by Gail Godwin
Was Aunt Charlotte still sleeping? She ordered her wines in cases from a discount store in Myrtle Beach and had them delivered to the island. (“They have a much better selection than locally, and nobody around here needs to know my business.”)
“I can show you how to take care of your bike,” Lachicotte had offered rather shyly. Wheezer had been right, why not just ride and stop thinking? But that was easier said than done. “You are a deep thinker,” Mom would say. “You get it from his side. I’ll tell you all about it when you’re a little older. All you need to know for now is that we loved each other, and he would have loved you if he had lived. When you’re old enough to understand, I’ll try and answer all your questions.”
Did he even know you were going to have me before he died?
I had told Wheezer he was dead and showed him the picture I was not supposed to show, the man she kept in a tin box in the bottom drawer. It was a small posed black-and-white photo, just the frowning face.
“This was before I met him,” Mom said. “He was younger then. But it was the only picture he had to give. When that picture was taken he wasn’t in a place he wanted to be. When he did choose to smile, he could light up your world.”
XIV.
I had reached the end of the road, where Aunt Charlotte had to park the car when she brought her heavier painting equipment. Hiding Grief Cottage from sight were the tall dunes that she’d had to climb, negotiating her way around the Spanish bayonets.
What I had been intending to do suddenly seemed completely insane. I had been planning on showing him my new bike. (“This bike frame is from a 1954 design that has become a classic. You might have been riding a bike like this if Hurricane Hazel hadn’t happened.”) But there were two levels of reality I had completely left out. Why would it please him, even if he were alive, to see another boy with a bike he probably couldn’t afford? And beyond that, the more serious level: why would a dead boy, trapped in his rotting cottage for fifty years, unknown and uncared about by everyone in the world, wish to celebrate my new bike?
I needed to keep the different parts of myself in their proper places or I could go insane. Aunt Charlotte would be in her rights to send me to an institution.
Yesterday afternoon, at just about this hour, I had seen him slouching in the doorway. I had seen him with my daytime eyes and though his face had been in shadow, he was gazing straight at me. We were in some kind of electric time warp. In the moonlit hammock last night, I had fantasized sending myself north to be with him at Grief Cottage because he could not come to me. And, although this was in my willed imagination, as I walked into his outstretched arms there had been actual physical rapture, which had left results on my body and on my clothes. These results were nothing new. They had been happening for years in my sleep. Mom said it was perfectly normal for little boys. “What about little girls?” I had asked her. “They have those episodes, too,” she said, “only with little girls it happens inside them and there isn’t any evidence.”
If I hid my new bike in the tall grasses, would it be safe from thieves, or had I better drag it with me up through the dunes? I was still headed for Grief Cottage, though not to show off the bike. I would leave it outside the wire with the CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT signs and go up on the porch and simply show myself to him. It was important, I felt, for me to come every day so he wouldn’t think I had forgotten him.
But just as the roof of the cottage showed itself above the dunes, I heard men’s voices fading in and out against the sound of the ocean. And sure enough, when I reached the top and looked down, there were two middle-aged men standing outside the wire fence, one in sunglasses and khakis with a polo shirt and docksiders like Lachicotte’s, but without socks, and the other looking hot and out of place in a dark suit and tie. Not far away in the sand was parked a strange two-seated vehicle with fat wheels and an open frame. The man in the suit was writing in a small notebook but the other man looked up and spotted me and called out. I called back that I couldn’t hear and slid down the dunes dragging my bike.
“I said I hope you weren’t planning on breaking into this place.”
“Oh, no sir, I—”
“Because it’s about to fall in all by itself, and we wouldn’t want anyone to be inside when that happens.” He spoke with Lachicotte’s accent.
But there is somebody inside.
“I’m supposed to take photographs of the cottage for my aunt to paint from. She just broke her ankle, so I said I would ride up here and take some new shots of the cottage.”
“Well, son, you better get cracking. It’s going to have to be leveled pretty soon.”
“But it’s the oldest house on the island.”
“Eighteen-oh-four, to be precise. The Historical Society never loses a chance to drum that date into me.”
“Eighteen-oh-four?” inquired the man in the suit, still writing in his notebook. “They might want to put that in the brochure. ‘The Old—’ Does the house have a name?”
“Grief Cottage,” I said, earning a sharp look from the local man.
“You’d want to call it the old Hassel House,” he told the other. “That’s the family that built it. Rice-planters who came here in summer to avoid the cholera. Back then the cypress was hewn on the mainland. They chiseled numbers on the pieces so the house could be assembled on the island. Then the timber was conveyed by horse-drawn—”
“But why ‘Grief Cottage’?” the man in the suit asked.
“Oh, it’s just a name that sprang up after Hurricane Hazel hit the island in 1954,” the man with no socks replied. “There were some folks staying in the cottage and they were swept out to sea. They weren’t even in the cottage. No bodies were ever found. If they had stayed inside, they’d have probably survived. These tough old houses withstood the storm because they were built so high off the ground on solid brick pilings. Plus the dunes protected them. This house would still be usable today if its successive owners hadn’t let it fall to pieces.”
“Why doesn’t anybody bother to know the name of that family?” I heard myself asking belligerently.
“What family is that, son?”
“The people who died in that hurricane. The family that was in the cottage.”
“Well, I expect their names are known by somebody. It surely would have been in the papers.”
“My aunt has two books about the island’s history and neither of them said a name. Just that it was an out-of-state family, the parents and a boy. And yet they were the only ones lost in that hurricane.”
“Maybe someone should look into it,” said the man in the suit. “It could make interesting copy for the brochure—like that gray ghost you told me about that wanders the beach before storms.”
“I’ll look into it,” said the man with Lachicotte’s accent. He had regarded me coldly since my outburst. I was probably considered a threat to his transaction with the other man. “If you want to take pictures, son, you’d best get on with it.”
“Oh, today I was only scouting out possible angles,” I said. “My camera’s back at my aunt’s house. To tell the truth, I wanted to try out this new bike.”
“It’s handsome. Vintage beach cruiser, isn’t it. You get it locally?”
I named the bike shop. “Lachicotte Hayes helped me choose it.”
The atmosphere warmed. “If Lash helped you choose it you can be sure it was the best bike in that shop. My name’s Charlie Coggins.” He bounded forward and thrust out his hand. “And this is Mr. Sampson from Chicago.”
Mr. Sampson nodded me into existence and resumed his note-taking.
“You see that vehicle over there?” Charlie Coggins pointed toward the strange contraption on fat tires. “That’s what is called an amphibian. You can drive it through water, up and down dunes—it’s ideal for my line of work. I thought I knew everything about assembling things, so I sent for this kit. When it arrived I couldn’t make head or tail of the directions, so I had the parts trucked over to Lash and he helped me
put it together. Lash could put together a space shuttle if he had all the parts. Well, we better get on with our work, Mr. Sampson has a plane to catch this evening. Nice meeting you. Say hello to Lachicotte for me.”
Producing a metal tape measure, he knelt down and shot it across the sand, calling out dimensions. The Chicago man wrote them down. Once he interrupted Charlie Coggins to ask, “Won’t that be too long for the property?” “Not at all,” said Charlie. “You’ve got to remember that this property sits on two lots.” They appeared to be designing a long terrace, where people could dine out above the sea. Understanding I had been dismissed, I mumbled a goodbye and prepared to drag my bike back up the dunes.
Before I turned to go, I stared hard at the cottage door. It was lit up, like yesterday at this time, but there was no figure in the doorway staring back at me. What had I expected? For him to be lounging there watching the men who had come to destroy his house? Yet in case he was looking out from some unknown spot, I leveled a powerful gaze at the cottage which I hoped would send the message that I knew he was there, and that I would be back, and that I had by no means forsaken him.
But as I was pedaling home I realized he might not have recognized me in the new bike helmet.
XV.
Looking back on that period Aunt Charlotte referred to as her “house arrest,” I am touched by my faith in my young powers. I felt pretty sure that I could take charge of any problem that arose. And who is to say that this confidence, even though founded on the heroism of inexperience, didn’t make a difference? Riding my bike home from its first outing to Grief Cottage, I was already deep into ways of helping Aunt Charlotte get through her laid-up spell without hating herself for being beholden, to use Lachicotte’s word. My job was to keep her spirits from festering—another of Lachicotte’s words.
For a start, I knew she was going to be another kind of patient from my mom. Mom had a completely different temperament. Mom was the kind of person who tried to fit in with the situation, always ready to admit she was at fault, and grateful—too grateful, sometimes—for attentions shown to her. You might say Mom’s major tactic for enduring (though Mom was hardly a tactician) was appeasement. After stowing my bike in the garage, I was surprised and a little crestfallen to find a very in-charge-looking Aunt Charlotte presiding at the kitchen table with a banana and a glass of wine before her. Wearing fresh clothes, she announced that she had just taken “a bath of sorts” by perching at an angle on the rim of the tub. “I left the floor wet, but other than that it was a success. It will be easier next time.”
“I’ll run the mop over it.”
“Sit down first and tell me about your bike ride.”
“I went up to Grief Cottage on the road—the tide was too high to ride on the beach. There were these two men up there talking about tearing it down.”
“Who were they?”
“One was a real estate man named Charlie Coggins. He knows Lachicotte.”
“Yes, Coggins sold me my shack. Not him, but his father. Back then it was the only real estate firm. Who was the other?”
“He was from Chicago, a Mr. Sampson. I think he was a representative for some buyer. They’re planning on building something bigger because the property has two lots.”
“Ah, I wanted to take more photos, and here I am grounded.”
“I’ll take them for you. I already told them I was going to. All I need is your camera and for you to show me how to use it.”
“You’re very thoughtful, Marcus. Unlike most boys your age. Not that I know any boys your age except you.”
“Mom had to work, so I did the things at home.”
The swervy way she guided the wineglass to her lips showed how new she was at using her left hand. “Did you like the look of your new school?”
“It looked okay. I think Lachicotte is very nice.”
“Well of course he’s nice. Tiresome sometimes.”
“How is he tiresome?”
“He nags too much. He means well, it’s just his way. He wants to fix things. Rehabilitate them, smooth out their kinks, polish them up. But people aren’t cars. And it does wear a little thin, his aw-shucks-grease-monkey routine. His family is older than God, at least in these parts, and he has tossed away more advantages than most people ever dream of having. Marcus, since you’re here, would you mind peeling this banana for me?”
For the first few days of Aunt Charlotte’s house arrest, things went smoothly. We had established our routine. She slept later into the morning because she wasn’t painting. She hated hopping along behind her walker and soon dispensed with it, preferring to hop on her own steam, steadying herself against walls and furniture with her left hand. I got used to hearing her hop down our hall and shut herself into the bathroom, which was next to my room. She would mutter to herself while taking her “bath of sorts.” I kept the bathroom super-clean, leaving supplies of fresh towels and washcloths and extra rolls of toilet paper in easy reach. Whenever I finished in there, I made sure the floor was dry, the sink had no hairs in it, and the toilet seat was down. Now she asked me to open four bottles of red wine at a time. I was to put two of them, lightly re-corked, in her studio, and the other two on a kitchen shelf in easy reach. She stayed in her studio all day, with the door closed. I heard her hopping about intermittently, muttering and moving things around, and then long periods of silence. Our one meal together continued to be supper.
She was still in her quarters when I set out on my early morning bike rides. From six to eight the beach was wonderful. Dogs were allowed to run without leashes during those hours, and there was an entirely different kind of beachgoer. There were the dog owners, of course, and the very old, with hats and sleeves, who needed to avoid the stronger sun. The bird life was louder and bolder down at the surf before the children cluttered it up with their shrieks and toys. There were also the runners and the exercisers and a few bike riders like me. This one old man had his black poodle tied to the back of his bike, which distressed me until I saw that the poodle seemed proud to be trotting along and showing off his obedience. I couldn’t believe how much faster biking was than walking. I could bike from Aunt Charlotte’s to Grief Cottage in less than fifteen minutes.
I hadn’t seen the ghost-boy again, but, like with Aunt Charlotte and me, he and I had a routine of sorts. I would sit on the top stair with my back to the open door and talk to him. I kept it safe and casual, the way you might turn away and pretend to be talking to yourself to put a nervous animal at ease. I had thought about warning him they were planning to demolish the cottage, but then decided it would be cruel. Besides, what alternative dwelling could I offer him? Also, he might connect the bad news with the person who brought it. Of course, it was possible that he knew already, that he had seen and heard the men—or absorbed it in some ghostly manner unknown to me.
There was so much I didn’t know about relationships between the dead and the living. Whenever we had indulged in one of our ghost story binges, my former best friend, Wheezer, friend would grumble, “There ought to be a rule book on how to behave with ghosts!” He improvised a few rules for us to follow if we ever met a ghost, but so far none of his rules fit the situation with my ghost.
At first I limited my talk to nature, the ocean, and the surroundings we shared. I remarked on the sunrises and the tides and I worried aloud about the fate of the baby turtles, which had been much on my mind. (“They need to get out to those ocean currents fast because the coastal waters are thick with predators and the babies are defenseless and very tasty.” And when I felt a knot of sadness behind me, like the gathering of someone’s woe, I quickly reassured him: “Don’t worry, they are born knowing what they have to do. They have been doing it for forty million years.”)
It was hard work courting a ghost, requiring constant exertions of empathy. Some subjects left him cold. For instance, I had thought I would initiate personal topics by filling him in on what the islanders thought had happened to him and his family during Hurricane Hazel. B
ut I’d barely begun when I felt his withdrawal. I was a crazy boy talking aloud to an empty porch.
I recalled how stealthily I had courted Wheezer back in first grade. At the beginning I observed him from a cautious remove. He was a delight to watch—a complete little man, everything about him defined and sharp: his precise and finicky modes of movement and speech; his lovely floppy roan-colored hair, cut often at a salon in the style of an old-fashioned boy, like Christopher Robin dragging Pooh down the stairs. He had a soft, reedy, hoarse voice and employed his own phrases for keeping aloof from the mob. “Come on, people,” he would say, or “behave yourself, people.” When his friends displeased him, he called them “people,” which crushed them. But when someone impressed or surprised him he would reward you with an “Outstanding!” in his hoarse little voice that was a side effect of his asthma.
For the whole first half of first grade, I watched and listened and kept my distance. Besides being a natural leader, he was a keen placer of people. Aware that I would be seen by him as an outsider, I decided to play up my outsider-ness. I had studied him long enough to guess that the way to his heart was to be as unlike his friends as possible. I could see that they bored him with their lack of imagination, their likeness to one another. The phrase “single mom” was just coming into popular usage and I told him that’s what my mom was. His grandfather owned the furniture factory where Mom worked as section manager in the polishing and packing department.
Wheezer was fascinated by anything to do with the paranormal and was always devising tests to see how extrasensory we were. (I was more developed than he was, he concluded.) He did a brisk business on eBay, acquiring old issues of Weird Tales dating back to the thirties. He introduced me to the stories of Roald Dahl, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury.