Beach Music (66 page)

One day I found Shyla weeping on the garden bench against the brick wall that separated our two houses. I lifted myself up onto the wall and with both arms extended balanced myself expertly and ran along the wall until I spoke from above her and asked what was wrong. Then I saw the blood on her legs. Taking her by the hand, I led her a back way through a neighbor’s gate and overgrown yard toward a portion of marsh that led to the dock behind our house. The jasmine was blooming and the bees looked as though they were stitching flowers together with invisible silken thread. I made her take off her shoes and socks and then both of us dove in our light summer clothes into the incoming tide.

“Saltwater cures everything,” I assured her.

“I’m dying. I want to die I’m so embarrassed.”

“It’s probably something you ate,” I said, using my mother’s stock reply for everything.

“My mother will kill me when she sees I went swimming in this dress.”

“We’ll sneak into my house. We’ll use the tree,” I suggested.

The tides of Waterford washed Shyla clean and she and I sneaked into the yard of my house and scrambled up the back side of the live oak where I had hammered two-by-fours to make a ladder. Shyla undressed in my room and put on a tee shirt and old pair of my shorts; then she handed me her wet dress and underpants and asked me to throw them away. Afraid for her and worried about their discovery, I dug a deep hole beside the marsh in a place hidden by fences and placed the bag within. While I was completing my task, Shyla went to inform her mother she was bleeding to death.

Yet it was not that bleeding that was killing her slowly, but Shyla’s inability to incorporate the wounds of her parents into a world that made any sense to her. Though she was being raised in a quiet backwater Southern town where almost any child could find a sense of safety, cohesion, and composure, she was born a child who could pull every electron of anguish from the aura surrounding a loved one and take it gladly into her own system. She consumed the pain of others because that was her food of choice, the one fruit she would always choose to smuggle out of Eden. Her disease was Auschwitz, but that was a difficult diagnosis for anyone to make in the low country of South Carolina in 1960.

For over a year she managed to hold herself together. Then her mother followed her after dinner one night, a meal that Shyla had barely touched, up the stairs to the attic, where she heard Shyla talking in whispers to a group of girls who were not answering back. For fifteen minutes she listened to this fearful monologue of instructions and encouragement, then opened the door suddenly and found Shyla surrounded by all the dolls of her girlhood, shrouded in black like nuns. Shyla was smuggling food to them every night and warning the dolls not to make noise when the Germans were patrolling outside.

Horrified, Ruth took her daughter in her arms and apologized for telling her anything about the terrible past. She had underestimated the extraordinary power of her own story and the fabulous sensitivity that Shyla brought to the taking in of that story.

The next day, my mother watched in disbelief as Shyla walked into our backyard and buried all her dolls in a mass grave she had
dug the night before. That August was one of the hottest on record and it marked the first time that Shyla was sent to the Children’s Division of the South Carolina State Mental Hospital. She was committed to Bull Street, where she remained for six weeks and was treated for extreme depression.

Shyla returned from Columbia unchanged, except that she seemed more inward and self-contained. Her fragility made her special, but we remained comfortable with each other and often did our homework together at the kitchen table at my house where the noise in that overpopulated household seemed to have a calming effect on her. I thought she was getting back to be the Shyla I had always known, and then one night that winter it snowed in Waterford for the third time in the twentieth century. The snow triggered some clear but inexplicable image in Shyla that had nothing to do with the weather itself. The strange chemistry of snow and memory took possession of her and she learned again that madness wore many masks, could change addresses at will, was master of disguise, guile, and the cheap shot. This time it came to her in human form, in the shape of a beautiful, sorrowing woman.

When the woman appeared she brought with her an imaginary country that only Shyla could enter.

She subtracted the real world, erased it completely as she showed herself to Shyla and comforted her with wordless majesty. She was exceedingly kind.

Though Shyla always knew these visitations were born within her own mind, she never lost the sense of excitement the coming of the lady inspired within her. She could not summon her at will: The lady planned the visits with foresight and cunning. Each month, she followed the laws of menses and came only after Shyla’s period had begun.

Once I found Shyla on her knees in a trancelike state in her garden. It was beginning to snow.

“Something’s wrong with Shyla,” I said when I found Mrs. Fox.

“What has happened?” she said, drying her hands on her apron and running out into the yard. She saw Shyla kneeling by the brick wall, moving her lips, but with no words coming forth from her slightly opened mouth, staring, transfixed, at something invisible.

“Shyla, it is your mother. Listen to me, Shyla. You cannot do this to me. Not to me or your father. You are a happy girl. You have everything. Everything, you hear? There’s nothing to be afraid of. There’s nothing to hurt you. You must be happy. It is your duty to be happy. What did he do to you? Did Jack hurt you? Did he touch you?”

“Jack would never do anything to hurt Shyla, Ruth,” I heard my mother’s voice say. “You know that better than anyone. How dare you accuse Jack of such a thing!”

Ruth turned her sad eyes toward my mother and put both hands up in the air in a pathetic, supplicating gesture. “I cannot bear it if something is wrong with my Shyla. I simply could not stand it, Lucy. You do not understand, but this is my hope and my husband’s hope and every dream we have or ever had is contained in this girl and her sister. How could there be anything wrong? There is plenty of food and nice people and no bombs blowing up people in their sleep. Everything is good and I find her like this. For what, Lucy? You tell me for what.”

My mother approached the kneeling girl from behind as the snow continued to fall. She knelt beside Shyla and put her arm around her shoulder.

“You all right, good-looking?” Lucy asked after a minute.

“What’s that?” Shyla said, as she noticed the white buildup on her sweater.

“It’s snow. I grew up with it in the mountains. But it’s rare down here. You scared us, honey. It was like you went off to the moon for a visit.”

“No, Mrs. McCall. I was here. Could you see it too?”

“See what, Shyla?” Lucy asked, looking back at Ruth.

“The lady,” Shyla said.

“Oh my God, she is crazy for sure,” Ruth said, walking around in circles until my mother stopped her with a withering look.

“How nice. Are you sure it was a lady?” Lucy asked.

“Oh yes, such a beautiful lady.”

“I have dreams like that sometimes, too, Shyla,” Lucy whispered. “Sometimes I think I see my poor dead mother and we have the nicest talk together and she seems so real I could reach out and
brush the hair out of her eyes, but then I realize she’s not really there at all. Maybe it’s your imagination. Maybe you’re just dreaming.”

“No, Mrs. McCall. She’s still there. She’s on the fence.”

“What else does the lady look like?” Lucy asked. “Describe her more carefully.”

“Her hands are folded in prayer. A light around her head.”

“Don’t ask her anything more, Lucy,” Ruth said. “I beg of you. She is crazy enough without having to answer these questions.”

Lucy looked over at me, ignoring Ruth, and said, “It’s the Virgin Mary. The Mother of Jesus. We’re privileged to be witnesses of a holy apparition.”

“I don’t think Mary appears to Jews, Mama,” I said.

“Are you in charge of her appointment calendar?” my mother answered and I could tell her mind was made up in this matter. “Besides, Mary was Jewish. It makes perfect sense, if you look at it in a certain light.”

“Mrs. Fox doesn’t seem like she’s on the same wavelength,” I observed.

“Shyla,” Lucy asked with gentleness, “do you know the statue that I keep in the front hall of my house?”

Shyla nodded her head.

“Is that the lady you’re seeing? Is it the Blessed Virgin Mary? The Mother of Jesus of Nazareth?”

Shyla looked at Lucy and affirmed the fact. “I think so.”

Lucy made the sign of the cross and began to say the Apostles’ Creed. “Say a rosary with me, Jack. We are witnesses, like the shepherd children of Fatima or with Bernadette at Lourdes.”

“Mrs. Fox is crying, Mama. I think we better get Shyla inside her house. We’re all covered with snow.”

“And leave poor Mary outside alone?” Lucy said. “I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”

“I don’t see nothin’, Mama,” I said nervously.

“You and I were not chosen to see, Jack,” Lucy explained. “But we were chosen to bear witness to what Shyla has seen.”

“I haven’t seen what Shyla’s seen. She’s shivering, Mama. Get her inside.”

“Will you stay out here and keep Mary company?” Lucy asked.

“Yeh,” I said. “I’ll baby-sit with Mary.”

“Don’t you be flip, young man,” Lucy warned, helping Shyla to her feet and walking her to the back door of her house. “Ask for her intercession. Ask her to get your father to stop drinking.”

“Mary, make my father quit being a drunk,” I said.

“You call that praying?” Lucy said, looking back at me. “How about a little sincerity? If I was the Mother of God I wouldn’t give you a damn thing if you asked for something in that tone of voice.”

“I never prayed to a wall before,” I said, irritable and cold.

“No one likes a doubting Thomas, son. And they certainly don’t go far in life.”

“What if it’s just a figment of Shyla’s imagination?” I asked. “What if there’s nothing but ivy on this wall? Then what exactly am I praying for?”

“Then we’re just making Shyla feel better. We’re supporting her and believing in her. If there’s nothing on that wall, you’re just praying to the same God you normally pray to.”

“I can do that inside where it’s warm.”

“Keep
her
company,” Lucy warned.

It was the first reported apparition of Mary in the history of the South Carolina diocese. The news did not please the Waterford rabbi nor did it amuse Father Marcellus Byrd, the passive, unsociable priest who had been bumped around backwater parishes of the diocese for twenty years. In fact, it pleased no one at all except for my mother.

In the following six months, Shyla lived out her life among the hurt and insane at the mental hospital on Bull Street. Here, she learned the awful laws of electricity. Her vision of the weeping lady was replaced with nothingness and confusion. They stunned her brain and made it imageless. Her lady died by the conveyance of a power surge through the soft tissues of her brain. Shyla shuffled through the girls’ ward on slippers, untouchable and undismayable, and the doctors nodded to each other when after her therapy she could not tell them the name of her hometown. Shock treatment was a natural predator of memory and she did not recognize who I was when I sent her a letter that first week.

I wrote her every week she was away and the live oak that served
as highway and hiding place between us seemed bereft without her. My letters were inevitably shy and stilted, but in each one I told her I wished that she would come home soon. I had spent my entire childhood in shouting distance of Shyla and I felt uncentered without her in the middle of my own life. No one in town mentioned Shyla when she was away. The stigma of the asylum made her unmentionable and even her parents seemed to avoid me in shame whenever I saw them in the streets. Her disappearance was more of an erasure than a going-away.

On the last day of school that June I left a note for my parents that Mike, Capers, and I were going fishing out at the fish camp on the Isle of Orion and not to expect me back for a couple of days. Now began that period of delicious freedom when my pals and I spent the entire summer on the river far from the gaze or worry of parents. If a Waterford boy did not want to spend all of his time on a boat or playing sports, it was a cause for real parental concern. My father found the note and felt a twinge of nostalgia as he thought of his own timeless, languorous hours spent cruising past the oyster banks in search of feeding bass or sheepshead so long ago in that faraway time when he was allowed to think of himself as a boy.

At five in the morning, I went out of my window to the branch of the oak tree that almost touched down on the roof of my house. I caught a ride with a sheriff’s deputy who was transferring a prisoner to the Central Correction Center in Columbia who drove me to the main entrance of the state hospital on Bull Street after delivering a stern lecture on the dangers of hitchhiking.

The grounds were lonely and well kept and the buildings looked well wrought but crestfallen. I wandered through the bricked-in campus for an hour, trying hard to look nonchalant and clearheaded. By the time I saw Shyla at visitors’ hours, I thought my own sanity was suspect and temporary.

Shyla seemed older, more womanly than I remembered. She had the run of the place and took me on visits to the library, the canteen, where she paid for my lunch by signing her name, and the nondenominational chapel.

“You ought to watch crazy people come here and pray. It’s better than the circus. Some of them scream out, ‘Amen,’ others
shout ‘Mama,’ others go crazy and have to be dragged off to solitary by their attendants. But most of them just sing, pretty as angels. Crazy people have good voices. That’s been a big surprise.”

As we circumnavigated the seventy-seven fenced acres, exploring every nook and cranny, I gave Shyla a summary of all that had occurred during her lost months away from school and Waterford.

When we walked in front of the main administration building, Babcock, Shyla suddenly took me by the hand and led me up the front steps. We ran quickly to the back hall where she hurried me up three flights of stairs, then to a cavernous attic room that led to the great dome that dominated the skyline for miles around. A small narrow stairway took us through the gloomy fretwork of support beams that held the dome aloft. The woodwork was elaborate and it seemed as though ten forests had died to provide all the timber that buttressed that graceful, silver dome, which floated lighter than air above the trees of Columbia. When we reached the highest point on the stairway there was still a huge open space to the top of the structure. Hundreds of bats hung like baseball gloves, their eyes adjusted to the darkness. I could hear pigeons cooing in the eaves below them and could smell mildew and guano and mold in the stagnant air.