Islands Page 21

  “We don’t really know,” I said over and over in the days after the fire. I could not count the people who asked. I knew that the others were getting the questions, too. In the four days afterward, until the memorial service, I stopped going out except for essentials. I canceled a trip to St. Louis, and handled my office work from Bull Street. Lila showed no houses, and Camilla ordered her groceries from Burbage’s. Our answering machines worked overtime.

  For the truth was, we really did not know, absolutely and without question, what had happened that night on the beach, and likely never would. It seemed quite certain, though, that it happened exactly like Duck Portis, the fire chief on the island, and Bobby Sargent, the chief of police, thought it had. Fairlie had been curled up on the downstairs sofa before the dying fire, and had lit the kerosene heater because the night had turned bitter cold. Somehow, later, probably from a gust of the wild, booming wind that had come up off the ocean and in through the flimsy, uncaulked glass doors from the porch, the old heater had overturned. The smell of kerosene was still powerful in the charred living room, even after the water from the fire truck had saturated it. It wouldn’t have taken long. The house had been a firetrap for years; we knew that. Duck and Bobby thought that Fairlie must have been deeply asleep, and died of smoke inhalation before the flames reached her. But I could tell from Lewis’s haunted eyes that he did not think so. He had, after all, seen Fairlie before she was taken away. Bobby had reached him first.

  Duck and Bobby and Lewis and Henry had grown up summers together on Sullivan’s Island, and had authored all manner of mischief before sober manhood overtook them. When they could not find Henry, they had called Lewis at Edisto. He had gone immediately to the beach house. After pronouncing Fairlie he had tracked Henry down in West Virginia, with a team of doctors who had gone into the mountainous coal-mining country. I remembered later that I had trained the nurses who accompanied them. Lewis did not remember much of that phone conversation. He never did. We protect ourselves as best we can. Henry had wanted Fairlie to go to Stuhr’s Funeral Home, so Lewis called, and rode there with her. Then he went home to Bull Street, to wait for me.

  As far as Duck and Bobby could tell, the fire had started about eleven. The holidays were over and the black, blasting wind had driven most of the vacationing cottage owners home. The beach house was far down, on a jog that curved sharply right, out of sight of most of the permanent residents. It was a motorist coming home late over the great, humping bridge from Charleston who had sighted the flames and called 911.

  “Why on earth was she downstairs wrapped up in an old quilt?” people asked. “There must have been five bedrooms in that old heap. Why did she light a kerosene stove as old as Methuselah when there was an electric space heater right across the room? Could she have been, you know, drinking?”

  But to us, it all seemed perfectly understandable. Fairlie loved to sleep in front of the fire. She did it often when we all stayed over. Usually she built the fire up enough so that it would last her the night, but in that bone-rattling cold it would not have been enough. I could just see her dragging the old kerosene stove out of the jumbled kitchen closet, lighting it, and rolling up in the dusty quilt that covered the sofa. Fairlie had always hated the electric heater. She had thought that it was dangerous.

  “They all are,” she said once. “Why else do you always read about them burning down tenements and housing projects? It’s never a kerosene stove.”

  “It’s probably because even our indigent have electricity now,” Lewis had teased her. “Would you willingly smell kerosene if you didn’t have to?”

  “I like it,” Fairlie said stubbornly. “It reminds me of the bunkhouses at home. My father used to pour it on all our scrapes and punctures, too; we were always stepping on horseshoe nails.”

  Oh, Fairlie, I thought. If I could think that you just drifted away on a tide of warmth with the smell of home all around you, I could start to get past this. Maybe.

  But I could not think that. Lewis’s eyes and his silence would not let me.

  “Did Henry see her?” I asked, on the evening of the day that Henry had flown in from West Virginia. He had gone directly to the funeral home. Lewis and Simms had met him there. They would not let Lila and Camilla and me go. Lewis had not even called Camilla until the middle of the morning after the fire.

  “Let her sleep,” he had said. “There won’t be much for her for a long time.”

  “No. He didn’t even ask to see her. I had told him on the phone pretty much how things were. She was cremated; she’d asked for that long before, after Charlie’s ceremony. Henry and Nancy and the kids are going to take the urn to Kentucky. There’ll be a very simple, private interment there. I don’t think she’s got much family left.”

  “She wanted to go home. He was going to go with her,” I sobbed. “But, oh, Lewis, not like this.”

  “No, baby. Not like this.”

  “How was he? What did he say?”

  I could not imagine what there was to be said after your wife had died by fire. I could not imagine how Henry was.

  “He didn’t say much at all,” Lewis said, “except that if he hadn’t forgotten about the opera at the Gaillard and gone out with the doctors, it wouldn’t have happened. I never saw anybody in such pain. He thinks it’s his fault.”

  “Oh, Lewis, nobody made her go out to the island,” I said, weeping. “She would have been just as mad at him in Bedon’s Alley. It was her choice.”

  But I knew Henry, and I knew that he would wear Fairlie’s death like a shirt of nails until the day that he, too, died.

  9

  I DID NOT GO TO FAIRLIE’S memorial service. I woke up the day before in our bed on Bull Street, coughing and aching and so desperately tired that for a long while I could not get out of bed.

  “Flu, maybe, or that other thing that’s going around,” Lewis said, dressing for the clinic in the dim, shuttered room. “Stay in bed and drink lots of water. Take aspirin. Call me in the morning.”

  I turned back over and burrowed under the covers. Gladys groaned in her sleep and moved up against me. She had slept with us for the past two nights, and had begun to whine anxiously when I left her sight. In truth, she was the real reason I was not going to the house on Bedon’s Alley to see Fairlie off. I did indeed feel awful, but I knew it was a malaise of the heart and spirit, not the body. I simply was not going to leave Gladys.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Camilla said briskly when I called to tell her. “She’ll have to get used to being by herself sometime. You can’t take her with you out of town. Why don’t you bring her? She can stay in the kitchen. Or she can come stay with Boy and Girl. What will Henry think?”

  But I knew that for old Gladys to be in her lifelong home without her people would be cruel past imagining. And she had never been particularly connected to the two Boykins. Henry was her polestar. Henry and now, perhaps, just a bit, me. It was, of course, a desperation allegiance, but I was not going to break it.

  “It’s what Henry would do,” I said, sure of it. “I’ll stay here and put together a little lunch for us. I know that Henry and Nancy are going straight to the airport after the service. Nobody’s expecting a gathering of any kind.”

  “I’m going to do that,” Camilla said. “I’ve already ordered the stuff from Ginger Breslin’s. All I’ve got to do is pick it up this afternoon. You stay in and take care of yourself.”

  I felt an obscure flare of anger.

  “I’m going to do this, Camilla,” I said firmly. “This one time, I’m going to take care of us. I know you do it better than anybody else, but I’m doing it this time.”

  There was a small silence, and then she said lightly, “Well, of course you must, if you feel so strongly about it. What can I bring?”

  “Nothing. Just give Henry and Nancy my dearest love.”

  “You know I will.”

  I made a pot of chili that afternoon, and cornbread. That and a salad of iceberg lettuce and Ru
sian dressing just felt right. It was still cold, though fair, and the wind still battered the harbor and the downtown streets. No herbed and sauced and layered things on that day. No champagne. No mesclun. Just the walloping, comforting chili and some grocery-store red and white wine, and what Lewis called the “dreaded iceberg.” It was a childish meal. I ached for childhood, even the one I had had. I thought that we all would.

  They trooped in just past one the next day, looking whipped and diminished, old. For the first time, at least to me, old. I hugged them as you would children who had come shivering home from school, and set them before the fire, and poured mugs of a lovely hot thing Fairlie had taught me to make long ago, saying it was an old Kentucky bluegrass recipe. Claret cup, she called it: red wine and beef consommé, lemon and cinnamon and nutmeg and a pinch of sugar. It should not have been good but it was. It warmed you down to your metatarsals. We drank a lot of it. And we talked. Gladys snuffled each of us in turn and then flung herself down at my feet.

  Lewis and Henry and Camilla had spoken briefly about Fairlie at the small service with more laughter and remembrance, all told, than tears. Others had joined in; everyone had a Fairlie story. Nancy had gotten up and started to speak about her mother, and then sat back down, trembling. Camilla had put her arm around her shoulders, and for the rest of the service, Nancy wept quietly. When the young minister from Holy Cross on Sullivan’s Island asked if anyone else would like to say anything, Fairlie’s youngest grandchild, Maggie, only four, piped up and said, “Granny taught me how to pee in a conch shell so I wouldn’t mess up the beach.”

  The laughter from the small group gathered on Fairlie’s gilt dining room chairs, placed in curved rows around the fireplace in the big old cave of a drawing room, was instantaneous, a surf of love and delight for Fairlie. It was, Lila said, the only time Henry’s expression changed. He had winced as though someone had plunged a dagger in his heart.

  “But, oh, that minister,” Lila said, shaking her gilt head so that her hair fanned out from beneath the black velvet band. Lila had always kept her hair a silvery ash blond; it was difficult to tell where, or if, she was graying. “Well, he didn’t know,” Camilla said. “Nobody but the family and we knew that he was taking her ashes back to Kentucky. For that matter, nobody but us knew that they were planning to retire there. You can’t blame him. It was a lovely thought.”

  “What?” I said, dreading the answer. I had wanted Fairlie’s memorial to be flawless.

  Just after Christmas, Creighton Mills had astounded, and, in some cases, shocked, everyone who knew him by leaving the Episcopal church and becoming a Catholic. He had since then been in semi-reclusion at the the Franciscan order out at Mepkin Abbey. Downtown buzzed; an ecclesiastical scandal was a morsel of choice.

  It was widely put about that Creigh had had some sort of awful secret on his conscience, and finally left the world and took the weight of it with him.

  “Atonement, that’s what it is,” some of his elderly congregation said. But Lewis disagreed.

  “I think he just got tired of being downtown’s perpetual preppy priest. That habit must be pretty comfortable after all those crew-neck sweaters. Still, I wish he’d been there for Fairlie. I know that silliness from the Book of Ruth must have hurt Henry like hell.”

  “What?” I cried.

  “He talked about how Fairlie came to us in her youth and cast her lot with us,” Camilla said, “and how enriched we all were that she had chosen ours and Henry’s home as her own. Then he read from that passage that starts out ‘Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest I will go, and wherever thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people will be my people…’ oh, you know. Everybody was nodding and whispering about how sweet it was, and I know Henry was simply dying. He still thinks it’s because of him that she’s going home in a bronze urn. This whole thing is going to kill him if he can’t get past that.”

  There was a small silence, and then Lewis said, “You know, at least one of us is going to have to end up at Magnolia, or we’ll all be put outside the city walls for the vultures to eat. Charlie in the ocean and now Fairlie in Kentucky. I don’t know which is considered worse. We can draw straws.”

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, Anny, but you might want to give Nancy a call before they get away,” Camilla said. “I think they’ll still be in Bedon’s Alley. Nancy is absolutely furious with you for not being at the memorial, and nothing any of us could say changed her mind. It’s shock and grief, of course, but I think it probably hurts Henry to hear it, and I’m sure you can straighten it out with no trouble.”

  I was as shocked and hurt as if I had been slapped across the face. Nancy had always been her sunny, easygoing self around me; she was very like Henry in that way. That she could be angry with me was as ungraspable as it would be to learn she thought I was a child abuser, or worse.

  “Of course I’ll call,” I said, getting up and going to the telephone in the kitchen. There was one on the table in the sitting room, but this one was out of earshot. I had no idea what I was going to say.

  The telephone in Bedon’s Alley rang a long time before being answered. I was just beginning to think, gratefully, that they had left for the airport after all, and then the receiver was lifted and Nancy’s voice came on the line. It was flat and dull, without affect.

  “Sweetie, this is Anny,” I began. “I hear you’re upset with me for not being with you all today, and wanted to say how sorry I am if I caused you any more pain—”

  “Lewis said you weren’t feeling well,” her voice cut in. It had hardened into steel. “Couldn’t you just have sucked it up for an hour? Everybody was talking about it. Mother always said she felt closer to you than any other woman in the goddamned Scrubs; I guess she was a fool to think you felt the same way about her.”

  I heard Henry’s voice in the background, but hers overrode it.

  “Lewis also said that you wanted to stay with the dog. Well, isn’t that just wonderful? By all means, let’s keep the dog happy….”

  I heard Henry’s voice again, this time nearer, and nearly as hard as his daughter’s.

  “Hush, Nancy,” he said. “It was just the right thing to do. Nothing could have pleased me more. Gladys was a part of your mother’s heart, just like she’s a part of mine. I’d appreciate it if you’d apologize to Anny.”

  Nancy’s voice rose to a wail. I knew that she was not speaking to me.

  “You care more about that damned old dog than you do us! You always did! The dog and the precious Scrubs—”

  Somebody replaced the phone very softly.

  I told no one.

  As often happens in the Low Country, the spell of bitter February weather morphed abruptly into spring and stayed there. The air was sweet and tender with the smell of the first bloomings, and the skies over the harbor were denim blue and dotted with fluffy white Disney clouds. Afternoon temperatures crept toward the seventies, rains were mild and showery, and Charleston moved outdoors.

  We moved into the three houses on the creek. Or at least Camilla did, lock, stock, and barrel, into the middle house she had been in when I first saw the creek property. She was, she said, going to spend a week or two there, and she hoped we’d join her when we could; the marshes were greening and battalions of waterfowl were back. She had seen a flight of egrets the day before that had looked like a snowstorm, settling into a huge live oak across the creek.

  “Camilla, do you think you should be out there alone all that time?” I said. “It’s not like Sullivan’s; there’s not a soul around out there for miles and miles. It’s really wild country. I’m not sure I’d want to be there alone even overnight.”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said, smiling. “I never have been, on the water. It’s not like I was the only living thing out there; the marshes and creek at night are as noisy as the VFW hut on Bohicket Road. Everything in the swamp is out trying to seduce everything else.”

  In the end, w
e had decided that we could not leave her alone on the creek, and on the following weekend we brought whatever furniture we could gather and set out in a caravan down the Maybank Highway. Simms had brought a huge truck and crew from the plant, and by late Saturday afternon, we were in.

  Lila and Simms had brought most of the furniture they had moved from their Wadmalaw Island place; it had been in storage at the plant. It was lovely: big, carved pieces with the look of the West Indies about them, and a lot of airy rattan. Their bedroom had a mahogany plantation bed, overhung with sheer white cotton fabric, that I coveted. By the time the crew left with the truck, everything looked as if it had been there for years, just waiting, Lewis said, for Architectural Digest to get there.

  Our house, on Camilla’s right and closest to the water, had a few rump-sprung pieces of wicker that had not been claimed from the Battery house and a quartet of plain iron beds that had been in the children’s sleeping porch at Sweetgrass. Linda and Robert Cousins, old now and withered of skin but still erect and vital, came out on moving day with a carful of wonderful old linen: sheets, coverlets, dresser scarves, napkins, tablecloths, a few thin, silky towels. They had long been folded away somewhere with camphor and lavender. It perfumed the whole house.

  “They were Lewis’s grandmother’s everyday linens,” Linda said when I exclaimed over them. “Miss Sissy was fixing to throw them out. I dug them out of the barrel and took them home and put them away. I always thought somebody might want them.”

  I hugged her. She smelled of the same lavender and camphor. “It will make this place home in an eyeblink,” I said.

  “Something needs to,” she said tartly. “What you doing out here on this creek and marsh? You got a creek and marsh just like it back at Sweetgrass.”

  We had, in fact; I had thought about that more than once. But it seemed to me that this marsh and this creek were very different from the ones on Edisto. This was creek water, slower and darker, though almost as wide. The land on the hummock was wilder. And there were no ghosts. That was the main thing. I was done with shades and remembrances every time I rounded a corner or put a foot on a creaking stair. I would never in my life stop loving and missing Charlie and Fairlie, but I could not have borne them catching at my heart twenty times a day. I needed life and the living, and hoped that we could make it happen here.