Untying the Moon, page 22
“Help me know my body again,” she says.
With longing from the marrow in his bones he enfolds her, careful of her healing places, but he holds her as a woman nonetheless, holds her long enough to make certain this is the path they will travel.
She is fragile, but she is Bailey once more and she offers herself to him entirely. When she stands to undress he says I’d like to do that, but let me light the candles first. Sweet illumination. They lie side by side in the dancing candlelight and he smoothes his fingertips over the golden form of the woman who was the girl who has awed him since the day of her birth.
Gone are the childhood nicknames they have used to buffer intimacy through the years. They are Bailey and Ben granting themselves the long withheld privilege of one another. Passion concealed in prudence is laid bare. Desire stymied by duty flows free. Hurricane Hugo careens into Carolina as she moves over him and licks his eyelids, his earlobes, the nape of his neck, the cup of his navel, the swell of every muscle that quivers in his powerful athletic body. Marathon man.
And after the first surge he rolls atop her and with the feather she found wisps the shape of her, every curve, every angle, slowly outlining the features of her fullness. Ever so slowly he coaxes chill bumps on her sweat glistened skin until she draws him to her with trembling hunger. Then he kisses the sweat from the back of her knees, the crook of her elbow, the swell of her breasts. Kisses the scars of childhood mishaps, the marks of recent wounds as well. Hurricane or not, they are heedless of all else in existence but the rhythm of their bodies sounding one another without guile.
He dampens a soft white wash cloth and freshens her, blows long unhurried breaths for her to dry. In the last hours before daybreak they sleep entwined as Poseidon and Zephyros gather water and wind and gaudily withdraw to the west.
At first light Bailey stands at the curtains, massive damask curtains that have shut out the light for four days. She opens them enough for her long elegant body to silhouette in an image Ben will carry to his grave. Aphrodite as she looks to the sea that spawned her.
“My god,” she says. “The river is there. And the bridge. What day is this?”
“Friday—the twenty-second.”
“The equinox,” she says. “Grand Mère’s birthday.”
She turns to where he lies and smiles a real Bailey smile, opens a window to the fresh sea breeze.
“Get up, Bossman,” she says. “There’s work to be done.”
By 7:00 A.M. Hugo has been downgraded to a tropical storm and passes over Charlotte with sixty mile per hour winds. In South Carolina everyone east of I-95 is without power. Hundreds of thousands. In Charleston there is no electricity, no running water, no phone service. Trees and power lines barricade the streets.
Bailey and Ben pitch in with the already hustling Mills House staff. No one pays attention to bruises. The second floor pool deck is converted to an outdoor kitchen and by lunch time National Guardsmen are treated to cheeseburgers. In the next days the refrigerators and freezers are cleared and many meals are shared before the food can spoil.
Downtown Charleston is a world unto itself for those like Ben and Bailey who have no option to exit, and help is needed everywhere on the peninsula. Hundreds of workers from out-of-state power companies are welcomed. Red Cross and other volunteers emerge and neighbors look after one another.
Tammy Barnes helps care for the 850 people who have taken shelter at Gaillard Auditorium where the roof is gone and windows are shattered. David Johns hand pumps fuel to keep the hospital generator going. In the full force hurricane winds Gary Fulford and Benjamin Green have run backhoes to rescue three old ladies and four kids trapped in a collapsed building. Down the street Leroy Mosely unlocks the doors to the grocery store before meats and produce go to waste. Heroes of Hugo. The news is filled with their stories.
In Awendaw Fire Chief David Phillips helps evacuate twelve people from a fallen building and opens a relief center to distribute food and clothing. Principal Jennings Austin and Deputy Charlie DuTart are in charge of the shelter in McLellanville where the storm has surged twenty feet. Heroes all.
By Sunday Hugo crosses the Ohio Valley and dissipates in the North Atlantic, but stories and statistics, good and bad, take center stage in the days that follow. In Francis Marion National Forest 8,800 square miles of trees are down. In Montserrat alone 60,000 people are homeless—100,000 in the Caribbean and Carolinas combined. Thirty-four people have died in the islands. Twenty-seven in South Carolina. Martial law is in effect—no one is allowed out after dark—but even Chief Greenberg is unable to stop glass from shattering. Looters now, not the storm.
Crews, paid and unpaid, work around the clock to restore services and provide food and shelter. Truckloads of water, canned goods, diapers, bread, ice, roofing shingles, nails, radios, even generators are received from donors near and far. People at phone banks coordinate help for displaced animals. Once the roads are cleared, a swarm of volunteers lights daily with their own tools and the sounds most heard throughout Charleston county come from hammers and chain saws.
Bailey and Ben help cook and ladle, saw and stack wherever they are needed. In the weeks that follow they car pool with others from Kirk’s Bluff up and down Highway 17. Ben takes leave from his practice and rents a carriage house on Tradd Street, calling up every trick he learned in medical school at short-handed clinics around the Lowcountry.
The day after Hugo hits Padgett lets himself into Bailey’s loft in Alexandria and removes all evidence of his presence. Music, books, clothes, photographs. The rum only he drinks in the freezer. His sweatshirt in the hamper. He seals the key in an envelope with no return address and mails it to Ben in Philadelphia. A typed note says, “No duplicate made, but go ahead and change the lock.”
As if he needs a key. The following week when no one has come he lets himself in on the night guard’s break and rearranges most of it exactly as it was. He’d missed an album on the turntable. Slack, Turner. He clicks off the penlight, sits in the chair that was once his and hears words about losing your senses. Knocks back a shot of añejo. Words about making your own prison. Another shot. About being too far gone to hope for what you’ve lost. Another. He doesn’t have to play the song—he is the song. There’s not enough booze in the world, not even to numb it. Desperado.
And he doesn’t need the light to find the pillow where he’s lain with his head turned to hers and tried to tell her. Now there’s nothing to tell. Instead he gathers his things again and flees. Holes up in his lair with no way to lick the self-inflicted wounds. But he cannot stay away. One night he takes the towel she’d hung on the shower bar, the thinning bar of soap, strands of hair from her brush. Another night his plunder is the white skirt she wore that first day in the arbor, then a small piece of blue beach glass, a paint brush long set aside and a strip of canvas where she’s haphazardly wiped the brush of color.
Night after night in pockets of darkness he organizes her music alphabetically, takes every book from its shelf and holds it. Each time he begins a letter that he crumbles and carries away, makes himself remember that his sons have birthdays and soccer matches. His sons who keep asking about Bailey.
As life settles from the hurricane, Retta tricksters Bailey into staying near Kirk’s Bluff with veiled hints of some health concern. Says she needs Bailey to drive her to Savannah or Beaufort or Charleston for various appointments. Mentions that she’s feeling a bit lightheaded and isn’t as young as she used to be—nothing to worry too much about but she sure does appreciate Bailey being there with her. And while she’s at it Retta eases Bailey into prenatal care, makes the first appointment herself.
“This is your baby,” Retta says. “Never mind about the rest of it. Your child and my grandbaby—that’s what I know for sure and that’s all this baby needs.”
The lease doesn’t expire on the loft until January but there’s no point. Thanksgiving Sunday Bailey and Ben drive to Alexandria and she sits cross legged listening to the Eagles as she packs boxes for Kirk’s Bluff and boxes to give away. Padgett is unmentioned but Ben smells the loathing and anguish.
Once again she gives the aquariums, this time to her landlord who’s replenished the fish feeder and checked the balance of the tricky saltwater tank. Laborers are there Tuesday morning to load the pieces for Kirk’s Bluff in the front and the pieces for storage in the back. Ben drives the U-haul to Philly to offload what Bailey doesn’t need and pack the rest of what they’re taking to Carolina.
Two days before Christmas, exactly three months after Hugo, a winter storm spreads a soft layer of snow across the Lowcountry. Real snow. Birds around the feeder: Cardinal, Northern Junco, Carolina Wren, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Tufted Titmouse, Chickadee, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Mourning Dove, Swamp Sparrow, Song Sparrow. Their cross-hatched patterns in the wet ground can be witnessed even after the snow has melted.
Some people live their entire lives without marvels.
March comes in tangles of jessamine and wisteria, azaleas and dogwood lace. Bailey’s birthday means three months before the baby’s due. She tries to shut the box on forbidden sorrow but finds there’s no such thing as forbidden sorrow. The pull to Padgett is excruciating. Until she forces herself to slow down and remember. Even then.
Desire leaves long trails in a bygone heart.
Leather Joe has designated himself watchman of the property. He’s pleaded with Cecil to let him work at the dock and made a deal with George to help farm the Simmons’ crops. He keeps guard on the road and both houses—wherever Bailey is. He sleeps on the boat and if Cecil stays offshore he sleeps in his truck.
“He won’t hurt me,” Bailey says to Leather Joe one hot afternoon. She’s made corned beef sandwiches for the crew and hands him a jug of tea.
“No ma’am, he won’t,” Leather Joe replies.
Retta knows this too, but she’s also aware that Padgett has been in the woods watching Bailey—and him. Too stealthy for the dogs and far too stealthy for Leather Joe, but the birds confirm what she’s already been told.
The eyes of Henrietta Simmons reach deep into the Lowcountry. Whether strip mall parking lot or logging road cut-through, automobiles with Maryland or Virginia plates are made known to her—the unmarked ones even more quickly. As if she needs spies to verify. He can slip around the underbrush all he wants, stand on the roadside with a gas can, but she is full aware each time he sets foot on Martin or Simmons property. Full aware that whatever happens on the bluff stays on the bluff. If she needed Cecil or Ben she’d let them know, but she can tend to this. She and High Sheriff Henry have a non-negotiable understanding. You don’t mess with Retta, son.
Late into the night on the third Friday in May Retta sits on the porch shelling butterbeans in the dark and hears a heron scold its way out of the creek. She has been waiting. As she walks to where he’s braced himself into a moon-shadowed pine she stops and he steps forward. Cicadas drum thousandfold in the thicket around them. She reaches toward him with the package, simply wrapped—the last violet handkerchief—farewell gift she gave him the day they met. She says nothing, regal, but doesn’t look on him with disgust. The note that he will later tape inside his foot locker says,
“People don’t change, son, they only become who they are.
You’ve known who you are for a long while, but she is still becoming. Let her.”
In the house Retta refrigerates the beans, readies for bed, and eases into the sheets where George lies with his arms behind his head gazing into the pressed tin ceiling.
“This little hitch in my giddy up is all I’ve got to show for my time overseas,” George says. “You can’t even see what that boy’s got to show for it.”
“Not for us to cure,” Retta says.
“Not like we could,” he tells her. “I never stop praise for the birthday that kept Ben out of that mess.”
“I’d have had two chances to remedy that,” Retta says.
“The draft?”
“Yes sir,” she says. “His left foot and his right foot.”
“Those that don’t know you might think you jest.”
“But you’ve been around long enough to know better,” she says. “And I’m glad about that. Sweet dreams for you.”
“Sweet dreams for you, proud walker.”
Mariel Asherah Martin is born 11:36 A.M. on the twenty-first of June, 1990. Eight and a half pounds, just over twenty-one inches long. She is born on May Isle, surrounded by water, despite Cecil’s months of protest. Bailey agrees for Ben to help Retta but won’t budge on her insistence to bear the child as she wishes.
Cecil is the first to call her Curly. And so she is—a curly blend of African features descended through her father’s lineage and her mother’s Anglo-Eskimo bones. Crystal blue eyes. Bailey’s baby. And Ben’s. Retta’s grandchild, just like she said. George and Cecil are suspended in disbelief—but not for long.
“How ’bout them apples,” George says as he and Cecil look at each other and grin, look at the baby and grin.
For Bailey the weeks flourish with newborn details and a hunger to paint. She spends hours at the sunroom easel, Mariel snugged into the body wrap carrier or nestled into the “Moses” basket Retta has woven with rushes from the creek bank. The work explodes with spontaneous color that comes too quickly for oils so she’s turned to watercolors—bold vibrant strokes with surges of bird shapes and fish shapes. Arcs and angles, shifts of time and water. Ben brings reams of paper and one of every paint tube the Charleston art store stocks. He brings whatever he can think to bring from every baby store he can find. He brings flowers to both houses and anything else any of them need. He’s overflowed and unbound.
All of them are absorbed with the baby, but Retta doesn’t forget. When Padgett comes, as she’s known he would, Retta waits for a time between feedings when Bailey’s busy painting in the late afternoon light, swaddles the baby in a thin blanket against the mosquitoes, tells the dogs to stay, and follows the seldom used path through the pine patch to the far fence.
“Come out,” she says, “and see for yourself.” When he does, Retta peers hard into his eyes that cannot hold hers and says flatly, “This is the last time. No more.”
She cradles the baby to her chest and stands for a moment to listen if he has words, but there are none.
“Find a way to live with yourself,” she says, then turns and walks to the house, knowing he’ll not be there when she looks to the woods once more.
As he retraces his steps Padgett sees the old hound dog move like an apparition through the lengthening shadows and knows that other eyes are on him.
He smells the danger before the form of it is manifest, then there it is. From the layered bark of a tall pine beside his pickup the limp snake hangs, lifeless. Impaled by Cecil’s hunting knife. Rattler.
It will surely strike no maidens.
He backs out of the thicket, assessing. Proceeds. A hundred yards down the dirt track the familiar truck pulls in behind him from a brambled logging trail, follows at a dead serious distance. In the rear view mirror there are two shapes. The one he knows to be Cecil. The one he knows to be Ben.
Everything solid begins slipping and he’s not certain he can catch hold again. Not sure if he should.
The prospect of settlement. Conclusion. Here and now, on this dusty strip of backroad. At their hands or his own.
He slows. Brakes. Stops. The truck behind him follows suit. He reaches under the seat but the leather he withdraws is not the holster, it’s the baseball glove Danny couldn’t find last week. The gun is there too, and the thought of his son handling it buckles him.
Enough.
Brake lights lift and the two trucks recommence in measured tandem toward the hardtop where one recedes and turns for home and the other continues down the lost highway to a place of further reckoning.
Further Reaches
JUNE 1993
Curly’s third birthday festivities don’t end with the party. That Monday three suitcases and a picnic basket are ready to roll.
Retta won’t travel farther west than New Orleans but that means Nashville’s within range. Blue Ruby’s been freshly tuned but Retta says no, she’ll chauffeur the Solid Gold Cadillac since she won’t be driving to Alaska next summer for Curly’s first cross country trip. Ben can accompany them on that excursion.
“Alrighty then,” Bailey says, “but that means we need a cooler.”
Never mind about Atlanta. They take the back way through the mountains, veer off to Cherokee and Chattanooga, and two days later wheel up to the front door of the Hermitage Hotel, the three of them with their matching straw hats and a car full of road snacks. Their room overlooks the State House, but the room can wait.
Chet Atkins is playing a surprise set at Robert’s Western World and they squeeze into a table near the door and order fried bologna sandwiches and onion rings while they listen to the sounds of honky tonk heaven. Curly and her mother twirl on the miniature dance floor and when it’s time for a break they buy red cowgirl boots and wear them next night to the Grand Ole Opry.
The Ryman is under renovation so they drive out to Gaylord Opryland and Curly is mesmerized by Marty Stuart and the lights and every detail of what happens on and off stage, where the inner workings of show biz can still be seen. She doesn’t understand why they can’t dance like they did at Robert’s, but she sings words that don’t match the songs in a voice sweet enough that nobody minds.
“Looks like we’ve got us a star in the making,” Bailey says after the show on the ride back in to Nashville. “We might as well head on to Graceland from here.”
It’s the Peabody ducks that Mariel will remember most about Memphis, but when the three of them pull into the driveway at Kirk’s Bluff the Solid Gold Cadillac is packed with enough Elvis souvenirs to make the King himself proud.
