The Memento (15 page)

“Well, she’s got lots of frigging money. And you’re getting too grown up for playing if you’re twelve.”

Jenny’s favourite game was Dead Body and she’d get the three of us playing it whenever she could. One of us would have to pretend to be dead of a tropical illness or a plague. The dying was the first part of the game. When the dying was done and you was lying in the grass in the final position of your death throes, the two living would carry the dead body and heave it onto a marble bench by the garden, with a bit of help from the corpse. Jenny would do the sermon, followed by lullabies we used as hymns, dancing about until the body would rise. Jenny’s mother had a fit when she caught us at it once and blamed me and Art, the country children with our queer ways. That only made us laugh for it was Jenny who come out from the city with her queer ways. Jenny was the first to speak up and tell her mother it was her idea. She relished shocking Estelle but it was impossible to do—Estelle was convinced her frail little girl was pure and innocent. Even when she saw her do something right in front of her. It was amazing.

My mouth was dry and I smacked my lips as we walked. “There’s nothing wrong with playing, Loretta says … being carefree. You know the garden party Loretta was telling us about? It would be in here.” I pushed the door open and there was Evermore.

The fragrant thick air wrapped around us. I pulled the door shut. Margaret put her hands on her hips where the nylon skirt pulled tight and looked around speechless, under the spell of Petal’s End just for a moment, even pushing her bangs away for a clear glimpse. “No one’s going to believe me.”

“Well, that will be fine with the Parkers. They don’t like people talking about their business so you best be careful what you say in case it gets back. Jenny calls it her garden. She’s possessive like that.”

“Doesn’t that make you mad, Fancy? Jenny sounds like a spoiled bitch, if you ask me.” No one had asked Margaret, but that never did stop her from offering her opinion.

“Jenny don’t intend to be mean … most of the time. She tries to be nice but she don’t really understand how.”

“Fancy can whistle.” Art looked over at me. “And she can do embroidery.”

“Those are useful skills,” Margaret said, “if you’re a fucking bird or an old hag. Don’t you two watch television or anything like normal kids?”

“There are no televisions at Petal’s End. Marigold don’t want no new stuff. She don’t trust it. This is where we come and play. And this is where Jenny likes to come. Marigold and Estelle don’t like Jenny down on the beach.” I didn’t bother whistling but I spun around with my arms out, and Art joined in.

We gave Margaret the tour, taking her to the gazebo. Margaret took in the latticework. Its intricacy reminded me of embroidery. We told her how Marigold had loved dancing with her son and that the Colonel never had time for dancing. Margaret rolled her eyes and when we showed her the hedge labyrinth she said it should be cut down. It hadn’t been trimmed yet and the seven-foot walls were ragged.

“When it’s pruned up you won’t say that.” Art held his hands up. “If you fly over it, it looks like a rose. There’s an aerial photograph of the estate in the library. There’s four ways in and at the centre there’s a white marble bench, if you can find it. The Colonel had it made as a wedding present for Marigold. She never, ever goes in. She says the hobgobblies hide there.”

“The Colonel was forever going on about the war. He seemed to be in made-up days all the time, by the end. He would walk around apologizing to people no one could see.”

“Did he really have a pet bear?”

“Well, it lived in the woods and he fed it. Marigold said he spent
more time following the bear around in his last years than he did with her. Maybe he tried to dance with it and that’s what set it off.”

“That was the problem,” said Art. “He thought it was his pet.”

“Grampie said no wild animal is ever your pet.”

“Well, he should have told the Colonel that. It chased Marigold about the estate. They set a trap for it. No one could walk in the forest. Marigold was right to be upset, Fancy. It tried to kill her,” Art said.

“Yes, it was in league with the hobgobblies, she declared. It was one of their representatives. Imagine. Don’t go scaring Margaret.”

“I’m not trying to scare anybody,” Art said. “But it did try to kill her!”

“How do the two of you manage when you aren’t together?” Margaret made a face. “It’s like listening to one person with two voices. Down in the valley no one really cares what happens over here. I’m just here to look after the old lady.” She looked over her shoulder.

“The Colonel’s family built Petal’s End way, way back. They owned all the land over on the mountain in the days of sail, before the trains and highways. Loretta says the first Lord Parker was a lumber baron. Petal’s End and Lupin Cove was so different a long time ago. In the past they used to dredge the harbour, and it was a lot deeper, that’s what Grampie said.”

“I can’t imagine. You two are like little history teachers. I bet that’s your favourite subject at school. It always made me want to poke my eyes out with a pencil.”

Art looked hurt. “Well, we just thought you might like to know a bit about the place to help you understand Marigold. When the ships stopped coming was when Petal’s End started being mostly their summer place. The Parkers have a big house in the city. That’s why they let the Annex be a mental hospital during the war, because they didn’t need all the space,” Art said.

“The Colonel got money for it. Tell the truth, Art. Parsimonious, Grampie called it. One way they knew the Colonel had dementia
was when he started throwing money away. Marigold put a stop to that.”

“How’d the old lady get sick?”

“After Charlie died she had her attack,” I said.

“Stroke. The proper name is a stroke, Fancy.”

“Fine, Art, a stroke. When your veins get too tight. Marigold shrivelled up on one side.” I thought of my embroidery and how I needed to fix her face.

“Well, my veins are getting tight just listening to the two of you. I’m only eighteen and I can feel a stroke coming on.”

We didn’t bother taking Margaret to the family cemetery or to the Wishing Pool surrounded by the cedars where the broken teacups was lying at rest in pieces at the bottom of the water. We came back by the long perennial beds. There was butterflies everywhere.

“There’s all kinds of rare types,” Art said. “One of the gardeners told me that. And heritage variety plants, too. He says the butterflies like the air here. He calls it a microclimate.” A butterfly fluttered to the stretch of lupins. It had a border of white and black at the edge of its blue wings. “That’s the Melissa Blue. The blue lupin is the only flower with the nectar they like. The gardener says their larvae eat the leaves. It’s got gossamer wings,” he added.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Silky. Ma uses that word for embroidery floss.”

Art nodded. “You can’t touch their wings though, or they can’t fly. They’ll die if they can’t fly.”

We walked out of the garden and Margaret glanced around hesitantly again, like she wasn’t sure if any of this was real. “What happened to the son, Jenny’s father? I mean, I heard what happened to him, in the end, but what did he do?”

She didn’t like history but she sure liked the gossip. “Oh yes,” I said. “Mr. Charlie. He seemed to spend all his time travelling. He was nice, quiet. He helped with the family empire but he didn’t seem to have a real job. He didn’t come over too much that last year.”

“I guess he just came back to kill himself, did he?” It seemed there was constantly things Margaret could make fun of.

It was a scandal but it had faded out of sight, out of mind. Not out of our minds, though. You never forget the sight of a dead man.

“The whole place is creepy. It was back here, right?” Margaret waved her hand at the west side of the house. The air felt cold to me despite the swelter. And it wasn’t fun no more. I didn’t want to be talking of the dead.

Twelfth-born
, I was thinking.

We were just past the carriage houses then. The summer sun was still high but had moved through the sky. It must have been close to suppertime. Only the roof of the west side was visible where we stood. Margaret started walking toward it. We hesitated, but followed close behind.

“That was the mental hospital that Loretta mentioned was mouldy,” Art explained. “Marigold called it the asylum. She said that’s what Petal’s End was, a sanctuary. There was a swimming pool back there once, a black-bottom pool. It was filled in a long time ago. Loretta said she could hardly remember a pool being here. None of the Parkers are swimmers. They like croquet and badminton.” There was only a slight depression in the grass in front of the abandoned wing of the house.

We were around the side of the house now, where the lawn ran down a steep hill, and a high, ornate wrought-iron fence with a heavy gate blocked the wing off from the rest of the property. The far end of the neglected wing was against the forest. It wasn’t built that close but the forest had grown in to meet it.

“It’s so creepy. Estelle is right to want it torn down. You mean to tell me that two snoops like you never come back here?”

Still we didn’t tell Margaret. I knew it was making Art sick just remembering.

“Can you get into it from the main house?”

“Yes, but the door is locked. One of the old soldiers had a heart attack playing croquet. There was only a few left by then and they moved them all at the same time when he died, back down to the valley to a place for seniors. That was when Jenny was a baby.” I knew the key was hanging on a nail behind the painting in the hall leading into the kitchen. Jenny had shown it to me once. She didn’t say a word, just lifted the painting, her huge blue eyes moving to and fro like they was on either end of a teeter-totter. We heard Loretta’s shuffle and her voice calling us and Jenny let the painting bang down.

Margaret pushed through the gate. It creaked and Art jumped. We followed her. That’s what children do. They follow, even when they know they shouldn’t. There were stone benches, the remains of garden beds and a marble bird feeder. Lupins were growing around the edges and the Melissa Blue butterflies were flitting about, more petal than insect.

There were dusty blinds and sheer yellowed curtains in the windows. “Which room did he do it in?” Margaret looked at the far end.

I pointed. “In there. That was the entertainment room for the patients. He was hanging from the middle of the room where the light was.” My heart was pounding thinking about it. It was a warm spring afternoon and the lilacs were all in bloom, and the lily of the valley. They had all those flowers at his funeral.

“Is that so?” Margaret laughed. “Chandelier Charlie. Maybe they should make it a hotel and call it that, Chandelier Charlie’s.” Margaret laughed like a maniac and she licked her lips as though she was trying to savour her own chortles.

Art was staring at his feet.

“If anyone catches you talking that way, Margaret, they’ll ship you right back down to the valley and your daddy, so you best think on things. You shouldn’t talk that way about the dead. They wouldn’t like it.” I didn’t know why I said that. The words just come out of my mouth.

Margaret held her breath then, just for a moment, and she tossed her hair. “Well, I didn’t mean anything by it. He couldn’t have been much of a man, my father says. Leaving his family behind.”

“Well Mr. Charlie died and there ain’t nothing we can do about it, and talking bad don’t make it better.”

Margaret’s voice was low. “Did they see him hanging there? Who found him?”

Art’s eyes stayed on his feet. “We shouldn’t talk about it. It’s not respectful.”

“Jenny and her grandmother found him. And then I came in … and then Art. The door was open. We went in to play. We would sneak in. Jenny was first there. The rope was long. He was dangling there, the tips of his toes on the floor, like he was going to start dancing. Charlie’s face was purple and black.” I wanted to scare Margaret, and Art knew it.

“Fancy! We shouldn’t be talking about it. It’s not right.”

Margaret wasn’t smiling any more. “That’s no story for a girl your age to be telling, Fancy Mosher. It’s disgusting. I don’t believe either of you were there.” She took a step back from us.

I thought she was going to cry and it made me feel powerful. I wasn’t myself. “Well, then, you shouldn’t go asking, Margaret. Jenny says this place is haunted, that Charlie comes out at night, looking for who hung him there.” I was making that up now, to scare Margaret. Art hated it when people made stuff up, but of course he was thinking now that maybe this might be true.

“Well, there was no one to blame but himself. Maybe Charlie comes back now, looking for himself.” Margaret laughed, but we didn’t laugh back and she stopped. She pulled her bangs down. “Maybe someone strung him up in there. To get his fortune. Maybe Estelle did it.”

“Marigold owns the whole lot of it so I guess that didn’t work out for too good her.” I thought about the picture Grampie did of Mr. Charlie. He was pointing his finger in it, maybe judging those
looking at the painting. Grampie saw him. I knew that now, and Art did too. It’s why Marigold was never the same, knowing Charlie knew something. Something he told to Grampie.

Art’s voice was the lowest I ever heard it in my life. “We should go back and see if Loretta needs us. I’ve got to be getting home soon. I have to help my grandmother with supper.”

That was when I noticed one of the windows was open just a crack. They saw it too.

“I thought you said no one goes in there,” Margaret said.

“Loretta must have done that. For air circulation. There’s black mould. It can infect your brain.” I didn’t know if that was true but it come easy off my tongue, like I was protecting the place from Margaret, or Margaret from Petal’s End … I couldn’t tell which. Margaret wanted no part of it and that was probably wise, but Art and I, we were already deep within the world of Petal’s End, too far in to get out.

“You know, at Bible School they said your family has the devil in them. That’s what the ministers say, Fancy.”