Oren
When we started planning this trip, I told Paul, ‘My mother’s family has been on that land since the end of the Civil War. They’re beholden to it.’
‘Beholden?’ he said. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’m telling you, I need to blow them off that place,’ I said, ‘or they won’t go.’
‘Big bad wolf? You could just sneak up and kill them,’ he said.
‘It’s not that easy.’ I said. ‘They would still be there. Something of them would.’
‘Now you’re talking about ghosts?’ He was impatient with stupidity.
‘Something bigger and realer,’ I said. ‘Something in me. If I don’t go to war against them and blast them out of that house, they’ll never be gone. Not for me.’
‘There will be damage,’ he said. ‘Your sister and brother. Are you willing to live with it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Depends on what they’re like.’
‘You’d better figure that out fast.’
‘I need to see what they’re made of,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll know.’
‘Just don’t start believing in ghosts,’ he said.
Face-to-face, I said to Lexi, ‘I guess this doesn’t look like the kind of place I would expect Kay Jakobson to live.’
‘I guess not,’ Lexi said. She was nineteen but looked younger. Stunted. Did she look like me? Not even at a squint. She looked more like the pictures Kay painted of herself. What did they look like? ARTFORUM said, Kay Jakobson’s self-portraits, despite their pure, unforgiving lines, show the same desire that makes people scratch the scabs off their skin and reveal intimate secrets to strangers. Lexi had the palest skin, but with her dress hiked halfway up one thigh and those blue eyes, she seemed to have something craving that needed to get out.
The house hadn’t changed since I’d been gone. It was two stories with just one door because my mother’s great-great-great-grandpa thought a backdoor was an extravagance or wanted no one sneaking up behind him or both. When the roof leaked, they painted it with tar from the kiln. They nailed a new layer of shingles over the tar and smeared them with another coat to be sure. In the heat, the tar dripped from the eaves, and brown tears ran down the walls.
‘Nice windows,’ I said to Lexi.
Lexi put a hand on her bare thigh. ‘Mom cleans them with Windex,’ she said. ‘When tar drips on them, she uses a razor blade.’
I wondered what Walter and my mother had done to her. I said, ‘A lot of tar.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Why?’ I asked. How much did she belong to this house? How much did she belong to my mother and her husband? Where would she stand when the fighting started?
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Walter makes it. My mom’s husband. Pine tar is the best. Sand pine and slash pine and longleaf and loblolly. That makes the tar that everyone on the island wants when they want tar. Once a man drove from Charlotte to buy some. It’s that good. Termites don’t like it.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘I could talk for hours about tar,’ she said.
I couldn’t tell if she was playing with me. ‘It sounds like it,’ I said.
‘Everyone in my family can,’ she said. ‘Except my little brother. He doesn’t talk. At all. Did you know you can mix tar into your shampoo if you’ve got dandruff?’
‘I don’t have dandruff,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘You can also disinfect a cut.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I could teach you a thing or two,’ she said.
I smiled.
She said, ‘You should come up on the porch. Get out of the rain.’
Instead, the screen door opened and Walter came out. He wore blue jeans and held a .22 rifle. Eighteen years had aged him thirty. He’d last seen me when I was a kid and he thought Tilson had killed me, but wouldn’t he know me?
‘Bad idea to climb over a gate,’ Lexi said. ‘And when someone lives on an island with only one old bridge, it’s a bad idea even to cross that bridge.’
Walter asked, ‘Who are you?’
If I went up the porch steps and took his gun, I could shoot him and then hunt down my mother. I said, ‘An admirer.’
Walter screwed his face. ‘An admirer of what?’
‘I want to buy one of Kay Jakobson’s paintings,’ I said. ‘I’m a collector – starting out.’
Walter said, ‘You’ve got money, I suppose?’
‘Some,’ I said. ‘Enough, I hope. For an artist of her kind.’
‘What kind is that?’ he said.
I stared down his stare. He showed no recognition, no worry. ‘She’s not for everyone,’ I said.
‘But she’s for you?’
‘I like self-portraits,’ I said.
Then he eyed me as if he might know me. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘you’ve come into our yard uninvited. I don’t like you. You can go back out the way you came in. You want a painting, buy it from the gallery.’
Lexi said, ‘Walter is a Puritan of sorts. If you can believe that a man who likes nothing more than to screw my mom can be a Puritan. If you can believe that every morning a Puritan would sneak four eggs from our chickens and eat them plain. No salt. No pepper. And leave half a scrambled egg hanging in his beard. But Walter knows what he knows and he holds to it like God has told him it’s so.’
Walter said, ‘You’ve got a filthy mouth, girl.’
She looked down at her Bible.
I asked her, ‘Will you introduce me to your mother?’
She pointed at the shed across the yard. ‘That’s her studio.’
‘I’m obliged,’ I said.
Walter said, ‘The boy in the suit is “obliged”?’ He pointed his .22 at the sky and fired it. The sound stung the air.
If I tried to take the gun, he would shoot me. I said, ‘What’s your problem?’
He said, ‘I don’t like strangers coming through the gate unasked.’
I said, ‘There was no bell, no way to let you know I was here.’
Walter laughed. ‘You want a doorbell? Where the hell do you think you are?’
‘How do visitors let you know they’ve come?’ I asked.
‘They don’t,’ he said. ‘That’s why we have the gate. That’s why there’s a lock on the gate. That’s why there’s a hill between the gate and the house. That’s why we live on an island south of nowhere. We don’t want visitors.’
I laughed at that.
But Walter chambered another bullet, metal sliding against metal. ‘You’ll be leaving,’ he said.
I thought, If he kills me now … but I said, ‘I’ve come to see your wife.’
‘What makes you think she wants to see you?’ he asked.
Lexi put the Bible on the floor under the swing and jumped off the porch. ‘I’ll take you,’ she said.
Walter fired into the sky again, but Lexi and I crossed the yard, kicking mud and wet weeds. The stench of tar hung in the air. Tilson stood by the chicken fence and watched us, fear in his eyes, as if I was a ghost of myself. Next door, Lane Charles turned from his field and watched, grinning idiotically.
‘What’s your name?’ Lexi asked me.
It was too soon. I said, ‘Call me whatever you want.’
Lexi stopped and looked at me. Did she know me? She said, ‘I’ll call you Edgar Allan.’