working that summer in the family boatyard, so I would not have seen much of him had I wanted to, but I had not wanted to, before. And then suddenly I did, and as if summoned by sorcery he appeared out of the fog with a plate of still-warm molasses doughnuts from his mother and a volume of Thoreau’s essays he wanted to discuss with Grammaude. He did that a lot; I can’t remember a time that Mike and my grandmother did not talk about books and writers when they spent time together. I thought he looked even taller than I remembered, and I blushed for some unfathomable reason. I had not seen much of him since the middle of June, when I had cut my hair.

  When we had gorged ourselves on doughnuts and dipped into and back out of Thoreau and Grammaude had gone upstairs to dress, he said, “Get your oils. I want to show you something.”

  And as naturally as if we had left off our association the night before, I got my yellow slicker and hat and followed him out into the fog.

  “Where we going?”

  “Osprey Head,” he said, and I smiled. I had first been taken to Osprey Head in his company by his grandfather when I was very small, and we went at least once each summer after that, Mike sailing his own catboat when he was adjudged old enough. We did not go often; it was Park Service land now, and they did not encourage foot traffic o
n it because of the nesting eagles. But Cape Rosier natives and some of the summer people did go, quietly and infrequently, and though they undoubtedly knew of the visits, the service did nothing to stop them. Those pilgrimages were just that: gentle voyages to pay homage. The colony of eagles was flourishing now, and seeing the huge purse-like nests and the great wings against the sky never failed to make the hair on the back of my neck prickle and tears come to my eyes. Osprey Head: it was a wonderful idea, a celebration of wildness and freedom. It would signal an end to my self-imposed exile.

  We did not go down to the dock where Mike’s catboat swung against its mooring, though. We cut through the dense spruce and fir wood that spilled down the rocks to the beach below the Aerie. I knew you could get to the bridge that way, the wooden one that connected the long thin finger of Loon Ledge to Osprey Head, but I had never crossed that bridge and had been to the little secret half-moon beach only once, when Grammaude had taken me and Mike there long ago, for a picnic. We had had our lunch and paddled in the flaccid little wash of surf, and then she had told us of the beautiful solitary woman who had lived in the big house above the beach, who had been a friend of my great-grandfather’s, and how she herself had come there to sun and dream while she was waiting for my mother to be born. It was an enchanted spot, but somehow I was not comfortable there. It seemed too much the property of others, and I did not mean the Park Service. They merely owned it. It belonged to people who were dead now, yet somehow lived vividly in the quiet air. I had not asked to go again, and Grammaude had not suggested it. Perhaps she had felt those presences too.

  I knew Mike would explain why we came this way today in his own time. He did few things without a reason. I was content, that misted morning, to clump along behind him in my sucking boots, one hand affixed to the back of his sou’wester. I could not see far beyond the path and the closest trees and clumps of white-dropleted bracken. We often went without talking for long periods of time on our rambles. There was no need. By that time we could finish each other’s sentences and not infrequently catch each other’s thoughts.

  We slogged through the ferny undergrowth that led out to the tip of Loon Ledge, and only when we approached the water did I make out ahead of me the bulldozers squatting on the beach like prehistoric animals at rest in a misted dawn, and the piles of lumber under tarpaulins, and the raw yellow beginnings of a much more substantial bridge beside the spidery old one. It seemed to reach out into infinity, vanishing as it did in the white fog about ten yards out. I could not see Osprey Head at all.

  “Well, shit, what’s this?” I said. “I didn’t know this was down here.”

  Mike grinned at my language, but then his face went sober again.

  “Nobody else did either, until it was well under way. Seems like the Park Service is going to build a pedestrian bridge and let people pay to go over to Osprey Head and have picnics and gawk at the eagles. Going to put a parking lot right here and sell tickets and everything. Granddaddy said they’re going to make a right fair bit of money with it.”

  “But Mike, the eagles!”

  “I know,” he said, bitterness thick in his voice. “They’ll leave. The Park Service says they won’t, but Granddaddy says different.”

  “What?” I was near tears. “What does he say?”

  “He says some damned fool did a study that says eagles will acclimate to people, so they’re going to haul fools in and sell ’em eagle views by the carload.”

  “Can’t he get them to stop? Can’t he talk to them?”

  “He tried, Darcy. He and some of the men went all the way over to Augusta to talk to the parks people, and took a petition and everything, and even wrote to the national headquarters in Washington. The Augusta folks wouldn’t even talk to them, and nobody in Washington answered the letter. Granddaddy’s trying to find out who to call now. My dad called this guy he knows at the Ellsworth American, to see if he’d write an article about it, but the guy said he was sorry about the eagles and all but it really wasn’t news. He said as soon as there was some hard news, to let him know. Dad asked him what he’d consider hard news, and he said when the eagles filed a petition in Augusta, that’d be news. And he laughed. Dad was pretty mad, and so was Granddaddy. But they both said there wasn’t anything we could do about it.”

  “But you think there is,” I said. It was not a question.

  “Yeah.”

  He turned to face Osprey Head, staring off into the fog as if he could see the island through its swirling density. Then he turned back to me.

  “I think we ought to give ’em some hard news,” he said.

  That night after Grammaude had gone upstairs to bed I got up and put on my jeans and a sweater and went out on the porch to wait for Mike. My heart was hammering, but it was not precisely fear I felt. It was more the enormous, profound sense of an appointment with some irrevocable destiny, something that was mine alone to do and must be done but that would change me for good and all. It was solemn and exhilarating at the same time, an important feeling, powerful and adult. I hugged myself in the thinning fog and stared into the darkness beyond the barberry hedge, but I saw nothing of Mike yet. There were no other lights on this lane. It was past midnight.

  Mike had told me why I had to do this thing with him, and after he did I could see that he was right.

  “It was your own mother and my aunt and uncle that ran the ospreys off,” he said. “They did it back when they were younger than we are now—or than I am, anyway. They killed a young bird and tore up all the nests. Nobody knows why. The ospreys have never come back. I know it’s got nothing to do with you and me—Granddaddy told me so when he knew I’d found out about it—but it seems to me like somebody’s got to do something for those eagles now, and it ought to be us. Try to make up a little for what our kin did. Do you see?”

  “Yes.” I was horrified and ashamed. I had never heard the story. There seemed no end to the things my mother had broken.

  “We could get in trouble.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Me either. Okay. Here’s what we’ll do.”

  I saw the soft yellow glow from Grammaude’s upstairs window go out, and as if in answer to a signal Mike stepped out from behind the barberry hedge and motioned to me to follow him. He wore dark clothes, as I did, and sneakers, and in each hand were ditty bags containing the things we would need. I took a deep breath and followed him off into the dark.

  By the time we gained the beach on Loon Ledge, the fog had mostly dissipated and pinpricks of stars studded the high, milky sky. There was no moon, but we could see clearly. The sighing, rolling bay and the islands seemed to give off a luminous white light of their own, and we could make out the machines and the tarpaulined lumber piles and the bridge easily enough. I have seen that light many times beside other seas than that one. I have never known what it is.

  Mike stood still, looking out toward Osprey Head as he had that morning, and then I saw, rather than heard, the deep breath that he drew.

  “You can still back out,” he said.

  “No way,” I said fiercely. “You think I’m chicken? I’m not chicken. You made me an honorary Willis, remember? If I’m chicken you’re chicken.”

  “Okay. Then let’s do it.”

  And he took a kerosene can out of the ditty bag and gave me another, and we walked past the bulldozers and out onto the span of scaffolding of the new wooden bridge, anointing the floor planks with that raw breath of destruction. When we had gone out as far as the bridge went, Mike took out a box of kitchen matches and handed it to me.

  “You want to do the first one?”

  “Sure.”

  My hands were shaking, and it took three matches, but I eventually got one lit and stood looking at him. He stared back. I tossed the match to the floor planks and we watched for a moment as it fizzed and smoldered futilely, our very breathing stopped, and then, when it budded and flowered and bloomed into flame along the railings and the planking, we thudded back to the be
ach followed by flame.

  We stood on the cold beach for a small space of time, watching as the fire fed and grew and drew back on itself and then boomed along the bridge toward the beach, the skeleton of the planking blackening and shriveling in the white heart of it. Then we scrambled back up the cliff path and through the woods to the boathouse and called the fire department and the editorial departments of every newspaper and television station on the mid coast; Mike had prepared the list that afternoon. We even called Portland and Augusta and Bangor. This time the man at the Ellsworth American listened to us.

  And then we went to wake my grandmother and Mike’s parents and grandfather and wait for what would come.

  We had thought we were prepared for recriminations from the Park Service and punishment from our parents, but it is the nature of children to see themselves as both heroic and invulnerable, and in our hearts I am sure neither of us thought the furor would be unmitigated by admiration for our daring and our passion to save the eagles. But the wave of official outrage that broke over our heads was swift and cold and very adult. Almost before the fire had burned itself out under the helpless noses of the volunteer fire department, representatives from the Park Service in Augusta were knocking on the door of Retreat, where Grammaude and Mike’s parents and grandfather had incarcerated us. The unamused sheriff and a couple of his deputies were there too, and a few of the older men and women from the colony who were especially close to Grammaude. They were drinking coffee and murmuring among themselves, and occasionally they would look over at Mike and me, where we sat side by side in front of the fire on the sofa, but no one spoke to us. Grammaude looked a million years old, bleached and ill; the thought occurred to me as I sat in my isolation—for we had been told to sit down and be quiet—that this was the second time one of her own had been brought home in disgrace over Osprey Head. Shame flooded me.

  “I didn’t want to hurt Grammaude,” I whispered to Mike, sniffling. He squeezed my hand.

  “It was the right thing to do. She’ll soon see that.”