She began:
“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;”
She caught a movement in the periphery. Jack appeared behind Eulia, his beard clipped, his hair shining; he, too, had cleaned up for the occasion. He’d never appeared in full daylight before. He stood with his hands clasped low, merriment at the corners of this mouth. Miranda glanced at Els and nodded. Peanut squirmed in Vivian’s lap and pointed at Jack, his expression crinkling toward a wail, but Jack raised a finger to his lips and Peanut looked at his mother and back at Jack and only stared. A quick scan of all the faces told Els that nobody else could see Jack, though Eulia hugged herself as if she was chilled.
Liz touched Els’s elbow. “You okay?”
“Brilliant,” she said, and continued reading:
“When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;”
Jack looked into the coffin and smiled. He stepped in front of Eulia and turned to face her, but she stared through him at the coffin, her mouth in a tight line, her nails digging into her upper arms. Jack reached toward her face, then lowered his arm. His shoulders drooped.
Eulia looked at Els.
“That all?”
Els resumed reading.
“Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”
When she closed the book, Jack was gone. Peanut gasped and blinked.
Watching Eulia, Miranda spread her arms. “All a’ we here to help our friend Jack find peace. His spirit been very troubled, since long before that wave carry him into the next land. He need our assistance. He need our forgiveness for all he done on this earth.” The corner of Eulia’s mouth twitched. “Each and every one a’ we need to reach deep in our hearts and find that forgiveness and welcome him, yes, welcome him back from that spirit land where he been trapped.” When she raised her arms higher, her bracelets slid to her elbows. “Reach into your hearts. Reach.”
Miranda began whispering, and soon the whispering turned into a sort of hum, and then a chant in a language Els didn’t understand. Miranda closed her eyes and swayed side to side. Eulia looked at the coffin as if she expected the scarecrow to sit up. Els worried she might bolt.
Miranda lowered her arms and seemed to reinhabit her body. “Now, I want all a’ you to think about something Jack loved and some way you loved him.” Her head was bowed, but Els saw her sneak a glance at Eulia, who was looking at the sea, tears caught in her long lashes. “We gon’ gather Jack back to us with love so he can leave us with love.”
A breeze rattled the palm fronds. A cattle egret landed on the crab ring and regarded them with its yellow eye, strutted a few steps, and lifted off again, tucking its feet. It winged over their heads and up the mountain.
After a nod from Miranda, Boney closed the coffin. Miranda placed both hands on its lid and began whispering again. Finally, she straightened and said, “Gentlemen, set him down.”
Using the lengths of nylon rope Boney had run under the box, the men eased the coffin into the hole. Pinky approached the dirt pile, loaded the shovel, and tossed earth onto the coffin. Pebbles rattled on its top. He handed the shovel to Liz, who followed suit and handed it to Jason, and it made the rounds of the men twice before Eulia, eyeing the grave, stepped forward.
She grasped the shovel handle, sank the blade into the earth, and stamped the shoulder deeper. Straining, she lifted the blade and dumped the dirt into the hole, then reloaded the shovel and tossed again. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist and stamped the shovel down again. Her church pump slipped off the side and she lost her balance momentarily, but she went back at it, panting, for two more loads.
Everyone stood back, Els watching the coffin disappear, the rest watching Eulia.
“Let us finish this, Eulia,” Liz said.
She glared at him and dug up another load. “This ain’t gon’ finish nothin’.” She threw more dirt into the hole.
Pinky touched Eulia’s arm. She pushed the shovel handle toward him. Her face was running with sweat and maybe tears. Her church hat was still in place; dirt marked the hem of her skirt and was caked onto her shoes. She brushed off her hands, took Peanut from Vivian, strode to her car, and drove away.
The men regrouped around the grave and Liz tried to take the shovel, but Pinky tightened his grip and lifted his chin in a gesture of dismissal. Blinking back tears, he set to his task. Only Miranda was smiling, her hand on Vivian’s shoulder, her eyes on the sea.
“That’s not what I call receptive,” Els said.
“Heart got to shift in its own time,” Miranda said. “We open it a crack.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” Boney asked.
“Jack’s last wishes,” Els said. She started walking toward the house. “Come along. It’s time to get out of this sun, and Liz has needed a beer for hours.”
CHAPTER 43
She flapped the Dylan Thomas book at the moths that gathered to her torchlight beam and shifted on the stack of cinder blocks next to the closed grave. In a whisper, she resumed reading “Fern Hill,” over and over, until tears splashed the page, as if the last iceberg of her anger had thawed and was rushing to escape. Susie lay in the soft earth at her feet, gazing up with her concerned expression.
“That would have been my other choice,” Jack said.
Els aimed the torch toward the lime trees.
“But I knew it would break you up to read it in front of everyone.” He shielded his eyes.
She pointed the beam at the book. “This might have been written for Mallo.” She read:
“And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,”
Jack recited the rest of the poem, walking a slow circle around the grave, his hands clasped behind his back. He finished:
“Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand.
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
“Time holds us all green and dying,” he said. “Only the lucky among us sing in our chains.”
“Sing he did,” she said. “He was fairly bursting with life and determination.”
“I’ve been hard on you about him,” he said. “Everyone needs their own time, I guess, and it’s never over, is it? The mourning, I mean. Maybe the anger too.”
“Maybe Miranda is right. Only love can force either out.”
“Or forgiveness.” He sat on the other stack of concrete blocks and looked at the sea. “Nice try today.”
“Miranda thinks this grave might give Eulia a place to seek you out, if she wants to,” she said. “I’ll add a bench and a proper stone, maybe plant croton in honor of indomitable hearts.”
“Cara,” Giulietta called from Toad Hall. “Who’s there?”
Susie sat up and pricked her ears. Giulietta was in her nightgown; the moonlight touching her bare shoulders cast a blue shadow onto the deck.
Els glanced at the emptiness where Jack had just sat. “I wiz just reading aloud,” she called.
Giulietta crossed the grass barefoot, with enough of a wobble that Els wondered if she’d been tippling in Toad Hall. “I heard a man’s voice,” she said.
Els was relieved she’d skipped the funeral. “See for yourself how alone I am.” Els flicked the torchlight around the grave and
into the citrus grove.
Giulietta peered into the darkness, then sat on the stack of blocks Jack had vacated. “Your tears, cara, can’t be for this man you never knew.”
“This burial reminded me I can’t visit everyone left behind at Cairnoch.”
Giulietta’s shoulders moved the way Els had seen before, somewhere between a shrug and a shiver. “Nobody there I would visit, even if that Russian serves us cakes and vodka.”
Els studied Giulietta’s silhouette against the glow from Toad Hall. “You never loved Father.”
Giulietta swatted a mosquito. “Not in your romantic way,” she said.
Els removed her shawl and draped it over her mother’s shoulders. “Did he ever love you?”
“Maybe. For a while.” Giulietta gazed toward the lights on St. Kitts.
“Tell me the story, Mum.”
Giulietta stared out to sea long enough for Els to worry she might not answer, then she smoothed her hair and sat up straighter. “I am barely twenty,” she said. “My father drives a truck delivering vegetables. When he drinks, he beats my mother, sometimes all of us. My two older sisters are married and complaining always about money, and I do not want the life any of them have. I work at any job I can find to pay for school, but it is nothing like your fancy university. Mostly a place for young people to become angry. In the mid-sixties, there is great poverty, protesting. Terror in the streets. Student strikes and riots.”
“Were you passionate about politics?” Els asked, wondering if she’d inherited her rebellious streak.
“Politics matters to my friends, my lovers,” Giulietta said. “All I care about is art and staying alive.” She shifted on the blocks. “Your father is working in Naples—some assignment with the bank. His colleague rents a house on Ischia and they come many weekends and they like to drink at a place where I am tending bar. He thinks I’m exotic, talented. It excites him to be, how you say, ‘slumming’ with me. He is handsome in that pink English way. He has the confidence of a rich man, and he is the only person I meet who is ottimista in the middle of so much agitazione.”
“He wooed you with promises of a posh life,” Els said.
“Nobody is wooing anybody. I am throwing everything I have at him and he is falling for it. He is my way out.”
“Were you always so cynical?”
“Disperata,” Giulietta said. “What is there for me but a life of poverty, painting in obscurity, marrying some fool who goes to fat in a few years and smashes my face for fun?” Susie poked her nose into Giulietta’s lap, and Giulietta fondled her ears. “I tell your father I am carrying his child. Soon enough, it is not a lie. The local priest marries us. I am wearing a lace tablecloth for my veil.” She kept staring at the necklaces of light on St. Kitts. “It is good, living in Naples with money. When your father’s work there ends, we go to Scotland and I see the trap I have made for myself. He travels to Edinburgh, to London. By then we speak very little. He leaves me in that freezing house under the evil eye of Beatrice.”
“So you ran away,” Els said.
Giulietta looked at Els and then to Toad Hall, as if she was gathering strength either to tell Els why she left or to run for the safety of the cottage. She stood up so abruptly that Susie jumped back; then she tossed the shawl into Els’s lap and hurried to Toad Hall. When her mother looked back before shutting the door, Els wasn’t sure if she was weeping or if it was simply a trick of the moonlight.
CHAPTER 44
Els looked around the Christmas Eve dinner table at her mother, the Flemings, Tony and Lauretta, and the Oualie gang: Liz, Jason, and Boney. She’d found her tribe. To humor Giulietta’s insistence on making a traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes, she’d closed the pub for the day and set up the secret garden for eleven, using Cairnoch’s formal linens and silver. When they all toasted the cook, Giulietta preened. Els could have sworn she was flirting even more than usual with Liz, too, but she didn’t want to call her on it and disrupt the holiday merriment.
At half ten, after the guests departed with overstuffed bellies and armfuls of gifts, Giulietta retired to Toad Hall to ready herself for Midnight Mass.
Announcing he’d help wash up, Liz drew Els to the gallery, where he and Jason had rigged a Christmas tree in Jack’s tradition: a dried century plant stalk in a bucket of sand, its skeletal branches twined with fairy lights and hung with empty beer bottles on ribbons. The breeze tinkled the bottles.
“I failed Gift Wrap 101,” Liz said, and pulled a package from behind the bucket. It was swaddled in newsprint and tied with yellow nylon rope.
“I hardly deserve a gift.”
“The giver gets to judge worthiness,” he said.
Jack would have had some pithy quote to that effect, but when she looked into Liz’s eyes—deep blue, expectant—she bit back that observation and tore off the paper. Inside was his cornflower-blue linen shirt, the one he’d worn on the first night at Sunshine’s, the day he’d given her Susie, the afternoon of Jack’s funeral.
“I thought your wardrobe might be a little thin,” he said.
She shook out the shirt, freshly laundered but unironed, pulled it over her sundress, and hugged it to her. Liz leaned in and kissed her lightly, and she put her arms around his neck and kissed him back. “I have something for you too,” she whispered.
She led him to the lounge, where she’d stashed a flat package behind the bar. He weighed it in his hands before gently removing the wrapping.
She’d cribbed Iguana’s lines from the photo in Liz’s brochure to paint a watercolor of the boat in full sail against a muted sunset. She hoped the painting would touch him as much as the shirt touched her. That it might demonstrate that her envy of his love for the yacht and the sea had softened into a kind of acceptance.
“I’ll give it a place of honor,” he said. “In the saloon. No, in my cabin.” He tucked the painting under his arm. “Got a day group tomorrow. My guess is that they’ll want to end up at Sunshine’s. Meet us there if you like.” He kissed her, and again, and then walked down the hill. At the gate, he looked back at her for a long beat, waved the painting, and turned toward Oualie.
Christmas was two hours old, but Els was still pacing the gallery, trying to sort out her mother’s shift in mood toward agitation and wariness since Mass. She wished she’d never committed to open for brunch later that morning, even though reservations were strong, so she could hang out at Oualie with Giulietta. She feared that any day now her mother would announce her departure, or simply disappear, leaving her with so few of the answers she craved.
Jack bubbled out of one of the beer bottle ornaments, a crimson hibiscus behind his ear. He stepped back and admired the tree. “How did the sinners enjoy Mass?” he asked.
“Mum got all chummy with the priest afterwards, gushing over his sermon about God’s infinite love and forgiveness, blah, blah, blah. I thought she was aiming it at me.”
“We could all do with a little forgiveness.” He was standing so close she could have smelled him, but the only scent she detected was melting candle wax and salt air. “That grave isn’t working,” he said. “Eulia’s been there at least five times since you planted that damn box. Sneaks up after work and sits for a few minutes on the bench you put there. Cries, even. She was there tonight.”
“And you didn’t appear to her?”
“You think I didn’t try? Whenever I get close, I’m in a tornado, whipped this way and that.” He looked toward the grave. “I hoped Christmas might soften her up. People get sappy at the holidays.”
“You think?” she said. “Mum was teary when she went off to bed, and I’m positively inside out.” She gathered her shawl tighter. “I dreamt of Mallo last night. You were in the dream, too, Jack, both of you standing at the foot of my bed, and when I reached for him, you pulled him out the window.”
“Don’t blame me if your heart is cracking open and letting him escape,” he said. “Ever consider he was pulling me out that window? All of us need a little he
lp letting go.”
“What’ll it take to make you let go?” she said.
“I can see you’re done with me.”
“You’re in the way.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re in your own way. Admit what you feel. For that matter, damn it, feel what you feel. If you want me to be done with you, try that.” He stepped toward the tree. “And then, Miss Ice, if you can accomplish that, just get me a few minutes with Eulia and we’ll be square.”
He condensed, became one of the fairy lights on the tree, then flared and winked out.
CHAPTER 45
She’d never worked so hard on Christmas in her life. Between delivering drinks and helping to wait tables because she’d given Genevra the day off, Els kept glancing at Toad Hall, but by half two Giulietta still hadn’t appeared.
When her mother finally ambled into the kitchen wearing her red linen shift and turban with a beach towel slung over her shoulder, Els said, “I thought you might be hiding.”
Wariness swept over Giulietta’s face, then she shrugged. “Seven fishes is big effort. Maybe swim wakes me up.” She grabbed the remains of some eggs Benedict off a guest’s plate before Els could sweep it into Susie’s bowl and walked out the door. As Els watched her cross the court, a wave of disappointment and fear coursed through her.
Once the last brunch guest finally departed at four o’clock, Els gave in to the heat, peeled off her sundress, and stretched out on her bed. When she woke, it was already dark. The peculiar stillness that was common on Nevis holiday evenings was broken only by the surf and the faraway barking of dogs. She went to the lounge and noticed when she poured a glass of wine that Giulietta had left a used one on the bar. A faint light burned in Toad Hall. Her mother was a puzzle, at times so animated and seized by her schemes and at others nearly a recluse who ate and drank at odd times and discouraged conversation. Whenever Giulietta became distant, Els feared she might be slipping into depression.
The Moon Always Rising Page 29