Burnt Mountain (27 page)

He saw my face and put his arms around me.

“I can drive back tonight, you know.”

“No. It’s a long way, and those mountain roads… and besides, the most fun is after the campfire, anyway.”

“That’s right, you did campfires at that camp of yours, didn’t you? And what possible fun did you get up to after your campfire,
seeing as they were all preadolescent girls?”

I stood still in the darkness of our early-morning foyer and heard a slow, deep voice saying, Didn’t anybody ever tell you
that Zeus was a serial rapist?

Nick Abrams’s voice.

“Not much, to be honest about it,” I said, my face going hot.

“Then I won’t, either. See you in the morning, love. Take you to brunch at the Ritz if you like.”

He kissed me and was gone out the front door. In the open doorway the heat eddied and coiled, and then retreated as he shut
it. Another hot day, then. My heart sank.

And then I thought, What possible difference can it make? and went to take my own shower and feel my way into this barren
day in which he was not coming home.

By the time I had been at Carol’s house for an hour or so that evening, the sky blackened and lightning forked and thunder
crackled, and we fled onto her screened porch just as the first great drops fell, sizzling on the pavement around the pool.

“Thank God,” she said. “I think if this heat breaks, everything might get back to normal, or nearly.”

Chris and Ben and Bummer scrambled out of the pool and dashed into the house.

“Stay close, guys!” she called after them. “Dinner in less than an hour!”

Nothing from Ben and Chris, except the sounds of the doors to their rooms slamming. Bummer called froggily that he was going
to play video games in the den.

“They’re still mad, I take it,” I said. “Chris and Ben, I mean.”

“Of course. It was obviously my fault that they were impelled to shoot an old man with water guns and steal his fudgesicles.”
She sighed.

Then she turned her yellow head and looked at me. “They’re really good kids, Thayer. I don’t know what’s gotten into them
this year. It’s just such a
major
change. And I don’t even know exactly when it started. It’s funny about the big life changes, isn’t it? That you don’t even
realize that they’ve happened until long after, and then you can’t remember when. Or what happened that might have touched
them off.”

I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close on the big glider on the porch. She was all bird-fine bones and a steady,
tiny shivering. Outside, the rain poured straight down, making its own music and sending us the intoxicating smell of wet
earth and grass.

“Things can change back,” I said. “I don’t think anything is written in stone, Carol. They
are
good boys. You all will laugh about this someday.”

“Way better than crying,” she said. “I’m glad I have you around, Thayer. All my other friends in the neighborhood have kids,
and there’s always a little of the Well, at least
my
kids didn’t get hauled down to Juvie, going around. How nice to have a friend with great good sense who doesn’t have kids
yet.”

I said nothing. This was an entire subcontinent that I meant to keep unexplored.

I had thought I would be restless that night and sleep poorly, but with the air off and the windows open and the cool murmur
of the retreating storm outside, I was asleep before I even had time to miss Aengus.

I slept late, until almost ten, and jumped out of bed thinking that perhaps he had gotten an early start and was already
home, letting me sleep in. But he was not in the house, nor outside. I put on jeans and a shirt and went out to tend my battered
flowers.

He was not home by lunchtime, either. At two o’clock he called to say that he was not getting in until about six.

“The steps to the swimming float are busted and I told Nog that I’d help him fix them before I left. It won’t take very long.”

“Oh, Aengus… isn’t there somebody else up there who could help him?”

“Not at the moment. Big Jim left early this morning, and the older counselors have lit out for Atlanta. It’s their afternoon
off.”

“Do they just go off and leave all those little boys by themselves?”

“Nog can handle them,” he said. “They idolize him. He just needs another pair of hands for the float. I’ll be home soon.”

This last was said rather crisply, and so I said only, “Fine,” and we hung up.

He was, indeed, home by 6:00 p.m. He came into the kitchen, where I was making gazpacho, and hugged me from behind and swung
me around.

“You really must have had a good time,” I said, laughing, as he put me down and finished up with a little riff of a dance.
I cocked my head at him. I had perhaps seen this Aengus once or twice before but not often: joyous, gleeful, every inch of
him lit with a living fire. He seemed at once distracted and as focused as a burning glass. He could not seem
to be still. I stood just looking at him, afire in my kitchen, smelling the smoke of his burning.

“Wow. Can I go with you sometime?”

“Well, I will be going again, I think, maybe once a week. Those kids are incredible. It’s as if they were created for the
sole purpose of hearing these old myths. I never saw anything like it. But I don’t think you could go. Strictly for the menfolks.
No women allowed except on Parents’ Day. Besides, it’s not exactly comfy. I’ll tell you about those top bunks sometime.”

At the dishwasher, I froze for a long moment.

He came up behind me and kissed me again, on the neck.

“Believe me, our bed is a fine sight better.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did you remember to ask Big Jim about Carol’s kids going to the camp? She’s really between a rock and a hard
place with them.”

He took his arms away, and I heard him walk over to the counter on the opposite wall. For a long time he said nothing, and
then he said, “Yeah. Big Jim said for her to come by anytime and they’d talk about it.”

“Oh, that’s great. Will you call her and tell her?”

Again he was silent, and I turned and looked at him. His face was closed, his fires out.

“I’m a bit fagged out at the moment. Will you call her?”

Still looking at him, I picked up the telephone on the counter. What had gotten into him so suddenly?

Carol was ecstatic.

“Give Aengus a big hug for me,” she said. “I’m going over there right now.”

Aengus wanted a shower and a nap, so I put the gazpacho in the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of wine. I felt fidgety
and dislocated, not quite sure of where I was, nor why I felt that way. I gave Carol another hour and then called.

“How did it go with Big Jim?” I asked when she answered.

There was a long pause, and then she said in a voice so strange and robotic that I would not have known it was hers, “He’s
going to take them. I’m going to drive them up tomorrow. Bummer, too.”

She said no more, so I said, “That’s wonderful. How on earth did you manage that?”

Another long pause, and then the robot voice said, “Don’t ever ask me that again, Thayer.”

Shocked and sickened, for there was no mistaking her meaning, I went to the door and stared out into the twilight. I thought
about our conversation yesterday afternoon, about change. About how you could never tell precisely when it happened.

“You were wrong, Carol,” I whispered. “We do know when it happens. You know when it happened for you; you know the precise
moment. I knew, really, when Aengus said he was going up to that camp. My mother knew when she came back from the family camp
on Burnt Cove, on her honeymoon. And Aengus knew when he came home from camp today, knew that a great change had happened.
He was vibrating with it.”

Camp. Camp Forever.

The camp on Burnt Mountain.

I
n the middle of July I took a job. It was actually just a part-time job, selling books up at the little independent bookstore
at the end of the small mall that housed the multiplex. Its name was Ephemera, which probably made no sense at all to anyone
but its patrons, of which there were not a great many anyway. It could not and did not try to compete with the immense, rapid-fire
disgorging machines like Barnes & Noble and Borders. It had a small inventory of quirkily wonderful books, by time-faded and
contemporary authors, and there was no one on its staff who was not eccentric, immersed in books, and knowledgeable about
them to an astonishing degree. I did not consider myself any of these things and was grateful when they hired me, but as Simon
Morganstern, its owner, said, “You’re young enough and presentable enough and smart enough to kick our image up a notch without
scaring off our old customers.”

Ephemera had a tiny cafe and a cat, as well as an old-fashioned cash register on which we did business. Its espresso machine,
probably one of the first ever made, honked and hissed and whistled before delivering of itself a shot of inky, sludgy espresso,
and the cat, Moriarity, was not a cuddly lap creature but a cranky presence that regularly spat at anyone who tried to pet
him. I had been intimidated by everyone and everything at first but soon grew to love the customers and the espresso machine
and Moriarity and the kinds of books we carried and, most of all, the people of Ephemera. It was almost like finding my lost
tribe. The pay was abysmal but enough, as Aengus said, to help us through September, when my kindergarten teaching job began.
And the job got me out of the house during his working hours, so that he would have no distractions. Aengus, that summer,
was writing a book, but for a long time I did not know that.

Aengus’s first trip to Camp Forever had started us down a crazy path, so thicketed with the unexpected and the unimaginable
that I could not see beyond its first curve. At first it was just his intensity, his sense of manic joy when he came home
from Burnt Mountain. I had seen those before, on a smaller scale; it was still a part of Aengus. But soon he began to go two
and then three nights a week. I drew the line at weekends, or I think he would have gone then, too.

“I’m married to you. I’m not married to Carol. I want to spend at least some time with you,” I had said when he suggested
that Carol and I find something to do together on weekends, especially since all three of her boys were at camp now.

“Take up golf,” he said. “She plays well, I hear. Or have a
tea or something and get to know the rest of the Bell’s Ferry women. You know, Thay, you really don’t have many friends.”

“That’s because I’ve always been with you, since you’ve known me, anyhow,” I said, stung. It sounded, incredibly, like he
was trying to get rid of me, only simply that could not be. This was Aengus. This was Aengus and me. Married under a tree
on a mountain by a witch.

I did not worry a great deal about it, not at first. When he was with me, he was still totally
with
me. We still laughed at the same things…. We still gardened and sweated and cursed the heat and made fun of each other’s
grubby face. And at night, in the big bed that still floated almost alone in the huge space on the third floor, he turned
to me as eagerly, made even hungrier and more joyful love to me, cried out my name more often than he ever had.

Only now it was in Gaelic.

“
Tainach! Alainn, nas aille….
”

“English, please. This way I’ll never know whose name you’re really calling.”

“I’ll be calling no other woman’s name, ever,” he said softly into my damp hair.

And I do not think that he ever did.

Still, this new Aengus was a frequent burr under my saddle.

“What is it about that camp, Aengus?” I would say. “What does it have that holds you so? Why can’t I share it?”

He would look at me thoughtfully.

“I think… it’s the way the boys
receive
, Thayer. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but they seem so hungry for the old ways, the old tales. I’m just now realizing
that I never really
knew what teaching was. To… to have something that seems so necessary to someone else, to really give it… It’s as if these
kids are missing sort of a vital nutrient or something and I have it and can give it to them. It’s… heady stuff. I don’t find
that at Coltrane. I’ve never found it at any other school; if I did, I’d apply there in the blink of an eye. But I haven’t
run into it anywhere, except at this camp. Oh, I know, it’s just a summer camp; it won’t last past the end of summer. But
there hasn’t been anything else like it….”

“You haven’t really looked, darling,” I said. “Maybe a school for younger people.”

I had thought until now that his college work had absorbed him fairly well; it had seemed so at Sewanee. But this was serious
business. We would have to address this….

It was also the first inkling I had that I was not the be-all and end-all of Aengus’s prowling heart. The moment I realized
that, I realized also that it had been a foolish thing to assume in the first place. Nobody could be absolutely everything
to anyone else. Not in real life, anyway.

But Aengus has been to me, some small hidden voice deep within me whispered. Hasn’t he? But if, indeed, that was not possible,
then what else was it that filled my heart? For it
was
full. Had been, since we met. I would have known if there had been empty space there. There had been long, aching times when
emptiness howled before I met him. I knew that territory. I did not live there now.