'You
wanna see something?' Mrs. Chantry shouted from the upstairs window.
'Sure,'
I shouted back.
She
disappeared for a moment, and then suddenly the porch and verandah were ablaze
with multi-colored Christmas lights. Red and yellow and blue and violet, every
color imaginable.
Mrs. Chantry
appeared once again at the window.
'Hell
of a thing, Mister Ford,' she shouted.
I
held out my arms as if to embrace the moment. 'Hell of a thing, Mrs. Chantry,'
I hollered back.
'You
spent enough time standing there lookin' like an eejut?'
'Sure
have,' I replied.
'I'll
come down,' she said, and then her head disappeared once more, the window
closed with a thud, sending another small shower of snow down from the sill,
and I walked towards the steps again to wait for her.
Whatever
she called it - Christmas punch, hot toddy - it was strong.
Beneath
the taste of almond and nutmeg, something slightly bitter like new season
blueberries, there was the promise of a warm slow death from sourmash or rye. I
couldn't decipher it, but I drank it, and when I finished the first glass I
asked for more, and it was forthcoming.
She
drank too, Eve Chantry, and she didn't even ask why I'd come, merely took my
coat and hung it on a stand near the fire to dry, told me to kick off my boots
in the front hall and come inside.
Maybe
she was short for company too.
'Benny
did the lights,' she told me. 'Benny Amundsen from the soda shop.'
I
nodded. 'They're cool,' I said.
'Cool,'
she said, and smiled.
'So
where's your buddy?' she asked me.
'Nathan?'
She
nodded.
'Chicago,'
I said.
'Seeing
relatives?' she asked.
'Yes,
his ma's sister.'
Eve
Chantry nodded. 'Who died?'
I
frowned, looked at her askance. 'What makes you think someone died?'
'Reverend
Verney has never left at Christmas. Christmas is serious preaching time. Many
souls to save at Christmas. There's a war to fight this time of year, between
the birth of the baby Jesus and the shopping mall.'
I
smiled. Mrs. Chantry was almost as cynical as I.
'Nathan's
ma's sister's kids, two of them, and a third missing somewhere and the Army
can't find him.'
'Vietnam,'
Eve Chantry stated matter-of-factly.
'Vietnam,'
I said.
She
shook her head slowly and turned towards the fire burning in the grate.
There
was silence for some minutes.
'They
sent for you yet?' she asked eventually.
'No.'
She
looked at me then. 'They will you know, and for Nathan Verney, and most of the
other kids.'
I
nodded. 'I know.'
'You
willing to go?'
'Willing?
No, I'm not willing,' I said. 'Who would be willing to go?'
She
smiled knowingly. 'My husband was willing to go,' she said. 'He knew what he
was doing, he knew it clear as daybreak. He knew that he'd die as well, but he
still went.'
'He
knew he'd die?' I asked.
Eve
Chantry smiled. There was something beautiful and nostalgic in her face. 'Yes,'
she said, her voice soft and measured. 'He knew he was going to die because he
should have died in about 1938, and he didn't, and from that point forward he
felt he was using up someone else's time.'
I
frowned. 'I don't understand.'
Mrs.
Chantry settled back in her chair. 'I was born around here,' she said. 'I was
born in 1898, a different world back then, a different world entirely. I grew
up in Charleston, folks had money, no shortage of money, and I was educated at
a real school with real books and a chalkboard and everything. My father wasn't
a religious man, but he attended church and he treated people well, treated
them with respect, and he never considered I should have anything but the
best.'
Eve
Chantry reached for the bottle of Christmas punch and refilled her own glass.
She handed it to me and I did the same.
'I
met the man who would become my husband in 1922. I was twenty-four years old,
he was eighteen. He wasn't even a man, he was a grown-up child, but I knew, I
really
knew,
that this was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my
life with. And he knew it too. His name was Jack Chantry. His father was a
fisherman out near Myrtle Beach, and he couldn't read or write or spell his own
name. They were poor, poor beyond anything I could imagine, but Jack
Chantry
possessed a life and a spirit and a will to live like no-one I'd ever known.'
She
paused; she was looking at pictures in her mind, snapshots of Jack and his
father, images that conveyed the elan, the vitality of which she spoke, and
though I could not see them I could feel the emotion in her voice. She spoke of
something powerful, and I was acutely aware that that sense of magic and power
was exactly what was missing from my own life. This was something I could
perhaps have possessed with Caroline had I been strong enough to hold her.
Perhaps
she knew this, perhaps it was her reason for talking.
'We
met in secret for more than a year,' she went on. 'We'd meet down by Lake
Marion here, and other places, and I took it on myself to teach him to read, to
write his name, to learn the alphabet, and never in my life have I ever met
anyone who possessed such hunger for understanding. He learned faster than I
thought possible, and soon he was writing letters to me, even poetry.'
Mrs.
Chantry smiled. 'It's ironic, but had I not taught him to read and write,
perhaps it would never have turned out the way it did.'
I
leaned forward. There was something about the way she spoke that made me so
much
want
to know more of what happened.
'Jack
wrote me a letter telling me he loved me, even suggested we elope together, and
it was that letter that my father found. He was a fair man, an honest man, but
he was rigid in his belief that there were classes of people, that people
should marry within their class. But that was not so much the issue. The real reason
he was so mad was because he felt I had betrayed him. That I had been carrying
on with this man behind his back, that I had lied for a year or more about
where I had been, who I had been with. That was something he felt he could
neither understand nor forgive.'
Eve
Chantry smiled.
'My
father gave me thirty dollars, told me to pack all I wanted in one case, and to
leave. If I was so committed to this man, this ignorant fisherman's son, then I
could take my lies and my black-hearted deceit and find my own way in the
world. I was twenty-five, Jack Chantry was a little more than nineteen, and we
went to South Carolina where no-one knew us, and we started our lives
together.'
I
shook my head. 'Hell,' I said. 'That's tough,' I said.
'It
was a different world, Daniel, a world we'll never see again. The main streets
were dirt roads, people lived all their lives and died right there in the same
town where they were born, and we just rolled into some place and made out we
were a newly-married couple. I became Eve Chantry, he became older than me, he
started work on a farm and I took in washing, and we found ourselves a little
room to rent. It was good, I can't tell you how good it was, and we were happy,
Daniel, possibly happier than anyone else in the world.'
She
was smiling, a slow-burn glow of color in her cheeks, a light in her eyes that
had not been present when she'd started speaking, and I watched with a degree
of wonder.
'It
was the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a time of change and
invention and motor cars and airplanes, and everything was moving so fast and
everyone was in such awe of how the world was growing, that they never really
had a problem with two young folk moving into town and making themselves
useful. People trusted others a whole lot more then. You started out believing
someone was telling the truth, and they had to work to convince you otherwise.
Now it's the other way round. Now you assume that someone's bullshitting you,
and then they have to prove to you they ain't.'
She
laughed softly, quietly.
'So
we just settled down, settled right in there, and I never wrote to my mother or
father, and as far as I know they never made any attempts to find me. Jack's
father was different, he didn't give a damn who his son married as long as he
was happy, and though he was sorry Jack wouldn't work with him on the boat he
also recognized true love.'
Eve
smiled, sipped from her glass.
'We'd
go down to Myrtle Beach every once in a while and see Jack's folks, and that
was fine as far as they were concerned.'
'Did
you have children?' I asked.
She
nodded. 'I'm getting to that, Daniel Ford. You want some more punch?'
I
shook my head.
'You
wanna smoke a cigar?'
I
frowned.
'I
like to smoke a cigar every once in a while,' she said, and got up from her
chair. She went over to the mantel, and from a mother-of-pearl inlaid box that
sat there by the clock she took two slim dark cigars.
Using
a taper from a jar at the other end of the mantel she lit both cigars and
handed one to me. They smelled rich, spicy almost, and when I touched that
thing to my mouth it was almost as if the haunt of its taste was absorbed
through my lips.
I had
smoked cigarettes before, many times. Smoking cigarettes was all a part of
growing up. A cigar was a new experience, along with Eve Chantry's Christmas
punch, and I took it slowly, carefully, and there was a magic in the smell and
the taste, even the way the smoke drifted in curlicues and arabesques around
our heads, that added to the mysterious ambience of that time.
There
was something about the day that was special.
I
knew I would remember this day for a long time, perhaps for the rest of my
life. My one disappointment was that Nathan was not there. Nathan
should
have been there, but he was out in Chicago dealing with the brutality of war
and the dissolution of a family.
Mrs.
Chantry sat down again.
'Our
daughter was born in 1926. I was all of twenty-eight years old, Jack was
twenty-two, but for reasons of social acceptance we always gave our ages the
other way round. We weren't even married, never did get married, but everyone
knew us as Mr. and Mrs. Chantry, and never had reason to suspect otherwise. And
our daughter was an angel, bright and beautiful and the happiest child I've
ever known. Her name was Jennifer, and Jack Chantry, fisherman's son, turned
out to be the best father any child might ever wish for.'
Eve
Chantry paused a little while and smoked her cigar. The smoke obscured her face,
and for a moment she seemed to disappear completely. I glanced to my left, and
there through the window I could see the multi-colored ghosts of lights from
the verandah, reflected up against the glass from the snow beneath.
'We
stayed there near Wilmington, just over the state line, for ten years, and then
when my father died we decided to return to Charleston. My mother was of a
similar mind to Jack's father, a lot of time had passed, and she understood
that sometimes when you love someone it doesn't matter what people think or
say. You know what you know, you know what's in your heart, and sometimes you
just have to follow it.'
Eve
paused again, her eyes softened with memories, and I watched her intently.
'Summer
of 1938 we came down here. I got to know my mother all over again. Jack bought
a small boat and he took it out across Lake Marion and he taught Jennifer to
fish. She loved to be with her father, her world revolved around him, and if
there was something he could do then she wanted to do it too. We stayed up here
the whole summer in a house we rented, and every day they'd go out across the
Lake and work on her fishing. Two weeks and she never caught a thing. Jack was
patience itself, but Jennifer was frustrated. It didn't matter whether she
could fish or not, she knew that really, but it was something that made her
father happy so she wanted to master it. So she went out on her own, took that
little boat out across the water one morning before either myself or Jack was
awake…'