Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  Back in Forsterville where the furniture factory was, my best friend had had a nickname: everybody lovingly called him Wheezer, because he suffered from bad asthma. But to Wheezer, whose real name was Shelby, I was never anything but Marcus.

  Just the right distance to make me walk out of myself, Aunt Charlotte had said. I wished I knew what she was trying to walk out of, what kind of debris in her history she needed to sort out. If she came to the island when she was in her thirties, did she have three times as much debris as I had?

  One foot and then the other. Remember, each time the water inches closer, you are closer to your goal.

  Is it a mirage, that tiny white truck bouncing toward me? No, that’s him, heading south. His sunburnt salute. Way to go, dude. Tide swirling closer now. Pride saved.

  Oh no, surely that couldn’t be Aunt Charlotte’s famous cottage, rearing up all broken and ugly in front of me. But it had to be because the island ended here. The town commissioners had been right to want to remove such an eyesore from their ocean view. When Aunt Charlotte first came here, it couldn’t have looked this bad. After all, some cheery tourist had been painting it. And then Aunt Charlotte taught herself to paint and painted it over and over until it became the kind of picturesque ruin people paid money for.

  If a house could be a zombie, this grim husk, guarded by those evil-sharp bayonet cactuses Aunt Charlotte warned about and fenced by sagging wire posted with CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT: DANGER signs, would qualify as one. And more than fifty people had paid money to have Aunt Charlotte paint this zombie house to hang on their walls at home! The porch on the south side had been sheared off and some shingles were nailed up against a replacement wall. Had that been the porch where he left a cigarette while his parents were out desperately searching for him?

  When I got closer I could view the rest of the house from the front. The noon sun boiled down on its crumpled roof, mercilessly entering a doorway without a door and the gaping window holes on either side. Maybe at dark this place would pass as a picturesque ruin. But the cottage would have to be almost a silhouette to make you want to hang it on your wall.

  I was hot and very thirsty. The zombie house offered the only shade in sight, so I wriggled under the wire fence with the KEEP OUT warnings, snagging my backpack and scratching my arm. I cautiously climbed the rotting steps to the front porch, which slanted downward. At least it was cool under the crumpled roof and I could report to Aunt Charlotte that I had “almost” been inside.

  I made a kind of lounge for myself on the slanty porch. As its slope inclined toward the ocean, it was like being teasingly tilted forward, just short of getting tossed overboard. Sweat drying on my shirt, I drank my water, then slowly ate my sandwiches, the high tide crashing around me. I would not be ashamed for the sunburnt man to see me now, though in his official capacity he would probably have to order me off the condemned property. (“Because otherwise, dude, I could lose my job.”)

  I folded the empty lunch wrappings and stuffed them inside my backpack, which I plumped into a pillow for myself. It was the backpack I had taken to school when Mom was still alive and I sniffed it to see if there were any traces of our old life together in the apartment. There was a faint bread-y smell, but that was probably from today’s sandwiches. The porch beneath the backpack had its own smell of salt and old timber and decay. The ocean was so close I could feel the spray and I felt myself sliding into a nap. Which was okay, I had earned my tiredness. I would rest up before heading back to Aunt Charlotte’s. She was only in the middle of her day and would expect me to be in the middle of mine.

  When I awoke, it was out of a dream in which the sunburnt man had been standing in the doorless doorway of the cottage. He leaned lightly against its frame, watching me sleep. I knew not to turn and look toward the door because I would wake completely and I wanted to prolong the way I felt him watching over me. Also, a dialogue was going on between us, though neither of us spoke aloud. We could read each other’s minds. I asked him if he had been inside the cottage and he said yes, he sometimes checked things out to see how bad they were getting. I asked how bad were they, and he said bad enough for this place to come down. When I asked if I could have a look inside, he said that is exactly why I am here, to forbid you to go inside. But why? I wanted to know. Because, Marcus, people who go in don’t always come out. I asked how he knew my name. Because I needed to know it, he said.

  ***

  Now the tide was going out, the sound of the waves more distant. How long had I been curled up on the porch, completely awake? It seemed a while ago that the sunburnt man had been watching over me.

  But something still was. I felt its presence by the electric prickles all down my back and by my serious reluctance to move a muscle. Then the reluctance turned to cold fear. There was no way in the world I could muster the courage to roll over and see what was in that doorway.

  Whatever was behind me was not watching over me like the sunburnt man. It was more like I was being appraised the way I might appraise some alien creature that had wandered into my scope of vision and curled up with his back to me. I felt no big-brotherly protectiveness coming from this watcher, only an intense, almost affronted, curiosity. Whatever was looking down at me seemed to be waiting to see what I would do next.

  I’m not sure how much time I remained sitting there with my back to the watcher. It might have been only a couple of minutes but it felt like the clock had stopped and I was trapped in a timeless state of fright. What I did do next was somehow force myself to sit upright on the slanty porch. My heart was thrashing, louder than the ocean. My back, still feeling the prickles trained on it, stayed rigidly turned to the doorway. My knees were shaking so much it was an effort to stand. Snatching up my backpack, I took a flying leap over the rotting steps.

  Even after I had crawled under the fence with the CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT signs and started walking south, my neck felt fused forward on my shoulders. I knew it was beyond my powers to swivel it around and risk seeing whether I was still being kept in sight.

  V.

  “Last time you were there, did it have the fence with all those ‘condemned’ and ‘keep off’ signs?”

  “Those have been up for a while,” said Aunt Charlotte. “The fence is in my photographs, but I transformed it into an erosion fence—those picturesque wooden fences you see in so many beach paintings. How did the cottage look?”

  “It’s in terrible shape. It has to be a lot worse than when you last saw it. It’s more of a zombie house. Did anybody ever say anything about it being haunted?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Why?”

  “You said they started calling it Grief Cottage. I thought maybe—”

  “You mean, the parents coming back to see if the boy ever returned home? Their spirits unable to rest, that sort of thing? No, all I’ve heard are the stories about how they were all lost.”

  “Or maybe the boy.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “His spirit being unable to rest.”

  “I’ll have to check. I have two books about the history of the island. Grief Cottage is mentioned in one of them, but I forget which one. I’ve never been able to read either of them all the way though. Every time I try, I get angry. Did you feel any spirits when you were there?”

  “I only went on the porch.”

  “You shouldn’t even have been on the porch. But what boy could resist?”

  “Why do you get angry?”

  “About those books? Where to start? With the sea turtle eggs, probably. But I need to back up a little. The ladies who wrote these books are from families who have been coming to the island for a zillion years. I don’t know which gets my goat more. Their cozy assumption of entitlement, or their cruel ignorance about anything outside themselves and their family histories. The sea turtle eggs are a case in point. You know how sacred the whole egg-laying thing is now. We have to turn off our porch lights after dark so the mothers can come up to the dunes and lay their eggs in
peace. And then the whole countdown period—well, you know. We have our very own ‘clutch’ of eggs with the red fence and warning sign. So I’m paging through this book—I forget which one—and the lady’s saying how much fun it was back in the good old days to go out in the morning and find some turtle eggs buried in the dunes and bring them inside and eat them for breakfast. So delicious. The size of ping-pong balls, and even better, the yolks don’t get hard even after you boil them, so you can suck the yellow out. A real gourmet treat for the privileged few.”

  “That was in a book?”

  “Yes, and more. Of course, both these books were published back in the nineteen-seventies, before the turtle patrols got going. But I’ll turn them over to you and you can look up the stories about people lost in hurricanes. As for ghosts, there’s this man in gray who appears on the beach before a hurricane. Some say he wears a Confederate uniform, others say just gray clothes. If he looks straight at your house, it won’t get washed away. If he avoids looking at it, you’d better evacuate.”

  “And people have seen him?”

  “That you’ll have to decide for yourself, Marcus. People see what they want to see. Or imagine they saw. And others say they saw something in order to sound psychic or special. I’m not big on ghosts. There are enough horrors in the real world to worry about.”

  That night Aunt Charlotte gave me the promised art tour of her website. We sat side by side in front of her laptop at the kitchen table and she clicked on the different paintings and then we enlarged them. I was mostly interested in the Grief Cottage painting, which I recognized as the “Abandoned Cottage” postcard Mom and I had received.

  It was the place I had seen today but it was also something else. If this painting hung on my wall, it would make me feel sad and spooked every time I walked past it. But I would walk past it again and again just because it made me feel this way. Surprisingly, given its dark mood, Aunt Charlotte’s painting wasn’t a night scene. Above the derelict cottage was a soft blue sky with innocent clouds. The sand dunes, though heavily populated with sea grasses and Spanish bayonets, were white and pure. The marked contrast made the picture even more unsettling. It was an anterior view of the cottage, though you could figure out it had lost its south side. The front of the cottage, including the slanted porch where I had slept earlier, had sunshine breaking into its shadows. It was the middle of the day in the painting, the light fell much as it had today, but somehow, the way Aunt Charlotte had painted it, the picture reminded you of the impermanence of everything and the treacheries awaiting you even on a nice day.

  “You really captured its mood,” I said.

  “What kind of mood?”

  I hunted for a good word. “Well, forlorn.”

  “Forlorn, I like that. Too bad you can’t really see my brushwork on the computer screen. It intensifies the forlornness.” Pleasure softened her gruff voice. “The actual painting is small, only eight by ten. Nestled in a deep frame under the right lighting, the effect is even stronger.”

  The day after my trip to the cottage, the rain began. “I’m surprised it didn’t come sooner,” remarked Aunt Charlotte at the end of the second day. “June is always the wettest month. I hope you’ll be able to amuse yourself, Marcus.”

  The first two days of the downpour were a gift. I wasn’t ready to repeat that walk to the cottage. And it was a relief to have some indoor time when I wasn’t expected to act like a boy pleased to be at the beach. All I had to do was give the appearance of amusing myself. This turned out to be easy. I could lie in the hammock on the covered porch and watch the tides going in and out. I liked the aches all down my legs from the day before. I doubted I had ever walked that far in my life. The aches were a reminder that I had made it. I liked to go back over the moment when the sunburnt man, bouncing south in his little white truck, gave me a thumbs-up. During the rainy days, I was to see the white truck bouncing up and down the beach but couldn’t tell if it was him inside. When it rained, there probably wasn’t as much trash in the yellow barrels. I wondered whether he thought of me. But then I had to remind myself that he knew nothing about me, except that I had set out to walk north that day, that I was out of shape, and that I was later seen still walking north—probably farther than he had thought me capable of walking. He didn’t know I lived here full time: for all he knew I was a one-day visitor with a backpack.

  I had Aunt Charlotte’s two books by the local ladies. One was called Chronicles of a Legendary Island and the other Our Island Then and Now. I kept both books with me in the hammock so I could be seen looking into them on Aunt Charlotte’s sporadic trips to the bathroom or to the refrigerator to grab a yogurt or uncork a fresh bottle of wine. Though my back was to the house, I was conscious of her checking on me through the window. Just as when I lay turned away on the porch of Grief Cottage and had been conscious of something checking me out from behind. The only difference was: one was an everyday occurrence, the other implausible—maybe just a lonely boy imagining something “in order to sound psychic or special.”

  First I leafed through the books looking for illustrations. In both there were lots of old maps and reproductions of records and deeds in old-fashioned handwriting, mostly dating from the 1800s. Transfers of property dated as far back as 1791. There were rough line-drawings of the island with the names of owners printed out on little numbered squares representing the lots where the first houses were built. Both ladies’ books had this same map, labeled Courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society.

  The first numbered square at the north tip of the island had belonged to a family called Hassel. Then, some pages later in the Then and Now book, there was a map where the squares bore the names of later owners. #1 Hassel was later sold to Wortham, who later sold to Barbour. But there was a star next to #1, which led to a footnote saying that since Hurricane Hazel, this property was now the site of a ruin “slated for demolition.” The Then and Now, published in the 1970s, said the demolition was already being announced. Aunt Charlotte had come to the island in the late seventies. Neither book contained a photograph of Grief Cottage, though some other old houses were often included as a backdrop for blurred family pictures: a group of women picking shrimp on the porch of “Sunrise Cottage”; men in hats standing beside a Model-T; women with bathing suits like dresses and men in costumes like long johns setting out for the beach. At frequent intervals there would be a posed snapshot of a black person in apron or overalls looking up from work to grin at the camera.

  The only mention of “Grief Cottage” was at the end of the “Fierce Storms” chapter in the Legendary Island book. After pages of blow-by-blow descriptions of houses floating out to sea and entire families and their servants dropping one by one from trees into the engulfing waves of the 1822 and 1893 hurricanes, a single paragraph was devoted to Hurricane Hazel (“the most devastating storm since 1893”), which struck with merciless fury in 1954, “the year before the island got telephones.” But due to an efficient neighbor warning system, most of the islanders made hurried escapes to safe places on the mainland. The only missing people had been a fourteen-year-old boy and his parents, an out-of-state family staying in the Barbour cottage after the summer season. No one knew their fates for sure because their bodies were never found. It had been a sad tale of out-of-state people underestimating hurricanes, the book said: the parents having gone out in the storm to search for the boy and the boy possibly having gone out in search of the parents. The house itself, the oldest on the island and tucked safely behind its dunes, withstood the tempest, all except the south porch, which was destroyed by fire before or during the hurricane. Since then the cottage had remained empty and been allowed to fall into ruin. Islanders had taken to calling it “Grief Cottage.”

  I was glad to be able to report my findings to Aunt Charlotte. “It was an out-of-state family, but it didn’t give their names or mention anything about a cigarette.”

  “I must have heard that part from the locals, then. Did both books mention
this out-of-state family?”

  “No, just the one. The same one that had that story about the turtle eggs.”

  “I’ll bet the Confederate ghost made both of the books.”

  “Yeah, they had the same painting of him walking along the beach.”

  “That painting has become an industry all by itself. You can order it in a variety of sizes, either as a framed print, a metal print, or a canvas print.”

  “What’s a metal print?”

  “When the painting is reproduced on a thin sheet of aluminum. It gives a very high gloss effect. Looks good on large walls in offices.”

  “But they don’t get to have originals. The artist doesn’t paint it fresh, over and over again, like you.”

  “He can’t. He died in the 1930s, shortly after he painted it. His heirs are still raking in the bucks from that one picture. He was an excellent landscape painter. I saw a local retrospective once. That painting was the only time he ever put in a human figure. What would he think if he knew his one gray guy would make him famous?”

  “Do you ever think about being famous?”

  “As I said, Marcus, I’m thankful to have this fluke of a talent. It’s my livelihood and I enjoy it. When you’re painting you don’t dwell on old miseries. There’s something about the smell of pigment and the way time becomes meaningless when you’re painting.”

  As the rain continued to fall, those boxes from my old life stacked in the garage nagged at me. I didn’t want Aunt Charlotte to think I was at loose ends. If she found me hanging about, she might worry she wasn’t doing enough for me and start feeling guilty and then the guilt would turn into resentment. I had watched my mom fight this progression in herself after we had moved from Forsterville to the mountains and had been cooped up for too long in our miserable upstairs apartment in Jewel while our life went from bad to worse.