Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (17 page)

“But these are all the same,” I said. “There’s no point to it.”

Then I noticed Blakie was staring at me. Suddenly I began to feel paranoid, like when I was a teenager out getting high, walking back into the Lonely House and praying she wouldn’t notice how stoned I was. I felt like I’d been lying, although what had I done, besides stick two cards in my back pocket?

But then maybe I was lying when I said there was no point; maybe I was wrong. Maybe there
was
a point. If two of the cards had a meaning, maybe they all did; even if I had no clue what their meaning was. Even if nobody had a clue: they still might mean something.

But what? It was like one of those horrible logic puzzles—you have one boat, three geese, one fox, an island: how do you get all the geese onto the island without the fox eating them? Seventy-three cards: seventy that Katherine had counted, the pair in my back pocket; where was the other one?

I fought an almost irresistible urge to reveal the two picture cards I’d hidden. Instead I looked away from my mother, and saw that now Katherine was staring at me, too. It was a moment before I realized she was waiting for the last card, the one that was still in my hand. “Oh. Thanks—”

I gave it to her, she put it on top of the stack, turned and gave the stack to Blakie, who gave it to me. I looked down at the cards and felt that cold pressure starting to build inside my head, helium leaking into my brain, something that was going to make me float away, talk funny.

“Well.” I wrapped the cards in the paisley scarf. It still smelled faintly of pipe tobacco, but now there was another scent too, my mother’s Chanel N
°
5. I stuck the cards in my bag, turned back to the dining table. “What should we do now?”

“I don’t have a clue,” said my mother, and gave me the smile of an octogenarian tiger. “Ivy? You decide.”

—

Julia’s father was Egyptian, a Coptic diplomat from Cairo. Her mother was an artist manqué from a wealthy Boston family that had a building at Harvard named for it. Her father, Narouz, had been married and divorced four times; Julia had a much younger half-brother and several half-sisters. The brother died in a terrorist attack in Egypt in the early nineties, a year or so before she left me. After her mother’s death from cancer the same year, Julia refused
to have anything else to do with Narouz or his extended family. A
few months later, she refused to have anything to do with me as well.

Julia claimed that
Five Windows One Door
could be read as a
secret text of ancient Coptic magic; that there were meanings en
coded within the characters’ ceaseless and often unrequited love affairs, that the titles of Nola Flynn’s silent movies corresponded to oracular texts in the collections of the Hermitage and the Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale in Cairo; that the scene in which Tarquin sodomizes his twin is in fact a description of a ritual to leave a man impotent and protect a woman from sexual advances. I asked her how such a book could possibly be conceived and written by a middle-aged inhabitant of Maine, in the middle of the twentieth century.

Julia just shrugged. “That’s why it works. Nobody knows. Look at Lorca.”

“Lorca?” I shook my head, trying not to laugh. “What, was he in Maine, too?”

“No. But he worked in the twentieth century.”

That was almost the last thing Julia Sa’adah ever said to me. This is another century. Nothing works anymore.

—

I caught an earlier ferry back than I’d planned. Katherine was tired; I had taken her and my mother to lunch at the small café they favored, but it was more crowded than usual, with a busload of blue-haired leaf-peepers from Newburyport who all ordered the specials so that the kitchen ran out and we had to eat BLTs.

“I just hate that.” Blakie glowered at the table next to us, four women the same age as she was, scrying the bill as though it were tea-leaves
.
“Look at them, trying to figure out the tip! Fifteen percent, darling,” she said loudly
.
“Double the tax and add one.”

The women looked up. “Oh, thank you!” one said. “Isn’t it pretty here?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Blakie. “I’m blind.”

The woman looked shocked
.
“Oh, hush, you,” scolded Katherine. “She is not,” but the women were already scurrying to leave.

I drove them back to their tidy modern retirement cottage, the made-for-TV version of the Lonely House.

“I’ll see you next week,” I said, after helping them inside. Katherine kissed me and made a beeline for the bathroom. My mother sat on the couch, waiting to catch her breath. She had congestive heart disease, payback for all those years of smoking Kents and eating heavily marbled steaks.

“You could stay here if you wanted,” she said, and for almost the first time I heard a plaintive note in her voice. “The couch folds out.”

I smiled and hugged her. “You know, I might do that. I think Sue wants a break from me. For a little while.”

For a moment I thought she was going to say something. Her
mouth pursed and her grey eyes once again had that watchful look. But
she only nodded, patting my hand with her strong cold one, then kissed my cheek, a quick furtive gesture like she might be caught.

“Be careful, Ivy Bee,” she said. “Goodbye.”

On the ferry I sat on deck
.
There were
only a few other passengers. I had the stern to myself, a bench sheltered
by the engine house from spray and chill wind. The afternoon had turned cool and grey. There was a bruised line of clouds upon the horizon, violet and slate-blue; it made the islands look stark as a Rockwell Kent woodblock, the pointed firs like arrowheads.

It was a time of day, a time of year, I loved; one of the only times when things still seemed possible to me. Something about the slant of the late year’s light, the sharp line between shadows and stones, as though if you slid your hand in there you’d find something unexpected.

It made me want to work.

I had no customers lined up that week. Idly I ran my right hand along the top of my left leg, worn denim and beneath it muscle, skin. I hadn’t worked on myself for a while. That was one of the first things I learned when I was apprenticed to Julia: a novice tattoo artist practices on herself. If you’re right-handed, you do your left arm, your left leg; just like a good artist makes her own needles, steel flux and solder, jig and needles, the smell of hot tinning fluid on the tip of the solder gun. That way people can see your work. They know they can trust you.

The last thing I’d done was a scroll of oak leaves and eyes, fanning out above my left knee. My upper thigh was still taut white skin. I was thin and rangy like my mother had been, too fair to ever have tanned. I flexed my hand, imagining the weight of the machine, its pulse a throbbing heart. As I stared at the ferry’s wake, I could see the lights of Rockland Harbor glimmer then disappear into the growing dusk. When I stuck my head out to peer towards the bow, I saw Aranbega rising from the Atlantic, black firs and granite cliffs buffed to pink by the failing sun.

I stood, keeping my balance as I gently pulled the two cards from my back pocket. I glanced at both, then put one into my wallet, behind my driver’s license; sat and examined the other, turning so that the wall of the engine house kept it safe from spray. It was the card that showed only the figure of a kneeling man. A deceptively simple form, a few fluid lines indicating torso, shoulders, offertory stance—that crescent of bare neck, his hands half-hidden by his long hair.

Why did I know it was a man? I’m not sure. The breadth of his shoulders, maybe; maybe some underlying sense that any woman in such a position would be inviting disaster. This figure seemed neither resigned nor abdicating responsibility. He seemed to be waiting.

It was amazing, how the interplay of black and white and a few drops of gold leaf could conjure up an entire world. Like Pamela Colman Smith’s designs for the Waite tarot—the High Priestess, the King of Wands—or a figure that Julia had shown me once. It was from a facsimile edition of a portfolio of Coptic texts on papyrus, now in the British Library
.
There were all kinds of spells—

—

For I am having a clash with a headless dog, seize him when he comes. Grasp this pebble with both your hands, flee eastward to your right, while you journey on up.

—

A stinging ant: In this way, while it is still fresh, burn it, grind it with vinegar, put it with incense. Put it on eyes that have discharge. They will get better.

—

The figure was part of a spell to obtain a good singing voice. Julia translated the text for me as she had the others:

—

Yea, yea, for I adjure you in the name of the seven letters that are tattooed on the chest of the father, namely AAAAAAAA, EEEEEEE, EEEEEEE, IIIIIII, OOOOOOO, UUUUUUU, OOOOOOO. Obey my mouth, before it passes and another one comes in its place! Offering: wild frankincense; wild mastic; cassia.

—

The Coptic figure that accompanied the text had a name: DAVITHEA RACHOCHI ADONIEL. It looked nothing like the figure on the card in front of me; it was like something you’d see scratched on the wall of a cave.

Yet it had a name
.
And I would never know the nam
e
o
f
this card.

But I would use it, I decided.
The least trumps
. Beneath me the ferry’s engine shifted down, its dull steady groan deepening as we drew near Aranbega’s shore. I slid the card into the Lorca book I’d brought, stuffed it into my bag, and waited to dock.

—

I’d left my old GMC pickup where I always did, parked behind the Island General Store. I went inside and bought a sourdough baguette and a bottle of Toquai. I’d gotten a taste for the wine from Julia; now the store ordered it especially for me, though some of the well-heeled summer people bought it as well.

“Working tonight?” said Mary, the store’s owner.

“Yup.”

Outside it was full dusk. I drove across the island on the rugged
gravel road that bisected it into north and south, village and wild places. To get to Green Pond you drive off the main road, fol
lowing a rutted lane that soon devolves into what resembles a washed-out streambed. Soon this rudimentary road ends, at the entrance to a large grove of hundred-and-fifty-year-old pines. I parked here and walked the rest of the way, a quarter-mile beneath high branches that stir restlessly, making a sound like the sea even on windless days. The pines give way to birches, ferns growing knee-high in a spinney of trees like bones. Another hundred feet and you reach the edge of Green Pond, before you the Lonely House rising on its grey islet, a dream of safety. Usually this was when the last vestiges of fear would leave me, blown away by the cool wind off the lake and the sight of my childhood home, my wooden dory pulled up onto the shore a few feet from where I stood.

But tonight the unease remained. Or no, not unease exactly; more a sense of apprehension that, very slowly, resolved into a kind of anticipation. But anticipation of what? I stared at the Lonely House with its clumps of asters and yellow coneflowers, the ragged garden I deliberately didn’t weed or train. Because I wanted the illusion of wilderness, I wanted to pretend I’d left something to chance. And suddenly I wanted to see something else.

If you walk to the other side of the small lake—I hardly ever do—you find that you’re on the downward slope of a long boulder-strewn rise, a glacial moraine that eventually plummets into the Atlantic Ocean. Scattered white pines and birches grow here, and ancient white oaks, some of the very few white oaks left in the entire state, in fact, the rest having been harvested well over a century before, as masts for the great schooners. The lesser trees—red oaks, mostly, a few sugar maples—have been cut, for the Lonely House’s firewood and repairs, so that if you stand in the right place you can actually look down the entire southeastern end of the island and see the ocean: scumbled grey cliffs and beyond that nothing, an unbroken darkness that might be fog, or sea, or the end of the world.

The right place to see this is from an outcropping of granite that my mother named The Ledges. On a foggy day, if you stand there and look at the Lonely House, you have an illusion of gazing from one sea-island to another. If you turn, you see only darkness. The seas are too rough for recreational sailors; far from the major shipping lanes; too risky for commercial fishermen. The entire Grand Banks fishery has been depleted, so that you can stare out for hours or maybe even days and never see a single light, nothing but stars and maybe the blinking red eye of a distant plane flying the Great Circle Route to Gander or London.

It was a vista that terrified me, though I would dutifully point it out to first-time visitors, showing them where they could sit on The Ledges.

“On a clear day you can see Ireland,” Katherine used to say, the joke being that on a Maine island you almost never had a clear day.

This had not been a clear day, of course, and, with evening, high grey clouds had come from the west. Only the easternmost horizon held a pale shimmer of blue-violet, lustrous as the inner curve of a mussel shell. Behind me the wind moved through the old pines, and I could hear the high rustling of the birch leaves. Not so far off a fox barked. The sound made my neck prickle.

But I’d left a single light on inside the Lonely House, and so I focused on that, walking slowly around the perimeter of Green Pond with the little beacon always at the edge of my vision, until I reached the far side, the eastern side. Ferns crackled underfoot; I smelled the sweet odor of dying bracken, and bladderwrack from the cliffs far below. The air had the bite of rain to it, and that smell you get sometimes, when a low pressure system carries the reek of places much farther south—a soupy thick smell, like rotting vegetation, mangroves or palmettos. I breathed it in and thought of Julia, and realized that for the first time in years, an hour had gone by and I had not thought about her at all. From the trees on the other side of Green Pond the fox barked again, even closer this time.