by Gail Godwin
XII.
A persistent knocking yanked me out of a sleep so profound that I couldn’t recall where I was or who I was. The nearby crash of the waves against the surf brought me back to Aunt Charlotte’s island and then I remembered my mom had died, and something else bad had happened more recently. It was morning though I had no memory of going to my room the night before, but obviously I had left the hammock, changed into my pajamas, and crawled into bed.
I was remembering Aunt Charlotte’s fall only as I opened the front door to a stranger, an elderly man, built like a bantamweight wrestler gone to seed, with shaggy white hair and white stubble all over his face. The only things neat about him were his clothes: a freshly ironed short-sleeved shirt with small red and white checks, khakis with the crease still in them, white socks, and docksiders.
“Good morning, Marcus,” he said, though what I actually heard was mawnin, Mah-kus. “I’m Lachicotte Hayes, a friend of your Aunt Charlotte’s. She wanted me to check on you. May I come in?”
I hadn’t found my voice yet, but I stood aside to indicate he was welcome.
“First things first,” he said. (Fust things fust.) “Your aunt is going to be okay, though she’s vexed because her arm’s in a soft cast and she won’t be able to paint for a while—her wrist wasn’t broken but she tore a ligament. They’re releasing her at noon and I’ll be bringing her home.”
“What about her ankle?”
“Well, it’s broken. Clean break in the fibula. It’s in a cast, too, which poses another problem. She can’t do crutches with one arm so she has to make her choice between a walker and a wheelchair. I told her I’d opt for the wheelchair, but if I know your aunt she’ll prefer to hop around on one leg in order to retain some control. Have you had your breakfast yet?”
“I just woke up.”
“And I woke you. May I make amends by cooking your breakfast? I’m a good cook. My third wife said she married me for my cooking.”
Both of them had been married three times, I was thinking. Had they ever had sex? It was hard to imagine, when people were so old. As it seemed polite to say something back, I asked if he was still married to his third wife, which made him laugh, exposing a mouthful of small, brownish teeth.
“Oh, she had enough of me a long time ago. These days, I’m taking a page from your Aunt Charlotte’s book, though I’m a speck more sociable than she is. How about breakfast?”
As the house opened directly into the kitchen, he was already en route to the refrigerator. “Uh-oh,” he said, after examining its contents. “No eggs, no bacon, no butter (buttah). What do you all have for your breakfast?”
“We don’t eat breakfast together. Usually she has a banana and microwaves some coffee in the middle of the morning.”
“I see nothing’s changed there, except she used not to have the microwave. What do you eat?”
“I usually have a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk. That’s really all I want.”
“Well … ,” scratching the shaggy head. “I guess you better have that, then. I’ll join you in a cup of tea.” He opened a cabinet above the sink. “There used to be a nice tea caddy in here, from Queen Elizabeth’s coronation…”
“A red tin box with a lion and a unicorn on it?”
“That’s the one.”
“It’s in her studio. She keeps her brushes in it.”
“Oh, my, isn’t that just—” He cut himself off midsentence and patted the upper shelves until he seized a plastic container filled with tea bags. “At least she saved my Typhoo.”
And so I sat down across the table from Lachicotte, as he asked me to call him. It was the first time since coming to live with Aunt Charlotte that I had faced another person at breakfast. He took milk in his tea and settled for two packets of sweetener after unsuccessfully digging at the rock-hard substance in Aunt Charlotte’s sugar bowl.
“I’ve been commissioned to go shopping with you for a bike,” he said. “I know a place.”
“You mean now?”
“Sure. It’s only half past nine. We can’t pick her up until noon, after the doc has checked her out. If you don’t absolutely have to have a new one, they’ve got some prize vintage models at this place. I’m partial to vintage models when it comes to cars, but it’s completely up to you.”
“But won’t it seem thoughtless?”
He looked perplexed. “Come again?”
“I mean to shop for a bike the same day she’s coming home in two casts.”
“That’s very thoughtful, but the sooner we get you some wheels, Marcus, the better for her. She won’t be able to drive for some time. You’ll be running errands, doing the grocery shopping. We’ll get you a roomy basket to go on the back, and you’re going to need a helmet. Until she phoned last night from the hospital, I didn’t know she had anyone living with her. I offered to come over right away, but she said you were a mature young man and had locked all the doors and would be fine. We haven’t been regularly in touch, your aunt and I, though she knows she can always count on me. And I feel the same about her.”
I had never set eyes on a car like the one waiting outside Aunt Charlotte’s house. A dazzling creamy white with a long swooping back and a majestic hood in front crowned with silver wings. Its upholstery was buff-colored leather, the dashboard a highly polished wood, and the steering wheel was on the wrong side.
“It smells good” was all I could think to say once I settled in the passenger seat.
“It’s the leather cleaner I use. They ought to make it into an aftershave. This is a 1954 Bentley Sports Saloon. It was built in England, which is why the steering is on the right. You should have seen it when it came on the lot, it would have made you cry. Restoring these old beauties is my passion, like your aunt’s passion is painting. I love this automobile. Pray God nobody makes me an offer I can’t refuse. Fasten your seat belt. I was required to install them if I planned to drive in traffic. When I was your age, Marcus, nobody dreamed of seat belts in cars. We expected them on airplanes but that was it.” He keyed on the ignition and pulled away from the curb. The engine sound was a discreet, obedient murmur.
As we were driving across the causeway he said, “I’m very sorry about your mother.” (muh-thah) “Charlotte told me about it. But your aunt’s a good person. You can trust her. That doesn’t mean she can’t be provoking sometimes, but we all have our warts. I used to provoke her on a regular basis.”
“How, if it’s not rude to ask?”
“She said I tried to repair people like I do cars. And I nagged her about—certain of her habits. Like not ever picking up the phone. And some other things. Are you looking forward to school?”
“Some parts of it.”
“Which parts are those?”
“Well, I really like studying and learning things. Making friends is the hard part. I had a best friend at my old school, but then Mom and I had to move away and I never found anybody at my next school.”
“What grade will you be in?”
“I’ll be in eighth. I skipped a grade.”
“You’ll like our middle school. My second wife’s daughter went there. She loved it. The kids are friendly. It’s too bad you had to leave your best friend, but my guess is that a new one is already waiting in the wings for you to show up.”
“What happened was, Mom worked in this furniture factory in North Carolina. Then we moved across the state to the mountains and she worked for a small outfit that made custom furniture for people. It was time for us to make a change.” That had been Mom’s and my story after we moved away and I thought it sounded very credible as I told it to Lachicotte Hayes.
“I’ve always been partial to the mountains myself,” he said.
“After I got older and could be on my own, Mom was planning to take the high school equivalency exam and go on to college. She wanted to make something of herself.”
Lachicotte Hayes took some time to mull this over. “I would say she had already made a great deal of herself by
bringing you up so well.”
XIII.
It was a subdued Aunt Charlotte that Lachicotte Hayes and I helped into the passenger seat of the Bentley. Gone was her edginess, her gritty independence. It was as though she had hired a stand-in to represent her in the role of the humble invalid who was grateful for any help offered to her by fully-mobile people until she could resume her self-sufficient remoteness.
She had been stoically awaiting us in a chair in her hospital room, dressed in last night’s clothes and sheathed in two serious-looking casts. She looked smaller and defeated. In the other bed was a lady watching a game show with the sound turned up much too loud. But for all that, Aunt Charlotte might have been deaf. I am not actually here, her face said. When the nurse came with the wheelchair, which was “policy,” she allowed herself to be folded into it and wheeled out to Lachicotte’s car. I carried the shiny new walker she had been issued, stowing it beside me on the backseat. By the time Lachicotte got her settled into the Bentley, she had mumbled several half-audible thank-yous without appearing particularly glad to see either of us, though she did call me by name once. Lachicotte didn’t get even that: she called him “you” and I saw her roll her eyes at him once when he attempted to say something optimistic. He helped her fasten her seat belt and told me to fasten mine, and off we went with a swish of tires. In the backseat it sounded like I was riding inside the wind. Lachicotte told Aunt Charlotte we had found me a bike and it would be delivered to the house, along with its accoutrements, later today. “Repay you” was her barely audible reply. These were her only words on the trip home.
Just before we reached the causeway, Lachicotte announced he was going to take a “teeny shoaht-cut” in order to drive by the middle school I would be going to. He cruised slowly around its circular driveway, the Bentley’s reserved engine ticking over, and pointed out where the school bus would unload me. “I used to pick up my second wife’s little daughter from this school and take her to my shop on the days her mother had classes: she was studying to be a psychologist.” The school was a single-story brick building that had been added onto. Its grounds were well kept and there were bright shrubs in bloom. Though Lachicotte had meant well, I felt queasy at the thought of school buses and classrooms and recesses, the whole thing starting over.
“Some days, if I happened to get there a little early,” Lachicotte said, “I would go inside and wander the halls. There’s a school smell that carries you right back: floor polish, metal lockers, chewing gum. I loved my one year in middle school, only back then they called it junior high.”
“Why did you have just the one year?”
“My folks sent me off to boarding school. It was the customary thing. My sister had to go, too, when the time came. She loved her school in Virginia. I about froze to death in New Hampshire. I ended up going to four boarding schools, but each one was farther south so at least I got warmer.”
“Then did you go to college?” I asked.
“I lasted half a year at the College of Charleston. Then I embarked upon my true calling as grease monkey.”
Aunt Charlotte uttered a scornful humpf.
When we got home, I unfolded the walker and with Lachicotte’s assistance she made it up the front stairs and into the kitchen, where she planted herself in a chair and announced she was perfectly all right. “It’s not as though I’ve been permanently damaged,” she said, as if we had inferred she was.
“You might want to consider getting someone in,” suggested Lachicotte. “I could rustle up some names for you, if you like.”
“Marcus and I will manage on our own,” she said firmly. “But thank you, Lash.” It sounded like she was dismissing him and he must have picked up on it because he left, saying to call him if we needed anything.
When he was gone, she said, “Listen, Marcus. I want us to go on as before. You’ll have to put up with the annoyance of my hopping around the house, but other than that things won’t be all that different—except I can’t paint! I may be symmetrically challenged, but I still have a working right leg and left arm. I can dress and undress myself; I can also get myself from one room to another and open and close the refrigerator door.”
“But I want to help. Are you in pain?”
“The painkillers haven’t worn off and I have the rest of the container and a prescription for more if I want them. But I’ll probably tear it up.”
“No, don’t do that.”
“I don’t want to become an addict or anything. Of course you can help, Marcus, but I don’t want you to feel trapped.” Then she laughed, which I thought was a promising sign. “But since you’re here, could you bring me a bottle of wine and a glass? You’ll have to open a new one. I can’t manage the corkscrew. And while you’re at it, you’d better uncork an extra bottle. I think I’ll sleep away the afternoon. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll discover all of this has been a bad dream.”
How far back did her “all this” cover? As far back as before her fall in the kitchen? Or as far back as before I arrived?
All was silent in her studio/bedroom by the time they delivered the bike, a vintage 1954 beach cruiser, suitable for riding on sand. In addition to the helmet, Lachicotte had purchased a large rear basket, which could be attached to the fender when I went to the island grocery store, and a saddle pack for small items that fitted beneath the seat.
I would have liked to inaugurate my bike on the beach, but high tide was rolling in. So I set off north on Seashore Road, which ran parallel to the beach. This was the road Aunt Charlotte used when she carried too much painting equipment for walking to Grief Cottage, even if she had to climb over the prickly dunes at the end. It was the same road on which Mr. Art Honeywell in his truck, fleeing Hurricane Hazel, met up with the nameless parents “on foot,” desperately searching for their nameless boy.
There had been an awful moment on the track behind the bike shop when Lachicotte and the shop owner stood by dotingly to watch me “test drive” the beach cruiser I had chosen. But what if I had somehow forgotten how to ride and fell off? Lachicotte would be so embarrassed. Every boy in the world could ride a bike, though it had taken me a while to learn on Wheezer’s older brother’s bike. “Your trouble, Marcus, is you’re thinking about falling off,” Wheezer said. “Stop thinking and just ride.”
I wished Wheezer could see me on this beauty. How odd that he felt like the dead one, though he was still living in Forsterville, doing his old things—whereas the nameless dead boy in Grief Cottage was so alive.
When Lachicotte and I had been doing some emergency grocery shopping, leaving Aunt Charlotte in the car, he had given me his business card with work and cell phone numbers. “Call me if you need me, doesn’t matter what time of day or night,” he said. “It may get depressing for her. She won’t be able to paint for a while and she hates being beholden to anyone. We’ve got to try and keep her from festering.”
When Mom had the flu really bad once, I did everything for her. I made sure there were always liquids beside the bed and that she took her medications when she was supposed to. I changed her sheets and pillowcases sometimes twice a day and made simple things for her to get down (Jell-O, chicken noodle soup from a packet) when she didn’t want to eat. I slept on the sofa and cleaned house and did the laundry and still kept up with my homework. Aunt Charlotte wasn’t actually sick. She was, as she said, “symmetrically challenged” and couldn’t paint for a while, and our job was to keep her from festering, though I wasn’t entirely sure what Lachicotte had meant by that.
But one thing I did know: until I turned eighteen, she was all that stood between me and foster care.
My bike tires made an exciting thrum on the paved road. On my left side was what they called “the creek,” where people fished and crabbed, but it looked wide enough to be a river. Whatever they called it, it needed a causeway over it between the island and the mainland. On my right side were high dunes, which allowed passing glimpses of the ocean from the driveways cut into the dunes. The
driveways led to the beach houses, a few spiffy ones with sprinklers going on lawns and bright shrubs in bloom, others varying from needful maintenance to shabbiness. Most of the houses had names carved on lintels or displayed on boards. Rossignol House, No Saints, Pryor’s Folly. Had my aunt chosen not to name her house, or simply not bothered to? The house to the left of Aunt Charlotte’s, facing the ocean, belonged to an old lady named Mrs. Upchurch. Its name, Seacastle, was carved deeply into a driftwood signpost. Though it stayed empty most of the year, except when the old lady came with her caregiver from July through October, the house was faithfully maintained by a local service. There was also, Aunt Charlotte said, a middle-aged son who lived in Washington and visited for short periods. The house on Aunt Charlotte’s right, facing the ocean, was one of the shabbier rentals with no name, hardly visible behind its dunes and tall grasses, from which we often caught bursts of rock music between the roar of the waves. It was some renters in that house who had forgotten to smooth down the sand after their badminton games and caused the mother turtle to mistake the humps for a dune.
After she told me about old Mrs. Upchurch, I imagined a very old Aunt Charlotte with a caregiver and myself as a middle-aged man coming to visit. But it didn’t feel like something that would ever happen. What I could imagine quite well was a very old Aunt Charlotte, wheeled out on the porch and telling someone, “My great-nephew lived with me for a while. He was a thoughtful boy and I liked having him around. He was so helpful that time when I hurt myself and was laid up. I often sit here listening to the waves and wonder what he would have been like as an adult.”
The bike’s momentum gave me a sense of power. With my own speed I was creating a breeze. A fishy smell rose up from the creek. The sky had wisps of clouds with strokes of purple. Aunt Charlotte and her skies. How was she going to get through the days without her paints? The Steckworths had happened only yesterday! I had seen the boy in the doorway only yesterday. Then later came the moon shining on the hammock and the thud and the smash of the bottle, followed by the ambulance men and then the new bike today and seeing the middle school where it would all start up again.