Burnt Mountain (13 page)

D
uring my last week at Camp Sherwood Forest a murderous wave of heat coiled up from the south and buried everything in its
path in a gagging miasma. Our mountain valley had seldom felt anything like it. Grass burnt brown; leaves wilted and curled;
the surrounding evergreens were not stirred by so much as a breath of fresh air; the sky was lost in a dirty white, shimmering
haze. It was hardly possible to continue outdoor activities; the horses foundered and the campers threw up after softball
and hiking. Even swimming and sailing were like bathing in tepid bathwater. Some of the campers ended up in the infirmary,
lying white and still under wet cloths on their foreheads, and many of the younger ones were taken home early. We suspended
campfires for the time being; even after dark the heat sucked the life from us. The small television in the dining hall said
that the area had reached 108 degrees and there was no sign of abatement. The
directors decided to close camp a few days early and called parents to come and get their prostrate offspring before Sherwood
Forest could be sued…. For what I could not imagine. A heat wave?

Even I felt it, sunk as I was in the misery of Nick’s absence. The same nausea that dogged most of us pooled at the bottom
of my tongue, making eating, even drinking water unpleasant, as the ice machines had given up. The cooks in the dining hall
set out cold salads and sandwiches for meals. Attendance was down by at least a half by the time the first parents rolled
in to collect their stricken young. I heard several of them remark that it was no cooler at home. This was usually followed
by a sigh that I thought might have been translated “but at least we’ll all die together.”

My grandmother sent Detritus up for me in the Mercedes, but she did not accompany him. She and my mother, I knew, were down
at Grand’s house at Sea Island.

“You stretch out there in the back and I turn up the air,” Detritus said sternly when I slumped into the car. “You don’t look
so pert to me. Yo’ grandmother comin’ back on the train tonight, but yo’ mama gon’ stay on for a little. She say for you to
stay in the house and don’t go runnin’ around town till she get back. Yo’ grandmother got one of them window air conditioners
for every bedroom, and it feel real good. I ain’t never seen no heat like this in all my born days.”

I nodded and closed my eyes and let the blast of stale, chilled car air wash over me. It felt like pure heaven. After a while
I pulled the old tartan car rug up over me and drifted off to sleep, the tires droning in my ears. It was a sound I
could remember from childhood; I associated it with my father and the driving trips we took. I slept, not stirring, until
the motor noise stopped abruptly and I heard the thunk of the emergency brake being pulled up.

“Are we here?”

“Yassum, we home. You go on in the house. Your grandmother say Juanita gon’ give you some supper and stay with you till she
get home. I gon’ pick her up at Brookwood Station about ten.”

It was still hot in the big white house, but not so suffocating with all the fans on. I almost tiptoed through the empty,
darkened rooms. It felt utterly alien to come into this house with no one in evidence, with all the rooms dark and breath
held, with no sound at all. I crept down the center hall into the kitchen, where I had seen a light under the door, but heard
nothing. When I opened it, Juanita sat at the kitchen table, a fan trained on her, reading a movie magazine. Her hair was
pinned up on her head and she wore one of Lily’s old flowered sundresses. She looked, I thought, ten times better than I did.

“I got you some cold chicken and salad in the refrigerator,” she said. Juanita was not much on hellos or good-byes. “You go
on up and I’ll bring it to you. I got you in Miss Lily’s room. The air conditioner is on.”

“What’s wrong with my room?”

“Your mama got some stuff piled up in there. We was gon’ to take it out before you came home, but you come so early…”

Her tone rang with the grievance of my early homecoming.
Still faintly sick and feeling as if I had done Juanita a discourtesy, I crept up the stairs and went into my sister’s room
and crawled straight into the bed without turning on the lights. In a minute, I thought. In a minute I’ll get up and unpack
and all that stuff….

When I woke I looked into white sunlight on the rose-papered walls that were not my own and for a moment could not think where
I was.

“Welcome to the world, sunshine,” said my grandmother’s musical voice, and I turned my head and saw her sitting in Lily’s
slipper chair beside the bed, with a laden tray on the footstool beside her. The smell of coffee curled into my nostrils and
I swallowed thickly. I knew that I could not drink the coffee, nor, for that matter, eat the eggs and bacon on the plate on
the tray.

“Can I have some water?” I croaked. My throat was dry as far down as I could feel it.

She poured from a carafe, ice clinking into the glass, and I took it and gulped it down in one long swallow. For a moment
it threatened to come straight back up, and then it settled, and the delicious coolness in my mouth and throat made me close
my eyes in pure joy.

“Oh, boy,” I said, smiling at her. “I’ve been thirsty for cold water for at least a week.”

She kissed me on the cheek and pushed a straggle of hair off my forehead.

“I heard it was as hot as sin up there in that valley,” she said. “You’re pale as a little ghost. I’m keeping you inside for
a while. We’ll read and watch TV and we can start to get your
clothes ready. You’ve only got a month or so before classes start, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking that fall and Agnes Scott seemed as far away as the millennium and that Nick would be back before
then. I stretched and smiled.

“I’m glad to see you, Grand,” I said. “When is Mother coming back?”

“In a few days. She ran into some people she and your father knew from Hamilton, a student’s parents, I think. They live on
the island, and they’ve asked her to stay awhile with them. Doesn’t your friend Nick live somewhere down there? I wouldn’t
be surprised if she ran into his father. Everybody knows everybody on the coast.”

“Nick’s in Europe with his father, looking at architecture,” I said. It was delicious to speak of Nick, to use his name, in
front of people. “He’ll be back in about a month. He’s starting at Georgia Tech.”

She gave me another hug.

“Things are going well with you two, aren’t they? That’s a happy thing. Is he going to be the one, my dear?”

“Oh yes. Yes, he is. It’s not too soon, Grand. I’m not too young. I know Mother thinks I am, but… I know this. I just know.”

“Well, who better than you, darling?” she said. “He’s going to keep in touch from Europe, of course?”

“Oh yes. Every day. He’ll write almost every day, and he’ll call—Do you know if there’s been a call yet?”

“No, but I’ve just come home, and he’ll think you’re still at camp, won’t he? Give him time to get his feet on the
ground. And eat your breakfast. I’m going to get Juanita to help me move you into your own room. Lily’s is lovely, but it’s
hardly you, is it?”

Lily’s room was literally a bower. Roses climbed, rioted everywhere, from her bedspread to the curtains and rugs and slipper
chairs. My mother loved roses. Her firstborn daughter had little choice in the matter. Fortunately, Lily loved them, too.
She was a rose girl from her fair, flushed cheeks to her small pink toes. My room was serviceable blue chambray and blue-striped
curtains. My rugs were dark, close-knit blue, as sturdy as iron. Mothers learn a lot with their first daughters, I think.
And from the beginning, I had no hint of roses about me.

“Wild red honeysuckle,” my father had said once, when I asked him. I thought honeysuckle was better than roses any day. I
still do.

I poked at my breakfast while my grandmother and Juanita carried my things across the hall to my room. I felt boneless, limp,
bled of energy. It was not hot in the room with the air-conditioning on, but perhaps the fact that I knew that outside was
still a motionless swamp of heat was sapping my body. And, of course, Nick not being here. Without Nick I felt as if half
my breath was gone.

Presently I pulled out some faded blue shorts and found a tee shirt in Lily’s drawer. It had roses on it, of course, but it
was loose and cool, hardly touching my body. I went out into the hall and started downstairs and met the still, thick heat
at the top of them. My head whirled sickly, and I clutched the stair rail and sank down on the step with my eyes closed, waiting
for the world to settle.

“What’s wrong, Thayer?” I heard my grandmother say from behind me, worry in her voice.

I shook my head. “I think maybe it’s still the heat,” I said foggily. “It’s really hot in here without the air-conditioning.
I don’t think I ever felt it like this before.”

“It’s not that hot,” she said. “I hope you’re not coming down with something. Stay there; I’m going to get you a cold washcloth.”

“Grand…”

“Stay,” she said.

The washcloth felt good, and the dizziness passed. I went on down the stairs and into the kitchen, thinking to snag a cold
soda and go down to the riverbank, to check out my small fortress there. I had not thought of it for a long time, but today
it seemed welcoming, almost pulling me there.

“I’m going down to the river for a little while,” I said to Juanita, who was stirring something in a blue pottery bowl. “Tell
Grand I’ll be back before lunch.”

“You better not stay out there too long,” Juanita said. “The weatherman said it was going to be one-o-six today. You look
pretty peaked to me.”

“Back atcha,” I said in mild irritation. “Oh, by the way, have there been any phone calls?”

“Yes, none of ‘em for you. The man’s gon’ come fix the ceiling fan in the hall, and your mama called and said she’d be home
tomorrow afternoon….”

I thought of my mother, crisp and cool as a melon in something linen, probably sea green, and her gilt hair pulled back as
she always wore it in hot weather. I could not imagine
that one drop of sweat had been permitted to stand on her forehead or in the hollow of her throat, much less under the arms
of her linen dress. She was the only woman I had ever known on whom linen did not wrinkle. This irritated me even more and
I went out the back porch door and let the screen door slam. This always drove my mother wild.

I walked across the long lawn down toward the trees that fringed the river. The grass was spiky and brown under my bare feet,
and the earth was actually hot. Above me the sky was high and white and so heat hazed that the sun looked like an orb dropped
into milk. No wind stirred the drooping trees. No birds sang. No dogs barked. No lawn mowers buzzed. By the time I reached
my little house, still ringed with boughs, in the roots of the big live oak, my head was throbbing with heat and my heart
was pounding high in my throat. I leaned down to duck into the little enclosure and felt the world spin wildly again.

When I woke up, Detritus was bending over me, trying to pull me erect, and my soda was pooling on the dry earth beside me.
My grandmother was kneeling on my other side, wiping at my face with a damp cloth.

“We’re going to get you right back to bed, darling, and then I’m going to call the doctor. See if you can stand up now.”

“No, Grand, it’s just that it’s so hot…,” I began, and vomited on the earth in front of me.

“You’ll have to carry her, Detritus,” my grandmother said. “I’m going ahead to call the doctor.”

He did, as easily as if I had been a bag of feathers.

“Grand, please don’t call the doctor, I’ll just rest awhile, and then…!” I called to her retreating back.

She and Juanita tucked me into my bed with the window unit grinding out cool air, and I did feel better. My room closed its
arms around me, and I felt lulled and far away, as I had sometimes when I was sick as a child and knew that I was being cared
for and nothing remained for me to do but lie still on piled pillows. Usually it was my father who sat at my bedside, at night,
anyway, and his deep, cool voice seemed to lift me up on waves. Now it was my grandmother’s.

“Dr. Neely says it’s probably heat; he says he’s got half of Lytton down with it. But he said for you to rest today and drink
lots of fluids, and for us to call him in the morning if you’re not better. He feels you will be.”

I closed my eyes and then opened them.

“Has… have there been any phone calls?”

She looked at me steadily for a long minute and said, “No. But you know I’ll tell you if there are. Let it go for a little
while, darling. He hasn’t had time yet.”

She brought me iced tea and a couple of aspirin, and I settled back on my pillows and closed my eyes again.

“Do you want the radio?” she said, and I nodded. In a moment the mannerly strains of an old song that I knew my father used
to like floated into the darkened room.

“I found my April dream… in Portugal with you….”

“Lisbon Antigua.”

Lisbon, I thought, sliding into sleep. We could go to Lisbon…. Maybe you’ll go this time, and you can take me back another
time.

Anywhere you want, Thay. Anywhere you say, Nick whispered. I heard the door close softly as my grandmother went out of my
room and I turned over in my bed and into Nick’s arms. I don’t believe I dreamed, but when I woke again I thought for a moment
that I was on the top bunk of the cabin at Sherwood Forest and Nick was still sleeping beside me.

I sat up abruptly when my hand reached out and touched, not his warm skin, but a pile of books and magazines. I looked around
in confusion and distress and saw my grandmother again, sitting beside my bed. No bunk. No cabin. No Nick. She looked as if
she had been there a long time. The entire room was dim and she reached over and switched on my little bedside lamp and smiled
at me.

“What time is it?” I mumbled, my voice clogged in my throat.

“After six. You’ve slept all afternoon. How do you feel?”

“Okay,” I said thickly. “Sleepy, but I don’t feel sick. I was sick, wasn’t I?”