Beyond the porch, on the street were the waters of the harbor, light from the moon gleaming off them. And beyond that, the ocean. I looked past Claire at all of it, trying to keep my mind blank. I had returned to tell her the truth, and now I was not able to do so. My first long silence over the years had been a burden I could barely endure; this new silence crushed my spirit.
“That’s all you’re going to say?” she asked.
“It’s all I can say.”
“Then you’re right,” she said. “Nothing between us matters. Now leave me alone.”
“Claire . . .”
“Go,” she said. She shifted her position and leaned against the wall, as if the conversation had exhausted her. “My life’s dream has been accomplished. I told you what I wanted to tell you. I hate you. Now go away. I have no need to see you again.”
“Claire . . .”
The dead bolt clicked. Ella swung open the door. As if she had been listening and waiting. “Mizz Claire,” Ella said, “please come in now.”
Ella put her shoulder beneath Claire’s right arm and helped Claire to the doorway. Halfway inside, Ella turned and looked over Claire’s shoulder.
“Good night, sir,” Ella said to me. “You have outworn your welcome.”
Chapter 9
Back in my room at the bed-and-breakfast for
the second night of my return to Charleston, again I could not sleep.
It had taken hardly more than the first day for Charleston to defeat me.
I had learned I had no chance for revenge against Pendleton, also that I had no chance of finding my way back to Claire. All that remained was a search for my mother, with a fear for the answers I might find: She might be dead. Or she might be alive and that would
mean she truly never wanted to be a part of my life.
Ever.
In my mind echoed the anonymously sent letter that had brought me here.
Find enclosed an airline ticket and the police report that will let you return to Charleston. Five nights have been booked and paid for you at Two Meeting Street Inn. Go to the hospital and speak with Edgar Layton. You must do this soon, for Edgar has advanced colon cancer and is about to die. He has answers about your mother. He is not the only one. Ask Helen deMarionne the truth. She knew your mother best.
There was more to discover, however, than the truth about my mother.
I also wanted to know who had sent me this letter.
**
Of all that had happened on my first day back to Charleston, one phrase came back to me as I lay in shadows with little gratitude or appreciation for the nineteenth-century luxury that surrounded me in my room at the bed-and-breakfast.
Do you believe in a God of love?
Why had Helen asked me that?
My answer to Helen a few hours earlier would have been that I could not believe in any God unless I truly could see him in the stars.
I was an astronomer, in no small part because of that first glimpse through a telescope at the age of five. The letter that had drawn me back to Charleston had found me at a small community college in Santa Fe, teaching astronomy.
Because I’d spent my early twenties in travel, I was an older student when I finally went to college in Santa Fe, securing a bachelor’s degree in science by my midtwenties.
I had chosen Santa Fe because it would allow me, as a student, occasional access to its observatory, high in the clear mountain air.
I’d made friends and connections as a student—it helped that I had enough money to rent an upscale apartment and enough sense to throw semiannual discreetly lavish parties with the right people, naturally from the astronomy department. I believe I was not hampered by the traces of my southern accent or by my refusal to discuss my past except for my travel stories, for as I discovered, a one-legged man of cultivated mystery is never unattractive.
Because of my connections, when a minor teaching
position opened at a nearby community college, I had no trouble getting it, despite my relative lack of academic credentials. It was only first- and second-year astronomy that I taught, well within the abilities of anyone able to read the textbooks, and the position paid poorly, so my competition for the job had not been sterling anyway. (My understanding of calculus and advanced mathematics was too pitiful for me to ever get a required Ph.D. to let me teach
at a more advanced level, or better yet, involve myself in research. No, at best I was an enthusiastic layman, with sound knowledge of the workings of the sky as determined by those fortunate ones with the mathematical ability.)
I was content with my position at the college. The night sky had always fascinated me, and this gave me regular access to one of the world’s most powerful telescopes.
Yet nothing I ever saw from the observatory on that New Mexico mountain ever held the place in my memory given to my first glimpse at the moon up close. I never forgot, either, the old man telling me I could see God in the stars. For what I learned showed the opposite for so long.
This was confirmed again and again for me as I continued to absorb, through books by like-minded scientists, everything possible about the cosmos.
I learned, of course, that in the early 1600s the Catholic Church had forced Galileo Galilei to drop his support of Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory that Earth revolved around the sun. Theology dictated that the sun and the universe revolved around Earth, for had it not been written in Psalm 104 that God had placed the world on its foundation, never to be moved?
Even as a teenager, I found the dogmatic theology of the early Catholic Church ridiculous and, because of it, in my mind I made a clear division between faith and science, that it was one or the other. Accordingly, my reasoning went, if
I had to choose between accepting the existence of God on the merit of faith or instead choose the proofs of science without God, my decision would be easy.
I was not actively agnostic, however, merely uninterested in those on the other side of science, and in particular, those on the other side of astronomy. The universe was fascinating enough without God in it.
Yet.
When I look back, I see that one of the first times God openly beckoned my soul happened in the Arizona desert.
Upon leaving Charleston, I made it my goal to circumvent the world and thought it foolish to ignore my own backyard before crossing the Pacific. I had spent three months hitchhiking westward across America. This was the time of Detroit gas-guzzlers, before the phrase serial killer had gained common usage in cultural parlance, when hitchhiking had a romantic innocence.
I had also determined that I would avoid the interstate highways. It seemed that I would not see much of America in an intimate way from the roaring strips of asphalt, and I had no interest in thumbing for rides at exit ramps all across the country. No, I wanted small-town cafés and quiet intersections and rides from local farmers.
This philosophy served me well.
In Arizona, I made the trek to the edge of the Grand Canyon, then headed south, through the fir-dotted mountains and finally down past Prescott and farther west until I reached the desert flats.
The rides on the narrow ribbons of isolated highway were infrequent, not because of inhospitable locals but because of the scarcity of vehicles out in the lonely heat.
At one roadside turnout, I spent five hours vainly waiting and saw no one. I did not mind. I had shade and plenty of water, and roadrunners are fascinating creatures as they scurry from mesquite to mesquite.
As dusk approached, I stuck with my policy of refusing to hitchhike in darkness, not that it was likely anyone would arrive. I pulled a picnic table far enough away from the road that I would not be detected by any passing headlights. I used my knapsack as a pillow, stretched out on top of the table, and stared upward at the dazzling show of stars.
I was looking at a four-dimensional sky, for although we see it in two dimensions from the surface of the Earth, the tapestry of stars is woven not only in height and width, but in depth a
nd time.
The light reaching my naked eyes on that lonely night had left some stars ten years earlier, other stars hundreds
of years earlier. Had I had my telescope with me—and I purchased a small one shortly after because I regretted wasting this opportunity—I could have seen stars and galaxies of stars so far away that they had sent forth their light thousands and tens of thousands of light-years earlier.
Thus, peering into the universe is akin to peering backward into time, and this marvel alone should have given me some sense of awe of what God has done in creating something from nothing, but the shutters of my soul at that time in my life were closed tight.
Then, as if the glittering light of millions of stars on a desert night wasn’t enough to nudge me toward him, God sent forth another marvel, no less wondrous than the stars above but far more rare.
Something in the early hours of the morning woke me from my sleep on that roadside picnic table fifty miles into the desert. I cannot say it was the cold, for I was not shivering. Nor was it a noise. But some instinct that alerted my body.
I struggled to my elbows and looked in all directions. When I saw what had wakened me, it took several confused moments to realize what I was seeing.
The moonlight threw silver across the coarse sand and cactus and mesquite. That silver seemed to roll across the ground, as if the sand had become a flowing live tapestry, twenty-five or thirty yards wide, just beyond the picnic table that was my bed.
I hardly dared breathe, afraid to give notice of my presence. For what I was seeing was a blanket of tarantulas, thousands upon thousands of them marching resolutely forward, surging onto the road ahead, then disappearing as my eyes lost them to shadows beyond the road.
Fully five minutes passed as this wide, heaving carpet of brown and silver streamed by me. Then they were gone, leaving me to wonder if I had imagined this vision.
In all that I have read since, I have found no explanation for this gathering of tarantulas or for the instinct that compelled them to march as one to a destination unknown to all but themselves.
I simply know that it happened, and I was there to witness it.
In a media-driven culture, it takes great effort to shake loose cynicism and view the world again with the wonder of a child. Those who do, however, will find themselves humbled and awed by all the mysteries of existence.
I sympathize with those who say it is preposterous to think that this world is moved by an invisible hand, that something or someone created it and exists beyond what we can sense. I, too, was once reluctant to accept that there might be more to life than what was visible to my eyes.
But is it a truly preposterous notion?
For without God, the universe is a place of despair.
Despair that I well knew that night in my room.
Despair that had been my companion since the summer of my tenth birthday.
For while I did not know where my mother had gone, I alone truly knew why she had abandoned me.
Chapter 10
The next morning in Charleston, again I decided to first check with the hostess of the bed-and-breakfast to see if anyone had left a message for me.
Although it was only 6:45 A.M., she appeared as immaculately primped as if she were ready for a dinner party. I, on the other hand, had one more day’s growth of beard and wore khakis and a navy blue golf shirt.
She watched me carefully as I made my way down the curve of the staircase, noting, I’m sure, my limp.
I asked for any messages.
With a beaming smile and a covert glance over my shoulder to confirm I was still alone, she handed me an envelope. As if she had been expecting me or my request.
I turned it over and glanced at it. It had my name on the outside, in the slant of feminine handwriting.
Finally, I thought, progress.
I stepped onto the piazza of the elegant house before opening the envelope, fully expecting another message from the person who had sent me the airline ticket.
The envelope was unsealed. I lifted the flap and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
Lunch. 12:30 p.m. At 82 Queen. It is about your mother.
That was the total message. Same handwriting as the outside of the envelope. Unsigned. On plain paper, in a plain white envelope.
I hurried inside. “Did you see who left this?” I asked.
Her eyes widened at the possibility of intrigue. “Oh, my heavens, I did not. It was on the table just inside the door.” Her eyebrows arched. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
“No,” I said. I remembered where I was. The venerated South. “No, thank you, ma’am.”
I walked out. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had read the note herself and was as curious as I was about who had left it for me.
**
April had brought the low country its usual blue skies, clear as if seen through polished glass, not yet hazed by wilting summer heat; with the sunshine came the familiar fragrance of magnolias from the hidden gardens of the ancient mansions. The beauty of the morning lifted my spirits some. Much as it might hurt my leg, I chose not to take a cab; few destinations were far in this cloistered southern end of the peninsula that made old Charleston.
I walked around the rocking chairs on the mansion porch, ducked beneath a hanging basket of ferns, and stepped down to the brick path on the trimmed lawn. I headed east half a block, staying within the shadows of the oaks of White Point Gardens, until a turn took me up Church Street.
During the summer of my fourteenth birthday, I would rise early each day and take this same route up Church, following it as it changed from the narrow cobblestone south of Broad to wider pavement as it neared Market, heading ten blocks north where the carriage houses drew tourist trade for horse-and-buggy rides.
At that hour, just after the sun had burned away any mist over the tidal rivers and the marsh flats, before the bustle of cars and the clatter of horse hooves, the wind had not had a chance to build, nor had the clouds of afternoon thunderstorms. In the almost magical peace among buildings two or three centuries old, on crooked cobblestone streets disturbed only by the warbling of songbirds flitting among the branches of the blossomed trees that overhung the sidewalks, I liked to imagine I was part of an earlier time, when the ships brought in slaves and took away bales of cotton, or when soldiers in gray darted from house to house, or when the women daintily picked their way across mud streets as they fanned themselves beneath parasols. I wanted to live in any other time but the time of my boyhood, before the Barrett name had become a burden of legacy generations old.
Other times during those walks of my fourteenth summer, I would imagine that I was seven or eight years old, before I had driven my mother away, and that all I had to do was reach out with my hand and she would smile and reach for my hand in return. I would be able to point at one old building leaning into another, and she would describe to me how each had survived any of Charleston’s varied tribulations—the War of Northern Aggression, the earthquake of 1886, the great hurricane of 1911, and the assorted fires of each—explaining the monstrous iron braces that workmen had used to straighten and tighten the buildings.
Those summers—before my mother had left me, when I had her to myself for a few precious hours each day—were so perfect I wasn’t sure I could trust my memory of a woman so pretty sometimes she would catch me staring at her long dark hair or her flawless features or the black eyes that shone with so much life. Before I had driven her away, we would wander the old streets, and the music in her voice would cradle me as she told stories about the people and the buildings. From her, I had absorbed not only Charleston’s history, but her fascination for the pirates and plantation managers and slaves and gunrunners and soldiers, seeing them through her eyes so clearly it was as if they walked the streets or sat on the piazzas of the old mansions as ghosts.
Of what little my mother had left me upon her departure, it was this gift—the knowledge and love of Charleston’s history—that I tr
aded upon during that summer. At Market Street, I would wait for the first tourists to spill out of the hotels and offer to guide them, walking them past the buildings on Church Street I knew so well, past the old Planter’s Hotel that was now a stage theater, past St. Philip’s Church with its wedding-cake spire, once saved from fire by a black boatman who called the alarm and was rewarded for it with a grant of freedom, past the pirate house where Blackbeard himself may have traded goods with the town’s gentry.
Most of the tourists I guided were older women—Yankee schoolteachers or bored wives of rich businessmen—perhaps charmed by the earnestness of a gangly boy in a pressed shirt and ironed pants.
In looking back, I wonder if what drew them was my sorrow and innocence and southern accent. For I’m certain I was not the best guide, yet when I finished the one- or two-hour walk with my customers, they unfailingly tipped me as much as I had charged them for the tour.
Except for the memories my walk up Church Street now brought me, that fourteen-year-old boy was a stranger to me. What little I shared with that boy—and only when I permitted myself the weakness—was the remnant of that sorrow, an undefined longing, like the nearly invisible current of a slow, deep river carrying the soul forward to an unknown destination.
Chapter 11
At 7:30 A.M., I walked into the office of Senator Geoffrey Alexander Gillon.
I expected the wheelchair. Senator Gillon had been in one as a high-profile public figure since my boyhood, and he shrewdly played the sympathy raised by it to his advantage during photo ops and political campaigns. What did surprise me was the size of the senator’s private law office overlooking Charleston Harbor on Vendue Range, something I immediately guessed that Gillon equally shrewdly underplayed, for he met constituents in a smaller, spartan office on King Street, paid for by state funds.
The Vendue Range street name had been given in honor of the Vendue masters who had brought Charleston its first boom of wealth through their auctioneering skills. As a young lawyer still scheming for senatorship, Gillon had purchased one of the wharf’s warehouses before Charleston’s heritage movement had made them fashionable, before conversion of the ancient brick shells into offices and homes and restaurants had dispelled the ghostly echoes of long-dead auctioneers and slaves with the tinkle of contrived laughter and replaced the forgotten dust of cotton bales and bags of plantation rice with the burnished wax of gleaming hardwood.
Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series) Page 7