“Did she and Mr. Harshaw ever think of having children? They were married for a long time, weren’t they?”
“She ran away with him at sixteen and they split up when she was twenty-six. So that’s ten years. He was a lot older than her and had been married before. He didn’t have kids in that marriage either, so maybe he couldn’t. The reason he and Mom decided to separate was because he was sick of doing what he called ‘fancy side work.’ He wanted to go back to logs and own a sawmill. The sad thing is he did get his sawmill and was crushed by a log falling off one of his trucks. But Mom loved Forster’s. When they made her supervisor of finish work there wasn’t much of a raise, but she said she felt appreciated. And even when we had to leave, Mr. Forster wrote her a recommendation to a custom furniture maker he knew in the mountains and that’s why we went there. But Mom only worked at that place for a short time because he went out of business and she had to start looking for other jobs.”
“Did you ever tell me why you and your mother had to leave Forster’s?”
“It was my fault. I beat up a boy so bad he stopped breathing and almost lost an eye. He was my best friend. He was also Mr. Forster’s grandson. His family had settled the town and pretty much ran everything. The name of the town itself was Forsterville.”
“It doesn’t sound like you, Marcus. Did he do something?”
“He said something really horrible and they say I went crazy.”
“My word,” Aunt Charlotte said, pressing her left hand flat against her heart.
“After that I had to go to a psychiatrist for some mandatory sessions and when those were over we packed up our things and drove to the mountains to start a new life.”
“Well, Marcus, if you ever want to tell me more about it, I’m here. And if you don’t want to, that’s fine, too.” She repositioned her left leg in its cast on the stool in front of her. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to know who your father was before your mother died. But from the little you’ve told me, he sounds like someone who would have loved you and been proud of you. I did know who my father was, for all the good it did me. It turned out he was the devil incarnate.”
“How would a person know that their father is the devil incarnate?”
“You wouldn’t at the time. It would be later, when you were safe enough to look back. At the time all you would feel at first would be a misgiving, that something wasn’t as it should be. Later on, it may grow into a full-blown sense of wrong. But it’s a wrong you’re part of. You can’t do anything about it because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.”
The only specific past history she had offered in our porch talks were some caustic anecdotes about her no-good husbands and more information about her former jobs. She and my mom would have had so much to talk about. Aunt Charlotte had stocked shelves at a Home Depot (“I loved riding around on the forklift cart”), mixed drinks in a bar, seated people at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, been secretary to a funeral home director (“I also did the makeup on the stiffs, undercover, of course”) and a “Jill of all trades”—house cleaning, yard work, caretaking, and pet sitting—her third husband serving as the titular and mostly useless “Jack” of their short-lived enterprise. (“We lived from hand to mouth, most of the time.”)
“Where did you get the money to buy this house, if it isn’t rude to ask?”
“I won a lottery. No, I did, really. Actually I won two lotteries. Every week I bought one of those cheap scratch-off tickets. Without fail, every week, tongue in cheek. The first time I won thirty-five dollars. The second time I won ten thousand. Just enough to get out of West Virginia and buy a beach shack in South Carolina.”
“What about your husband? Didn’t he want his share?”
“Luckily, we were divorced by then, or he would have wanted it all. At the time of my lottery windfall I was bartending at night and I was still in a state of ecstasy to be free at last. You have no idea.”
“So that was the beginning of your solitary life?”
“Yes, I guess it was. You’re good company, Marcus. You listen and put things together.”
XX.
While being good company for my aunt, I was also thinking about the ghost-boy who waited for me at Grief Cottage. Did he feel slighted that I had cut down my daily visits to the single morning ones? Did he wonder what he had done wrong, or was I pushing my human tendencies onto him? In my afternoon talks with Aunt Charlotte, I felt disloyal about neglecting him. Or maybe I should start thinking of him as the ghost-man. After all, Lachicotte’s niece’s little granddaughter had mistaken me for a man. (“Who is that man spying on us?”)
But stop, I would warn myself: What sane person would be equating one’s loyalty to a great-aunt with one’s loyalty to a ghost? What, after all, was the figure I had seen once in a dazzle of afternoon light? How could I consider it a relationship when the person I thought I saw had been dead fifty years? The truth was, I felt love for him the way someone feels love for another living person.
I went back and tried to track the whole thing from the beginning, as you would trace on a map a route taken. When had it started, our strange relationship? Well, with Aunt Charlotte’s story about Grief Cottage—the history of the place itself—and, following that, the story about what that derelict cottage meant to her, what it stood for, when she walked up there in her first days of freedom on the island. It had reminded her of the debris in her past, but then also it had started her painting.
Having heard her say it had a haunting quality and a powerful mood, my first view of the actual thing had been a letdown: what an eyesore, the sooner it’s leveled the better. And then I had crawled under the wire fence and eaten my lunch on the porch and fallen asleep and dreamed that the sunburnt man was standing in the broken doorway behind me, watching over me while I slept. And then I woke up and was scared to turn around and face the doorway. I sensed something watching me from behind and I felt its motives were not as friendly or protective as the sunburnt man’s had been. But then, what were they? And I had caved and fled.