Islands (30 page)

12

T
HE WEEK BEFORE
Gaynelle came was the worst week I could remember. Later I would look back on it and think of it as the February of my life: dull, leaden, endless gray, with no hope, no sign yet, of spring. A time to simply try and not yield to death by slow, cold suffocation. The time of the shocking, tearing pain was largely past. I now believed that Lewis was gone. It remained to me to try and find a way to live with that. I could not see one, and for a time, did not try. I simply kept on in my accustomed groove, head down, as an old pony at a children’s party would, long after the music has died.

I went to work in the mornings and came back to the creek in the afternoons. Henry was always there; he had insisted on staying full-time until we found someone for Camilla. None of his phone calls to the hospital or the home nursing organizations yielded anyone who wanted daylong duty on an isolated creek so far out of Charleston.

“They’d have to drive too far to buy lottery tickets,” Henry said wearily. “No matter. I’ve got the folks at Queens looking for me.”

I did the shopping and cleaning and helped Camilla, so far as she would let me, in the afternoons. I managed to get light suppers together, mostly soup now, with the winter closing down on us, and the dark falling early. We would sit by the fire afterward, always at Camilla’s house, so she would not have to limp over to join us, and talk desultorily of nothing much, certainly not our three numinous dead. And not of what might come next. If anyone had asked me what my plans were, I could only have stared stupidly at them. My plans were simply to live through each day.

We did not speak much, but Camilla seemed to have found her old serenity again, and smiled at us every now and then, or closed her eyes in appreciation of the music pouring from the little cassette player. She loved baroque music. I never had, but found it soothing and softening now.

But still, it was a dull, dead, frozen time, and all of us took refuge in early sleep. I would settle Camilla into bed, and then Henry would walk me to my door, give me a brief, silent hug, and disappear out back to his guest house. For the first few nights after Lewis’s death I had hardly slept at all, fearful of the horror of either dreaming of the pearl-eyed man or waking up and remembering that he was gone. But I slept now, great, dreamless, sluglike drifts of sleep. I could neither remember nor imagine the long nights at the beach house, when we had laughed and drunk wine and told scurrilous stories, and listened to the hush of the surf. Now if I woke at all, I would hear only the winter stillness of the marsh, and perhaps the hunting cry of an owl. Henry said that he had heard the bellow of the great bull gator, closer now, but I never did.

Each morning, almost always around six
A
.
M
., I awoke in tears so violent that they doubled me over and took my breath. I would stuff the bedcovers into my mouth to keep from howling aloud, and cry until I was drained and faintly nauseated. After that I had only dry eyes and the heavy dullness; but I knew the tears would come once again at dawn. It did not seem to matter much.

On the Friday of that week, I came home at noon to find Henry trying to maneuver Camilla back into her bed. She had not fallen, but he had heard her cry out and found her halfway in and halfway out of her bed, unable to move either way. She was in pain, and he was having a hard time trying not to hurt her.

“Camilla, you know you’re supposed to holler if you need to get up,” I said, rushing to help Henry. She felt like a bundle of feathers and reeds under my hands.

“I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to call Henry McKenzie every time I want to go to the bathroom,” she spat out between clenched teeth. “And if anybody comes dragging a bedpan in here I’m throwing it at them. Full.”

We laughed a little. Camilla was down there somewhere, beneath the surface of this straw woman. I helped her into her bathroom and looked at Henry.

“I’m going to ask around some,” I said. “I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ve seen some work-wanted notices on the bulletin board at the BI-LO. We’ll find somebody.”

“I guess you can get almost anything at the BI-LO,” Henry said mildly. I smiled, and thought that at one time I would have laughed.

That night at dinner, Camilla said, “Guess what they’re calling us around Queens? Instead of the Scrubs?”

We looked up at her. She looked pretty that night, her long hair loose on her shoulders, a bronze silk caftan shot with gold floating around her. In the candlelight she looked like…Camilla.

“What?”

“The Death Squad. I hear Bunny Burford started it. It’s all over the hospital by now.”

“How do you know?” I said, my voice trembling.

“I keep in touch,” Camilla said.

I flinched. It was true, I thought. Death followed us. We were, instead of those once-golden people, smoke-dark ones. Some of the fear that had begun to subside rose in my throat.

“I think we’ll just fucking see about that,” Henry said, and he got up from the table and went into the kitchen. We heard him on the telephone for a long time, though we could not hear what he said.

We heard a little later that Bunny had left Queens and taken a position as administrator at the new little Frogmore medical center. It was miles away from a town of any sort, famous for its Frogmore stew and with a still-flourishing voodoo culture and a largely rural black population. Nobody in Frogmore would care a great deal about Bunny’s delicately vicious innuendos. Frogmore was not given to innuendo.

“Guess you really got her sent to Coventry,” Camilla said to Henry, when we heard the news.

“Why, Miss Camilla, how you do run on,” Henry said, not looking up from his crab bisque.

“Lewis threatened to do that once,” I said, smiling, and then remembered that that time Bunny’s poison had spilled over Henry in his grief for Fairlie, and stopped abruptly. Tears sprang into my eyes.

“I’ll get the bread,” I mumbled, and fled into the kitchen.

“Let her be,” I heard Camilla tell Henry gently. “She’s trying terribly hard. I really never realized what a child she is, in many ways. We need to take better care of her.”

My tears stopped and indignation took their place. Child?

“I’d hardly call her a child,” I heard Henry say, and felt a small vindication. When I came back into the dining room, my tears were long dry. I did not let Camilla see them again.

The next morning I drove up Bohicket Road until I came to the John’s Island rural center. There was a small collection of buildings: a town hall, a filling station, a boiled peanut and tomato stand, and a new BI-LO store that dwarfed the surrounding countryside. I never saw many houses around the intersection, but the parking lot was almost always full of pick-ups and dusty SUVs, and a great many mud-spattered motorcycles. I looked at them incuriously. Motorcycles, to me, meant Marlon Brando and the Hell’s Angels. I did not expect to meet either at the John’s Island BI-LO.

Inside, the glaringly blue-white store was thronged with people, largely women, in blue jeans and hunters’ vests and thermal sweaters, pushing carts spilling over with canned beans and frankfurters and nacho chips and dog food and beer, no doubt a weekend’s sustenance for a large family. Many of them seemed to know each other, and stopped to talk, clogging the aisles with only a glance at me as I tried to maneuver my cart past. I would smile apologetically, and they would shove their carts over without looking at me, going on with their talk of K Mart bargains and country music concerts at the North Charleston Coliseum. On this morning, I suddenly ached to be one of them, ached to look forward with a simple, hungry joy to hearing Travis Tritt live in concert on a cold Saturday night.

Lila and Simms were coming out for the rest of the weekend, and I bought fresh scallops and spinach and mushrooms, and, on impulse, four dozen fresh oysters in their shells, half sunk in shaved ice. I could almost taste them slipping down, sweet and briny and almost translucent. Lewis had loved them above all other edible things….

On the way to the checkout stand I remembered the bulletin board, and went to scan it. Amid the notices of boat trailers and crab traps for sale, home catering for weddings and funerals, the local junior high school production of
Amahl and the Night Visitors
, and lost hunting dogs, I found a neat note on heavy pink card stock written in lavender Magic Marker that read: “I have skills in many areas, from housekeeping to baby-sitting to cooking and chauffeuring. I can do substantial home repairs, too. My hours are flexible, and I can sometimes stay over if needed.” And it listed a number.

The note was signed with a fat, tipsy lavender heart.

The heart, and the unusually literate narrative, captured my interest. I took down the number, and when I got back to the creek, I called.

The answering machine chirped, “Hi. You have reached Gaynelle Toomer. If it’s about the child support, call my lawyer. If it’s about the card at the BI-LO, please leave a message.”

“Ah…this is Mrs. Lewis Aiken,” I said tentatively. Child support? Lawyer? “We live in the three new houses out on the creek, and we need someone to come in weekdays, usually for about five hours, to straighten up and look after a semi-invalid. There’s no heavy lifting involved, and she is not elderly, just recovering from an accident. We might be interested in some cooking, too. Please call me back.”

At cocktail time, when we had all gathered in Simms’s and Lila’s living room for drinks around the fire, I told them about the Lady of the Purple Heart, as Henry had dubbed her.

“She sounded interesting,” I said. “Quirky, sort of, but quite literate. But she hasn’t called yet. Maybe we’re lucky. Maybe she’s a transvestite coke dealer in reality.”

“Just what I’ve always yearned for,” Camilla said.

“I’ll track down somebody Monday,” Lila said. “I think Kitty Gregory’s maid has lots of family out near here. Maybe there’s a niece or a granddaughter or something. Was this woman black?”

“No,” I said without thinking, and then wondered how I knew. But I did.

Lila frowned.

“I’ve never had much luck with white girls. They’re always running off to go to acrylic nail school or somewhere. And Lord, all those tales of woe! Straying boyfriends, and mothers locking them out of the house, and I don’t know what all.”

“Lawsy, Miss Scarlett,” Henry said.

Lila flushed.

“I didn’t mean that as a racist thing. It’s just what’s been my experience.”

Camilla opened her mouth to speak, but her words were lost in a burring, bellowing roar that rolled down the gravel road and up into the turnaround. The outside lights came on automatically, and we hurried to the windows to look. It sounded at the very least like a bulldozer run amok.

“Keep back,” Simms said, and went to the door and opened it. We crowded behind him.

In the sucking blue pool of the mercury-vapor security lights, a great fuchsia motorcycle stood, traced with tongues of painted purple and gold flames. A young woman was just getting off it and starting for the door. She was tall and broad shouldered and flat bottomed, and had a mass of fried-looking rusty red hair and a mask of freckles. Her nose was snub and her mouth was wide, lips chapped from the wind and turned up in a delighted smile. You had to smile back, even as you goggled at her. She wore tight black stretch jeans and a black leather jacket scalloped with what looked to be pounds of metal studs, and her boots were what Lewis used to call shitkickers. She was covered with dust.

“Hey,” she said, smiling at us as if we were meeting at a family reunion. “I’m Gaynelle Toomer. I lost the number on the machine, but I knew where the houses were. Booter used to be an old friend of my daddy. Lord, look at these houses, will you? Booter would drop his teeth. I’m sorry to be late; my kid’s rehearsal ran over. Is one of you Mrs. Aiken?”

I raised my hand like a child in school.

“I am,” I said, meekly.

Behind me, Henry began to laugh.

“Please come in,” I said. “You must be frozen.”

“No, ma’am. Used to it.”

She looked around.

“This is pretty,” she said. “Booter would think he’d died and gone to heaven. I don’t think he ever had anything but a double-wide out here.”

I motioned for her to sit, and she did, peeling off the leather jacket. None of us spoke for a long moment. Under her turtle-necked T-shirt reposed the most amazing pair of breasts I have ever seen. They bobbled softly under the pink stretch fabric like a pair of overripe melons, and looked to be just as large. I could tell that she was not wearing a bra. She smiled around good-naturedly, as if everyone in the room was not struck to stone by the breasts, and it crossed my mind that she was not flaunting them; she had no need to. This young woman was completely at home with her body, totally situated in her freckled skin.

I wondered how she ever got any work done, hauling those breasts around. Or how she rode a motorcycle, for that matter. Jouncing must have been a real pain.

I introduced her around. She nodded pleasantly, memorizing us. To Simms and Lila she said, “This is your house, isn’t it? It looks just like you.”

Lila made a strangled noise of assent, and Simms nodded vehemently, not yet able to speak. I had the distinct feeling that if he ever cornered Gaynelle Toomer in a bathroom, he would definitely not come off best.

Henry smiled his sweet smile.

“You said your family knew Booter, didn’t you? He was one of my best friends when I was growing up, mine and Lewis’s…Dr. Aiken. He…we lost him recently. I think Booter would be sad to know that. There wasn’t an inch of this creek and marsh we didn’t poke through.”

“I heard about Dr. Aiken,” she said. She turned to me. “I’m real sorry. He was a wonderful man. He fixed my daughter’s foot when she was three, and she’s doing pageants now. I knew you must be his wife from your message on the machine. You must be missing him awfully.”

I nodded, smiling, blinking away tears.

“Yes. I am. It’s nice to know he could help your daughter. She does pageants, you said?”

“Yeah. Little Miss beauty and talent pageants. She’s a natural, if I do say so. Took to it like a duck to water. She was Little Miss Folly Beach Pier last summer, when she was six, and she’s practicing now for the John’s Island Junior Tomato Princess. That’s why I was late. BI-LO is one of her sponsors. I’m still looking for another one; she has to have two. If y’all know any rich folks who’d like to have a part in the career of a little pageant winner, put a bug in their ear.”