Burnt Mountain (22 page)

We went, not back out onto the veranda but into the front room that served, I supposed, as the living room. It was immaculate
and filled with air and light; the tall windows were open and the furniture gleamed with polish and scented the air with lemon.
It was somehow a pure room; there were few bibelots around on the polished surfaces and no plants or flowers except an exploding
bower of white hydrangeas that sat in the fireplace, so huge and perfect that they were obviously fake.

Carol saw my glance and grinned ruefully. “Faux, of course. I’ll bet I’m the only house on Bell’s Ferry Road with fake flowers
in my house. Chris and Benjamin and Bummer gave them to me for my birthday. I made a huge fuss over them and put them in here
where living feet seldom fall.”

“I think they look lovely,” I said. Somehow, they did. “It’s a beautiful house. I’ve always loved Dutch Colonial.”

“It is indeed,” Aengus said. “Although coming from one who grew up in a peat hut with a straw roof—”

“Oh, shut up,” Carol and I said together, and we all laughed. The night was suddenly good.

We had, surprisingly, mint juleps. They tasted wonderful.

“The secret is to make your own simple syrup,” Carol said, only she said “shimple” and I realized she’d had a couple before
we arrived. “Mint’s out of my garden, too. Isn’t it funny? You can’t kill mint even where nothing else will grow.”

She fixed us another and got up to see to dinner. I offered to help, but she said there was really nothing left to do. As
we raised our second drinks, Bummer came into the room.

“Hey, Aengus! I mean Dr. O’Neill,” he said in a froggy voice that somehow went with the chipmunk teeth and the yellow hair,
now slicked to his head and showing comb tracks.

“Hey, Mrs. O’Neill.”

“Hello, Bummer,” I said, smiling. He had pink cheeks dotted with tawny freckles; I would have liked to pinch them lightly.

“Hallo, Bummer.
Cen chaoi a bhfuil tu?
” Aengus said.

Bummer looked at him suspiciously. Aengus laughed.

“It’s Gaelic,” he said. “It’s a very old language that they spoke in Ireland and Scotland and so on. It’s Celtic language.
You remember me telling you about the Celts the other day?”

“Those guys that cut off people’s heads? Is that what they said?”

“Well, not exactly when they cut people’s heads off.” Aengus grinned. ” ‘
Cen chaoi a bhfuil tu?
‘ means ‘How are you?’ ”

“Well, I’m pretty good except I have a boil on my—”

“Bummer!” Carol exclaimed, coming back into the room. “Enough about the boil. Go call your brothers; dinner’s ready.”

“Okay, but I don’t think they’ll come. They’re still mad about having to go to camp.”

“Oh, God,” Carol sighed, gesturing for us to follow her into the dining room. We sat down at her table, set with yellow flowered
pottery and with my lilies resplendent in a blue bowl in the center.

“Chalk up another one for dear old Dad. I almost had them talked into going to camp somewhere this summer; I don’t know if
I can handle all three of them just running loose, and he comes along and says he thinks camp is for fags, and so of course
the rebellion has been mounted. They’ll go, of course, because I’ll cut off their allowance if they don’t, but now it’s going
to be such a damn battle, and it just didn’t have to be.”

“I’d like to go to camp,” Bummer said. He began to sing, “The Cabbal King with the big old ring fell in love with the dusty
maid…” He ran up the stairs after his brothers and out of sight.

” ‘The Cannibal King with the big nose ring,’ ” I said, laughing. “He ‘fell in love with a dusky maid,’ and so forth…. It’s
a classic camp song. I sang it at my camp.”

“Is it ever. That damned bus from Riverwood goes by at dawn every morning with all the little Woodies on it singing about
the Cannibal King at the tops of their lungs. I’d like to shoot out the tires.”

Bummer came back in, followed by two older boys. They walked straight and stiffly, and they were neatly dressed in clean jeans
and striped long-sleeved oxford shirts, but you could tell they would rather be anyplace on earth than that dining room. They
were handsome boys, both dark haired and dark eyed with mellow swimming pool tans, but their brows were drawn into straight
lines and their mouths were pressed thin lipped and shut, without looking at any of us as they dropped into their chairs.

“Chris, Benjamin,” Carol said tightly. “Please say hello to Mrs. O’Neill, our next-door neighbor.”

The oldest, who was seated next to me, turned slowly in his seat and looked at me. Or rather, leered at me. His eyes raked
me all over, up and down, lingering on my breasts under a white cotton tank, and he licked his lips slowly. Then the wet lips
curled up in a smile that seemed to scrape my underwear off beneath my clothes. It should have been a young boy’s parody of
lust, but it wasn’t; on this boy it looked disturbing and corrupt. I felt myself flush. Across the table from me I saw Aengus
make a small movement in his chair.

“Next door’s lookin’ pretty fine,” the boy drawled.

“This is her husband, Dr. O’Neill,” Carol said, her voice like ice.

The boy did not take his eyes off me. “Are you really married to that old geezer?” he said. “What a waste.”

“Chris!” Carol cried.

Aengus was out of his seat and around the table in an eyeblink. The boy turned his face to him, startled, and Aengus took
both his shoulders in his hands and leaned close to his
face and spat out a long string of words; they sounded guttural and dangerous, rather like a snake hissing. I knew he was
speaking Gaelic. When he stopped the boy sat still for a moment and then jumped to his feet. His face was pale under the tan
and his eyes were wide with fright. He turned and ran out of the dining room, followed by his brother Benjamin. No one spoke.
Aengus walked back to the table and sat down. Bummer began to cry.

It took a long time to get it sorted out. Carol was appalled and apologetic for her son; she was near tears. Bummer nestled
in her shoulder and cried quietly. Aengus apologized, too, but it was fairly obvious that he did not mean it. There was no
question of dinner. I finally kissed Carol on the cheek and said, “Bring dinner to our house tomorrow night and let’s start
fresh. There was no harm done. I can’t imagine what Aengus—”

“I’ve never seen Chris behave like that before,” Carol said dully. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. He’s not a
bad boy, but sometimes after his father—”

“I’ll even make dessert,” Aengus said, kissing Carol Partridge on the cheek. “How about humble pie?”

“Done deal,” she said, managing a weary smile. “Dinner will keep. It was only gazpacho and eggplant parmigiana.”

“Can’t wait,” said Aengus, who loathed eggplant more than he did war or famine.

Outside in the cool darkness, walking through our backyard, I said to Aengus, “What did you say to him? Was it a curse? It
sounded like one!”

“Nah,” he said. “Just Yeats. You know, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’?”

” ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,/And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;/Nine bean rows will
I have there, a hive for the honey bee,/And live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ ”

I began to laugh.

“I wonder how he’s going to feel when he grows up and finds out that he was cursed by William Butler Yeats.”

“Very badly, I hope,” Aengus said. “Nobody looks at my wife like that. Not even a snot-nosed twelve-year-old.”

A
engus did not like his new job. I was surprised and somehow frightened. I had never seen him discontented or unhappy before.
Annoyed, yes; angry, certainly. But never this dull, diminished apathy.

He himself could not really explain it.

“It’s just that almost all I do now is supervise. Just… supervise…. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to give up the direct
contact with… oh, mythology. Stories. The sense of the Celts as real, brave, bloodthirsty, stinking
men.
”

“But you can still read about them, can’t you? I mean, there can’t be many people who know as much about them as you do. Can’t
you just sort of… be with them in your head?”

“No. I guess I can’t. I never even thought about it before, but what I really need is to be giving them to people. Making
them come alive in other people’s minds.”

“Can’t you teach just one course? Surely they’d agree
to that. They know what your specialty is. They must have liked it or they wouldn’t have hired you.”

“I guess I could. Next quarter, maybe. This is just a summer program. I’ll suggest it. It just doesn’t seem that Coltrane
is a very… mythic place. Life is real; life is earnest.”

“How about some kind of private tutorial thing?” I said. “Maybe here, at night?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

He did not seem to want to pursue it, so I didn’t. But his unhappiness lodged itself in my soul, and its shadow went before
me everywhere I went in this new green river world. Even the house seemed darker, as it did on cloudy days.

I told Carol Partridge about it one day when we were down at the river watching Bummer swim. The river just above the old
iron bridge was shallow and sun dappled at its edges, and fairly gentle. Out in its middle it ran deep and straight toward
the falls below the bridge, but these shallows were made for swimming or, rather, for thrashing and dabbling. Upriver there
were a few other children minnowing about in it, just as Bummer was, all watched by tanned women in shorts and halters. I
wondered if anybody on Bell’s Ferry worked. I would begin teaching in the fall at a new charter primary school nearby, and
I knew that Carol spent a couple mornings a week working at the Junior League consignment clothing shop. I also knew that
it was volunteer work. Walter Partridge had paid pretty dearly for the privilege of pursuing young women. Carol and the boys
lived well, if not lavishly.

The day was rich with sun and the clean fishy smell of
wild-running water. Sun sparkled off the whorls of the river and lit Carol’s tousled hair to white-gold. Bummer’s wet-seal
body glistened all over. I felt the sun deeply on the top of my head; the smell of sun-heated hair was thick in my nostrils,
and my shoulders were just before burning. Wild honeysuckle starred the darker woods; its heartbreaking fragrance rode to
us on the little river wind. Deep, swift joy bubbled up in me, as it does sometimes when you are a child. I still could hardly
believe that this world had been given to me. I closed my eyes and smiled, and felt my cheeks stretch under the bite of the
sun. I would have to go in soon.

Not yet, though.

“Aengus isn’t happy with his job,” I said to Carol, my eyes still closed. That way I wouldn’t have to see the day dull with
my words.

“Why on earth not?” Carol said. “It sounded perfect for him to me. Coltrane is an awfully good school.”

“He mostly supervises,” I said. “There’s no time to teach. I didn’t realize he was so plugged into all that Celtic mythology
stuff, but it’s really painful for him not to… live it, I guess. It’s as though he’s lost his tribe, or something.”

“He’s head of the department,” she said. “Surely they’ll let him teach at least one class on whatever he wants.”

“I thought so, too. It didn’t seem to cheer him up. I’ve never seen him quite like this.”

We were quiet for a while, and then she said almost dreamily, “I have an idea.”

“Shoot.”

“Bell’s Ferry has this block party thing every summer,
around Midsummer Night. I know it sounds awful, but it’s sort of fun to get everybody together. Mostly people just drink and
eat hors d’oeuvres, but there’s always some kind of entertainment. We’ve had our kids’ bands so many times we’re about to
throw up, and once or twice we’ve had some kind of dance thing, but we’re all getting tired of the kind of stuff we can do
without having to pay for it. It’s at my house this year—lucky me—and I’ve been putting off even trying to think about entertainment.
But what if Aengus would come and tell some of those old legends and myths, or whatever he’d like to do? He’d be a sensation!
I’m sure he’s charmed every single soul he’s ever met….”

She looked at me expectantly. My heart sank. There was no way I was going to ask Aengus if he’d come be the entertainment
for Carol’s block party.

“Oh, Carol, I don’t know…. He’s pretty private about that sort of thing…,” I began.

“Nonsense! It’s an inspiration. I’m going to call him right now. Is he home?”

I knew that he was, it being Saturday. I imagined that he’d be on the veranda reading the
New York Times.
I almost lied about it, then sighed.

“Yeah. He’s home. But really, I don’t think…”

She got up and trotted up the bank a few paces to where she’d left her purse and her cell phone. She didn’t come back for
quite a while. I sat and watched the river play with itself and smiled at Bummer. If Aengus didn’t want to do it, he would
tell Carol. No harm done.

But he did. She came scrambling back down the bank grinning.

“He’d love to. He said something about the summer solstice and the Beltane Fires and… I don’t remember the rest, but he sounded
really enthusiastic about it. Maybe I won’t have to get everybody so drunk.”