After an outdoor buffet presided over by a white-clad chef in the only real chef’s hat I had ever seen and served by pretty aproned maids, Big Jim herded the men of the committee away into the house “to tackle the business. You ladies just sit around the pool and look like water lilies.”
“Back as soon as possible,” Aengus whispered to me on his way inside.
“Don’t hurry.” I grinned. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
It was not an unpleasant evening. The pool looked lovely with its lights on and its little waterfall splashing over rocks, and the sweet night wind brought the surrounding garden to us. Most of the women were agreeable enough; some I hoped I would get to know better. We talked of what women always do when they are tighter in groups: children. Almost everyone had them. Almost everyone was lamenting about some rocky rite of passage or other. Precious Mabry smiled around and said, “I just don’t know what it is, but we’ve never had a minute’s trouble with ours. Nobody in Riverwood seems to. You’d think they’d be tempted to get into mischief now and then; most of us… them… have enough spending money to do it right. But they’re angels, all of them.”
Something flickered in my mind, something about the children of Riverwood. Carol Partridge. I could hear Carol’s voice saying, somewhere and sometime, “Little zombies is what I think.” I was surprised. I would have thought that children on this side of the river, especially Big Jim Mabry’s children, would be plentifully spoiled.
Pretty soon the men came out to the pool to join us. Every one of them had that end-of-the-party-let’s-get-out-of-here look on his face. Some of the women rose to join them, but Big Jim held up his hand.
“I just heard Aengus O’Neill here tell one of his Irish story things, and I want the kids to hear some of them. Makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, he does. Precious, go round up those kids out of the basement and get ‘em out here.”
Aengus started to demur, but Big Jim overran him.
“They been down there all night practicing with their band. I want ‘em to hear what real entertainment is.”
Everyone clapped politely and sat back down. Aengus muttered something under his breath. Precious scuttled away to summon the boys.
Presently she came back with eight boys behind her. I stared. For a brief moment I thought they were octuplets. They all seemed to be about the same age, twelve or thirteen. All of them wore clean, pressed khakis and neat tee shirts, and all had clean, shining, carefully combed hair. At close range they did not look at all similar, but in the aggregate they were so alike as to be almost eerie. They nodded and smiled and spoke to everyone. Nobody shuffled or twiddled his fingers or twisted his baseball cap. Nobody wore a baseball cap. They resembled no teenage boys I had ever met.
“I didn’t hear a peep out of your band,” I said to Big Jim’s son Jamie, who did not look as if he shared a single gene with either his father or his mother.
“We try to keep it down,” Jamie said, smiling. “And it’s not a rock band. Actually we’re doing chamber music. We’re not very good yet.”
“You’d be surprised at how good they are.” Big Jim beamed. “They even got me to a concert at Symphony Hall last winter.”
The boys sat down on the rocks fringing the pool and looked expectantly at Aengus.
“You guys don’t have to do this,” he said. “Go on back to your music; nobody ought to have to listen to this stuff on a summer night….”
“No, sir,” one of them, a boy named Toby, said. “We all want to hear it. We studied the Celts a little last year in history; I even named my dog Cuchulain.”
“Did ye now,” Aengus said, laying the brogue on like frosting. The boys all laughed.
“Then I will give you,” Aengus said, “the stories of Chulainn, Cet Mac Magach, and Conor Mac Nessa, lads all who were up to no good as mere boys but who yet brought honor and greatness to Ireland.”
His voice slid, almost unconsciously, into the cadence I had come to think of as his fireside rhythm: It evoked fire; it lit fires; it called down fire from heaven. The boys fell silent; none of them moved. Aengus’s voice rose and dipped and sang; his hands wove pictures in the air; his blue eyes followed the movings of long-dead yet living men.
When he finished, the boys rose as one and applauded long and loud. Aengus smiled. Big Jim nodded and beamed.
The boys sat down again and leaned in close to Aengus.
“Are there books about them that I could read?” one of them said.
“Can you tell us some more another night, maybe?”
“I have lots of books about the Celts; I’d be glad to share,” Aengus said. “The library will have many more. And I’d be delighted to come and tell you more sometime.”
I simply looked at him.
“I never saw such… adult young men, for their age. They’re extraordinary,” I said to Big Jim.
“They’re good kids,” he said. “All neighborhood kids. But you should have seen them when they were younger. Hellions. We thought we’d be getting them out of jail by now.”
“Wow. What on earth happened?”
“Camp happened,” Big Jim said. “Maybe you’ve heard we’ve got this little old camp up on Burnt Mountain, to the north there.”
My head began to spin. Burnt Mountain. A camp on Burnt Mountain. A camp from which my father had never returned…
“Real old-fashioned camp this one is, none of this feel-good-about-yourself crap. Just swimming and boating and field games and lots of contests. Hiking. Tracking. Woodcraft. You know. Good counselors. Good headman, does everything. Even drives the bus.”
“I’ve heard the bus,” Aengus said, “and the kids singing.”
“Right. The damned Cannibal King. Know it by heart, I do. The head taught them that. Old Nog Tierney.”
Aengus raised his head and looked at Big Jim.
“Nog Tierney? An Irishman, then.”
“Don’t know about that. Didn’t look Irish. Looked like an ol’ Georgia upcountry redneck. Kind of hookwormy.”
“Tir Na Nog. An old Celtic land where you’re supposed to live forever. Pretty obscure. I don’t think anybody but an Irishman would know it.”
“Well, that’s interesting. The camp is named Camp Forever. We got the land from the old man about thirty years ago, and he gave it to us free on the condition that we name it Camp Forever. Beautiful land, wild and unspoiled, goes on forever on the back side of old Burnt, where nobody else is. Got a big spring-fed lake. Matter of fact, I guess I’m responsible for it. I was up there about thirty years ago hunting, just me and the dog, and ran into this guy. He told me it was his land, and I said I hadn’t meant to trespass, that it was beautiful land. One thing led to another, and I told him I lived here in this new community, lots of young families and children, and he said, ‘Make a good camp, wouldn’t it?’
“And that’s how we ended up with Camp Forever. I kept thinking that eventually he’d want some money for it, but all he ever asked was to drive the bus and hang out with the boys. Finally I made him take fifty thousand dollars and sign a regular contract. Free land just made me nervous. So I guess I own it now, but there’s no question of who ran it. He was a rough old guy, but you’d be surprised at what all he knew. More than an old dirt farmer, that’s for sure. All this stuff about the old days and the old times. I kidded him some about going to college. Swore he never did. The kids flat loved him. And when they’d get back from camp, they were different kids. Nobody ever had a scrap more trouble with them. When he got too old his son took over. He’s who we’ve got now, and just like his dad he is. Even named Nog. I couldn’t have told one from the other if this one hadn’t been a sight younger. Kids are crazy about him, too.”
“So this Nog number two is the camp head now?” Aengus said.
“I guess you’d have to call him that,” Big Jim said. “We’ve got a bunch of good counselors; kids fight to get on at the camp. And we’ve got a director, or that’s his title, anyway. Been t
here several years, but I don’t think I’m going to keep him on. He can’t get along with Nog, though I never met anybody else that couldn’t, and keeps running to me complaining about him. Says he’s too ‘free with the boys,’ whatever the hell that means. I’ve stayed up there a week or so at a time and I never noticed him being what you’d call free with them. He just knows so much about the place, and he tells them all these stories about the land and the old folks that used to live on it. The kids love it. There’s just something about him that—I don’t know—reaches out to you. Always interested in what you’ve got to say, laughs and jokes like a kid himself sometimes. But he’s got plenty of sense, just like his daddy did. I guess you’d just have to know him to see what I mean.”
“I’d like to know him,” Aengus said. “I’d like to see that camp.”
Again, I stared at him in the silence.
“Love to have you,” Big Jim said. “Maybe come up now and then and tell some more of those stories. Be a real hit around a campfire. We could put you up. We’ve got good dormitories. Want to give it a try, say this weekend?”
“Yes,” Aengus said, shimmering.
We rode almost all the way home in silence. Then I said, “Aengus, are you out of your mind? You know nobody we know hangs around with that Riverwood crowd.”
“Tir Na Nog,” he said slowly. “The Land of Forever Young. Awfully obscure myth for an old Georgia mountaineer to know. I’d just like to see what’s going on up there.”
“You’ll be sorry,” I said, smiling in the dark.
I’ve never forgotten that.
CHAPTER 15
On Friday morning after our dinner with Big Jim Mabry, I woke soon after 6:00 a.m., my hair drenched with sweat, my nightgown twisted around me, the damp sheets nasty on my bare flesh. Hot. My God, it was hot. We had not used the air-conditioning system; it had been a cool spring and there was almost always a little night wind off the river. But as if a great internal engine had simply stopped somewhere in the earth, everything had stilled and the monstrous heat had slid in ghostlike.
Beside me, Aengus slept on, immovable and serene, as he always did. No air stirred on my nakedness; there was an overhead fan, but we had not used that, either. I had only to get up and turn the wall switch on and we would have moving air, but somehow I could not make my limbs move; I felt as if something vital had bled out of them and into the heat.
It isn’t supposed to be really hot near water, I thought crossly, feeling betrayed by the river. I lay thinking about this. My father had always said it when my mother complained about the heat in Lytton. And we had had vicious summer heat there; I remembered that we had, but somehow I could not seem to feel that long-ago heat now. I had never really felt it. I know my father didn’t, either.
“You two were born without sweat glands, I swear,” Mother said petulantly. “It’s not natural.”
I could remember no really hot days at Sewanee, either. The Mountain and the Steep undoubtedly had something to do with that. And camp? My mind slid slowly, reluctantly, back to the summers at Camp Sherwood Forest. I did not want to go there, had not for years gone there, but I was too listless to pull my mind back. There had been water there, of course, the lake, and I remembered the cold of it, and the clean, fishy smell, and even the sun-scorched planks of the dock under my back and legs…. Nick. Oh, God, Nick. Had I ever seen sweat running down his face? I could not remember sweat, only the face…. And after, in the top bunk… No, there had been no sweat.
I got out of bed and pulled on shorts and a tee shirt and went, barefoot, down the driveway to the mailbox on the street. I would read the paper and have my coffee on the veranda, and perhaps by that time a breeze would have sprung up. I really did not want the air-conditioning. I hated the feel of a closed house in summer.
I had just pulled the newspaper out of the mailbox when I heard the grinding and shifting of gears and the surly growl of a big engine starting up our hill from the river. I stood still and watched. I thought I knew what it would be, and it was: the bus that took the little Woodies to camp. It was a regulation bus size and either new or freshly painted; its white enamel gleamed in the hazy sun. Camp Forever was written in dark blue script on its side. It was the most tasteful bus imaginable, I thought sourly.
As it drew alongside me I heard the children singing, “The Cannibal King with the big nose ring fell in love with a dusky maid….” Lord, didn’t they know any other camp songs? What was wrong with “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” for instance? Only it would have to be lemonade, I guessed. Or, of course, Co’-Cola.
As if cued, the children all looked at me as the bus lumbered past, but none waved except the bus driver. He turned his face to me and smiled and held up a forefinger, as country people often do by way of greeting. He had a pleasant, snubbed face, red and peeling from sun, and a thatch of ginger hair showed under his Camp Forever cap, which was turned around bill backward. I lifted my hand in return, and he went back to his driving and to singing lustily, “And every night in the pale moonlight across the lake he’d wade….” They ground out of sight up the hill toward the expressway, but, ” ‘Aye-oomph! Aye-oomph! Aye-oomph-tiddy-i-dee-aye-ay!’ ” floated back to my ears as if reluctant to let go of me.
When I got back to the house Aengus was in the kitchen making coffee.
“Hot enough for you? As I don’t believe I have ever said to you, have I?”
“No, you haven’t, and yes, it is,” I said. “It’s really awful. I don’t remember heat like this before.”
“And you born and bred in Georgia?” he said, handing me a cup of coffee. “Turn on the air-conditioning, for God’s sake. Or go jump in the river.”
“I don’t want to do either one,” I said childishly, and then laughed. “What I really want to do is sit here and whine.”
“Well, whine away, my dear. But I’m turning on the air when I get home and no arguments. We could maybe go out to dinner.”
“I don’t want to do that, either. Oh, I saw your camp bus when I went out to get the paper. Mighty fancy for a kids’ camp.”
“Consider whose kids,” Aengus said. “Did you see the driver? Big Jim said he was new.”
“Yeah. He looked about thirteen and was singing ‘The Cannibal King’ along with the rest of them. Somebody ought to teach those kids some other camp songs.”
“Maybe I’ll do that when I go up tomorrow night,” he said. “Really nasty ones, like ‘Roll Your Leg Over.’ “
I remembered then that he was going up to Camp Forever at Big Jim’s behest to tell Celtic tales to the Riverwood young. For some reason this made me crosser even than the heat.
“If you can sit around a fire in this you’re a better man than I thought,” I grumped.
“I thought you thought I was already a great man.”
“I do. Don’t listen to me. I guess I got up on the wrong side of the bed.”
“There’s no wrong side of a bed with you in it, babe,” he said. He kissed me on the cheek. “Gotta go shave. Just some cantaloupe would be great for breakfast.”
“I don’t have any,” I said with satisfaction, but he had gone into the bathroom and could not hear me.
I fiddled restlessly with answering letters and making a shopping list, then took a cool shower and pulled my heavy roan hair back in a ponytail and felt better.
Just after lunch Carol Partridge called.
“Thayer? Listen, could you possibly take Bummer for a while this afternoon?” she said. Her voice was not her own; it was tight and cracked.
“Of course I can,” I said. “Is anything the matter?”
“No… yes. Ben and Chris are in Juvie; the police just called. I’ve got to go get them out, and I don’t want to take Bummer down there.”
“Oh, Carol, what happened?”
“The little bastards and their cronies went into that ratty little grocery place next to the theater up in the multiplex and pointed water guns at that crazy old fool who runs it and ran out wi
th three huge boxes of fudgesicles. And when the old guy ran after him they shot him! With water pistols! Of course he called the police before they even got out the door, and he knows most of them, and at first he was going to press charges. Oh, God, their father is going to sue me for custody; I know he is. Anyway, if you could just oversee Bummer, this shouldn’t take me long. I just have to pay their fines and spring them.”
“Send him on. It’ll be a joy. And come by when you get back, if you can. I’ll give you a drink.”
It was scarcely fifteen minutes before Bummer came trailing through the hedge to the veranda, dragging a kite behind him and licking an ice-cream bar.
“Hey, Thayer. Miz O’Neill,” he said. “I was going to fly this kite, but Mother says there’s not enough wind. Did you know my brothers are in the juvie? They stole a bunch of fudgesicles. This isn’t one of them,” he said matter-of-factly, looking down at his melting bar. “This is vanilla. Theirs were chocolate. I don’t know what happened to them.”
I hugged him, wincing at the sound of “juvie” coming so easily out of his ice cream-smeared mouth.
“I heard,” I said. “I’m sorry. Maybe this will calm them all down a little.”
“Fat chance,” he said. “Would you like to go over to my house and go swimming?”
The thought of the broiling sun on the pool apron and Bummer’s inevitable shouts of “Marco Polo!” roiled in my stomach.
“I don’t think so, thanks,” I said. “But you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to go to the theater up at the multiplex. I think Harry Potter’s on.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “That’d be cool. I’ve seen them all, but I’d like to see them again. Is it the one where their teacher turns into a werewolf, or the one where all those brains come floating at them?”
“We’ll soon see,” I said. “Me, I vote for the brains.”
“Well, the werewolf was pretty cool, too. They had to fire him because of it, but he was really a good guy.”
“I guess some werewolves are,” I said, and we went up to the multiplex and dove deep into the chilled air and the utter enchantment of the boy wizard and his friends and their sorceried world. At some point I thought, This would be the way to live. Where nothing that happened really surprised you, because it was all magic anyhow. And even if it was bad, a brave kid with round black glasses could come and fix things.
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