Ondine was still sweating and a little draft lifted up and over the verandah railing, caressing her face. She felt dizzy and wondered if she needed more to drink or if the cold infusion itself had made her feel so disoriented.
“I see you aren’t making any notes. And your recording device has shut off.”
Ondine looked down. Her notebook and her phone were in her lap. The battery had died. She was stunned. She was sure she’d charged it. Her technical skills from years of research had been so reliable, habitual. The battery should have lasted for hours.
“See the whitecaps on the bay? The wind has come up. The tide is coming in now, as I said earlier it would do. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been to the island out there? Those cliffs make it look like a fortress. Parker Island is the true name but most people just call it the Island. It’s a curious landscape here, ain’t it? Deep forest to the south behind the house, but here by the front verandah the land slopes downward for a few miles through the fields until it drops right off to the beach by the bay you’re looking at. I suppose if my great-grandfather never cleared them fields you’d think we were landlocked. But I always said being landlocked ain’t nothing but a state of mind. Closer to the shore there’s a constant wind but set back up here away from the water it’s only occasional. It comes when it sees fit. Rose loved the smell — pine and moss from the forest, and woven through with salt water. I take the sea air for medicinal purposes, for my lungs. No doubt you’ll notice when you leave this road you’ll feel light-headed.”
Ondine already felt light-headed. “Well, I should be leaving soon. It’s a long drive back to the airport and my phone has died. And I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
The old woman gazed at Ondine. “Time is all I’ve had these long years, time and all these stories.” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes briefly and then opened them. Ondine handed the old woman the fan, wondering if she too was feeling woozy.
The old woman took the fan in her crooked fingers and placed it beside her leg on the seat of the chair. She let out a long sigh.
“I suppose you want an answer before you go. Answering your questions involves going back years and years. Rose disappeared after Elmore died on the farm. Elmore was my stepmother’s son, from her first marriage. He was a slow boy who would come and work. Rose was always so kind to him and our brother, Hiram, was so jealous. He was just like our daddy by the time he was becoming a man. Hiram couldn’t stand Rose paying attention to anyone but him. He even got mad if she spent time helping me. Poor Elmore was going to some fancy church camp that summer, down in the Valley on Lake of Redemption. Some missy hissy got him some money from a fund for country children. He was a sweet boy. Quiet in his mind but real kind. Elmore never made it to the camp. He was only fourteen. What a pity it was. Hiram said it was my fault, that I was driving too fast down the Flying Squirrel Road, but it was a lie.
“Hiram was in the passenger seat of the truck when we was driving out back to the strawberry fields. He was two years younger than me and four years younger than Rose. She was just turned sixteen that summer. Rose almost run the whole farm by herself. Hiram was mad he couldn’t be the man in charge but had to sit with his sister at the wheel. Hiram dared not say one word to Daddy for fear of the horse whip on his back. He surely did go on to Rose about how it weren’t fair. He’d never take a turn in the back or stand alongside the passenger side of the cab on them running boards. That’s where Hiram made the dirt-poor kids stand who came to work on the farm. July is always such a hot month and you’d kill for a ride even just twenty feet.
“They held onto the truck with one hand and their hats with the other so the wind wouldn’t steal them away into the woods. “I remember how Elmore was standing on the running board outside the passenger door, the window rolled down, and Hiram talking his bullshit about how he was this expert farmer, like he was lord of the strawberries. Strawberry pickers all over the truck. Elmore was there one minute, ducking from Hiram who was teasing him, and then he was gone. Hiram said the truck bounced and Elmore lost his footing. Hiram swore he was reaching his arm out the window to steady Elmore, not pulling his arm back in from pushing him.
“Daddy took the whip to Hiram until Rose came home from visiting Elmore’s grieving mother. Hiram’s back was bleeding. Rose got out the gun and held it at Daddy ’til he saw her and then he dropped the whip. He was afraid of her after that. And our brother Hiram was afraid of what Daddy would do to Rose. All spring Hiram said Daddy was planning something terrible. He was worrying Rose would spread lies about him.
“And sure enough, come the summer, a year after Elmore fell and hit his young head on the hard dirt, Rose vanished. It was the end of August, as it is now. We looked all over them roads and through the fields and forests and down on the beach. But no sir, we didn’t find her, only her shoe and her straw hat in the woods by the stream. People said it all started with Elmore’s death, how it all went bad after that. But it went bad long before.”
* * *
The sun had come around in the sky. It was late in the afternoon.
The old woman was impervious to the heat. She was like an animal, perfectly acclimatized to her environment. Part of Ondine wanted to leave, but a bigger part of her couldn’t stop listening.
“Sometimes people leave and you never have no answers. That’s what my father said, after the police stopped coming around a year after Rose went missing. At first he raged how someone killed her. Next he raged she took off like her filthy whore of a mother. We did not talk of Rose after that first year. Daddy would not allow no more speculation or discussion. He went quiet like something was coming for him. He got stranger in his mind. He heard things calling in the dark. Keep away the night birds, he’d yell. Don’t go near the stream running down through the woods. Don’t answer if anything comes knocking at the door. Close it tight and bolt it. Put down the windows and put rags around the crack at the bottom of the door. Don’t let the mist seep in.”
* * *
Dark clouds were slowly moving in from the northwest, above the lowering sun. Ondine wondered if there would be a lightning storm and the air would clear. She looked at her phone again. Useless thing. She set it on the railing.
The old lady’s eyes were closed once more, lost in her story. “After Rose vanished just like our mother did, people whispered. I only know the bits I overheard, for no one would ever tell me the exact circumstances surrounding our mother’s disappearance. But it was common knowledge she was tired of our father’s constant fists and demands on her body.
“It wasn’t so easy for us, of course, left behind on the Mountain with our father. He wouldn’t let us speak of her. It may interest you to know our mother’s name was also Ondine, like yours, like Rose’s middle name. Our father insisted our mother was a loose woman who didn’t care about her children. His story for the neighbours was she had taken off with a travelling salesman who had come along selling farm equipment. I have a memory of him wiping down the kitchen counter and floor early one morning. He’d never done a bit of cleaning before. There had been a loud noise. I came down the stairs crying. Rose came after me and put me to bed. But when we were older she would never discuss it with me, no matter how much I begged. She only said to be patient.
“Our father never changed. We saw this with our stepmother, who come along so many years later when Daddy decided he wanted a new wife.
“I still make my way down to my stepmother’s grave and throw a few flowers about and say a prayer to Holy Mother Mercy. I would take you there, my dear, but we’re almost out of time. The tide will be high. There was never any grave for my sister or my mother. Every year in May I take spring ephemerals from the woodlands and throw them into the bay, hoping the waves will carry the flowers to them. And at summer’s end I always pluck the petals from the last of the beach roses and toss them into the sea.”
Ondine saw then that the brass door knocker
was not a fish, but a woman with a tail. A mermaid. The old woman watched her. “There’s some things I won’t discuss, and I don’t care if you need it for your history projects and the like. I don’t care who you are related to. Ain’t it pretty up here on the Mountain? People have come by wanting to make an offer on that big old barn off behind the house. They say they’ll take it down board by board and ship it far away and raise it up in an alien land. And the work sheds as well. Imagine that. Idiots, is what I say. And they call me crazy. You couldn’t pay me to set foot in a barn moved so many miles. There’d be a curse on it.
“I love the Flying Squirrel Road, just sitting here. Once upon a time the woods were full of flying squirrels and other beings that move through the night. The house is close to the road but hardly any cars go by. I used to worry about the distant relations who lived on the Brow of Mountain Road overlooking the Valley, that they’d come visiting. There was a wicked young cousin who was a danger. I put a hex on this road to keep her away. I’m just pulling your leg. They left a number of years back and moved to Mercy Lake. If it’s some tourist driving by, it just means they lost their way, but if I wave they seem to speed up. Maybe if I put some paint on the house. It peeled off years ago.
One guy who stopped come right up on the verandah when I was inside taking a shit. I could hear someone out there so I finished up my business and come out. Didn’t he go off screaming. ‘I thought this was an abandoned house,’ he yelled as he went running off to his car. I sat in this here big rocker I’m in right now and watched the bastard tear off, dust flying off the dirt road. Then I looked down and saw I had left my gun out. I was just cleaning it. Always like to have it in working order, you know. It’s not always loaded so don’t you worry your pretty head.
“Some folks roam the world in search of wondrous sites, but living here there’s no need. Wonder is all about. Sometimes when it’s this hot I sit out on the verandah all day long and look out across that field to the blue bay. When I was little we still used horses for hay but then we got a few tractors. I still take a ride in the wagon sometimes. The old tractors are rusting in the fields. See them? Back there behind the barn. You’re looking the wrong way. There’s nothing in those old sheds and behind them — it ain’t nothing but woods in the direction where you’re looking. It’s pretty in there, but you have to be careful what time you go in so you don’t get short on light. No one wants to be in the woods when darkness falls.
“So look over at them fields. See the birch trees running alongside? And the line of poplars on the other? Listen to the wind chiming in those leaves. That old strawberry field is fallow now but it used to be one of the best strawberry fields we had. Sweet sun-warmed berries. The old tire swing still works. The tree branch up there went and grew all around the rusty chain it’s hanging from. You can give it a try anytime you want. Sometimes when I’m up in my bed there’s squeaky sounds. Don’t go looking so scared. That’s nothing more than the wind blowing.
“It’s cool here on the verandah and under the tree where that dog is napping. Now the dog might look like he’s sleeping under the sugar maple, the one I was telling you about which Rose planted, but if I snap my fingers he’ll wake up and you won’t be able to run. Don’t worry though, I’m just kidding. He’s an old dog. His bark is wicked mean but he’s got the rheumatism and he is no longer able to run like he once did. You can’t tell for how he’s lying there in the shadows. Most of his teeth are gone. But you should never trust an old dog even if his teeth are gone. Sometimes they can turn.
“That dog, he don’t like the heat. I don’t mind it, for it never lasts long here, and when winter comes in, she don’t let your thoughts linger on summer too long. She’s that kind of lady. You love her and only her.
“You have to be careful telling stories. Some of them aren’t yours to tell, you understand. Bad things happen when you steal them or change them. Did you know this?”
Ondine looked away, toward the small pond where something jumped. The fountain was running now. Maybe it had been the whole time and Ondine hadn’t noticed.
* * *
“I came back up here on the Mountain to the old place for good after I did my one and only time in jail. You didn’t know that, now did you? Oh, I imagine I was almost forty by then. I can’t remember. The whole decade just seems like it was one big long year. Daddy was gone finally, wizened up in a nursing home. I did go see him from time to time and he’d mutter away and say things that made me shudder. It was mostly nonsense. A bird flew in the window, he said, a bird with deep green eyes. A hand was crawling under his bed flashing a pretty ring with a purple stone. The mind does that for some. It collapses like the old barn over there will someday. But it never happened to me nor my brother. Our minds stayed sharp. Hiram’s mind was still clear when he had the heart attack in the woods by the waterfall. I found him there when he was breathing out his last words, his regret over how Elmore died, how he always knew he’d pay for it.
“Some people, they get more astute when they get older. Hiram got craftier, but not one damn bit smarter or sensible, mind you. Always coming up with some way to get ahead that always involved putting someone else behind. Don’t get me wrong. He’d do some nice things for you, if he wasn’t trying to pull one over on you. He was the one who picked me up when I got out of jail. He testified to the judge about my character. Of course that don’t mean much, for Hiram had no trouble lying for his kin. At least family loyalty ran in him. When my prison days were behind me I took over the family farm to work it in the old ways, with the horses, the plough.
“Look at old Lucretia Swindelle, they’d say, the lady farmer who did her husband in. They never found his body. I did not hide it. It wasn’t me who took it.
“It was terrible sad when Rose went missing. I remember that morning. It was so hot and still. There was a horrible scream. Daddy said it was a peacock in the trees, one that came over from Petal’s End from the idiot who had them as pets a long time ago.
“Let’s go for a walk now, down to the water. You keep looking at the forest so I’ll take you there. It’s this time of day I like a walk, down by the stream, to the beach. The stream runs fast in the autumn, freezes in the winter, and then dries up in the early summer. But it’s late August now so it will be flowing once more.” The dog didn’t move as they stood up and Ondine couldn’t tell if it was dead or alive.
* * *
They were walking along the path now, along the stream. Huge ferns grew on either side of the water, and the tree canopy made for such thick shade it felt like night never left the forest. The path was steep as it headed down through the woods to the beach and Ondine had to pay attention to every rock, every step. She was dizzy from the heat, from the exertion it was taking now to go down through the forest. There were occasional water pools, small waterfalls, and bits of red and brown seaweed scattered beside them.
The old woman’s voice was high as she spoke quickly now, as though she was expecting something to happen and she might run out of time. “I can tell you to the best of my recollection, you understand, what happened to Rose. It’s been some time and time is like the evening light. It softens and bends things as the eye falls upon them. Do you hear the crickets? Last week they come on in the early afternoon. Sometimes I feel like a cricket, something small and little, that no one can see, but still makes a noise. This is my summer song. I sing it while I can now. There was a time I sang a song in every season . . . a song for autumn when the leaves went changing colours and the sky went deep blue. The air cold and crisp, smelling like rot . . . the smell of coming death. Then my winter song, the words I’d sing as I carried the wood in for my fire. The time of year when the blue would drain right out of the sky like something was sucking the colour out, a pale blue I would later see on my little girl’s mouth when they pulled her from the river and her face was the colour of the winter clouds, and her lips was like petals dead upon the snow.
“When
I look up at those black December skies with the big old moon rising up through the bare branches of the oak tree, I can hear Rose then, calling to the moon as she always did: Over the mountain, over the sea, where my heart is longing to be, please let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I love. But that was her December song and it stopped with her.
“You’re looking the wrong way, back there by the woods. You turn your green eyes away from there, and look down over the bay. I know what you are.
“Look over the waves, my girl. They travelled by the stream, up to the land, looking for husbands and a soul. But woe betides the man who was charmed, for there was no forgiveness for any transgression against her or her children.”
They had come out from the trees now to the rocky beach. There was a thick fog billowing in on the tide and the wind was cold and wet, the air briny. The old woman bent down and picked a few pink rose petals growing amidst the driftwood and shore brambles.
In the fog there seemed to be a high hum, as though there was a choir in the mists. There were dark shapes in the white haze as the waves crashed on the beach. The old woman threw her cane to the side and lifted up her arms. She raised her voice over the crash of the surf and looked at Ondine as she spoke. Her words were foreign and the exhortations were blown away by the wind as quickly as the old woman uttered them. And then the old lady was gone in the mists and the waves crashed in over Ondine’s feet, and the spray felt like cold wet hands stroking her cheeks as she fell into the water, the pull of the turning tide taking her seaward.
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