“It’s going to be hard to go back,” I said dreamily. “I feel eighteen again, with everything still ahead of us.”
“Not off by far, since you’re only twenty.” Peter grinned, his eyes closed against the sun. Then he opened them and looked at me. In the light they looked more like clear ice than ever, ice over cold depths untouched for centuries. His face and forearms had already gone the deep red-gold that the long days on the water burnt them, and the shock of hair had whitened. I smiled at him, simply because he looked so fine sitting there. My husband. My first love.
“Is it really so hard for you up here, Maude?” he said softly.
“This beautiful place: does it really make you feel as if everything good is behind you? Because that’s not true.”
“No,” I said. “I know it’s not. I do know that. It’s just that…now I know the outline of everything ahead. I didn’t, when I was eighteen.”
“And you don’t now,” he said. “Don’t be so eager to get your life all settled. Nobody can see ahead.”
“Can’t you?” I asked him, truly surprised. I would have thought that he of all people could see the shape of all that waited ahead for him, especially in Retreat. In that place where time had long since jelled.
“Of course not.”
We were mostly silent on the drive home. It had been a wonderful runaway day, and I was content to bask in its af-terglow, knowing that when we reached the cottage Petie would be awake and probably howling and the magic of the last few hours would disperse. But we could always go again.
There would be days and days for that, years and years….
It was well after four when we turned into the driveway of Liberty, and Micah’s truck was already there. But instead of being neatly drawn up to the back door, as it always was, it was skewed across the drive with two wheels on the front lawn, blocking
our entrance, and the front door lay back against the cab as if it had been slammed there with great force and left. The front door of the cottage stood open too, and I could see dim figures behind the sheltering screens on neighboring porches, looking toward Liberty.
“Petie,” I breathed, my heart stopping the breath in my throat, and was out of the Marmon and running across the lawn before Peter had completely stopped it. I heard him slam the car door and start across the lawn behind me, calling my name, and then a high red keening that I realized later was my own blood began in my ears, and I heard nothing else. When the screen door burst open and a figure tumbled backward out of it, I did not even hear the noise of that. I stared at the man who somersaulted down the front steps of Liberty and lay in a boneless heap on the white gravel walkway with deaf ears and stupid, uncomprehending eyes. Only when Peter arrived and bent over him and said, in disgust, “Oh, Christ, Parkie!” did I realize that the man was Parker Potter and that he was very drunk and bleeding from the mouth. Sound came flooding back, and even as I raced into the cottage I heard my child shrieking, and a softer sobbing, and the cold, furious voice of my mother-in-law saying, “Get out of my house this instant. I am going to call both the doctor and the police, and at the very least you will not set foot in this house again.”
Inside, in the lilac-spawned dimness, Micah Willis stood in the middle of the living room floor, breath coming in tearing gasps, one hand cradling the other, white as death beneath the tan of his face. His eyes stared past Mother Hannah toward his niece, who sat curled in a wing chair, face buried in her hands, crying softly. There were white rings around the irises, and his mouth was a slit scraped from granite. Mother
Hannah, in her dressing gown, something I had never seen her wear outside her boudoir, had a great brass Chinese candlestick in hand, as one would hold a club, and her face was mottled with rage and slicked with cold cream. In his crib, Petie bleated on and on. I went to him and picked him up automatically, even before I fully took in the scene in the room. Behind me, Peter said, “What in hell is going on here?”
Micah said nothing, only slowly moving his eyes over to Peter, and Mother Hannah advanced a few steps and took Peter’s arm and said, in the same cold, outraged voice, “I heard this terrible commotion, and then the children crying, and I came in and found him simply beating Parker Potter to a pulp, right there on the floor! He threw him out the door; I’m sure everyone has seen and heard it. Peter, call the sheriff; I want him arrested. I will not have this in my house—”
“Hush, Mother. What’s this about, Willis?” Peter said. His voice was a carbon of his mother’s; I had never heard it before.
Micah took a deep breath and shook his head. Polly Willis caught a ragged sob, and he looked back at her and then to Peter again.
“Came to pick Polly up and found him all over her out on the sun porch,” he said. His voice was tight and flat. “Had his hands all over her, one hand over her mouth…she was backed up against the windows white as a sheet, fighting him, couldn’t breathe…. I pulled him off her and knocked the living hell out of him, and if your mother hadn’t come in I would have killed him. I still may. He’s drunk as a skunk and has been, this summer long. If you folks want to put up with him, that’s your business, but if he lays a finger on one of my own again he’s a dead man. And I mean that. That child is one month over twelve years old—”
“You came into my home and hit a guest here,” Mother Hannah shrilled suddenly. I shook my head to clear it. I had never heard her raise her voice before.
“He was trying to rape my niece,” Micah said.
“Do not use such language in this house! You are dismissed as of this instant—”
“What are you saying?” I heard my own voice screaming at my mother-in-law. “He comes in here and finds that…that oaf crawling all over his twelve-year-old niece and you stand here and tell him not to use bad language? You think Parker Potter came into your house as a guest this afternoon? Do you let your guests rape twelve-year-olds? Where were you all this time?”
She whirled on me. “You hush your mouth! You know nothing about…about the way things are done here! You never have! I might have known you’d stick up for—for trash, against one of us…. I was asleep; I had no idea anyone was here but Polly and the baby.”
I stared at her, speechless, and then turned to Peter. He stood silent, looking from me to his mother.
“
Peter!
” I cried. He shook his head.
“Mother, shut up,” he said levelly. “If you can’t be quiet, go back to your room. He did the right thing; he couldn’t stand there and let Parker…
Christ!
What a mess. Thank God he got here when he did. Micah, wait until I get him home to Braebonnie, and then we’ll talk about this. Of course you’re not fired; I hope you don’t think—”
“I don’t think anything that’s not true,” Micah Willis said, his voice colder even than Mother Hannah’s and perfectly calm. “You better get him on home. I didn’t hit him hard.
Didn’t have to. The whiskey did the rest. You can probably walk him, if you feel like getting that close to him. And don’t bother firing me. I quit.”
Peter looked at Micah, started to speak, and then turned and went out the front door. I stood silent, Petie snuffling in my arms, one hand on Polly Willis’s trembling head. I knew I should comfort her, but I could not look away from the dark, dead-eyed man in front of me. He looked back at me, also silent. I saw his chest begin to slow in its heaving and heard his breath go nearer normal. Outside, I saw Peter come past the windows, half carrying Parker.
“Polly, can you walk, child?” Micah said then. I felt her nod her head.
“Then let’s get you home.”
He came over to her, and put his arm around her, and lifted her out of the chair, and walked her to the door. He did not look back.
“Micah, wait,” I called after him.
He kept going. The screen door banged behind him.
“Micah, I want to talk to you. I want to tell you…please come back a minute. Let me help with this, Micah, this is me…”
He turned to face me, dark and hard in the sun of late afternoon. Polly sat in the truck, staring straight ahead.
“No,” he said. “Don’t you understand? You are not one of us. I want nothing from you or your family. Or any of the rest of you.”
“But we’re not like that! That’s not us, that was Parker.”
“It only takes one of you,” he said. And he got into the truck and shut the door. I sat down in the wing chair where Polly Willis had huddled in her terror, and bowed my head over the struggling form of my child, and cried. Petie cried too, and I rocked him back and forth in my arms, but I did not stop crying, and I did not lift my head.
After a time I sensed rather than saw a presence, and looked up, and Micah was there, standing silently beside my chair. His hand rested on Petie’s downy head, and the baby had stopped crying and was looking solemnly at him. He still said nothing, only stood there touching the baby and looking down at me.
“You were there when he was born,” I said, tasting salt.
“You were there for his start; you were part of it. Please.
Don’t punish us all for what Parker did. I wanted…I want Petie to know you when he’s growing up.”
He sighed.
“I was wrong,” he said. “Not to hit him. I should have done that, and probably more. But wrong to say I was quitting. I wanted to tell you that. Polly can’t stay, of course, but Christina and me, we’ll stay on, I reckon. If she’ll still have us, and if Peter says so, she will. But it isn’t for her we’ll stay.
It’s for your father-in-law. And this little tad, that’s at war with everything, like you were. And for you, I suppose.
No…you’re not one of us. But you could have been. That’s the difference. You still fight it, all this, don’t you? Lord, I smell the smoke of your battles all the time. You’re some fierce, Maude Chambliss.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling a watery smile at him. He grinned in return, unwillingly.
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Thanks, anyway…Micah.”
“You’re welcome…Maude,” he said, and left again, this time for good.
After that, things were almost as they had always been in the summers, if not quite. Our hallowed routines of morning, afternoon, and evening still held, as they would on Judgment Day, I thought, and reflected again how totally enduring was the glue that held Retreat together, and how totally the product of form and custom. But this time I was glad of it.
It gave me a path back to normalcy, and I felt we all needed that more than anything. Oh, Mother Hannah was cooler than usual to me for a couple of weeks, and more distant, but I could hardly count that an injury. And Christina was perhaps a bit quieter in her kitchen, and did not so often sing as she rolled piecrust or washed china, and Micah did not come so often with fresh wood or paint or the shears. But they did come, and neither mentioned that awful afternoon, then or ever. I had not thought they would.
After one anguished apology from Amy, to which I would not listen, hugging her fiercely, we did not speak of Parker or the scene in the cottage again. Helen Potter sent a great armful of iris from Braebonnie’s gardens, but no note came with them, and as for Parker, no one saw him for a full ten days after that afternoon. He was, Peter said grimly, off on the
Circe
for an extended tour around the yacht clubs and harbors of the Penobscot.
“I told him if he came back before a week, at least, I’d beat the shit out of him myself,” Peter said. “He promised he wouldn’t. Said he was going to hole up over at Northeast Harbor with the Fitzwilliams, or somebody else over there, and get himself sober. I don’t know about the sober, but I’m pretty sure about Northeast Harbor. I hear he’s got a lady friend staying over there with friends.”
“Oh, God,” I said in utter disgust. “There’s just no end to it, is there? I don’t see how Amy stays with him.”
“What are her options?” Peter said, and I did not reply.
There was nothing to say.
But the fact remained that without Parker Potter the colony gradually drifted its way back into the old, lazy shoals of late June.
On the first of July, he came back, bronzed, cleareyed, pounds thinner, and more subdued than I had ever seen him.
He came straight from the
Circe
to Liberty, crisp in white ducks and boat shoes, his red
hair still damp and comb-tracked. He brought with him an enormous box of chocolates, which he said he had kept packed in ice all the way from Northeast Harbor, for Mother Hannah, a music box that played “London Bridge is Falling Down” for Petie, and a case of extravagantly expensive Bor-deaux for Peter. He had nothing for me, he said, because he did not wish to insult me with presents when he knew how I must feel about him, but I did have his solemn promise that he would not abuse the rest of the colony’s friendship again.
“And I want you to know that I haven’t had a drink since that afternoon,” he said humbly. “And I don’t plan to. I’m taking Amy home the day after the Fourth. It’s time I grew up and began acting like a father and a husband.”
After he left, Peter and I looked at each other.
“Do you think he’s serious?” I said.
“I think he’s sober,” Peter said. “That’s about as far as I’m willing to go. Whether or not he’ll stick to it is anybody’s guess. I think he’d be one of the world’s dumbest shits if he acted up again so soon up here. Everybody’s pretty fed up with him.”
“Well,” said Mother Hannah, admiring her chocolates, “you can’t say he wasn’t a perfect gentleman today. He’ll straighten up, you’ll see. Blood will tell.”
“Especially,” I said under my breath, starting for the sun porch where Petie had begun to wail once more, “when it’s full enough of alcohol to cook a rarebit.”
I was not convinced by Parker’s contrition. Behind the subdued voice and clear, ingenuous eyes something else, goatish and rank, seemed to prance and toss its swollen neck.
If I had known the word then, I would have sworn I could smell the powerful odor of testosterone in the air. I remembered all too clearly Peter’s words about the visiting woman friend in Northeast Harbor.
But for the next couple of days Parker was as good as his word. I saw him walking with Amy at twilight in the gardens of Braebonnie, his arm around her, her head inclined onto his shoulder. They were laughing, and once he reached over and patted the bulge in her stomach that was his baby. I turned away from the window then, not wanting to intrude even from a distance. I felt better about Parker Potter at that moment than at any other time since I had met him.