Up Island (39 page)

“Well, just the things that people talk about,” my
336 / Anne Rivers Siddons

father said. “Books. Music. The weather. How it used to be up here. The old families; that’s interesting to me. Being one of them, there’s not much Dennis doesn’t know about their history, even if he doesn’t know the current crop. It’s a pity he won’t reach out to his kin now. Seems to me he’d want his people around him. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Lot of bitterness there, though I declare I can’t quite see why, if he doesn’t even know them. Like we said, there’s something bad there. And we talk about the other folks up here, the ones who’ve only been here for a generation or so, or less than that. There’s a lot of them, way more than the old-timers. A real mixed bag. Storekeepers and fishermen and artists and writers and lawyers and real-estate people—seems to me half the island is trying to sell the other half some land, or buy it from them. Lot of building going on up here; Dennis says there’s a lot of anger about that, too. There are more really poor people here than you’d realize, he says, and a lot more folks just making it, and I can see why the temptation to sell any little piece of land you’ve got is so strong if your family is hungry. On the other hand, nobody, especially not the old families who’ve still got a lot of land, wants to see happen up here what’s happening down island. But the taxes are killing them. It’s got a lot of people at their neighbors’

throats.”

“How does Dennis know all that if he hasn’t been back to the Vineyard since he was eight years old?”

“He keeps up,” my father said briefly. “He’s always taken the
Gazette.
Anyway, we talk about a lot of things. You ought to come join us sometime. You know a lot more about books and music than I do. Seems to me that’s what he’s mostly hungry to talk about.”

“Well, let him ask me himself, then.”

UP ISLAND / 337

He chuckled.

“Would you go?”

“No. That’s not part of the deal.”

“Well, then.”

Perhaps, I thought, going into the kitchen to heat up supper, I resented it just a bit that Dennis Ponder needed more than me, too. I had found my carefully structured caretaking routine extremely satisfying; an uninvolved angel of mercy suited me perfectly. Dennis had never once indicated that he wanted more. I guess he really doesn’t, I thought. Not from me, at least.

I went by the farmhouse twice a day now, but now my father went with me two or three times a week, and on those days we stayed longer, and Bella put out a tea tray and some of the sweet bread she had baked that first time.
Massa
Sovada,
she said it was called: Portuguese sweet bread. The spice I had wondered about was saffron.

“It’s Easter bread,” Luz said. “We always had it after early Mass on Easter morning. And Holy Ghost soup; Bella, remember how Denny used to love that? He called it HoGo soup when he was tiny, because he couldn’t say the whole thing. Remember, Bella?”

“I remember.”

On those afternoons my father would tell a story out of his Southern boyhood to Luz, and then she would tell him one of her dark, splendid tales of royalty and battles and gold. Sometimes even Bella would chime in with a story, usually about King Dinis and his times. It seemed to me that the old ladies knew no stories but those that had happened in a distant, magical past. And occasionally, when I came alone, I would read the women something short, a poem or a part of a chapter from a longer book I was reading. That
338 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Christmas we were reading T. H. White’s
The Once and Future King,
my own college favorite and still, I think, Teddy’s, and even old Bella was charmed with the rich, lyrical tapestry of kings and knights and animals who talked, and swords that stuck fast in stones except for orphan toys. I had given a little glad cry when I came upon it in Dennis’s library, and had asked if I could borrow it.

He had only nodded.

“It’s an odd book for you to have, if you don’t mind my saying so,” I said. “It’s the only piece of out-and-out fantasy I’ve seen among all your books.”

“It’s not mine,” he said.

Later that evening I had looked at the flyleaf: “To Claire from Daddy, love at Christmas” was written there in Dennis’s backward-sloping hand. I wondered why he still had the book, but I was glad. It was soon Luz’s favorite of all the things I read to her, and I read it to her over and over far into the spring.

They did not ask again about Dennis, though sometimes when my father was with me he would offer some small tidbit like, “Dennis walked as far as the pond with me yesterday.

When he leans on Lazarus or me, there’s almost no place around the glade he can’t go by himself.”

Or, “Dennis and I put up a bird feeder at his camp. We counted seven redbirds there last evening.”

And Bella would be content with that. It was as if they had a tacit agreement. She did not wheedle, tease, or hint for more news of her son. But she always said, “Thank you, Mr.

Bell,” when he offered news of Dennis, and my father always nodded gravely. He never became Tim to her in all the time he knew her, and she never became other than Mrs. Ponder to him. Child of the

UP ISLAND / 339

Deep South, I did not think it strange. Nearing fifty, I still called the parents of my friends Mr. and Mrs.

But he spent the most time with the swans. In the early mornings, and again at sunset, when he took the bucket and went to feed them, he often squatted down on the bank or the dock and spent an hour or so just being with them.

Hanging out, he said. He never took the stick now, and he still did not permit Lazarus to go with him, though Laz fairly danced up and down in his eagerness to promise that he would not chase Charles and Di.

“Later, maybe, after you’ve proved you can hold it in the road,” Daddy would say to him.

I would see my father there, hunkered down with his arms wrapped around his long legs as he had done ever since I could remember, his tweed hat pushed back on his head, staring at Charles and Di. Sometimes he spoke; I could see his lips move. Sometimes they made noises back. But they never flapped or hissed at him, and they lifted not a wing at my father. I never knew what passed between them. I knew only that when I crept out to join them, fascinated by his taming of the two big, belligerent birds, they would immediately pull their beautiful, dingy-tipped wings back into the busking position and the grunts and hisses and snaky neck dartings would start.

“They act like I throw rocks at them,” I said bitterly to him one night when I had been ousted once again. “I might as well do it. What do you and Luz have that the rest of us don’t?”

“Pure hearts and simple minds,” he said. “
Real
simple minds. You know I told you I thought Di had something wrong with her wing? She does. There’s a break in the bone right where it goes into her chest, or shoulder,
340 / Anne Rivers Siddons

or whatever. The edges don’t quite come together. She could never fly with that.”

“How do you know?”

“She let me feel it. She didn’t like it, but she let me.”

“Shit,” I said in frustration, and then, “I’m sorry, Daddy.

It’s just that I feel like a washout up here. I’m supposed to be taking care of two old ladies and a sick man and two old swans, and all four of them like you better than they do me.”

“They know I’m not going to stir up their lives, make them change,” he said. “I’m no threat to anybody. It’s not fair, I know. I’m reaping all your good work.”

“Well, I certainly am not going to stir them up or change them,” I cried indignantly. “I’ve never done a single thing that would make any of them think that. We have an agreement…”

“I know, your famous agreement,” my father said and smiled. “I don’t care what kind of agreement you’ve got with who, Molly. There’s just something about you—an energy, an impact, a kind of presence—that makes people know instinctively that it’s not possible to stay unchanged by you.

It’s the one part of your mother that’s clearest in you, and I think it’s the thing about you she just couldn’t leave alone.

You don’t even know you have it, I don’t think. But it’s there.

None of these folks is ready to let go of what’s eating them, and so they stay a little shy of you. I think they’re afraid you’re going to heal them in spite of themselves.”

“Why…you never said anything like that to me before,” I said wonderingly. “I didn’t know I had…that. I thought Mother had all that in the family, she and Kevin. I thought I was the…you know, the one who made things work. The plain one.”

“Oh, baby,” he said. “That’s her doing, too. I could UP ISLAND / 341

always see when she did it, but she couldn’t help doing it and I couldn’t stop her. Plain one? Do you ever look in mirrors anymore? When you walk into a room, it’s not possible for people to look away. That’s not very comfortable for some people. I suspect it’s not to Bella or Dennis. They’re too busy staring inward at their pains and their hates. As for the swans, who knows? Maybe I smell like Luz and you don’t.

Maybe you smell like Lazarus.”

I laughed and went away cheered. He could always do that. On the way into the kitchen, I sneaked a look at myself in the wavy, speckled old mirror on the hat rack. I looked the same as I always did to myself: tall, filling the entire mirror, having to stoop a little to see the top of my head, tousled by the wind and flame-cheeked from the cold. There
was
a vividness there, though: a pure blue glint from my eyes, the steel-and-silver streaks in my hair, the wash of summer tan that still lay over the bridge of my nose.

“…an energy, an impact, a kind of presence…,” I whispered to the woman in the mirror. She flushed and dropped her eyes.

But all that night I was pleased, and felt pretty.

In the next few days, my father and Dennis Ponder started work on a nest for the swans under the porch of my camp.

“You’ll never in the world get them under here,” I said, watching as Dennis coiled and formed the dried reeds and grasses that my father cut from the pond bank with an old scythe he had found and restored to brightness in Dennis’s toolshed. Dennis sat cross-legged, or what would have been cross-legged, on the cold earth, with a rubber poncho over his lap, and the low winter sun on his head. His
342 / Anne Rivers Siddons

black-and-gray hair shone in the slanted light, and the sun was laying faint streaks of color on his cheekbones and forehead. He looked almost well, almost young.

“I’m betting on Tim,” he said to me. “If he thinks they need a winter home, then they need a winter home. He might be right. I hear it’s supposed to be one of the worst winters we’ve had in years and years. The pond’s apt to freeze right down to the bottom.”

“Worst winters? It’s been gorgeous so far,” I said, looking up at the low, serene blue sky. The winter glitter lay far out on Vineyard Sound this morning; I was getting accustomed to it now, but it still beguiled me. Only small, puffy white clouds like those of the summer sailed slowly up from the south.

“I remember a winter or two that started out like this,”

Dennis said, “and ended up with us being snowed in for days and weeks at a time. It seems to me we just plain had worse winters then. Maybe we’re starting into another cycle of that.

It doesn’t usually get too bad until after Christmas, anyway.

The water coming up from the Gulf is too warm until mid-winter. But the Vineyard
Gazette
had a piece about it, and the weather idiot on Boston TV has been hollering about it.

And your dad says the skinny at Alley’s is that there’s a bad one coming. Lots of talk about caterpillars and acorns and lichens.”

“Far be it from me to contradict a caterpillar,” I said. “You want anything before I head out? I just made some coffee.”

“Got any sweet rolls? Lazarus and I have worked up an appetite.”

“Coming up.”

I was so delighted to have him hungry that I UP ISLAND / 343

brought two big slices of the Portuguese sweet bread Bella had sent us home with, as well as the sweet rolls. Lazarus swallowed his in one gulp. Dennis looked at his and set it ostentatiously aside.

“Did she send you some Holy Ghost soup along with it?”

he said neutrally.

“No,” I said. “If you don’t want that, give it to Daddy when he comes up. He loves it. Nobody’s trying to force you to eat Portuguese. God forbid.”

I took off for Vineyard Haven at rather too high a speed, rattling fiercely down the path through the tangled skeletons of the low scrub and the bare winter woods. There was no way I was going to please Dennis Ponder, I knew. There was always going to be at least one small thing amiss with everything I did for him. I thought that if it had been my father who offered the
Massa Sovada,
Dennis would have eaten the whole loaf and asked for more. I was still fuming when I got back. It was not yet noon, and I thought that they would still be working on the nest, but the yard was empty and piles of rushes and grass still waited to be woven into it, drying in the sun.

My father was not in the house, but came in while I was putting the groceries away.

“Are you done already?” I said.

“Nope. Dennis had a kind of bad turn, so I took him back up. I’m afraid this was too much for him, but he was doing so well…”

I put down the groceries and moved toward the coatrack for my coat. “I’m going up and have a look…”

“No. He said to tell you he’ll be all right. He just wants to lie down. Let him be, baby. He’s promised to call if he needs help, and I think he will.”

“But I’m responsible—”

344 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“No. Ultimately, he’s responsible for himself. Leave him that at least.”

“What kind of bad turn?”

“Some pain. A dizzy spell. A little nausea. I don’t know.

He knows what to do for himself. Let’s let it be for now.”

“He goes back soon for a checkup,” I said. “I think it’s next week. I’ve got it on my calendar.”

“I know. Next Wednesday. I’m going to take him. He says he’ll go in sooner, if this keeps up. I gather it’s the first pain he’s had in a while.”