The Wonder That Was Ours

by Alice Hatcher

  Those of us in Mary’s house watched him pass. Overcome by his volatility, we scurried along shelves and skittered around wooden crates. Mary calmed us by stroking our antennae and blowing gently on our wings. She left potato peels on her floor and watched us eat. She held us in her hands and rocked back and forth on her heels. At midnight, she stepped out into the moonlight and hummed. We clung to the folds of her skirt and let our antennae rest in the trough of a deep vibration Tremor couldn’t hear.

  MADNESS

  MARY’S HOUSE WAS OUR favorite place on St. Anne, a refuge from Professor Cleave’s recitations when we had no tolerance for cruise ships and they none for us. We much preferred the fruits of Mary’s garden to fondue and fondant, and her dirt floor to polished decks reeking of disinfectant. Mary never once menaced us with cigarettes, badminton racquets, or aerosol cans. She spoke kindly and cooed to us. She let us be ourselves. In her home, we wandered openly, uncensored and according to our wont. But it was the siren call of her voice that always drew us to Rocky Point.

  If Mary was out gathering stones or bits of shells when we arrived, we’d wait for her. We never felt as though we were trespassing, for she always left her door wide open in expectation of her husband’s return. Mad with longing, we’d nestle in her burlap sacks and examine her Mason jars and dusty crates. We’d trail our antennae along the contents of her baskets and makeshift shelves—broken necklaces and candle stubs, bits of frayed ribbon and a compass with a cracked glass face. We’d touch the things she’d touched and take in her scent. She was, in life, our beloved saint, long before others claimed her for their own purposes; she remained so in death, after she faded from almost everyone else’s memories.

  When Mary returned, we’d gather within the pale of her lantern’s glow and gaze upon her. She’d rub dirt from potatoes unearthed behind her house and mesmerize us with the movements of her rough fingers over their golden skin. She’d cook dinner in a skillet, place some portion in her garden, and leave something for us on the floor. After dinner, she’d sit in her wooden chair and examine everything she’d gathered from the beach. She’d rub stones between her palms and bundle together twigs and feathers. She’d wet shards of clouded sea glass with her spittle and hold them to the light to study different colors fading behind salty patinas. She’d string shell fragments on old fishing lines and hang them beside her door. We followed her every gesture. She could have done anything and kept us watching and waiting, desperately pining.

  Toward the end of the night, she’d rise from her chair and rock back and forth on her heels and clutch the loose folds of her skirt. Then she’d smile, and we’d sense the first vibrations, the low hum that filled our minds with madness. She’d let strange syllables spill forth, and then without warning, hold back and draw us, straining, to the very edge of her shelves and our sanity, our antennae tingling and aching in intolerable anticipation. Finally, mercifully, she’d take us in her hands and bear us outside, hold us up to the moon and then close to her face. She’d stroke our quivering wings with her rough fingers and blow on the tips of our antennae until we lay exhausted, spent in the palms of her hands, in a state of unrivaled bliss.

  She had us trained like circus fleas. We were the willing channels of her love. Most people ascribed her behavior to insanity, though that’s hardly of interest to us now. It didn’t keep us from her then. To live, as she did, in the presence of death and to continue loving is certainly a form of madness. Perhaps that’s why Professor Cleave never spoke of love. To love is to surrender oneself to madness. Mary chose madness. She hoped, against all reason, for the return of love.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MARY HOPED AGAINST ALL odds—and what lousy odds they were in Rocky Point, where ongoing scarcity had engendered a certain meanness of spirit. At times even we fell prey to insecurity and strayed from Mary’s house to root around in washed-up garbage, mindlessly consuming more than we needed simply because we could. Transfixed by the trash on Rocky Point’s beach, we wandered with downcast antennae, oblivious to radio transmissions and matters loftier than our search for new and improved varieties of filth.

  Tremor could hardly be accused of ignorance when it came to long odds, yet he awoke the next morning feeling convinced he’d finally found home. He squinted into the sunlight piercing a broken shutter and considered a glass standing on a plank shelf and two rusted pans hanging from hooks, finding comfort in the solidity of familiar things. Then he saw the single plate and chipped cup on the table, a spare setting for a man without a wife, and without a son. In tentative steps, he crossed the room to a mattress bearing the impress of his father’s body. A creased photograph of his mother hung from a piece of tape curling from the wall. He knelt down and trailed his fingertips over his mother’s face, absorbed the quiet of the house, and for the first time grasped the enormity of his father’s solitude. He rose to his feet, quickly gathered a soccer jersey from the floor, and stepped outside. He shielded his eyes and counted a dozen men dragging nets from small boats onto the pier. Then he started toward the water, drawn by his father’s voice.

  Halfway across the beach, he paused before a patch of soft brown mud. All around, gulls were shrieking and pulling trash through the split seams of orange garbage bags. Amidst unrivaled excess, they pecked and batted us each time we approached. While they snatched bits of withered lettuce from one another (Black Friday, indeed!), we watched and waited, hoping to sample what remained after their violent frenzy. We’d feel worse saying that if we hadn’t been so unnerved by news of the Celeste, and so grasping on account of our fear. Still, that hardly changes the fact that we abandoned Mary that morning to forage for dregs, thwarted less by conscience than sharp bills and the menace of massive wings.

  Like all of us, Tremor found himself distracted by the gulls and a rising din at the end of the beach. He rubbed his temple and squinted into the sun’s glare. Surrounded by a flock of gulls, Mary was standing beside a piece of driftwood, howling and carving lines in the sand with a crooked stick. A short distance from her, a small group of children had formed a loose circle around her. The children limped and staggered in a ragged line and beat the sand with palm fronds in crude imitations of Mary’s movements. Sickened, Tremor turned away. Only the men pulling nets onto Rocky Point’s crumbling pier seemed indifferent to the unholy noise at the far end of the beach. Their banter ceased, though, when Tremor stepped onto the pier and made his way to a single-engine boat with a badly splintered gunnel. His father stood above the boat, looping a rope around his upper arm and hooked thumb.

  “Early for you.” He glanced at Tremor.

  Tremor studied his father’s face, lined by wind and salt spray, and the muscles along his father’s wiry arms.

  His father nodded at a pile of nets. “If you remember how I taught you.”

  Tremor lifted a net and pulled its edge taut. Without a word, his father set down the rope and drew a second net from the heap. Slowly, Tremor mirrored the movements of his father’s practiced hands, disentangling knotted cords and stopping every few seconds to pick scales and bits of seaweed from frayed lattice. As the steady rhythms of work resumed, conversation settled on worn topics, stale gossip and the morning’s dispiriting business.

  “Everyone’s afraid fish have the American disease.”

  “Messing with that woman, you look like you got the American disease.”

  Tremor listened to grim speculations and salving jokes and avoided his father’s gaze by looking down at the water lapping against the pier. Dizzied by shimmering oil slicks and the rocking of his father’s boat, he turned to the horizon to steady himself, only to become disoriented by the enormity of the sky. He backed away from the edge of the pier, into a puddle tinged by the innards of gutted fish.

  “You’ll ruin those town shoes,” one of his father’s friends said.

  Trevor pressed his forearm against his lips.

  “You want a job on a boat, you can have mine,” the man continued, carried by a ripple of laught
er. “Make lots of money. Wear clothes like the big man, Little Butts. Get greased with more than fish oil.”

  “Let him be,” Tremor’s father said.

  Tremor tried to adjust the net in his hands, and his fingers grew tangled in its loose weave. He struggled to find symmetry in its grimy folds, overwhelmed by incongruous angles and the smell of discarded bait, and distracted by the sound of John Bowden sharpening a knife at the end of the pier with the same dead expression he’d worn years before, carrying the weight of ankle chains and shoveling sand into the wind.

  The sound of metal scraping stone filled our antennae with dread, even though John Bowden had never threatened us. He’d never bothered anyone in Rocky Point, for that matter. He’d said little to anyone since he returned from prison, walking unsteadily but walking nonetheless, confirming Mary’s belief in resurrection. Over the years, his clothes disintegrated, growing seamless as sleeves fell away and hems turned to filthy fringe. He spent his days alone in his boat, chasing away waking nightmares with cane liquor and reminding everyone in Rocky Point of the future awaiting any expendable member of society—any patsy or scapegoat (any cockroach!) who strays too close to respectable establishments.

  Too young to remember John Bowden’s return from prison, Tremor simply envied the awe John Bowden inspired. He listened to the sound of scraping metal and imagined himself rising from repeated beatings, an outlaw hero able to silence children with a glance. When he sensed John Bowden’s eyes upon him, he looked involuntarily at Crazy Mary crossing herself and spitting on sand, praying and cursing with equal fervor. He turned away from Crazy Mary to find his father looking at the tangled net dangling from his fingers.

  “Give me that, boy.” His father stripped the net from his hands. “Be quicker without you.”

  Overcome by the stench and the sun and John Bowden’s unbending stare, Tremor stumbled from the pier, tormented by the sound of children howling in a collective echo of Crazy Mary. He dragged his hand across his mouth and looked to the end of the beach, helplessly drawn to the spectacle of Mary kicking sand at the gulls encroaching upon the driftwood. In loose and shifting formations, the children mirrored the birds’ movements, advancing upon Mary, scattering each time she faced them, and then regrouping. Tremor pressed his fingers to his temples and started to turn away when several children broke through the flock, only to fall back screaming about a dead body.

  One by one, adults made their way to the beach and saw in place of driftwood a man’s twisted form. They raced along the shore, toward their children, toward Crazy Mary. Tremor followed.

  At the edge of a small crowd, Tremor watched parents gather children into the folds of their clothing and cover tiny noses to ward off the effusions of a bloated body laced with seaweed and covered in flies. He glanced at a pale hand half-buried in sand and pressed his lips together. As he wiped a trickle of sweat from his face, a small girl strayed toward the body. Her mother lunged forward and grabbed the girl’s arm, yanking with such force that everyone heard or imagined the snap of a growing bone. The mother pressed the girl to her chest, as if to will away her child’s pain, and Tremor shuddered.

  He saw Mary, then, clutching her stick and drawing away from the body. He averted his eyes and gazed at a tangle of muddy blond hair and a swollen leg covered in bruises. Sickness welled in his stomach. He was taking a step backward when John Bowden brushed past him, edged through the crowd, and kicked a gull pecking the eyes of a dead fish beside the body. As the gull limped away, John Bowden glanced at the girl shivering in her mother’s embrace. The girl might have been in shock, for the pale imprint of her mother’s fingers hadn’t faded from her disjointed arm. When two more gulls wobbled toward the dead fish, John Bowden started walking back toward the pier.

  Moments later, he reappeared with a rusted gas can hanging from his fingers. He made his way to the center of the crowd and drew a small cardboard box from his pocket. Screeching gulls scattered in every direction as he doused the body and tossed a lit match. In a blinding instant, a sheet of flame rose in the air, folded inward and enveloped the body in a skein of blue light.

  Mary screamed. Tremor staggered backward, wiping tears from his eyes as strips of glowing fabric spiraled upward, carried by the heat of their own burning, blackened and then drifted down as ash. Without a word, John Bowden collected the gas can, walked back to the pier, and lowered himself into his boat. He spent the rest of the afternoon staring at the horizon, smoking cigarettes and drinking from an unlabeled bottle.

  Almost everyone who watched John Bowden burn the body felt, in turns, unspeakable gratitude and rising dread. From a safe distance, Tremor fell madly in love with the idea of John Bowden. We drew our antennae beneath our wings and trembled.

  No one called the police. All but three people in Rocky Point hid themselves behind closed doors and broken shutters, bemoaned the misery visited upon their village and prayed the next tide would carry it from their shores. Mary, alone, remained near the body. Tremor and his latest girlfriend sat in the weeds above the beach, watching her trace signs in the sand at the water’s edge.

  “Crazy Mary’s crazy as ever today.” Tremor’s girlfriend drew her knees to her chest. “Gonna get herself sick.”

  “Can’t catch nothing. John Bowden burned it away.”

  “John Bowden’s crazy as Crazy Mary.”

  “Better to get rid of it. Burn every last one that makes it to shore.” Tremor snapped a twig between his fingers. “If I had a can, you’d have seen me do it.”

  Mary crouched beside the water. With tiny waves lapping at her ankles, she collected broken shells and examined each one before casting it back into the sea or dropping it into her lap. Using a fold of her skirt as a strained sack, she finally made her way back to Rocky Point.

  “Take a photo,” Tremor said.

  “Take it yourself.”

  “Don’t want just the body.” Tremor wrapped his hand around his girlfriend’s wrist, pulled her from the weeds and pressed his phone into her hand. “I want to be standing next to it.”

  He edged toward the body until he was looking down at patches of blistered tissue around two empty eye sockets. A wave of nausea passed through him, and he turned to the pier, where John Bowden sat in his boat. Then he turned his back on Rocky Point. His girlfriend squinted at his phone and struggled to steady her hands.

  “Get it all.” Tremor cocked his head and lifted two unsteady fingers in the air.

  His girlfriend took a picture and staggered back into the weeds, holding a hand over her mouth. When he caught up with her, Tremor grabbed the phone and ran his fingers over his own image. He sent the image to EZ, pulled his girlfriend to the ground, and placed his hand on her trembling thigh.

  Within an hour, the image had traveled across St. Anne, passed through sweaty hands in barbershops, bars, and bakeries, and beneath disbelieving eyes in small mountain villages and towns along the ring road. It finally reached St. Anne’s police chief, who squinted at the charred body and the jagged outcropping of rock behind it. By that time, the image had returned to Rocky Point and ignited fearful conversations among those who knew better than to celebrate their own notoriety, and among all of us, who hid in the scrub or sought refuge in Mary’s house. Unlike Tremor, we’d seen it all before.

  When Tremor went home, he found the windows shuttered and his father sitting at the table, running his fingers along the edge of a worn leather belt. Without speaking, his father rose to his feet and brought the belt’s buckle down on Tremor’s shoulder. Tremor fell to the floor and pressed his hands to his face. On elbows and knees, he crawled to a corner and shrank from the blows falling on his back and shoulders. When he began to shake, his father spat on the floor.

  “Go away.” His father dropped the belt. “You’ve caused too much trouble here.”

  Tremor remained on his knees, holding one unsteady hand in the other and seeking words to explain himself until his father’s silence drove him from the house. At the edge of R
ocky Point, he sat down on the edge of a dry streambed. He traced his welts with his fingertips and struck the side of his head with his palm. His thoughts raced, and in his panic, he heard movements in the branches above him. He looked up at a tree riddled with holes and felt termites boring through his skin, slapped his arms and realized that his brain had again betrayed him, and that he could no longer rely on anyone, including himself.

  He’d been sitting in the dirt for an hour when he heard the sound of strained engines. He flattened himself in the streambed and watched two police SUVs moving down the path from the bypass, snapping overhanging branches and crushing saplings. After they passed, he crawled through underbrush to a pile of overgrown concrete blocks on a hill above Rocky Point. When the SUVs parked before his father’s house, he collapsed on a bed of nettles. Twenty minutes later, four policemen emerged from the house and made their way to the beach. Tremor waited in vain for a sign of movement inside his father’s house, for the parting of shutters or the closing of the door. Then he clawed at the dirt and wept.

  A moment later, he lifted his face from the ground. The scales of a familiar song were moving through the trees. Mary had returned to the beach. She was beating shredded garbage bags with a stick and cursing six policemen heading toward the pier. She dropped her stick as they passed and followed them at a distance, falling back each time they turned around to face her, and quickening as they neared John Bowden, still smoking beside the empty gas can. While they pulled John Bowden from his boat and cuffed his wrists, she waited at the base of the pier, violently scratching her arms. Then she followed them through Rocky Point, wailing and cursing and stumbling over loose asphalt as she drew her sandals from her feet. She slapped the soles of her shoes together, shattering the air with each crack. One by one, women appeared on stoops to watch John Bowden walking unsteadily, but walking nonetheless, between two policemen. When the policemen pushed John Bowden into an SUV, Mary lunged at the strangers who’d trespassed on the ground near the body, the site of her most recent heartbreak, and stolen John Bowden, her proof of resurrection.