Two

I have heard it said that life occurs in cycles of seven years. It may be true: I had been alone on the island for seven years when I became your Tante and a new cycle began.

Seven years alone. To my ears now it sounds like a jail sentence, a punishment. But at the time it was a relief and a reward.

For decades I had tried to live among people. To be a worker in the beehive of human activity—to live in one cell among many, to fill my cell with honey, to do my duty by my fellow creatures. Had tried to have lovers and had tried to have friends. Had tried to love, both selfishly and selflessly, and had finally come to believe that one could love only oneself, and that not very much.

I left home when I was a girl, and returned only when my father died and left his property to me, the sole survivor of our family. As I read the letter conveying the news, sadness burned through me like a flame, then died, and I felt nothing. I had no desire to revisit the past. If I went home, it would be to sell the place for as much money as it would garner, and then travel or return to New Orleans, where I had long lived.

It was 1955. No one was there to meet me when I stepped off the ferry and onto Grain Island for the first time in almost forty years and found the general store gone from the ferry landing, replaced by a wood-paneled diner, the kind of diner where you give your order standing and take a seat to wait for it. It was midafternoon when I arrived, and the place was empty except for a woman behind the pine counter.

I asked if she could call me a taxi. “Taxi?” she said, her small eyes taking in my padded shoulders and heeled shoes, the cut of my hair and the matching luggage that flanked me.

“I need to get to the old Deo place,” I said.

“How come?”

I didn’t want to dignify her rudeness with an answer, but I was tired and it seemed the only way I might make progress toward a warm bath and bed.

“Because it’s my home,” I said, not thinking what I might be revealing.

“Marguerite Deo,” the woman said, folding her arms across her considerable chest. For the first time I looked at her as you would someone you might know. The island was a small place, with a long and deep memory; it was possible she remembered me. But I did not recognize this heavy, coarse woman.

“Do you know me?” I said.

“Not really,” she said. “Just knew your folks, like everyone did. Sad about your father dying like that, all alone. He was a good man.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s why I’ve come home.”

She squared a pile of penny newspapers on the counter. “Old as he was, even after your mother died, he took care of himself. Wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t sell the place for love nor money.” Her eyes slipped over my clothes again. I could feel her judgment. “Guess he was saving it for you.”

I saw there would be no rushing this conversation, so I nodded politely and waited.

“Just lucky someone found him before the coyotes did,” she said. “Been dead there two days or more, out in the dooryard.”

This was a detail I hadn’t heard. Heat rose into my face. “I didn’t know,” I said.

“No, I suppose not,” she said, and was quiet.

I saw that she was done shaming me, and asked again about the taxi.

She snorted in amusement. “No taxis here, Marguerite Deo,” she said. “Not yet, anyway. We haven’t got that far.” I shrugged my shoulders and had turned to go when she stopped me. “But you can’t walk all that way in them shoes,” she said. “Nor with them bags. Let me get Billy to carry you over in the truck.” She said this without a touch of kindness in her voice, just the weary island pragmatism I remembered well. But I smiled, grateful anyway.

The boy she called to, the boy who looked up from where he was coiling ropes dockside, couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Yet there was already in his eyes the concentrated curiosity, the self-assurance, the righteousness that would come to mark him later, as deputy and then as sheriff. Without a word he listened to his mother and gazed at me, then picked up my bags and carried them to the truck parked nearby. I had to pull my narrow skirt above my knees to climb up and onto the seat, but he seemed not to notice or care, and continued his silence as he drove. I had questions I could have asked, he had answers he could have given, but somehow the etiquette of the moment did not allow conversation.

So I gazed out the window. When I’d left home the island had still been primitive—electricity had yet to arrive, motorcars were rare, the population was small and rural. Now cars and trucks traveled paved roads between clusters of new houses not quite organized into villages but nearly so, and electric signs buzzed above the doors of new businesses. Still, the island was poor as ever, the dwellings either neglected and ramshackle—unpainted farmhouses and sway-roofed barns—or cheap and new—house trailers and boxy one-story houses of the kind that had sprung up all across the country, to meet the needs of soldiers returning from the second war.

And then there was our house. Or rather, my father’s house.

My father’s father had been a fur trader when he was young— a savvy businessman, or so it came down to me. With the practicality of so many French traders, he took an Indian wife and settled down, claiming this big tract of lakeside land. His wife gave him twin daughters, who died as infants, and four sons; three went abroad and never returned, dying in foreign places, in foreign wars or of foreign disease. Only the oldest stayed on the island—my father, Marcel Deo.

He stayed to help my grandfather work the land, though the land wasn’t very workable. They milked cows, grew potatoes, planted apple trees, worked around the clock, and still produced barely enough for survival. Then my grandfather became ill— from my father’s descriptions, I would say it was tuberculosis— and he and my grandmother went off to take the cure. And did not return.

Now alone, my father took a wife. Anna LaRose was my mother’s maiden name, and an apt one it was: she was a dusky rose, dark-haired and dark-eyed, her face heart-shaped and fair. Yet she had been born and raised on a farm, and so, despite her beauty, my father judged her a good mate, used to hard work and practiced in the arts of agriculture and animal husbandry. In him—who by any objective standard could not be called handsome—she saw “promise.” Or so she was fond of saying. Looking back, I would say that what she saw was Papa’s hundreds upon hundreds of acres of land. Her own family was land-poor and an embarrassment to her in every regard but one: that its French ancestry was pure—that is, untainted by native blood. This was the sum total of her dowry, and a fact in which she took great pride.

In any case, her ambition put under my father the fire that made him what he became. The story goes that, a year after their wedding, my father was walking the land with a sharp shovel, planting it every few feet or so, looking for what might pass as arable soil, when in frustration he thrust the shovel so hard into an exposed ledge that a piece of rock chipped upward. Always quick of hand, he caught it. It was gray and dusty on the outside, but inside, where freshly broken, it was black as coal. He’d found a rare, thick vein of what is known as Black River Limestone—that is, black marble.

Later, when my father became important in the community, people liked to talk about how strong he must have been, to break marble with a shovel. They liked to say he got rich by giving up on the soil and going straight for the rock. As my mother told it, it was she who pointed out the value of the rock, she who harnessed my father’s anger and frustration to the yoke of ambition. He quarried the marble, found a market for it. They shipped it by barge to cities as far south as Baltimore. Polished up like glass, it made checkerboard floors, elegant architecture, posh fireplaces, even a cathedral. And it made them rich, at least by island standards.

On the foundation of the original farmhouse, they built the house I looked at now from the window of the boy’s truck. Always frugal, they built it not from the valuable marble but from the plain gray granite that my father also quarried. Still, in its time it was a mansion. Now that the oak trees flanking it were massive, the house itself seemed small. And yet it was a solid presence, much as my father himself had been: built to survive.

The truck stopped at the summer-kitchen door, beside which I could see my mother’s hollyhocks mounded green and already growing. Alcea rosea, I thought. I’d preferred the Latin name from the moment I learned it. A shovel stood there, too, propped against the wall, its blade rusting from the ground up. My father had died of heart failure, or so the lawyer’s letter told me; he had died outdoors, I now knew. Had he been digging when it happened? Digging for what? I’d never be sure. But that would have been like him, for he had always loved physical work.

“Here you go,” the boy said, as if to remind me that I had asked to come to this place and ought by rights to be getting out of his truck now. “Thank you,” I said, and opened the door.

I’d left a Louisiana already humid with summer weather, but here the season was early spring, the maple leaves still reddish and hanging and small. A chill gust of wind ruffled my hair, and I was reminded that Grain Island was once called “Île de Grain,” by which its first French inhabitants meant “Squall Island,” an intention the officials who anglicized the name had failed to reflect. It was an island known for wind, not wheat. Winter nights when I was a child, the wind rumbled in the chimney like a freight train. In summer, wind and drought sometimes brought the fields to dangerous dryness, and wildfires burned so quickly that all was lost. Most often, the wind came with a hard, driving rain or worse. I remembered a summer storm that brought hail down on my five-year-old head as my mother and I ran from the orchard to the house. I remembered a winter night when ice-laden tree limbs snapped in a wind’s angry mouth. I remembered a wagon ride home, my face buried in my hands against rain sharp as needles.

I fought a sudden urge to get back into the truck. If the boy had not already taken my bags into the house, I surely would have gone. Instead, I followed him. It was cold inside, with the kind of cold that comes of doors shut and not opened for some time. “Want me to start you a fire?” the boy said, lifting his chin toward the woodstove. I shook my head and fumbled in my bag for a dollar or two to give him. When he saw what I was doing, it was his turn to shake his head. “No need,” he said, and I felt a little ashamed.

And then he was gone, and I began my seven years alone.

What made me stay?

Some thought it greed. That I was waiting for the property to grow in value—as indeed it eventually did—before I sold it to the highest bidder. Which I did not.

Others thought it pure contrariness. That since they expected me to leave, I defied them by staying. If so, I defied myself as well, since I had expected to go, having no more faith in my ability to survive here than anyone else did.

I learned what others thought only later, for at first I had no one who could tell me. Only the looks I got when I went for supplies, when I filled my father’s old truck with gasoline, when I opened my wallet and pulled out a crisp hundred-dollar bill. I knew they were seeing me through a flawed lens, but I did not know what they saw. To tell the truth, I did not care, and made no effort to converse, to set the record straight. I cut myself off from communion, from community—telling myself I had no need of it.

No, I did not stay for the reasons they imagined, or even for reasons I could have imagined.

Why I stayed: First, I was fifty-two years old and happy to be alone. No, that’s too strong. It was more that I knew how to be alone, and since being alone was less painful than not, I preferred it. And alone I was, in that house. Day in, day out. Only myself to consider, myself to answer to, myself to entertain, myself to keep busy.

At first I had planned only to prepare the house for sale, to clean it from top to bottom; to eradicate the old smells and memories; to scrub floors, walls, and windows; to beat rugs; to open windows and replace the dry air my parents had breathed with the moist air of spring. I found clothes to wear in my father’s closet, work pants and flannel shirts. I rolled up cuffs and set to work. I went at it systematically. Overnight my hands became red, rough, callused. Light and air and the freshness of various cleaning powders came into the house; the smells of years of cooking, woodsmoke, and my father’s cigars went out, along with much of the furniture, most of which was new to me and therefore uninteresting. I kept nothing but the few lost toys I found, the furniture from my own childhood room, and a trunkful of childhood memorabilia my mother had accumulated—my confirmation dress and shoes, birth certificate, school papers.

But cleaning was not enough. I felt a strange desire to return the house to the freshness it had had in my girlhood, when it was new and every detail precise. I bought paint and brushes and a ladder and began to paint woodwork, first inside and then out. Then I stripped the paint from the kitchen cupboards, the wallpaper from the walls, the old linoleum from the floors. From books and helpful clerks I learned or recalled the skills that I needed to do what I wanted to do, from bricklaying to flower gardening.

It became important to me that I do the job as well as I could, but with my own hands. Besides the property, my father had left me rather a large sum of money, stocks and bonds, other investments. I could easily have paid workers to complete the work in jig time. But I did not. Home again, I found myself mimicking my father, hunting the mainland for bargains but also going further than need explicitly demanded, giving things a stronger foundation or a finer finish than required. Some choices—like the heavy brocade wallpaper I hung in my old bedroom—I imagined that my father would have blanched at. But otherwise, like any child, I also imagined he might have been proud.

The work kept me busy, made me forget everything else. And so a year passed, then two, three—seven. I gained scars and muscles, lost airs, I suppose; became self-sufficient in a new and deeper way, able not just to be alone but able also to shape that aloneness, to create a world of my own. I grew my own food, learned to fish summer and winter, cut my own wood. I needed no one, and no one needed me, and I felt satisfied.

And I fell in love, which was the second reason I stayed. Fell in love not only with the house, which despite its past had become my home again, but with the island itself, with the way the fields wove a green, swelling patchwork, with the way the lake turned to lead under stormy skies, with the way the wind scoured the air clean, with the light at dusk, even with the scruffy woods. Although I knew that love of a place was no substitute for the love of human beings, it was nonetheless a love of few risks. Fire, water, wind might threaten me, but the island could not be taken away, would never abandon me.

The third reason, of course, was you.

Your mother was still a girl. She looked like a woman, but she was a girl—transparent, luminous, a sapling with one root. She appeared at dusk one evening, emanating from nothing; was there when I looked up from the ground where on hands and knees I was planting beans, one by one. I knew instantly that she had come for a favor, although I did not know what shape the favor would take. I also knew that I would grant it, although certainly I had no reason to, and no one would have expected it of me. No, not the way I lived my life, a virtual hermit. Maybe that was why I granted the favor—to defy expectations? Or maybe it was only that she reminded me of myself: the clear hazel of her eyes, the way her hair hung over her bare shoulders, her slender arms, the milk-filled breasts that burdened her delicate frame.

I have always been a believer in signs. The circle around the moon that foretells snow. The pain in a joint that foretells rain. Simultaneity is never merely coincidence, serendipity never accident—cause is effect, effect cause. When I first looked up, I thought a door had opened up into the past to show me myself the way I had been, years before. When I first looked up, it was me as a girl I saw.

She showed me the baby—you—sleeping in a basket in the shade. She offered to let me hold you. I said no, thank you.

“Could you keep him,” she said, “just a few evenings, till I find another sitter?”

So that was the favor. I stood up, brushing the dirt from my hands. “What makes you think I know how to take care of a baby?”

“You’re a woman, aren’t you?”

What made her think that was proof enough? I was fifty-nine then, more than three times her age; maybe she assumed some experience, some wisdom I didn’t have. Or perhaps she thought only that if she could learn, so could I.

“Besides,” she said, “you’re so nearby.” It was then I realized where I had glimpsed her before—sitting in the sun outside a trailer down the road.

I did not want money, did not need it, so we bartered. Her husband—your father—would split and stack my winter’s wood in return for my keeping you evenings that summer, so she could wait tables in the bar at the inn, our one “resort.” Her mother-in-law—your grandmother Caroline—had got her the job; they would be working side by side. Otherwise Caroline herself might have cared for you. And your father was working as a carpenter on the mainland, coming home a day here, a day there. (A gentle, clumsy, overgrown boy, voice still cracking but beard thick and arms powerful and hands large enough to make your head seem no bigger than an apple, when he came to collect you, your basket was light in his hand but he held it steady, and you never woke.)

She went off to work, and I carried you inside.

That first evening I had one goal: that you not wake. I protected your sleep like a lioness, as if I thought in sleep the growing happened and to disrupt it was to tempt death. In short, I was afraid. Afraid of a baby waking and of what it—what you— might ask of me.

That first evening. In the basket, sleeping in a pool of light, you were so small, your life measured in weeks. At my desk working, I felt miles and decades away from you, yet at first I was distracted by your presence, by your minute breath, moist and rhythmic across the room. Like the breath of a plant.

At first I listened to you; then I grew used to the sound; then, gradually, my work caught me up again and I was mesmerized by the motion of my own hand as it moved across the page, delineating in words and drawings the details of Geranium robertianum, Herb-Robert. I had set as my task the composition of a book about the more obscure wildflowers found on my land. I wanted to celebrate that myriad populace that is all but invisible, that requires a caring, attentive eye to see its beauty. Why? No doubt because by then I too felt invisible, a woman more than half a century old and as invisible to the people around me as a knotweed flower. As homely and common and small as the Marguerite my mother named me for, the pale yellow daisy she was unaccountably fond of.

On the desk before me that night sat a single Herb-Robert plant, uprooted and lamplit against a white leaf of paper, collected from the shady ridge behind my house. Its leaves gave off an angry smell. With a precise hand I drew their fine-cut silhouettes. I had to work fast, for the flower—pink, five-petaled, pure and small—would fade quickly. When I had the shape down and what details could be drawn in black ink, I paused to let it dry; next I would take the color to it, thin washes of green, of rose madder.

It was a late-spring evening, almost summer. As I worked, the sun sank behind the ridge; the room became cooler, darker. I hugged my shoulders. Through the open windows I heard the high-pitched chorus of tree frogs at the swampy edges of the lake, the crickets, the wind in the trees as the air cooled. The birds were quiet, but spring was out there, singing away. I let it wash over me. I felt completely content but at the same time only waiting, suspended for a moment before returning to my work, my attention dispersed just for that instant, resting before it gathered itself again to the task set on the desk before me. Yet into that openness came a reminder from some self I did not yet know. My ears, which had lost themselves in the cacophony of the evening, all at once attuned themselves to a closer sound. Where was it? Where was that tiny rhythm, that small breath?

The pool of light had long since disappeared; your basket sat in shadow, cooling. How could I have forgotten? I rushed to you, heart pounding in the cage of my ribs. Believing you had stopped breathing. Believing I had already failed.

You gazed up at me—silent, but awake and alert. I picked the basket up, brought it with me, set it close to my chair. Arranged the blanket more firmly. The whole time, your dark eyes were on me, watching. Nothing moved but your mouth, that voracious mouth with a mind of its own. “He’s a hungry boy,” your mother had said proudly. If that voracious mouth insisted, I would heat the bottle in my icebox and hope that it satisfied. “Hungry?” I asked. Of course you didn’t answer. I wanted to interpret your look, to read that gaze, but I had not yet learned the language in which your eyes wrote their message.

I began to sing, the first song that came to mind. “It was just one of those things,” I sang. “Just one of those crazy flings. A trip to the moon on gossamer wings. It was just one of those things. . . .” I made it a lullaby.

In a moment your eyes closed again, and the steady moist breathing resumed. I returned to my work, but never again would it absorb me as it had; in fact, gradually I abandoned it, or rather it abandoned me, having found my commitment lacking.

“Was he good?” your mother said when she came to take you back.

“As gold,” I said, handing over the sleeping baby.

You.

Your parents loved you, but times were hard.

Of course, times have always been hard on Grain Island. It seems, in many ways, not a place intended to support life, or human life at least. Nothing but a big wind-blown boulder, poking up out of the lake like an iceberg. Nine places out of ten your shovel hits rock before its head is buried. Looking at the woods, you think the land must be good, must be rich. But notice how few truly large trees there are, how young the forest is, how young it stays. Cedar, box elder, maple: their seeds get here, take root, and grow, but before they can reach mature size, they run out of soil, sicken, and let the wind shove them over, roots and all. Only oaks can stay the course. Still, roots can break up rock, and one day centuries from now the island will have its soft deep cap of soil. For now it’s only in places, a rich clay loam where you can find it.

It was not the soil, of course, that brought the first people here, but the water; and not just for fishing, but for transport, rivers and lakes being their highways. Like my grandfather, native people traveled for commerce, trading from village to village, not for wealth but to survive—trading fur for grain, grain for beans, beans for meat. New settlements piled up like barnacles on rock wherever traders stopped to rest or hunt. When the French traders came, native villages became towns and towns became cities, and cities forgot that what lay beneath them was native land, native bones.

Grain Island was a place where many had stopped but few stayed. It never grew enough to forget anything.

Your parents stayed, as I did, because they loved the island— your father because he grew up on it, your mother because she had not. They fought to stay here, they struggled against the place to make a place for themselves on it. Just to make enough money to live, to stay where they wanted to be. That is why your mother went to work, when in her heart she would rather have been with you.

The summer fell into a kind of rhythm. I found myself watching for your arrival each evening, planning ahead for us. At first you were an infant, not even able to turn from your front to your back, but I knew a child ought to be stimulated, could be taught, no matter how young. I brought you into the garden with me. I laid your blanket on the grass and showed you flowers and colors and told you their names. I warded off insects; I dandled you and talked to you and tickled you and played games with you. I listened as you learned to make sounds; I praised you as you learned to reach, to grasp, to bring my finger to your mouth. Fall came; I discovered how you loved to watch a fire burning, and we spent our evenings by the hearth. I watched as your eyes lightened to blue, as the coarse hair you were born with fell out and was replaced by a fine, dark fuzz. My days revolved around those hours you were with me, and the days your mother stayed home and kept you to herself felt empty in contrast.

When the inn shut down for the winter, your mother’s job vanished, and she became free to care for you every night. It came up on me suddenly, that night in late October. “Well, Tante,” she said to me—it was her nickname for me, pronounced “taun-tee,” what she called the old aunts in her own family, in Canada—“Well, Tante, say good-bye to this boy. He won’t be troubling you anymore.”

I stepped outside to wave good-bye. The October wind battered the trees like surf. Even the great oaks swayed, their leaves clapping like children thrilled with a dangerous display. For some time your mother had been walking home in weather like this, had been walking you home in it, and I felt sorry that I hadn’t been paying better attention. As she put you in the buggy she’d brought and started bumping you down the driveway toward the road, I shouted after her. She stopped and looked back. “It’s turning cold,” I said. “I’ll take you in the truck.”

It was the first time I had offered such a thing. She raised a brow but nodded, and I went into the barn and brought out my father’s old truck. I rarely used it but always kept it running, at first because I thought I might need it to escape the island, and later because a truck is handy in rural life, something always needing to be hauled.

Your mother got in and I handed you up to her, then put the buggy in the back and got in myself. The truck had no dashboard lights, so I couldn’t see you, couldn’t see her, but I could hear her talking to you, low soft incomprehensible words, sweet words, loving words. Until that moment, my conscious thoughts of you had been not unfond, but I had pretended to myself that you were a bit of a nuisance, some extra trouble I had to go to. Now, as she spoke the feelings I could never speak to you and had not known I felt until that moment, my heart flooded with sadness at losing you.

She pointed me to her driveway. I knew it was there, but in the dark I did not know exactly where. In the truck’s headlights the trailer looked drab and insubstantial. “Would you like to come in?” Helen said. “Have a cup of coffee?” I struggled against, then gave in to, the impulse to say yes.

The trailer was dark. “Jack’s got a job down in Marlboro,” your mother said. “He’s coming home Fridays these days.” She turned on the overhead light in the kitchen, and for a moment the place looked worse than I had feared—shabbier, poorer. But then she turned on a lamp or two, filled a pot with water and put it on the stove, brought out a plate of homemade cookies, and it began to feel like a home.

I stayed for more than an hour, listening to her talk. Helen told me the story of how she and your father met, skating on the canal in Ottawa when they were both fourteen, she visiting from Manitoba. How he had hitchhiked to Montreal to see her whenever she was there visiting her great-aunts, who lived in the old section of town, spoke nothing but French, and loved Jack as much as she did. How, after high school graduation, they had a wedding up in Montreal. How her parents hadn’t made the trip, but the old aunts had thrown them a party, and Jack’s family had been there, his mother, Caroline, and his uncle and his sisters, everyone except Jack’s father, who had died two years before. She told how you had been born right in that trailer, on a winter night when the ferry wasn’t running; how by the time Doc Hobbs, young then and the only doctor on the island, came stomping snow into the trailer, you were halfway born but blue in the face, the cord wrapped round your neck. “He was a blue baby,” she said. “But he pinked right up.”

I didn’t say much, just listened. You were sleeping in her arms, and when she talked about you, she looked at you as if she still could not believe that you had come from her. “Isn’t he something,” she said.

Back home, nothing had changed. Yet everything had. As I lay in my bed, the silence I had once loved became oppressive. I found myself up and walking through the house. In the kitchen, I searched for something to eat or drink, although I did not want or need to eat or drink. Then I remembered the bottle I had found that first spring, hidden in a corner of the pantry behind moldy bags of rice and flour. Whose bottle had it been, I’d wondered then: Mother’s or Papa’s? Papa would have had no need to hide it, or, if he did, would have hidden it in the shed at the quarry. So—Mother’s, then. My virtuous Catholic mother, with a bottle of vodka hidden in the pantry. Vodka because they say it leaves no odor on the breath, although I have never found that to be true.

I found the vodka and poured a bit of it into a mug. It burned my tongue, pure alcohol, and then lifted the weight bearing down on me so quickly that for a moment I seemed to float above myself.

I filled the mug and took it with me to my bedroom, where it helped me sleep in my empty house.

A week passed. Your mother had invited me to come and visit “anytime.” But a certain stoicism infected me. I had become accustomed to a solitary life; the yearning I felt for you made me feel sick with loneliness. I wanted to wean myself of you, rid myself of the weight of our connection. But at odd times of day I would find myself thinking of you. An internal clock reminded me that it was time for your bottle, time to change your diaper, time to rock you to sleep in my arms. And suddenly I remembered the sensation of your fingers closing around one of mine, the calm, curious look in your eyes, the smell of your skin. Those last few days, you had sometimes got up on hands and knees, sometimes made sounds that sounded like words. And I was so proud. Now when those moments came back to me, and I found myself smiling, I tried to shunt them aside, to think of other things, jerking the steering wheel of my mind to the left or right as if a deer had stumbled into the road ahead.

And every night I drank a little. Just enough to help myself sleep.

Then the vodka was gone. I made a trip to the village, to the relocated general store. To make the vodka seem less the purpose of my trip, I bought several things, things I did not really want or need, including a small box of the zwieback cookies you gummed when you were teething. I watched the clerk’s eyes to see if she would stand in judgment of me, or wonder at this odd collection of purchases. But to her I was no different from any other customer. Tourism had changed the island; to the young clerk I was just another unfamiliar face in a sea of many.

Outside, a big-flaked snow was just beginning, the first of the season. I drove slowly over the slippery roads, but passed the turnoff for the center island road and instead drove down and along the lake road, toward your parents’ trailer. I was like a woman in love with a married man, drawn to you but at the same time wishing I were not. I thought at first I would just drive past, would not stop, but I could not fight the urge, and found myself turning the truck into the driveway again. The zwieback would be my excuse.

In the daylight and the snow, the trailer was not so bad. I could see flowered curtains in the windows, potted plants; I could see how the sun would shine in on a clear morning. “Tante! It’s good to see you,” said your mother when she opened the door to me.

You were there, sitting in a new contraption: a seat in a ring with wheels. You bounced in this thing, laughing; then, when you saw me, you pushed yourself across the floor toward me, rolling. “It’s called a walker,” Helen said. “Jack brought it home last week. Look how he took to it!”

I heard her but saw only you. You put your arms out to me and made the sounds that I had come to recognize as your way of calling me. I bent to you, took you up. “Big boy!” I said, pressing my face to your warm, sweet neck.

“He misses you,” Helen said, smiling.

My throat swelled at her words. I handed her the box of cookies. She opened them, and, still holding you, I took one and put it into your fist. You smiled at it.

We all sat down at the table. Helen leaned back, folded her arms, cocked her head and looked at me—at us. “You know,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about getting another job. A day job . . .”

I saw the query in her eyes. “I could watch him for you,” I said. My voice quavered, but only a little.

“I wouldn’t want to be a bother. I could pay you.”

“No,” I said. I had my hands under your arms; I felt your strong legs straightening, your feet pushing against my lap. “That won’t be necessary.”

And so I became your tante, for real and for good.

The next years passed so quickly for me, like frames of a movie flashing by. But I took solace in knowing how slow it must have seemed for you. You grew; how you grew! Overnight, or so it seemed, you were a boy, not a baby anymore.

I cared for you while your parents worked. When you were with them, I missed you, but always with the certainty that you would be with me again. You were four when Helen confided that she was trying to have another baby. I tried to imagine caring for two of you. It was not beyond imagining. I had changed that much.

People still talk about the winter of ’66 –’67. The winter of the big fish, they call it. Not because the fish were large, but because there were so many of them. Who knows what causes these occasional felicities of nature, or even if, in nature’s terms, they are felicities? The lake froze over early, froze deep and quick and never thawed till spring; the fish must have been frantic for food. The fishing shanties went up as quick as the ice froze, and quick grew into a ragtag village sprawled across the ice. Like short, faded strokes of paint on a white canvas. We could see it from the ridge above the quarries, you and I. We could look down and see it.

By then you were four, and I was sixty-three, and it had been more than a decade since I came back to Grain Island. By then the life I had lived in New Orleans seemed like an intermission, a long vacation, a dream. This house, this island, this life was reality, and I was happy in it.

But that winter a melancholy stole into me. Maybe it was the weather. As everyone knows, water warms an island, but that winter, the snug of warmth went early and stayed gone too long. The wind got caught in the trees, growled and wrestled among the branches. Dead branches brittled and snapped off from where they met the trunk, clean as if they had been cut. The days were endlessly sunny, but whatever heat the day accumulated, the night sucked away into an unlimited sky, clear and starry, no clouds to stop it.

The only happy note was that it did not snow. Oh, a thin crust persisted, replenished now and then by a lazy flurry, but the snows of normal years—hip-deep and then some—never came. The cold kept it away, kept moisture out of the air. Instead, hoarfrost gathered an inch deep on the insides of the windows, a filigree of white plumes preventing us from looking out. It was like living in a tomb of white crystals.

Each night after you had gone, I drank, even though it only took me deeper and deeper into the sadness that infected me like a virus. I could not understand why the past had come back to me just then, or why it would not leave, but I dwelled in a private hell, memories swirling around me like a play watched through a scrim.

This is how I felt that night, the night before the Ides of March, the year of the big fish. And so I drank more than I ever had before, drank until I had blotted out all sensibility, until I entered that dark timeless space I both cherished and feared.

I woke cold, head on the table. The coals almost out, the woodbox empty. Roused myself to stoke the fire. Went outside, into the dark.

My steps echoed like a giant’s in the silence. I felt swollen, leaden. It was still winter, still so cold that my breath froze into snowflakes that rose strangely up from my nostrils and fell again to melt on my eyelids. For a moment I considered lying down right there, right then, and giving myself up to the cold, taking that last step into oblivion. I looked up at the stars pricking the sky, and thought how pleasant it would be, to die under the constellations. But then I remembered that you would be coming in the morning, that you and your mother would find me, and I carried wood into the house, an idiotic two sticks at a time, one in each hand, taking each pair all the way into the house, leaving the doors wide open behind me and letting the cold bully its way inside. The wood cart stood idle. I was oblivious to everything but my objective: to fill the woodbox.

At last it was full. I chucked a few sticks onto the barely glowing coals, watching until they caught fire. Then I shut the doors and went into the front room and curled up on the settee, pulling the quilt around me.

My own coughing woke me at dawn. The scrim of the night before had become real; smoke was everywhere. My body conscious but mind still sleeping, I opened the doors, front and back, let the cold sweep inside again. I checked the stove. Shut tight. The smoke was not coming from the fire. I stepped out into the frozen air and craned my neck up to the chimney. Nothing there. Sometimes birds build nests in chimneys, but no bird builds a nest in midwinter. No bird can descend into a hot chimney.

I went back into the house. The smoke was curling about my things, caressing the wing-back chair, pausing over the open book on the table, sending a sidelong glance at the garden plans laid out there. Everything seemed gray and distant. I picked up a sheaf of drawing paper and waved it at the smoke, coaxed and cajoled it out the front door and out the back. Slowly the air cleared and the colors returned. I stood for a moment, sniffing the air, surveying the damage, asking myself what the smoke had wanted with me. It must have had a powerful desire to stay inside, when it loved nothing more than to rise straight up to the moon.

By the time you came, only a wisp or two of smoke remained, wandering about the house in a forlorn and desultory fashion, as if it had lost all ambition and didn’t know what to do with itself. It would be some time before I would recognize this for the sign it was, would be able to read the message the smoke brought to me, the way it foretold that day’s events.

According to your grandmother Caroline, who told me this story so that I could tell you, your father came of a good family with bad luck.

It is hard, in this scientific age, to believe in luck, to believe in curses or blessings given without reason. A good family’s good fortune can be explained by hard work, honesty, and perseverance; a bad family’s bad fortune by sloth and weak character. But only luck seems to explain how the slothful succeed, how the hardworking fail, why life seems like a lottery in which some people are born winners, others losers. A good family with bad luck; a bad family with good luck.

What could it be but bad luck, that a man like James Wright Sr., your grandfather, a football star in high school and as strong and healthy a man as anyone could imagine—hardworking, honest, and willing—would die of a heart attack at thirty-five? Leaving your grandmother with three children to care for and no insurance policy, his only legacy to your father—the oldest, at sixteen—the rickety fish shanty he’d built with his own two hands.

It seemed at first like good luck that your grandfather had an older, unmarried brother who could take care of the abandoned family. Homer had always worked the family farm, a going concern with fifty milking cows and a stand of sugar maples and the sugar house to go with it. After the war, he’d also begun what many people saw as a strange business: raising ornamental fowl. He’d done it more out of curiosity and a love of birds than ambition; still, before he knew it, he was, in relative terms, successful. People from as far away as Japan would come to buy from him— birds, chicks, eggs; his swans and ducks swam in ponds all over the globe, his chickens and geese populated lawns in England and France. In summer, the bird yard was like something out of a dream, peacocks dragging their tails, shiny black roosters, ducks with bejeweled eyes—all manner of rare and surprising creatures, the ground littered with their feathers and the air full of their calls.

If you went to visit, it was best to stay out of the house. The bird yard, the barn, the sugar shack were as neat as a pin, well cared for. It was the inside of the house that smelled like a barn. The kitchen seemed, at first, to have a dirt floor, but in fact it was linoleum that had not been swept or mopped for years; dirty dishes crowded the countertops and sink; the living room was mounded with old mail, newspapers, tin cans, milk cartons, jars—things Homer could not bear to throw away for fear of wastefulness—clean and dirty laundry mixing together freely (when he needed a clean shirt, a rare event, he sniffed until he found one). Having given up on the kitchen, Homer ate standing up and out of cans, washing the fork after each meal and keeping it in his breast pocket like a pen till the next.

It was not that he was an uncaring man. He was simply a man who cared less for himself than for other things: the land, the barns, the animals, the trees, his family—and Caroline, his brother’s wife.

Homer loved Caroline. She knew this. He did not know she knew this, but she did. And it became clear, after his brother died, that he wanted to marry her. He was so different from his brother, though, so different from the man she had married, that it was hard for her to consider the notion of him as a second husband.

Jimmy had been popular and handsome; he’s who gave you your dark hair and light eyes. He and Caroline were teenage sweethearts, married straight out of high school. They’d never had much, but it hadn’t seemed to matter. Caroline was happy with him because he was a happy man, an open man, the kind of man who cried when his babies were born and walked the floor with them when they cried, the kind of man who let you know his feelings straight out. Honest as the day was long, and free with his affections.

Homer had always been a quiet one. Not just quieter than his brother: quiet. It was rare for him to say more than a few words in sequence to anyone. I met him once myself, and can testify to this, but I cannot tell you whether it was because he was shy or because he had nothing to say. He was a hunter and fisherman who liked to go off by himself. Caroline said he could rarely tolerate a room that contained more than two other people. When he visited her house—to bring the weekly eggs and milk, say— he stood awkward in the kitchen while the daughter who had opened the door fetched her mother. Yet when Caroline came in, something happened to his face. You couldn’t call it a smile, she said, but it had a smile’s effect. And so she would invite him to sit down for a cup of coffee and he, awkward as he so obviously felt, would sit with her and listen and nod and pay attention as if he were distilling every word she had to say, boiling it down from sap to precious syrup to store away in memory.

And so, despite his silence on the matter, Caroline never doubted his love for her, never doubted that it was a pure, generous love, a rare love. And she knew he would have made a decent father: steady, reliable, capable. And she knew that when enough time had passed, he would ask her to marry him. She thought long and hard about what she would do—for her family, for herself. She didn’t love him, would never love him as she had Jimmy. And, in many ways, her life was already ideal—all needs met, except those most intimate. So she waited, hoping that the answer would come to her, that she could avoid hurting him, that time would somehow take care of things.

The winter of the big fish, it had been seven years since your grandfather’s death. Only the girls, eight and twelve, were left with Caroline; your father had married when he was eighteen and moved out and into the trailer down the road from me; you had been born. I had been caring for you for four years.

Something happened to islanders that winter. When the ice-boxes were full but the fish kept coming, people saw a chance to make money, and when the smell of money got in the air, people couldn’t help but inhale it. Some got together and began to truck their fish north to Montreal and inland to the landlocked cities, to sell to fish markets and restaurants. A kind of fever developed, something like gold fever. Fish fever. Those who were turning a profit showed it by spending the money in visible and frivolous ways: a new television set, for instance, or a new CB for the truck. Fancy winter boots, a new parka. Alcohol. Meat. It was not enough money to bother saving; not enough to put toward a new roof for the barn or a new truck. Just enough to make everyone feel greedy.

Soon the ice was cluttered with more than shanties. Feuds broke out when some people accused others of moving their shanties during the night; there were theories that shanties ought to be twenty feet apart, or thirty, or forty, but not everyone thought that, and there was only so much room where the fishing was best. Not wanting to share the bounty, men broke up with longtime fishing partners and brought their wives out instead. Fishing became a livelihood, a job—not a bonus, but something you counted on, something you had to do. Out before dawn and gone till after dark, parents neglected their children, who went wild with the freedom, grew surly when reined in. Sometimes a wife would make the long trip to take the fish to market while her husband stayed to fish alone. When profits dropped, mistrust developed. Was this all you could get? Where did you spend our money? Who’d you spend it with? You knew which women couldn’t answer by the port-wine bruises on their cheeks.

As tempers grew short, so did the season; as the season grew short, so did tempers. Now, men got up long before dawn to listen to the radio. Would today be the day the great thaw began? Tomorrow? Next week? And slowly, slowly, fish numbers diminished. Exhausted, angry, disappointed with themselves—the money gone, always, as soon as it appeared—the men kept pushing themselves, their wives, even their children. Lines had to be kept in the water at all times. Health didn’t matter, nor school, nor love; nothing mattered but fish. Even in the bitterest cold.

It hit your mother and father, too. Work was scarcer than usual that winter, housing starts being down; fishing seemed easier than scrabbling for jobs. And so Helen and Jack fished, and left you with me long hours every day while they went out on the ice in your grandfather’s shanty. “One more day,” your mother would say when she got you in the evening. “Jack says one more day.” She loved your father, Jack loved her; they were in this together. “We want to buy the trailer and the land it’s on. We want to build something together,” Helen told me, her face with a new, adult determination on it. “We want to have another baby.” Another night your father came to pick you up, his eyes bloodshot but blazing blue in a sunburned, smiling face. He held up a bucket of gutted fish. “Nest egg for the new baby, Tante!” he said, triumphant. And I knew then that their efforts had succeeded.

Your grandmother told me the fever was on Homer too, but for him it was different, she said. She got the feeling that, this winter more than any other, being on the ice was Homer’s way to get off to himself, to get away from people, including her. He set his red shanty far from either shore, where it sat by itself like a bishop’s miter, and he faced it north, up the middle of the lake, which must have made the wind bitter but kept the other shanties out of sight. And he went out as soon as chores were done and didn’t come back till sundown. But Homer didn’t care about the fish, or the money; in fact, most of what he caught he gave to Helen and Jack to sell, and the rest he gave to Caroline, stopping by almost every other night with a pailful, his face also reddened by the wind and sun and cold, and his own eyes like lights burning.

You know the ice can do strange things to a man, especially a man alone. Many a solitary man has walked off the ice and into his solitary home—his rented cabin, a trailer on a bit of owned land, the old farmhouse his daddy left him—and taken out the gun he inevitably has, and put it to his head. My father called it “ice sorrow.” Like lightning, it only needs to strike once.

That winter, Homer was a more solitary man than ever before. Caroline worried about him, out there day after day, speaking hardly a word to anyone, and no one to speak a word to. She asked Jack and Helen to keep an eye on him, which they were glad to do, and did, putting their shack as close to his as he’d allow. (“Don’t crowd me,” he told them when they wanted to come closer.) Still, Caroline was glad as the season drew to a close. State law said that by March fifteenth, the shanties had to come off the ice, for nights at least—too many shanties already littered the lake bottom from unexpected thaws. Although the more ambitious could drag them back on for the day if the ice held, March fifteenth was at least a kind of harbinger, a warning that spring would come and the ice would go. Caroline thought that once the brighter season of birds hatching and sap running began, Homer would come back from whatever dark country he had been visiting, the dark country she’d glimpsed in him now and then that winter when he’d come to visit her.

By the fourteenth of March, most everyone felt as Caroline did. Glad for winter to be ending. Ready for spring. Twilight time that day, Caroline was outside hanging wet clothes on the line, knowing they would freeze by morning, but also knowing that in freezing they would dry. Still, for the first time since November, the air was warm enough that it did not pinch your nostrils when you took a breath. Things looked softer, too, moister, as if some small, unmeasurable thawing had already begun. The sunset was generous, good cheer in its colors.

When the truck pulled into the driveway, Caroline knew it was Homer by the careful way he took the turn, by the unhurried way he shut off the engine and opened the door. He carried a box containing eggs and milk and the pail of fresh perch. “Hello, Homer,” she said, nodding, smiling at him, and he looked at her with his gray-blue eyes. “A bit warmer today, eh?” He nodded, still carrying the box. “Why don’t you set those inside? I’ll be in shortly.” He put the box under one arm as he opened the door and let himself into the kitchen.

I can picture it so clearly, the gray-haired, gray-eyed man, his large hands, his stooped shoulders, his whole being poured into that moment of providing sustenance to the woman he loved. Standing there in her dim kitchen, waiting for her. His ears tuned to her movements. When at last she comes inside, he sees her the way any man sees the object of his love, with eyes softened by longing. She takes off her coat. She’s still in her dirty waitress’s uniform, still smells of fried food and bacon grease, but when she thanks him, touches his hand, reaches up to kiss his cheek, then, at last, after seven years of longing—or more, for who knows how long he has felt this way—he is overcome. And for the first time he reaches his hand out to her, touches her shoulder, turns her toward him. It is a tentative moment, a dangerous moment; everything rests on this moment. But she kisses him—or does she let him kiss her? It is an awkward kiss, he knows it, an unpracticed kiss. But a kiss that changes everything. No turning back. So he asks her, his face in her hair so that he cannot see hers. At last he asks her, as if asking for release. “Marry me, Caroline,” he says.

“Oh, Homer,” she says, pulling away, turning her back, attending to the food he’s brought her. “Don’t let’s be silly.”

Why? Why did she treat his offer so lightly, dismissing it without hesitation? The proposal had not surprised her. Why not just ask for time to think? Why?

This is what she asked herself later, what she could not explain. She had humiliated the man who loved her. And whom she loved—as a brother, at least, and as a friend—although she let him leave believing she did not.

I never really knew your father except for what I saw of him and what your mother told me, but your mother and I became something like friends. Maybe because she was an outsider too, or maybe because she felt grateful to me, or maybe—who knows— because she thought by ingratiating herself to me she might benefit you financially. Whatever the reason, Helen treated me with respect and honesty. Often, when she came to drop you off or pick you up, I offered her coffee or tea, and we sat together and watched you, just watched you, sharing the wordless pleasure that only two mothers can share.

That winter, I’d taught you to play cards with me. And, using the cards, I also began to teach you to count, to add, to subtract— even to read, writing the words out next to the numbers and pictures. We told no one; it was our secret. When we were ready, we decided to show your mother first. That morning Helen kept her coat on while she listened to you read from the child-sized book I’d given you, shaking her head in amazement. “I thought he was too little to learn,” she said.

You went off to play. Helen turned to me with that sly look she sometimes got when she was amused. “Tante, you know, at first people said I was crazy to let you keep him.”

I dreaded the answer, but asked the question anyway. “What else did they say?”

She hesitated, gazing at the floor for a moment, and I knew she didn’t want to tell me. Finally, she spoke. “They said you didn’t belong here,” she said. “That you broke your parents’ hearts. That you were stuck-up and spoiled.” She paused again. “That you let your father die alone.”

“So why did you leave the boy with me, then?” This question was out before I thought about the danger of asking it.

“Because they were wrong,” she said, and I could see in her smile that she believed it.

Most days my house fairly glowed with heat, even early in the morning, because when the fire died down in the night, the chill nudged me awake to stoke it, and though made of stone and very old, the house was well insulated. I had seen to that in my renovations, and over the years I had found the gaps and holes and filled them. When mice and sometimes birds came and pulled bits of insulation out for their own nests, I merely filled it in again. “You’ve got to let creatures do what they will,” I told you. “They’ve got as much right as we do.”

The morning of March the fifteenth, the morning after I let the fire go out and the house grow cold, the morning the smoke filled my rooms, your mother let you in the front door and was gone before I could speak to her. The air still smelled like something burning, and the gray haze still wandered about the front room. I called to you from the kitchen, and you came, your cheeks red from the cold and eyes bright as always. “Wet log,” I said, explaining the smoke as I spooned coffee into the boiling pot. “Wet log, and I left the stove door open a minute, and I think someone was sitting up on the chimney top, keeping warm or cleaning his feathers.” A bit of smoke moved around the kitchen; some of it found the lamp on the table and went up through the shade and out its top. I watched you watch it. “Smoke loves a chimney,” I said. “It does?” you said. I nodded. “Smoke is the soul of the tree,” I said. “Fire sets it free, and a chimney helps it find its way heavenward.” You nodded, understanding.

When I had the coffee ready—mine hot and black, yours halved with cream and sweetened with sugar—I put it on a little tray with a plate of buttered toast and brought it out to the table in the front room. The smoke was almost gone, and the sun shone through the frosted windows, a pale but diffuse light. “What kind of tea is this?” you asked as you tasted yours. “Not tea but coffee,” I said. It was the first time I had made for you the chicory coffee I loved so much in my New Orleans days; my supply was shipped to me, and I considered it too precious to consume daily. “A very special kind of coffee, from far away.” “It’s delicious,” you said, the big word rolling around in your mouth like a marble. I showed you the treat of dunking buttered toast in the sweet coffee—my father’s treat—and you drank the coffee all up and asked for more.

The table was spread with our garden plans. We were working on a means to defeat the raccoons that had raided my corn the summer before. Coons like corn, so we would give them corn—some. I showed you the map I had finished the previous evening. “Here, by the woods, I’ll plant six rows of corn. All the way around.” I pointed. “And then here, I’ll plant the squash. All the way around.” My finger made a circle inside the corn. “Coons hate squash—it has those tangled, prickly stems, and they’re conservative about where they put their feet. So here, in the center, the good corn. The coons’ll eat the outside corn and leave the middle alone because of the squash.” I sat back in my chair, sipping. “What do you think?” You nodded approval like a wise old man.

After lunch that day, it was warm enough for a walk in the woods. We put on our wool jackets and went out with our hands bare for the first time in months, yours small in mine. I sniffed the air. “Smell that?” I said.

“Smell what, Tante?”

We stopped walking and raised our noses up, sniffed together. “That,” I said. “A little sharp, a little wet. Not a smell, really. More like a mood.” You nodded. “The ice is melting,” I said. “Mark my words, it’ll be out before the week is over.” We walked on, following the road up to the quarry, and then the path up to the ridge, where we could look down at the lake where your parents were ice fishing.

When we reached the top that afternoon, what we saw confused us. Smoke rising from a red shanty; a truck, nose down in open water and sinking; people clustered and scurrying; the huge arc of water spraying. We didn’t see what had happened, what calamity had caused all this. By the time we climbed the rocks to the view, it had already happened and the fire truck was there, and the ambulance was on its way, though they would not find the bodies, then or ever. But we knew it was Homer’s red shanty smoking, half sunk in the open wound in the ice, the blue of water as shocking against the white ice as blood on a sheet. And we knew it was your parents’ truck, too, nose down in the wound. We could not tell what had happened, but we recognized the shanty, we recognized the truck. We stood there, the two of us, silent, looking, knowing but not comprehending. How could this have happened? What, exactly, had happened?

I don’t think anyone ever knew. Your grandmother Caroline thought she knew, thought it was her fault. Thought Homer had done it to himself, set his rejected soul on fire. But it could have been an accident. Homer’d had a gas heater in the shanty. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep. Maybe he’d fallen down, knocked it over. People had watched your parents see the fire, had seen them rush to their truck, drive out to him, jump out of the truck and slide and fumble toward the burning shanty. People say Jack got the shanty door open and was inside when the ice gave way. The ice would have been weakest there—it was where the current ran. “Homer knew that. Homer knew the ice, and he would have known it was weak,” Caroline told me. Helen’s scream echoed across the lake. No one could tell if she rushed in after Jack, or if the ice took her down with the truck. It happened too fast. And then it was over, and quiet, and for a moment of sheer disbelief no one could move. Then everyone was moving. Somebody got on the CB, and the fire truck came, and the ambulance was on its way. And just then you and I topped the view, and looked down, hand in hand.

I knew they would come for you.

You had recognized your parents’ truck, so there was no pretending, and I’m not sure I would have pretended in any case. So when you asked me, “What happened, Tante?” I told you what I knew for a fact and nothing more: that it looked like an accident had happened. What I knew in my heart I kept to myself. What was in your heart, I’m not sure even you knew. You were only four.

We walked home. We went inside and had a cup of cocoa. Neither of us spoke much. We were waiting. For me it was one of those moments when everything around you seems at odds with what you know. The day shining, sun streaming through the front windows, the hoarfrost almost gone from the glass. Spring on its way.

And yet disaster was everywhere. For you, I’m sure, it felt unreal—a bad dream. For me, a dream recurring.

We went out and sat on the front stoop. By now the intimation of melting had become a reality of faint gurglings. Shady places would be frozen for months yet, but wherever the sun touched, the world was melting. I found a piece of yarn in my pocket, tied the two ends, and taught you to play cat’s cradle. Your small hands found the movements difficult, but you concentrated intensely, the distraction welcome. To teach you a new move, I shifted the strings from my hands to yours and demonstrated. Over and over we began again, our hands diving under the yarn and through, fingers plucking and pulling and weaving.

And so we were occupied when the car pulled into the driveway. “Afternoon, Miss Deo,” the deputy said, standing by the steps, hat in hands.

I nodded.

“There’s been an accident,” he began. I could see how hard it was for him. He was still a boy himself, really—only twenty-five. I stopped him.

“We saw,” I said.

This information lifted his head and opened his mouth. “You saw,” he repeated, shifting his eyes to you.

I nodded again.

“Well,” he said. And explained that you were wanted at Homer’s house and that he had come to fetch you.

We put you in the car and shut the door. He faced me. “They’re all gone,” he said. “All three.”

“I thought so.”

He turned to go. I put my hand on his arm. He stopped and looked at me.

“The boy,” I said.

He put his hand over my hand. “We’ll take care of him,” he said.

I watched the car pull out and move slowly down the road. You were so small in the seat that I couldn’t even see you to wave good-bye. And then you were gone.

I went inside. I sat down in a chair by the window. I folded my hands in my lap. As the light dimmed, I let the day and what it meant seep into me. Your parents were gone. I could see their young faces before me, but knew I never would again. Not Helen’s tender gaze, nor Jack’s strong one. Nor would you. My heart contracted at the thought of your loss—poor motherless, fatherless boy!

Most likely, you would go live with your grandmother now. It was only the other side of the island—certainly I could see you, could visit if I wanted. But I would no longer be your tante. For me, it was as if you had died, and with you, my own reason for living. I berated myself for not loving you more, for not loving our time more. For ever being impatient with you, or angry. For wasting any of it.

Four years had slipped through my hands like sand, like water. Gone. All we ever had was time, and that time had ended.

I drank myself into another stupor that night. Normally alcohol inhibits my dreams, or at least blackens them from memory. But I remember that night’s dream well. I did not dream, as you might think, of the horror of the accident, the fire, the ice giving way, the chill of the water enveloping your parents’ shoulders. I dreamed instead that I heard a sound like crying, like the mewling of an infant. I followed the sound, searching that house of the unconscious where rooms are too numerous to count and no hallway leads to the same place twice. Finally I found the source: a black kitten so small it fit into the palm of my hand. By now its cries were such torture to my heart and ears, I thought I might have to drown the thing to end our suffering. But instead I took it in my hand, stroked its head, put the tip of my pinky into its small, pink-tongued, voracious mouth and let it suck, as I had done for you when you were small and needed a nipple. The crying stopped; the kitten relaxed in my hand and shut its eyes in contentment. In contentment too, I then slept till morning, when I woke and set about getting you back.

Caroline Wright’s house had begun its existence as a horse stable. No one knew how old it was, but on the walls of the original room you could still see where the stalls had been. Over the years additions had sprouted in a hodgepodge, so that you had to go through one bedroom to reach another. A house making room for change, growing as a family grew.

I had seen the house in summer, and I knew Caroline had a talent for flowers. The land there was almost all rock, but that didn’t stop her: she simply planted rock gardens. The one that fronted the road flashed such color from May till October that you hardly noticed the house.

In winter, though, nothing kept you from seeing the aluminum siding, faded yellow; the patched window screens; the plastic stapled to keep the wind from penetrating the exposed foundation; the doorless shed, a drift of dirty snow in its entry. All this I noticed for the first time when I came to see her that day.

I half expected not to find her home. But a girl opened the door for me, nodded when I asked, and let me come in, abandoning me for the television set. I glanced at her and her sister, their eyes fixed on the grainy picture. I didn’t see you, though, and that worried me.

An archway led into the kitchen, which was lit up, and there I found Caroline, sitting at the table, smoking. When she saw who I was, for a moment she looked angry. But then our eyes met and her mouth crumpled; tears began to slide down her cheeks, and I saw she had just been keeping her sorrow at bay.

I bent and put my arms around her. It was not something I would normally do. She was a stranger. But she was also Jack’s mother, Helen’s mother-in-law, your grandmother, and I felt her sorrow as deeply as I felt my own. We stayed like that for a while, and then, slowly, we began to talk.

At some point, we opened a bottle of whiskey. Caroline was less accustomed to drinking than I was, I saw that quickly, so I kept a careful eye on her glass. But the liquor enabled her to open her heart to me as a young woman would to an older friend. And I listened to her as a friend would. We were not friends, but it seemed she had no one else to talk to, and I needed to listen.

We talked into the middle of the afternoon. I found myself unable to ask the question I had come to ask, unable to turn the conversation from her grief, her problems and guilt, to mine. For a long time she did not mention you, as if it were almost too much to bear, the thought of your loss on top of hers. A parent-less child, an orphan. It was only when the topic shifted from the past to the future that you came up.

“I’ll get Homer’s farm,” she said. “I know he intended that.” At this point her eyes were dry, her tone resigned. “James Jack will come live with us,” she said.

“Where is he?” I asked, as matter-of-factly as I could.

“With the deputy and his wife,” she said. “I thought he’d be in the way—I need to clean the house, get ready for the crowd. . . . ” Her eyes shifted toward the front room, where the television set talked to itself. “The girls can be helpful,” she said. “They’re old enough. But he’s only four.”

The tears began again. I would have cried for you too, and for myself, but I had not cried in many years and tears did not come now. I can watch him for you, I wanted to say. Let me watch him for you, let me bring him up for you. But I didn’t say what I knew would be fruitless. Caroline was not about to give up another member of her dwindling clan.

She kept the aluminum storm door open as I walked out to the truck. “Thank you for coming,” she called. I waved her off, promised to come back the next day, got in the truck and drove, not knowing what more I could do.

That afternoon, the deputy appeared at my door. “James Jack wants his truck,” he said, avoiding my eyes. I knew immediately which truck he meant—the big red one I’d bought you for Christmas that year, the toy you loved to play with more than any other. I left the deputy standing in the cold and went to the summer kitchen, where we kept your toys when you were not here. I put the truck and a few other things in a box. I did it mechanically. I took the box to the door. “Tell James the rest will be here when he comes back,” I said, shoving it out.

The deputy paused, as if considering whether to speak again, then said, “I guess it’s okay to tell you—my wife and I are thinking about keeping him,” he said. “Adopting him.” He shuffled his feet. A knife twisted in my heart. “Alma can’t have children,” he said, lowering his voice.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“Well, thanks for these,” he said, lifting the box.

Tell James I love him, an inner voice said. Tell him that for me, will you?

I did not speak. I shut the door.

I did not sleep that night, did not dream. I lay awake in the darkness of my bed and listened to the wind roaring through the trees, whistling like a hooligan determined to keep me awake and ill at ease. But I needed no help for that.

Things were stacked against me. The deputy and his wife were young, respectable, churchgoing, and infertile. I was old, disliked, mistrusted, and a lapsed Catholic, something not easily forgiven in these parts. The only thing I had was money, but money would mean nothing to the court, much less the town. If the deputy and his wife got to Caroline first, it was hopeless.

I decided to pray. It had been a long time since I had been to church, and longer still since I’d believed in God. But I did believe in that thing in the universe, something—not a being or a force, but a thing—that for lack of a better name could only be called luck. It was luck, I decided, that had brought your mother to me in the first place; luck that had brought me back here so that she could find me. Now I prayed for luck to bring you back to me again.

As soon as the sun rose, so did I. A restless energy motivated me. I was not sure what to do with it, but I had to do something, so, in the half-light of early morning, I made my bed, filled my wood bin and swept my house, scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom clean, and otherwise imposed order on my small world. Then I loaded the winter’s accumulation of trash bags into the truck and got in to take them to the dump.

The day was clear and springlike again. A line of vehicles waited for the gates to open. Inside, we parked and began to unload, like ants carrying giant crumbs to the hill. In summer the dump was a chaos of nauseating odors; in winter, smells frozen, it was almost pleasant. This morning it had not yet begun to thaw. People gossiped as they passed one another or walked together to and fro. Usually I would have ignored them, but that day I thought I heard Homer’s name, and tuned my ears to listen. The smattering of words I put together made me more curious, and I stopped a man on his way back to his car. “What’s this about Homer Wright?” I asked.

“Died intestate,” he said. He was a stubby, dark-bearded man who looked surprised to be asked a question by me.

“Intestate?” I said.

He nodded. “Owing back taxes, too,” he said, and moved on.

I rushed to empty my truck and drove straight to Caroline’s house. An unfamiliar car sat in her driveway; when I knocked, the door was opened by an older woman I assumed to be one of those plump busybodies who show up after a tragedy—in this case, a financial one. She eyed me warily. “I heard the news,” I said.

“Poor Caroline,” she said.

“How is she?” I said.

“Holding up.”

She blocked the doorway with her sizable body.

“May I see her?”

“Not now.”

“Tell her Marguerite was here, will you?”

A nod, and the door shut.

The nervous energy I’d awakened with shifted to a strange sort of optimism. I felt sorry for Caroline, who had after all trusted me, and who had suffered more than most people could stand—but somehow this seemed the answer to my midnight prayer. If that sounds selfish, what can I say? I was fighting for my life then, and for yours too.

It was Monday before I could do anything. I spent the waiting time drafting a document, researching what I could by telephoning a lawyer who had not heard from me since I’d left New Orleans. First thing Monday morning, I was sitting in the truck outside the town clerk’s office, waiting to do one last bit of research. In the books there I found the figures I needed, and I was ready.

This time when I arrived at Caroline’s, she was alone. The girls were staying with friends, she told me; she herself, dressed in black, was waiting to be taken to the memorial, which would begin that afternoon at one. For a moment, seeing her ashen face and the resigned slump of her shoulders, I hesitated. But I’d become a predator by then, and in her weakness I saw opportunity.

“What will you do now?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Stay here,” she said. “What can I do? They’re going to take the farm for taxes. This place is all I have.” She sighed. “Oh, Homer,” she said.

I took a breath and began. “I’ll pay the back taxes for you, Caroline,” I said.

She looked up sharply. “You?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“So that you can inherit the farm, sell it, and go away. Start a new life.”

She looked at me with a gratitude that turned, in an instant, to doubt and suspicion. “And what do you want?” she said, her eyes clear and steady.

I told her.

In a matter of fifteen minutes it was decided. She was surprisingly sharp-minded, surprisingly good at bargaining. I would not only pay the taxes, but buy the farm myself. I was happy to do so. I knew it would sell eventually and I would recoup the cost, or most of it—but even had that not been the case, I would have been willing. It was only money, and my father’s money at that. I would have given it all for you.

I don’t want you to think that she gave you up without pain or consideration. Perhaps if I had been kinder, if I had approached her at another moment, at a later time—if I had waited until she had time to recover from the devastation laid to her life—she would have refused. I admit I preyed on her at the moment when her future seemed bleakest. But she knew you would have a good life with me; she knew I loved you; she knew you loved me. Helen had told her all that, and Jack too. If they had thought to make a will, I felt certain they would have named me guardian. Besides, Caroline had her own daughters to worry about. She wanted to leave the island, to go away, to start over while she was still young enough. To find love again if she could. So, though she cried, she did what she thought was the right thing.

A day later, the notary public witnessed our signatures, and it was all but done.

I stood at a distance from the church, watching you arrive in the deputy’s car. His wife held your hand and led you to Caroline, who knelt and put her arms around you. How handsome you were, how grown-up in the suit they found for you, your dark hair wet-combed back. But I worried that you weren’t warm enough. I worried that no one would console you if you cried.

You didn’t.

You stood quite still and held your grandmother’s hand, but you did not cry. Three dead, but no casket to be buried. They would search for the bodies—not now, but when the ice went out. They would never find them.

I worried that you would not understand, and that you would.

It was a damp-cold day, and you wore nothing but a cheap suit, a white shirt, a black bow tie, thin leather shoes. I watched you go into the church, and then waited for you to come back out.

My sweet little bird.

You never cried.