Neverland, p.8
Neverland, page 8
The second summer on Gull Island the weather was bad but not bad enough to stay indoors. Mama and Grammy Weenie were silent together, although you could see Grammy eyeing her when we all sat down to the table in the evening, looking for faults, finding them, and then keeping her silence. I used to think how happy we’d all be if Grammy Weenie just died. I didn’t particularly love her, although she was at least interesting, if peculiar. When she talked of her long-dead daughter, she didn’t call her Cindy, but “Babygirl.” This was the oldest of the children—my mother being next, and then Aunt Cricket being last. We children called this aunt—who had died the year after I was born—the “Mad One,” because she ended up in some kind of drying-out farm in North Carolina and died crazy. But she would always be Babygirl to Grammy Weenie. When Grammy spoke of her maternal grandmother, it was not as Leonora Bourgeois, but the “Giantess from Biloxi.” Grammy Weenie was putting together a family history, although some days she said that her children and grandchildren weren’t worthy of this record at all. She would read it to us at night, and we would yawn and stretch and fall asleep to her grumbling voice:
“Of all things I am most proud of, it is of being a Wandigaux—Daddy was from the New Orleans Wandigaux family, originally from France, persecuted for their religious faith, who escaped the wrath of the Papists of their native land. And when I think of that name, I am reminded we are wanderers. I am from a nomadic stock, and Gull Island has become the end of the journey . . . Wandigaux I am, and all that I am is Wandigaux. My husband was a Lee of Culpeper. We raised three daughters, my Babygirl, Evelyn Jane, and Cricket, and so the blood continues. I have regrets, as all mortals must, and I have done things that I ought not to have done, but we must all answer to a higher law than the law of man: There is the Kingdom of God to which we are accountable. All around us is that Kingdom; it is in the Garden in which we live. I am a poor humble and erring servant, and it is true that I have not always tended the Garden. But I have done what I have had to do. I have done what I must . . . ”
The third summer on Gull Island we miraculously got along, and I completely attributed this to the fact that Sumter had been sent away to summer camp for the month we visited the Retreat. Aunt Cricket tended to cry every day because she missed her little boy, her “Sunny,” but Grammy was pleasant and made gingerbread men and read from Charles Dickens every evening. When she went through David Copperfield, she said, “‘I am born.’ Isn’t that marvelous? ‘I am born.’ Simple, direct, that Mr. Dickens knew how to begin, didn’t he? Beginnings are all, and what is well begun cannot be undone.”
Mama got a tan for the first time in years because she was finally able to squeeze into her bathing suit—she was never fat, but always said she was. Uncle Ralph and Daddy took us down to the Sea Horse Park, and although the roller coaster was still the unused dinosaur it had always been, and the Trabant and Whirligigs were closed, there were bumper cars and cotton candy. A long, thin black man with no arms and no legs rolled cigarettes with his tongue and then struck the matches that way, too. He charged a buck per rolled cigarette, but it was great entertainment. Still, as always, we had returned home at the end of August with mosquito bites and bad tempers from the humidity.
My dreams those summers were about going back to school, about my parents fighting, about my little baby brother who would be born shortly.
My dreams the last summer on the island made me scream.
3
The bunny screams because it is alive.
“Beau? You okay, honey?”
The bunny screams because it is alive.
“Beau?” It was my mother’s voice that brought me out of the nightmare, not the face of that little black-and-white bunny, its whiskered muzzle stretched like an open sore, its eyes red with fury and knowledge of what was to come.
It was not quite daylight, but almost. She had turned on the lamp by my bed and sat next to me. With the palm of her left hand she felt my forehead. “You don’t have a fever.” I always smelled her hair first: It was like her shampoo, but also was like vinegar and lemon. The rest of her smelled like calamine lotion with only a hint of pine-clean gin laced in her breath. She’d been smoking cigarettes, which she bummed off Aunt Cricket, but only when she was very drunk. I liked that smell of ashes and gin from her lips. She was all smells that reminded me that she was my mother—I had known that perfume since the day I was born.
“I didn’t wet the bed,” I said.
“Honey, I didn’t think you had. You’re a big boy. I was in the bathroom and I heard you. You let out a big old howl. Was it bad?” Sometimes, and this was one of those times, Mama looked at me like she didn’t quite know what to expect. I had always had dreams, and I had always told them. Sometimes they were about grades I’d get on my tests at school, sometimes they were about arguments, sometimes they were about storms that were on their way. Was it bad? she’d asked, as if she didn’t really want to know.
“Don’t laugh if I tell you.”
“Dreams are just ways of sorting out messy thoughts—nothing to be frightened of. Come on and tell me it. I promise not to laugh unless it’s funny.”
“I can’t remember,” I lied. If I was to tell her the dream, I’d have to tell her about Neverland. And I could not break my blood oath. “What time is it?”
“Half past the freckle, eastern elbow time.”
“Daddy’s gonna be getting up soon. I have to go fishing again.”
“You like it, don’t you?”
I nodded. Two lies and the sun wasn’t even up.
“Try to go back to sleep.” She wiped her hand across my forehead and took with it some of my sweat. “Sweetie? Just close your eyes a little longer?”
Another nod, another lie. I was getting good at this.
Sumter and I were forced to go fishing for three days in a row, and each time Uncle Ralph would threaten to throw the teddy bear into the water.
Those same three days, Mama, Governor, Aunt Cricket, and the girls went to St. Badon to shop and wander, leaving Grammy home to read her Bible and scribble her memoirs in small black composition books.
We’d return from our daily trip, bumpy and sunburned, Uncle Ralph or Daddy with the one or two catches of the day, and Grammy would be sitting up in her wheelchair in the alcove of the living room, where the afternoon light came through the streaked window.
She wrote and wrote, faster and faster, as if she had to get it out, all her memories, now, now while she still remembered.
4
“It was all for the good,” Grammy muttered, almost under her breath, as she sat up in her chair, and then she rose up.
“A miracle!” Aunt Cricket cried out as Grammy stood, wobbling, on her stick legs. “Praise Jesus! Alleluia!”
Grammy stood on her legs, “it was all for the good.”
“Oh, Mama, the Lord shines his light on us, He surely does!” Aunt Cricket cackled.
“Spirit and flesh fighting, and always spirit must rise, must rise and conquer the decaying flesh, nature is all decay.” Grammy pointed directly at me. “All that is natural is unnatural, child. All that can be made flesh can be corrupted.”
“Praise His Name!” Aunt Cricket sang, clutching her boxy breasts through the cotton of her blouse like she was ready to give up her heart and soul to Christ right then and there—and by way of her nipples.
From the open doorway I heard the screaming rabbit. I went to shut the door, and when I got there it looked like a golden dust storm of yellow jackets was heading our way, and the locusts in the trees were barking, and behind me Aunt Cricket cried out, “Praise His name! And bless the fruit of His loins!”
And the one who walked in shadows moved among the great yellow swarms, his hands outstretched. Aunt Cricket pushed past me and ran out onto the porch and into the swarm to embrace him.
I AWOKE from this dream in the car on the way home from fishing, and I felt in a fever from sunburn. My scalp was sweaty against the vinyl seat. Sumter was whistling in the backseat, and Uncle Ralph was grumbling about not having caught anything. Daddy was driving and didn’t look over at me.
As we drove up the road, the Retreat came into view, and I sent out a silent prayer that I wished I was home.
5
Julianne Sanders, our makeshift nanny and occasional cook for the brief holiday, snored when she slept. She lay curled into a fetal position on the front settee, her long legs impossibly drawn up in the least comfortable position imaginable, her face beatific in its calm. Her fluttering breaths were like distant foghorns calling out to each other. When we entered the house, the first thing Sumter did was go over to her and squeeze her nostrils shut until she started gasping. She reached up and grabbed him by the collar and shook him the way I’d seen mother dogs shake puppies, and my cousin let out a yowl to wake the dead.
“Sumter Monroe, you tell me how sorry you are you just did that” She was in complete control, smoothly coming out of her nap, leaning forward, her hands full of Sumter, shaking, shaking, just as if she’d planned on doing this.
“I ain’t sorry.”
Grammy Weenie, in her alcove, didn’t even look up from her composition book; she scrawled another line across the top of a page.
Julianne kept shaking him, sitting up as she did this, and I was amazed to see that Sumter put up no resistance and, in fact, almost looked defeated. “You are sorry, Sumter, you are the sorriest little boy I ever did see.” He was a rag doll in her hands, and I would not have been surprised to see the stuffing come out of him.
“Mama!” he keened.
“Your mama can’t help you now. She’s still out shopping, so you just take your medicine like a good boy and say you’re sorry.”
“Uncle! Uncle!”
“Not ‘uncle,’ sorry.”
“Okay, okay, sorry, I’m sorry!”
She let him go.
He stepped back from her and said, “Hey, you’re supposed to work for us, lady, not the other way around.”
Julianne did not lose her smile. Her arm flapped out like a swinging tree branch and slapped him on the face. She said something in a language I didn’t recognize. It sounded French, but at that age all I knew was laploomdaymahtaunt and I didn’t even know what that meant. What Julianne was saying was a blur of oohs and luhs. Even though it made no sense to me, it meant something to Sumter, whose eyes grew wide, as if hearing obscenities. “We understand each other, then.” She nodded and pinched his cheek, letting go and leaning back on the settee. She was all unshaven legs, dangly and bony, crossing over each other as she yawned and stretched. She saw me staring at her curiously and winked, “What are you ogling at, Beau? You never seen a Gullah girl with hairy legs before? You boys either go play and stay out of trouble till you get called to supper or you’ll be peeling potatoes for this Gullah soon enough.”
THIS was the first time she’d admitted she was a Gullah, and if I haven’t told you already, I’ll tell you now: I knew Julianne Sanders, right then, right at the moment she said she was a Gullah, I knew she wasn’t a Gullah at all, because she said it like it was a lie. She said it like she was laughing at me on the inside for being so gullible. She was something else, part of some other thing besides Gullah. She was somehow more dangerous than Gullah, who were good people, who got life under their fingernails and lived it. But Julianne Sanders was something else.
She was what the folks on the island called sinistre, which is not to say she was sinister, but that she was a left-hander, which in Gullah parlance meant she lived to the west of the West Island. She was part of a select group of families who were feared by the Gullahs because they were descended from a god and a goddess according to the popular mythology. It was Sumter who informed me of all this, but he also added, “But you’d think if she was truly divinity she’d shave her legs.”
He and I were tree-climbing up at the edge of the bluff. The day was growing late, and we’d taken our naps. The sun was slanting toward the mainland; the ocean trickled with piss-yellow light, as if schools of phosphorescent fish moved near the surface. Daddy and Uncle Ralph were playing cards out on the front porch. We could wave to them from our perch. Julianne was in doing some cleaning under the supervision of the strictest of taskmasters, Grammy Weenie, scraping around the linoleum on her wheels. Mama, Aunt Cricket, and the girls hadn’t returned from the mainland—it was near five o’clock, and if they were on their way, they were caught in the mild rush hour of St. Badon, the town just on the other side of the bridge from Gull Island.
“You can see the tiara bridge from here.” Sumter pointed out through the veils of shimmering heat, across the peninsula to a curved bow. Cars like ants crossed over it. “I wonder if we can see the Chevy.” Sumter held a pair of binoculars up to his eyes.
“Give me those.” I made a grab for them.
“Ask and you shall receive.”
“Okay, could I have those?”
“Pretty please with sugar on top?”
“Yeah, huh, right.”
“What the hell.” He hefted them over to me and I pressed the binoculars against my eyes and looked down at the bridge. The cars had grown, but only into larger ants. I tried to make out Aunt Cricket’s Chevrolet, but it was all a blur of movement. Sea gulls fretted and cackled down along the shoreline over feeder fish that had been driven up near the shoreline by the fishing boats.
“I don’t see them.”
“You think Julianne hexed your mama and daddy? She’s a sinistre and she talks that funny stuff. I think maybe she hexed me today, her and her leg hair.”
“What’d she say to you, anyway?”
“Who the hell knows? But she looked like she was fixing me with whatever it was. She thinks she fixed me, anyway. She’s a fixer, that crazy mama.”
“You looked like you lost it.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t lose it, bonehead.”
“Toadhead.”
“Nosehair.”
“Toadhead.”
“Know what?”
“What?”
“That’s what. Sometimes you suck, Beau, you just plain suck. Now give me those binos and go play in traffic.” He tugged on the binoculars, and my pulse pounded in my thumb where he’d stuck me with that fishhook out on Rabbit Lake.
The more he talked, the more I felt the blood break and crash within the confines of my sore thumb. “I hear the sinistres got a ritual where they are just like Catholics, only instead’a drinking the blood and body of Jesus in the form of wine and wafer, they use the genu-wine article, the flesh and blood, and you ask me, people like Julianne Sanders burn in Hell all the days of their life, and Mama says she’ll be knocked up before she’s seventeen with the way she sashays. But I don’t know what Gullah’s gonna get a boner for that hair on her legs. I think if I put my hand on it, it would feel like the Weenie’s silver-backed all-natural bristle brush, don’t you think? Bet her hair’s stiff as a tack and twice as sharp. But, hell, I sure would like to see that flesh and blood ritual, know what I mean, jelly bean?”
Sumter was given to sudden transformations. Crouching up in that tree with him, I wondered what would spit out of his mouth next. Grammy Weenie was always saying that blood was thicker than water, “and some of it’s so thick you need a knife just to get yourself a slice, and in this family we all have our knives and we all want our slices.” But I was convinced that Sumter and I couldn’t really be related. He was too spooky and unnatural, like an alien.
“Beau?”
“Huh?”
“You just looked funny for a second.”
“I ain’t been sleeping much. Bad dreams.”
“Lucy’ll take care of your dreams. Lucy wants to take care of all of us. You know that, don’t you? Lucy’s in and of the earth, she’s our mother, she’s the whole damn world. Don’t you worry about stupid dreams. We’d never abandon you, me and Lucy. We should go,” he said, bringing the binoculars down from his eyes. “Yeah, to Neverland. You coming? Don’t be scared, ’cuz, it’s our place. If you’re gonna be scared, be scared of Grammy and her home. Now that’s scary. Know what, Beau-Beau?”
“That’s what.”
“Nope. I was gonna tell you what that sinistre Julianne said.”
“No you ain’t.”
“Yeah I was. Only now I’m not so sure.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“She told me she’s seen my daddy.”
“Big whoop. I seen your daddy, too. Half the liquor stores in Georgia’ve seen your daddy.”
“Shows how much you know. You only think you seen my daddy, but I tell you, given her leg-hairy ways, I wouldn’t put it past that girl. Scared the be-jesus outta me.”
6
There was this woman who had nothing whatsoever to do her entire life because her husband died young and left a lot of money to her. She spent her winters on Gull Island and had, at one time, been neighbors with Grammy Weenie and used to come over and sit with her back in the days when Grammy was young. This woman began compiling a history of the island, which was pretty boring, mainly recipes from Gullah kitchens and Junior League barbecues back in the days when Junior Leaguers occasionally came to the peninsula. But this woman had a few screws loose, and she always repeated one of her favorite anecdotes about the island in each of her small self-published books—always on sale, even after her death, at the bait shop.
What a rich heritage our island is home to, what a luminous past, what an unmined treasure is Gull Island! And none so intriguing as the story of the slave-ghosts, a tale so lovely and peaceful that one can feel secure during the worst gale the sea has to give, if one is only at home on Gull Island.
