Up Island (24 page)

“Not to mention biology,” snorted Bella Ponder, but she was still smiling.

“Are there others?” I said. “Do they have children? What do you call them…cygnets, isn’t it?”

“They had babies the first spring,” Luzia said. “But something got them…a fox, or snapping turtles, or maybe a dog.

After that they never did again, that we knew of. I think…I think they just decided that each other was enough for them.

It’s quite unusual, I understand. You’ll see for yourself, when you get down there. You’re going to like them, and I do believe you’re the one they’re going to choose to take my place.

I can just tell. I don’t think foolishness bothers you, does it?”

Somehow that touched me to the core. I felt tears prickle in my eyes.

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“I guess it doesn’t,” I said. “I’ve lived with it a long time.”

“Well, then.” She slumped back against the pillows, obviously exhausted. “You go with Bella and see for yourself. It’s just the right thing; I could tell when you rang the doorbell.

But then, you didn’t ring, did you? I just knew you were there; that’s even better. I am so grateful.”

And she closed her eyes. The lids were blue and papery and veined, but the lashes lay sweetly on the old cheek. I looked at Bella.

“Can we see the house?”

“Of course. Just let me get my things,” she said.

Her things were a huge canvas boat tote crammed with paper bags and a beautiful old silver-headed cane. Even with the cane, it took me a very long time to get her out to the Cherokee and into it. When we finally achieved it, she was white and sweating and gasping alarmingly for breath, and I was soaked with nervous perspiration. What would I do if this old woman had a serious, or even fatal, heart attack in the Jeep? I did not know where the nearest hospital was, nor the nearest fire station. Was there even a phone in the big house? Yes, wires were stark against the blue sky. But I couldn’t possibly lift her…

She soon got control of her breath, though.

“Damned flabby heart,” she said calmly. “You can see why we need a little help. It’s funny, isn’t it? You never think it’s going to happen to you. When I first came to this island I was as strong as any man, and for more years than I can remember I took care of myself and my boy and Luzia, and that big old house, and the camps…and Luzia, well, you should have seen her when she came. You’d never have known she’s older

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than me. She was like a little lick of flame, or a piece of the wind, always moving, always running and singing and laughing. We used to run all over those woods, and swam in the pond…No, you never really do think it’s going to happen to you.”

I looked over at the wrecked old gargoyle under my lashes.

I could no more imagine her and the frail little old mummy in the big yellow bed running like puppies through the woods and in and out of the bright, cold water than I could imagine elephants, or monuments, dancing. Pity tore at my heart.

“Where did Luzia come here from?” I said.

“From West Bedford, just outside Boston,” she said. “A lot of my people and hers lived there when she and I were young.

There was a regular colony of Portuguese for a while; some of the men were at the Hanscomb Air Force Base, and others worked in Cambridge and Boston. Luzia and I were both born there, and we went to high school there. I was working in a restaurant in Cambridge when I met my husband; he was at Harvard then. When he…left us, my son and I, I needed help, and Luzia’s parents were about to move back to Portugal, so I asked her to come here, and she’s been here ever since. She’s all I have of family now…”

“Your son…is he…not alive?” I said hesitantly. I had not gotten the sense of tragedy from her, only bitterness, a formless anger.

“Oh, yes. I meant family here. My son just…doesn’t come here anymore. He has no more use for his father’s people than I do, and apparently they have none for him. None of them have ever made a move to contact him. None of them made a move to see him when he was here, when he was just a little boy. That’s

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why I sent him off island, so he could grow up and go to school among his own people, in West Bedford. He’s come back very few times since.”

“How old was he when he went away?” I said.

“Eight. He was eight.”

Eight years old. My God, poor little boy. To lose his father at two, and then his mother and his aunt and his very world at eight…no wonder he did not come back to this island.

“Where is he now?” I asked. “What does he do?”

“He’s a schoolteacher. He teaches in a private school in Washington State,” she said. Her voice was flat. “He teaches English literature, I believe, somewhere just outside Seattle.”

The “I believe” spoke of distance and pain, and I did not pursue it, except to say, mildly, “That’s a long way away.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s a pretty hat.”

I saw that she was looking at my mother’s hat in the backseat, and I accepted the change of subject.

“It was my mother’s.”

“She had good taste. I’ll bet she was a pretty woman.”

“Yes, she was,” I said.

She directed me back to the right, where we bumped in silence along the deserted, close-grown road, and then left on to Middle Road, which bisects the up island landscape, between South Road and North Road. We were driving along the glacial spine of the island now, and I did not try to con-verse with her; the sweeping vistas of meadows and boulders and moors and ponds and the great silver sea beyond claimed my eyes. Up island, in that moment, seemed as remote and empty of humanity to me as the Scottish UP ISLAND / 207

moors it resembled. It was crisscrossed with beautiful old piled-stone walls that, now, seemed to define nothing at all, and here and there a great piled old house, or an obviously new and opulent one, dotted the green and gray, or broke the racing cloud scud from the tops of the ridges. And then, abruptly, we were in the little town of Chilmark, with its community center and firehouse and huddle of stores and church and schoolhouse. I drew a breath of relief; here were life and the living. Men and women ambled about the crossroads or proceeded in trucks and Jeeps through the intersec-tion where the famous beetlebung trees loomed, beginning now to be tinged with promissory scarlet. It was near noon, and children ran in and out of the old shingled two-room school. It was such a classic, pastoral village scene that I grinned to myself, thinking what Tee would have said about it, and then, remembering, amended the thought to what Livvy would have. I did not mind the Disneyesque quality of it, though; this was real, and powerfully endearing, somehow touching a chord deep within me. Wasn’t it, after all, like this that people were meant to live? In villages, as neighbors, wrapped in water and hills? I smiled at Bella Ponder.

“So pretty,” I said.

“Pretty is as pretty does,” she said, and pointed right, and I turned on to Menemsha Cross Road.

The two old Ponder camps lay across North Road, at the end of one of a nameless warren of small, wild lanes that eventually led down to the waters of Vineyard Sound, near Menemsha Bight. It seemed to me that we bumped through the low-growing, close-pressing forest interminably, seeing nothing but overhanging branches and undergrowth—ferns and vines

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and the stunted trunks of trees—only occasionally catching a glimpse ahead of silver-gray, which spoke of open water and the sky. At the head of each tiny lane a ramshackle mailbox leaned, or sometimes a weathered, falling-down wooden gate that could have deterred no one. I asked Bella if any of the lanes had names, and she said that a few did: She could remember Prospect Hill Road, and Cranberry Road, and Beetlebung and Kapigan Roads, and, of course, Pinkletink.

“But,” she added, “I don’t think our road ever had a name.

People just call it Ponder Camp Road. That’s as good as any, I guess.”

She pointed again, and I swung the Jeep on to an even tinier, more green-choked road, and slowed to a snail’s pace as I felt my way through the ruts and vegetation. There was no glimpse of sea or sky now, only the relentless, scratching, pressing green. The roadbed was appalling.

“This must be impossible in winter,” I said.

“Not if you’ve got four-wheel drive,” she said. “I can’t remember ever being stuck in here.”

Of course not, I said to myself, chastened.

I followed a sharp turn to the left, then stopped the Jeep abruptly with a soft gasp. In a clearing just ahead sat a small, shingled, two-story cottage, gone dark brown now with age and weather. To one side of it, and a bit in front, a larger cottage stood, this one all on one level and shrouded with some sort of creeper going scarlet. Like the first, its trim and shutters were white, this one’s seeming new-painted and glistening in the unaccustomed sunlight of the clearing. From its mossy stone chimney a wisp of ghostlike smoke curled.

Flowers in window boxes rioted red and yellow and peach and pink against the old shingles:

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tuberous begonias, I saw. We could not grow them in this vivid perfection at home, though I had tried. The win-dowpanes shone. Behind and above it, the little two-story cottage looked dim and shabby and unloved, its chimney cold, its windows scummed and opaque with spiderwebs.

Beyond both the still, dark water of a little pond gleamed, ringed with emerald water weeds and rushes and small, wind-shaped trees. One end of it was thick with leathery-green water lilies. At its near edge, beside a listing little gray dock, a half-beached skiff lay, its faded red paint obscured in patches by the relentless vines. Beyond all of it, the silver of the sea tossed and flashed.

It was so utterly, picturesquely lovely, so somehow ridiculously operettalike, that I simply laughed. My heart squeezed with enchantment.

“Where are Hansel and Gretel?” I said. “Surely no self-respecting witch would eat them up in this place.”

“It’s right nice, isn’t it?” she said complacently, knowing of course how it looked; hadn’t she said she and Luzia had spent most of their summers here? I could see, suddenly, what a bitter loss this place must be to both of them. The old farmhouse on its wind-scoured hill was beautiful, in a stark and lordly way, but this secret glade, with its sunlit pond and the promise of the sea always before it, was sustenance and shelter. I could literally see it frilled in the first tender pink and green of spring; see it wrapped in silent, succoring snow; see it, as I would soon, licked by the fire of autumn. I had been right in what I sensed: This is what had waited for me up island. I knew before I got out of the car that I would take the camp.

“May I go in?” I said eagerly, turning to her.

“Why don’t you go see the swans first?” she said.

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“Take them a little bite and get acquainted, give me time to get myself up for walking some more. Then I’ll show it to you.”

“I can go in by myself; I don’t want you to make yourself ill,” I said.

“No. There are things I want to tell you about the house.

Take that top paper bag and go scatter some of that barley on the edge of the water and some right in it. They’ll be along; they don’t go far from the water.”

I dug the first paper bag out of her tote and got out of the Jeep and walked across the glade to the pond’s edge. The air smelled of pine and sun-sweetened grass, of the clean, fishy smell I associated with childhood lakes and creeks. There was, under the deep silence, a kind of hum that might be in-sects or just the living heart of the wood itself. I stretched and smiled, and walked carefully out on to the old dock, feeling it sway and hold, and tossed handfuls of the cracked barley she had given me into the water, and more behind me on to the grassy fringe of the pond. For a moment there was only the silence and then there was a kind of liquid rustle, and the sound of moving water, and a great white bird came gliding through the rushes toward me.

It was a mottled gray-white, as though years of wear and winters had dimmed the luster of its feathers, and its bill was bright red-orange, with a black mask above it and a black knob jutting over the bill from its forehead. Its neck was curved in the beautiful, tender S curve that I associated with fairy-tale books and old engravings. It was enormous; I was shocked at its size. It must have weighed a good sixteen or seventeen pounds. I don’t know why I was surprised; I had seen swans before, in zoos and botanical gardens. But somehow, here in this wild place, with nothing but UP ISLAND / 211

quiet water between me and it, it looked large indeed, and formidable.

It stopped in the water and looked at me, tilting its head to one side. Then it raised its wings over its back so that it was one huge, ruffled puff of white: lovely. I was captivated.

I knelt and reached my hand out to it, offering barley.

“Hello, you pretty thing,” I said. “Are you Charles, or Di?

Want a little nibble of brunch?”

From around a clump of reeds a white tornado erupted, rushing awkwardly at me, hissing and grunting. I had heard grunts like that from alligators on television nature shows: I jumped back reflexively, but not before the wind of great, flailing wings brushed my bare arms and face. It seemed that the whole glade, and the air over the pond, were filled with whirling, whistling wings.

I cowered on the dock, covering my head and face with my arms; the wings slowed and stopped, and I risked a look.

A second swan, much larger than the one who still lingered in the water, was waddling angrily back and forth along the bank under the dock, looking up at me and darting its big head, on the end of its serpentine neck, like a snake. Charles, no doubt of that. I had, I supposed, threatened Diana.

I stood frozen, effectively treed on the dock by the absurd swan, remembering the cast on Gerry Edmondson’s wrist, put there by a swan in a West Tisbury pond. Staying here was out of the question, I thought: I couldn’t go through this twice a day indefinitely. What if one of them broke
my
wrist; I wouldn’t even be able to drive. I felt a deep, childish sorrow start in my stomach: This place had spoken so clearly to me of something I had not even known I needed.