***
The rain beating down on Aunt Charlotte’s tin roof shut out the sound of the ocean. At supper a few evenings back, she had announced that she was within days of completing the McMansion painting. I told her I had made a start with the boxes. “Then this rain has been good for something,” she said. In the bathroom I always rinsed the sink after using it and wiped it dry with my towel. Mom had taught me this when she had to take a second job cleaning houses. It was the little touches, she said, that pleased people. Dry sinks and soap dishes, shiny taps. A single hair in the tub could ruin the whole effect. And I always made sure the seat was back down on the toilet. So far, I had erred only once, and Aunt Charlotte had let it go with a dry comment about sharing a bathroom with a man.
I brought in a second box only to shrink back as soon as I had taken a sneak preview. This box contained a different set of sorrows. Underneath some childhood books (Goodnight Moon, Mrs. Ticklefeather, Winnie the Pooh, and The House at Pooh Corner) were my mother’s winter coat, her sweatpants and tops she wore at home, her shoes, nightgowns, underwear, elastic stockings (which held in her varicose veins from standing at work), her laminated badge (“Section Manager”) that she had proudly worn at Forster’s furniture factory, her makeup and moisturizers, a box, half empty, of super-sized Tampax. Had the social worker-in-training made a phone call to his or her superior? “Listen, should I go ahead and throw some of the really personal items out, or what? I mean, Goodwill would take the winter coat, though it’s sort of shabby, but the other stuff?” And the superior must have repeated the lawsuit spiel.
The whole of that box, even the coat (let Goodwill find its own shabby coats!) went into the black trash bag. After paging nostalgically through Goodnight Moon and feeling sad, I tossed the books. Then remorse overcame me and I rescued the Pooh books. Mom had been so proud of herself for finding them at a library sale. (“They’re like new, except a child crayoned over a few pages in Pooh Corner.”) Best to pace myself with these boxes. What if they were going to get incrementally worse, each one harder to take than the one before?
It was a relief to return to the books by the privileged ladies with their cruel ignorance about anything outside their own history. When I was out on the porch in the hammock, the ocean noises drowned out the softer patter of the rain. I watched the Turtle Patrol, clad in slickers and rain hats, make regular visits to our clutch. And from Aunt Charlotte’s porch there was always the chance of spotting the little white truck bouncing north or south.
I went back to the “Fierce Storms” chapter in Chronicles of a Legendary Island, remembering how I had aced my research paper at the mountain school where I was Baby Wonk and Pudge who had skipped a grade. Our teacher, who liked me so much she often looked at me while she was addressing the class (which didn’t lessen my freak reputation), said that instead of rushing to start writing your paper you should read your material through several times and treat it like clues in a mystery. Because each time you read through something, the more things you would realize that you had missed the time before. What clues like in a mystery could I extract from the single paragraph that dealt with Hurricane Hazel at the end of the “Fierce Storms” chapter?
In the early parts of that chapter, which had recounted lost lives in the bad hurricanes of 1822 and 1893, all the drowned family members and their drowned servants were named. Even visitors and strangers had been diligently listed by name, even if only part of a name. (“Also drowned on that fearful night, a century and a half ago, were Mr. Warren Botsford’s nephew, Botsford Channing; Captain Wise, a visiting architect; a Dr. Venn from Charlotte, N.C.; a Miss Satterwhite and a Mr. de Vere…”)
Yet the only missing people after Hurricane Hazel hit on October 15, 1954, were not named. There weren’t yet telephones on the island in 1954, but due to an “efficient neighbor warning system,” most of the islanders made hurried evacuations to safe places on the mainland.
The only people who could not be accounted for were the fourteen-year-old boy and his parents, the out-of-state family staying in the Barbour cottage after the summer season. It was an unfortunate chain of circumstances, the out-of-state family most likely being unfamiliar with hurricanes, and underestimating the force of this one. One evacuating islander, Mr. Art Honeywell, reported having been stopped in his truck on Seashore Road by the desperate parents searching on foot for their son, but the boy had not been seen by anyone. It was later surmised that he had set off in another direction in search of the parents. As their bodies were never found, it is assumed that all three were washed out to sea. The house itself, the oldest on the island, withstood the tempest, all except the south porch, which had been mysteriously destroyed by fire during the hurricane. Afterward the cottage was sold and the new owners allowed it to remain empty and fall into ruin. Because of its sad fate, islanders took to calling it “Grief Cottage.”
***
What exactly was the “efficient neighbor warning system”? Did it mean only your neighbors got warned? What about strangers? Especially out-of-state strangers unfamiliar with hurricanes, who underestimated their force? Why hadn’t Mr. Art Honeywell in his truck said to the parents, “Climb in and we’ll search for your son together?” Where did the “age fourteen” come from? Had the parents told Mr. Honeywell, “We are out looking for our son, who is fourteen …”? Why hadn’t the boy been in school? And what kind of family stays in a beach cottage in October, “after the season”? Most likely a family who needed to take advantage of reduced rates. If Mom and I had ever gone to the beach we would have had to wait for after the season.
I was almost sorry this wasn’t a school assignment. I knew exactly how I would go about making the most of the material from the privileged lady’s storm chapter. Baby Wonk would have aced that assignment and earned more contempt.
I would have called my paper “Who Is My Neighbor?” after the story in the Bible where that “gotcha” lawyer tried to pin Jesus down by asking, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus had trounced him with the story of the Good Samaritan. (“Luke ten, twenty-nine!” the little kids at the foster home would have shouted wildly.)