Interrupting both our reveries, I said, "Thanks for talking with me, Rosalie. I know it's not easy, and I know you care. It means a lot."
"You're my daughter," she said, simply.
It went unsaid that the pact about Chris, that old concealment so many years silted under that I sometimes doubted its ultimate veracity, need not enter into the dialogue. Neither of us wanted to look at it, think about it. Christopher needed, in his way, to stay dead in order for us to stay sane.
The keeper's cottage was in sight now. Smoke rose from the fire pit, wafting our way. Bracken air hovered above the beds of beached kelp left exposed to the sun, their blanket of protective sea pulled back by the fingers of the tide. Three figures, our men, were making their way down from the house to the fire they had built. One waved to us, then all of them did and we waved back.
17
THIS PACT ABOUT Christopher's past wasn't one I pondered often. A year might go by and only the quickest disquieting flicker of it flew through my head, like one of those shooting stars that drew their ephemeral lines down the black sky the night he died. It was as if my secret with Rosalie were shut inside a metal safebox, padlocked, then left out in the rain so long that it had rusted solid. There was no reason to harp on it just now, whether or not Rosalie fretted that my monster might unhinge it, as it were, and crack the box open for all to see. Nothing and no one had opened it in times past. For all the doubts I had about some of my mother's convictions, I was loyal to her.
Toward Christopher, too, I still felt an abiding fidelity. He and I shared so many good times together, and I needed to tend to these most, like heirloom roses in the front bed of a memorial garden. It was Christopher who taught me to tie my shoes. Chris who helped me memorize my multiplication tables. Chris was the one who showed me where birds' nests were secreted away in trees and the right way to climb up high to see them. When I had chicken pox, Christopher read to me from my children's books for hours on end and cooled my forehead with a wet washcloth, fearless about getting sick himself.
Nor had Rosalie misremembered my having been in the woods above Henderson's before. But she barely knew the half of it. Once, she and Nep left me in Christopher's care when they had to spend a whole day and late into the night in the city attending—hard to imagine—a funeral in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The reception was to run late, so they instructed Chris not to leave me unattended. There was plenty of food and soda in the refrigerator, and he already knew how to light the oven to heat up the casserole she had prepared for our dinner. He needed to make sure I had enough to eat and got to bed by ten.
— I'm not a baby, I protested.
— I'm not a babysitter, he agreed.
— Don't you two wander too far from home, she admonished him. —And I don't want your friends in the house while we're out, understood?
We understood the second rule, but the minute they left, Christopher began stuffing his pack with food and told me to get my boots on because we were going to spend the day being Indians in the cliffs. A whole day with my brother to myself? I was thrilled. The cliffs were sacred terrain to him, which made it all the more special.
This was the year before four-wheelers became the sole means of transportation, so we hiked for a couple of hours off the beaten track so as not to be spotted by any of our parents' acquaintances, making our way along a hogback thick with pines until we were finally close to the cliffs. Everyone Chris ever brought here, including me that day, had to go through quite a ritual of induction. Adults were never to know about this secret hideout. To make sure they didn't, all visitors—there weren't but a few—were blindfolded and led by a rope tied around their waists up and down some rugged, trippy land. It wasn't a short hike, especially blindfolded. Once visitors were out of sight of any recognizable landmarks, they were unmasked in woods that looked just like other forested acreage in our area, except for the caved cliffs, purported by my brother to be old Indian dwellings. The idea was that only Christopher would know the hideout's precise location.
When he removed my blindfold, I yipped with excitement. He was right. This was a perfect place for some Indian families to reside. It perched on the westerly side of a steep and treacherous ravine, at the base of which snaked a creek where they must have hunted deer and rabbits and fished brook trout and had lots of fresh drinking water. One of the caves in particular had a blackened ceiling which, even in retrospect, made my brother's theory plausible. Certainly, someone had wintered here long ago.
— Now we're Indians, too, I said.
— Get some kindling, Pocahontas, he commanded in something meant to sound like the voice of a warrior, and soon we had a small fire going. We pierced hot dogs on the ends of branches he sharpened with his knife and ate our lunch in fine style.
— What's a funeral? I asked. —I mean, I know what it is. But have you ever been to one?
— A funeral's where they lock the dead guy in the last room he'd ever see alive if he wasn't dead. And all his friends hold hands in a circle around him and they say nice stuff about him and bawl a bunch. And then they put him in the cold ground and that's where he lives until God comes down from his cloud and gets him out.
— And then what?
— Then he's in heaven.
— What happens there?
— Don't you listen when we're in church?
I shrugged.
— Nobody knows what happens exactly, except you can't cry. No tears in heaven, Cass, because it's a place where nobody remembers how to cry.
— Oh, I said, wondering whether you would be able to remember how to laugh up there in heaven, if you didn't remember how to cry.
— Now, little sister. Are you ready for me to go capture some bad men from another tribe?
My heart sank a little. I knew what this meant, however clever Chris thought he was being. —Sure, I said, putting on a smile for him.
— Good. Keep this fire going, but don't let it get too big, hear?
Within half an hour he returned with Ben Gilchrist, Roy Skoler, Emily Schaefer, and another girl, all of them blindfolded and holding on to a rope that was tied around the waist of the person in front of them. It was quite a sight. Christopher never looked more triumphant.
— Look who I caught trespassing our tribal lands, Cass, he said, barely containing himself. I saw that Roy Skoler had already taken off his blindfold and was looking at me with those unflinching eyes of his. Roy had bottles of beer in his rucksack and a pack of cigarettes. Emily and the other girl brought marshmallows and graham crackers, which they immediately offered me, both of them taking it upon themselves to mother Christopher's kid sis. I never saw Ben or Christopher smoke before, but there they were, coughing and pounding their chests as they did.
— Peace pipes, Chris whispered to me. —Old Iroquois custom.
The party was more fun than I liked to admit, I who'd selfishly wanted my brother all to myself. The girls were full of questions about what I was studying in school, which movie stars I liked best, what sorts of things did I enjoy doing on weekends. They toasted s'mores and cooked more hot dogs. As the afternoon slid toward evening, the sky shifting toward an eggplant hue, they disappeared in twos and threes into the woods. Left on my own by a fire burning down to hissing coals, I wondered if they were ever coming back. I both did and didn't know what they were doing, but it didn't matter so long as Christopher said everything was all right and would take me home pretty soon.
Emily Schaefer was the only one of them who wasn't drinking, I noticed. At one juncture she and I were alone in front of the fire. She had come back from the woods all disheveled and with a dazed look on her pretty face and pine needles caught in her hair.
— Were you wrestling? I asked.
She hesitated. —That's right.
— Did you win?
She looked at me, I'll never forget, and gently, delicately brushed my cheek with the back of her fingers. The spontaneous act of affection from one girl to another. —I don
't think so, she said.
— Well, who won?
Emily shook her head. —I must look a mess. Would you mind picking the leaves and stuff off my back? I can't go home like this.
While she sat cross-legged and poked the coals with a stick, prompting them to flare again, I kneeled behind her, brushing the needles and dirt off and combing her hair with my fingers.
— I hear your father is a diviner, she said. —That he can find things that are hidden.
— That's right, I said, proudly.
— My father thinks he's cracked but doesn't cause any harm.
This made me wince, but even that young I'd begun to expect such comments. She was waiting for a response, so I said, —What do you think?
— Well, I think the world's a strange place, she answered.
— I guess so.
— Oh, it is, Cassandra. You'll see when you grow up. Meantime, thanks for making me look presentable. You're a good friend, she said, surprising and delighting me with this declaration. To this day I wonder whether we mightn't have become real friends, were she still alive.
Everyone loudly complained when Chris announced they had to submit to being blindfolded again in order to be led back out. I got to tie the blindfolds, so I didn't mind at all until my brother tied mine so tightly it made my head hurt, his breath stinking as he did, and led the protesting group back the way we had come. Roy Skoler was behind me in the single file and I remember him muttering drunken nonsense that might as well have been some foreign language. He touched my hair once or twice and jerked hard on the rope, trying to make me trip. Though he scared me, I never let on, doing my best to ignore him. Besides my brother, I decided in my blinking blindness that the only one of the group I truly liked was Emily. She had the face of a sad saint, I thought. And when she was nearby, she'd taken it upon herself to make sure I was glad to be there with them. Amazingly, my brother tucked me in bed by ten that night and even read me to sleep after swearing his sister to absolute and irrevocable secrecy about the activities of the day.
—Princess and chief must observe total silence, or die.
He needn't have threatened me on pain of death, as I never tattled. I probably idolized him even more for his crazy daring.
For all that, were I forced to face facts, I would have to admit that my venerated Christopher had never given my mother, or me, quite as much cause for the pride we always felt toward him. Other stories I knew about Chris—other things he allowed me to witness because he probably considered me too naive to recognize them for what they were—never diminished the adoration I felt for my brother. Over the years there were nights when I lay in bed, face-down in my childhood pillow, crying enough to make heaven drown, wishing he were still around rather than in that "last room" he spoke of. He calculated his sister's love and correctly relied on my hero worship to secure my conspiratorial silence.
18
THANKS FOR BEING so good with the boys," I said, sitting beside Nep in high grass and ferns, our backs against the sun-warmed white bricks of the lighthouse the day after Rosalie and I talked our way around the island.
"Nothing easier."
"I know they can be a little exhausting at times, with all that back-and-forthing they love to do, finishing each other's ideas, piling it on."
"Like we used to when you were—" searching for the word, "short."
"Young, yes. I guess we did at that."
"Feels good to be with them. With you, too."
"Idem," I said, reviving a term from our old code language. Meant same here and dated back to when I was first trying to learn Latin.
Some of what we spoke about was in words. Some was communicated with our eyes. Some came through the fragile bony flesh of the hands we held, unabashed, an old man and a woman who felt every last one of her thirty-six years. Our conversation was similar in tone but different in content from what we discussed during that Fourth of July. This wasn't another turning. I wanted no sixth turning. Indeed, if I could reverse some of those five turnings, my life would be better.
Nep told me he'd heard about both my visioned and found girls.
"People say—provoking things," he explained, pausing again to capture the words needed to complete his thought. "Me in the room with them."
"And they don't realize you're listening?"
"Not so much."
"So you've become the dreaded fly on the wall."
"Flies don't hear as well as I do."
"I'll bet you've been hearing them say your daughter's crazy, gone off the deep end what with her hanged girl and all."
After a moment, he said, "Why do you care?"
"I only really care what you think."
His gaze held mine so long I finally averted my eyes, looking down at the glistening grass where a row of tenacious ants marched not far from my crossed feet. Nep tightened his grip on my hand.
A little chagrined by my next question even before I asked it, I still was desperate to know. "Has anything like what happened to me at Henderson's ever happened to you?"
"Not the same."
"So you have seen something similar, is what you mean?"
"Everyone has. Even dogs, cats, birds."
I wondered if he had quite understood me, but his lucidity this day, in this sea-strong air and sitting on this piece of familiar earth, was unquestionable. Feeling a little like I was imposing some makeshift Platonic dialogue on my poor father, who never would have willingly played the role of Socrates, I asked, "Why is it that people, unlike dogs and cats and birds, laugh at those who see something they don't?"
"Because people, unlike animals, have a great—capacity for contempt."
Here his articulation was in full swing. His words made me recognize that my mentor absolved me, in his way, of feeling guilty about how most people had taken, or mistaken, what I witnessed in Henderson's valley. This came as an enormous relief. If I could accept his absolution, it would be a giant step toward pulling myself back into my own life.
I looked down at the column of ants, admiring them as they streamed ceaselessly through their intricate jungle of blades and pebbles, what had to be a tedious tract for them to negotiate, but for me represented a single stride. The comparative nature of everything, I mused. One man's mile was another's inch, one's truth another's fallacy. Was Rosalie's insistence on there being a god, a holy spirit, a virgin mother, an only-begotten son who died for our sins before being resurrected—was it any more discountable than my own appalling vision, and the forevisions and divining I'd wanted people to believe?
I loved myths. Taught them to others. But I cherished my gods as ideas, symbols, and I knew it. So was I among the contemptuous rather than the faithful? Our planet was roiled by believers who despised other believers who didn't believe what they believed. It was so apocalyptically palpable one could feel the world quivering with the frustration of it all. Was I any better than the next scorner?
"Are you saying I shouldn't worry about what they think one way or the other?"
"Why should you?"
"But you always cared about reputation when you were divining."
"I made a mistake," he said. I waited for him to continue, but he just sat, looking curiously across the overgrown meadow toward one of the old stone outbuildings, another structure on Covey I warned the twins to stay away from. A nice mansion for clever mice. Must have been a supply shed at some point, or maybe a large root cellar. The shingled roof had partly caved in. Most of its windows were long since blown out, leaving it open to the weather, though one pane remained intact, if ajar, and in it was a reflection of the lighthouse.
"Yes?" I glanced in the direction of the shed.
He rose to his feet, quietly, letting go of my hand.
"Nep, what's the matter?"
"The not-friend in the cloud I'm seeing."
"The what?"
"Who are you?" he insisted, wading through the grasses, his fingertips brushing the waving green spear tips that resembled an unmowed fi
eld of delicate June hay.
"Who is—Nep, where are you going?"
There was nothing to do but follow him. Our Platonic dialogue had come to an abrupt end.
"All right," he not-quite-answered.
I stayed close behind, wondering if this was one of his fugues or, as Rosalie called them, his walkaways. His disease suddenly extracting him from the everyday world to send him on some phantom mission he believed needed to be accomplished. Get somewhere he didn't really have to go. Or worse, where there was no getting to.
When we reached the stone hut, he peered inside through one of the empty windows. I did, too, alongside him. A damp cool earthen scent gave from the darkness, the ripe still air of a cavern. A fearsome-looking black and white spider, an argiope, had spun herself a huge oval web protected from wind and weather and was perched, waiting at its flexing center for prey. He took a couple of steps away from the shed and peered at the glass pane with great intensity. I looked at it, too, but saw only clouds moving across its dirty face.
"What is it?" I asked. "What not-friend?"
"What do you want?" not addressing me but turning around and gazing toward the top of the lighthouse, shielding his eyes from the sun with a saluting hand. "There," and pointed at the iron railing that enclosed the gallery, the catwalk used in the old days as a lookout post. Something white and fluttery dangled, hard to see, as we were both looking directly into the sun. With great purpose, he strode back up the rise to the door at the base of the lighthouse, fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out his set of keys, one of which fit the padlock.
"Dad?" squinting upward into the glare, then back at him.
Without a word, he opened the metal door, entered the gloom of the tower, and began climbing the circular staircase. My duty now was to make sure he didn't get hurt. As we crept our way along, hugging the curved and shadowed walls of stone, I found myself hoping against hope that he had seen the same girl I did a few days before. The mute girl with her black smiling dog. If together we saw a mutual specter it would change my life then and there. My gravity would return and I'd be able to believe in myself more than I had in months, years. After all, I hadn't told Nep anything about her.
The Diviner's Tale Page 17