Islands

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “You can talk about anything else under the sun, but he’s obviously not ready for that. Let him set the pace.”

  We all got to the creek about the same time the next Friday, at sunset, and Henry uncoiled himself from Camilla’s porch swing and came loping down the steps to meet us.

  “Well, if it’s not the estimable Scrubs of Charleston, South Carolina, and Booter’s Creek,” he drawled, grinning hugely, and we all hugged and cried a little, and pounded him on the back and Lila and I kissed him. He smelled like sun and freshly ironed cotton, and, faintly, of salt and pluff mud, and his face and arms and legs were lightly tanned under a coating of new sunburn. His silvery hair was neat again, if still a little longish; somebody, Camilla, no doubt, had trimmed it. He wore crisp khaki shorts and a blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms, and if you did not look too long into his eyes, he was fully and truly Henry again.

  “You look good, man,” Lewis said, clearing his throat. “You really do. And my God, Gladys! Look at you! We ought to enter you in the Miss Charleston contest.”

  Gladys, capering with manic glee beside Henry and barking up at us, shone as if she had spent a day at an exclusive spa, and wore around her neck a beautiful brown and black and white cotton scarf tied like a bandanna.

  “I swore I’d never do that to a dog,” Henry said, “but I brought it back from Mexico for Nancy, and it was just the color Gladys is, so I gave it to her instead. Looks a million times better on Gladys. Really brings out the cheerleader in her, doesn’t it? Bath didn’t hurt, either.”

  In a way, that first conversation set the tone for the rest of the summer. We found that, after an initial awkwardness, we could talk almost naturally among ourselves and around Henry without mentioning Fairlie or the fire. Henry helped by saying, that first night at dinner, “I know you all want to know, and I want to tell you. But not yet. I’ve got way too much to sort out. And you’ll understand that there are things I just can’t talk about, and maybe never will.”

  We nodded, looking at him in the light of Camilla’s tall white tapers. But we did not know, not really. Only Camilla knows, I thought, looking at her. She was smiling and nodding her head very slightly. When he’s ready, she’ll be there, I thought, and was comforted. Camilla would understand a great deal without Henry’s having to say it. But Fairlie and the fire and the years at the beach house were always with him, we knew, and always with us.

  For the rest of the summer, Henry stayed in the guest house, and Camilla stayed in her house. We came on weekends. It was not dissimilar to the way things had been at the beach house, except now, of course, Henry lived on the creek. Or did for the time being, anyway. He made no effort to look for a place in Charleston, and said nothing about continuing his practice, or flying with his doctors’ group. I wasn’t sure what he did with his weekdays; Camilla said he was out on the water a great deal, usually with Gladys, and spent a lot of time walking the fields and woods bordering the marsh. She thought that the days of solitude were when he wrestled with his demons; his eyes were often red when he came in for supper, as he always did. But at the meal, he was easy and soft-spoken, as he had always been, and often talked long to her over coffee, in the candlelight. But never of Fairlie. And never of the fire.

  “He’ll get around to it,” she said tranquilly. “I think he’s a lot nearer to it now.”

  He went to bed early and read late into the night, or at least Camilla thought that he did. Piles and piles of books lay about the living room when she went in to straighten up and take him his clothes and food. And his bedroom light burned late. She did not know where the books came from.

  “Camilla, you’ve turned into Henry’s maid and cook,” Lila said early in September. “He ought to kick in, or help you find somebody to do for you.”

  “He helps me more than anyone knows,” she said, smiling. “Including him.”

  On weekends he was agreeable and funny and as sweet tempered as ever, and often came with us when we sailed or swam. But never with just one of us. Henry that early autumn was everyone’s friend and no one’s confidant. If Lewis, with whom he had always been closest, missed the lazy, bone-deep bond that the years had forged between them, he did not say so. I thought that he was simply glad to have Henry back, on any terms, as was I. In those muted bronze days of September, when the monarch butterflies came drifting in from the north and settled in shivering clumps on the trees and shrubs, and the great autumn writing spiders wove their fables in the early mornings, Henry was alone only with Gladys and Camilla.

  Often, on those mornings, I would get up early and they would be sitting around the pool, dripping and bundled in towels, talking quietly. In the late afternoons, before we all gathered for drinks, Camilla and Henry and Gladys all stretched themselves in the lowering sun on Camilla’s front porch. Talking, talking. Once I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and looked out the kitchen window, and saw Camilla letting herself quietly out of Henry’s front door, and starting down the path to her house. I did not speak of it, except to say to Lewis once, “Wouldn’t it be something if they got together? They both know what this pain is like. They might be a great comfort to each other. And they’ve been together so long….”

  Lewis looked at me oddly.

  “Too much history,” he said. “Way too much.”

  And as the slow days burned toward October, Henry seemed to me to have achieved a fragile peace that I thought might be the beginning of healing. Camilla has done this for him, I thought. He’s finally talked it out to her. It was just the right thing to do. Even if the rest of us never heard the particulars of Henry’s terrible odyssey, the one who could truly help him had.

  Bless her, I thought. Without her he could have simply died of the infection of grief.

  In late September there came a day so blue and bronze and heavy with the smell of ripening wild muscadines that I awoke with autumn literally itching under my skin. It was a Saturday morning, and Lewis had stayed at Sweetgrass to talk to an agricultural agent about his longleaf pines. I knew that the day was an anomaly; the thick heat and buzzing insects would come back with a vengeance. In the Low Country, cool weather often does not come until Thanksgiving. This day was a token, a promise to wilting souls.

  It was still early when I took my bagel and marmalade out onto our porch. The sky was a brilliant cobalt vault overhead, but wisps of icy white mist clung to the shoreline of the creek. Tags of it drifted among the still-green grasses. Sound, muted and thick all summer, had a ringing new clarity; I could hear someone’s boat engine far down the creek as clearly as if it had been at the end of our dock, and the thumping helicopter sound of a rising flock of wood storks far across the water was crisp and clear. I stretched luxuriously, and started to amble, barefoot, down to the dock, simply to wrap myself totally in the morning.

  Behind me there was a soft, mechanical whining, and I turned. Henry and Gladys were bumping down the path to the dock in the golf cart. Henry raised his hand and smiled and Gladys wagged her whole back end.

  “Is this a day, or what?” I said.

  “This is a day,” Henry said. “Gladys woke me up begging to go out in the Whaler, so I thought I’d indulge her.”

  “She’s a good sailor,” I said, rubbing the thin hair on the top of Gladys’s domed head.

  “Has she been in the Whaler much?” he said.

  “I used to take her a lot. It’s better for her than the rowboat, because she can see out.”

  “Well,” Henry said, getting out of the cart and lifting Gladys down, “I’m glad it isn’t her maiden voyage.” They started down the dock, the tall, thin man and the limping old dog. Henry did not ask me to go with them. I was obscurely hurt; I don’t know why.

  I settled onto the bench seat in the pavilion and watched as Henry jumped down into the Boston Whaler. He reached up for Gladys, but she pulled back, turning her head from him to me and back again. You could read the confusion on her face. Finally she si
mply sat down.

  Henry began to laugh.

  “She’s not about to get into this boat without you,” he said. “Come on, hop in. I won’t keep us out long.”

  “Oh, Henry, three’s a crowd….”

  “Get in the boat, woman,” he growled, and I laughed and jumped down into the Whaler and picked up Gladys, who had come to the edge of the dock, waiting to be lifted in.

  We went far down the creek, toward the place where it swirled into the larger creek, and then into the slow, dark river that went eventually to the sea. Along its path eastward the banks grew high with oyster-shell bluffs and slick clay banks riddled with fiddler holes. If you were still and silent enough, you could see the crabs in their thousands, busily cleaning their burrows and waving their great claws about. But the softest splash and the bank was empty in an eyeblink. Gladys barked dutifully, but she knew by now that she would never get her teeth and paws on a fiddler.

  It was midmorning before the sun climbed high enough to touch the water. It was deep here, and opaque with the boiling, teeming strata of life that reached fathoms deep into the mud beneath its surface. It was sometimes dizzying to me to think, when I was drifting silently on the sun-dappled surface, that the creek was as close to the primal, generative stew as you could find on this present earth. Henry had slowed the motor to a soft, subterranean bumble. We had spoken very little. I was nearly mindless with contentment.

  He cut the motor, and pointed across the shell banks to the marsh on the other side of the creek. It was unbroken green here, except for small islands of palmetto and elderberry brush here and there, almost to the wooded horizon line. Shell mounds, I knew; or middens, thought to be the garbage dumps of the Indians who had taken the sweet shellfish from this creek for centuries before the first white man came. Each epoch had a favorite dish, Lewis had said; some strata were oysters, some crabs, some clams and periwinkles, some river fish. I had never explored one closely.

  “See that big one out in the middle of the marsh?” Henry said, and I did. It was high and rounded like a deep bowl, instead of a slightly conical hill, and larger than all the others. I had never seen it before. I had never been this far down the creek.

  “Boy, the eating here must have been great,” I said.

  “It’s not a midden. It’s a shell ring. Kind of an epochal calendar, you might say. If you excavated, you’d find all sorts of things that defined the culture of the moment. Pottery shards, shells and sharks’ teeth that were used for money, household artifacts, sometimes shamanistic totems. There was some big magic on these marshes. The College of Charleston has been dying to get an archeological team in here for decades, but Booter wouldn’t allow it, and Simms hasn’t either, so far. Lewis and Booter and I used to climb around it, and we found some pretty wonderful things, but as far as I know, nobody has ever dug it seriously. Get Lewis to take you over there sometime.”

  We sat in silence. A little wind smelling of brine and pluff mud and the faraway sea (Oh, the island! The island and the sea!) rose and riffled the water’s surface, cooling the sweat that had popped out on our faces.

  “It makes me sound like some kind of spoiled brat,” I said presently, “but I don’t think I could live anywhere that wasn’t beautiful. The Low Country spoils us.”

  Henry was silent. And then he said, in a faraway voice, “When I took Fairlie back to Kentucky, I thought that, well, at least she’d be in that beautiful green place she’d loved all her life, with the farm, and the horses, and all. There was a big chestnut tree on a hill overlooking the house and barns that somehow survived the blight, and she wanted to be…under it. But when I got there, the pastures had all gone to seed, and the buildings hadn’t been maintained, and there was red mud and sagging outbuildings everywhere. Her brother obviously hadn’t lifted a finger to maintain it. He lives fifty miles away, and the horses had been sold years before. He never told her that.”

  He turned to look at me.

  “Anny, God help me, the first thing I thought was, ‘Thank God I don’t have to come and live here now.’ I would have, you know; I’d promised Fairlie, and I would have done it. But it would have killed me. It was all right to leave her there; her childhood Kentucky was the only world she would ever know. But I couldn’t wait to back that car around and screech out of there. I’ve hated myself ever since, but I haven’t changed my mind about that.”

  He was silent again. I had a great lump in my throat, but around it I said, “We love what we love, Henry. There’s no reason on earth to give it up unless we have to.”

  He smiled, but it was a crooked smile, and I could tell by the twitching of the muscles in the corner of his mouth that it was difficult to maintain.

  “Well, I do love this land. I always have,” he said. “Maybe I took it for granted, but it was always my place. But, Anny, right now I don’t have anywhere in it to…be. I can’t go back to Bedon’s Alley. I don’t know if I ever can. The beach house…well. I even tried a shack on the edge of a river a thousand miles away, with a lot of tequila and a sweet little prostitute for company. None of it was a place for me. I can’t leave the Low Country and I can’t find a place in it.”

  There was so much pain in his voice that I reached over and laid my hand on his, and he squeezed it.

  “What’s wrong with here?” I said. “These are real houses. This is a beautiful place. People can live here comfortably just as well as in town. Maybe not forever, but for right now, why not let this be home? Camilla’s almost always here now. The rest of us are here every weekend. I know there’s nothing of…your old life here…”

  He laughed, shortly. “That’s the main reason it could work,” he said. “Nothing and nobody haunts me here. You know, I came home partly to see if I could find Fairlie anywhere, but it’s turning out that what I’m looking for is me.”

  “Well, when you find you, let us know. Meanwhile, we’re all just happy to have whoever it is who says he’s Henry back. It was awful, not knowing where you were….”

  “You’re a sweetheart, Anny Aiken,” he said, squeezing my hand and reaching to start the engine again. “I always told Lewis he wasn’t good enough for you.”

  It was well after noon when we came putting up to the dock, and Camilla stood on the end of it, clasping and unclasping her hands, and smiling a forced smile.

  “I wish you children would tell me when you go out,” she said. “I worry about you. I imagine the most awful things when you’re gone….” She turned and started back up the walkway, leaning heavily on the blackthorn cane that she carried everywhere now. She seemed more stooped than I had seen her in a long time.

  “I should have told her,” I said guiltily. “It would be so easy for her to fall now. Somebody needs to be here when she is. I’m glad you’re around during the week.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Listen, Anny, maybe it would be better if you didn’t mention anything about our conversation to her. She’s seemed kind of distracted lately. I don’t want to worry her.”

  “You haven’t talked to her about all that? I was sure you had. You ought to, Henry. She’s the only one who can really know what you’re going through. You know how strong she was after Charlie. She’s always been our port in a storm.”

  He laughed. “Cammy is the consummate survivor. But she’d try to fix me,” he said. “She can’t stand hurt and pain without trying to fix it. She always did that. I don’t need fixing. I just need listening to. Thanks for that.”

  When we got back to the house, Lewis was there, and Lila and Simms’s SUV, and the momentum of that beautiful bronze day flowed on.

  We sat late at dinner that night. The cool, winesap air held, and the stars burned like the stars of winter. The weather forecast was for rain, followed by returning heat and humidity, and we all held on to this night almost fiercely. The sense of change was strong. I remembered other days and nights at the beach house, when change had hung in the air as palpable as fog. I shivered in my skin, and poured myself another glass of wi
ne.

  We were in Simms and Lila’s dining room, which, with its dark plantation furniture and standing candleholders, had always seemed more a winter room to me, and though it was not yet cool enough, they had turned on the air-conditioning and built a fire. We teased them about the sheer decadence of that, but I think we all loved the living flame that danced on crystal and polished wood. We had had quail and hominy—“I’ll choke on one more crab,” Lila said—and sat now drinking wine and talking quietly. Gladys had come with Henry and lay under his chair, snoring noisily. Pachelbel poured from the little CD player. Outside, the autumnal croaking of a thousand frogs rose on the cool air, clearer now than it had been all summer.

  Henry leaned forward and put his elbows on the table and said, “I made a few calls today. I thought I might find something to do with myself. I can’t sit out here in the sun forever. I don’t think I’ll reopen the office, but maybe some on-call work, or even a few days a week at a medical center somewhere. The John’s Island center is new. They were interested.”

  “Will you go back with the traveling doctors?” I said. I realized that I did not want Henry to go anywhere, but it was purely a selfish wish. Of course, sooner or later, Henry would need to feel useful again. He had been useful all his life. That wouldn’t stop with Fairlie.

  He laughed. “I don’t think they’d have me on a silver platter after the last time. I am a legend among the docs of the air.”

  We all laughed, too, relieved. It was the first time he had spoken of those terrible weeks in the Yucatán, at least to us as a group. Another step on the journey, I thought.

  “You don’t want to push it,” Lewis said. “A month or two more might be good. You need to get some weight on you.”

  “And you need to get some off you,” Henry replied, and we all laughed again. Lewis’s stocky frame was thickening, no doubt about it. It bothered him not at all.

  “A little exercise will do it,” he said.

  Camilla was silent, studying Henry.