“They name them at the brig. Each dog is given the last name of a fallen person in uniform. That’s a nice idea, don’t you think?”
“Do you know who Barrett will go to?”
“Not yet. That gets decided in his final weeks of training. There’s a long waiting list and it gets longer and longer. It’s such a strange, awful war over there in Iraq. I never knew there were so many ways a person could get wounded and still be alive.”
“Maybe the wounded vet who gets him will live by the ocean and they can go on walks and Barrett can splash a little in the waves.”
“That’s a sweet thought. Well, Barrett, that’s enough beach time for us. It’s been nice talking with you. You take care, now.”
I put on my helmet for the ride home. The seniors and early exercisers were trickling down to the beach, some unleashed dogs racing back and forth between surf and owner, then bolting off to chase and smell other dogs, activities that would never be part of Barrett’s life. And yet he would be loved and needed. He would have a fabulous dog bed in a permanent home. He would feel, in whatever manner dogs felt things, indispensable to his veteran.
My cowardly bolt from the boy disappointed me. I’d had my chance and blown it. This was the fullest he’d ever shown himself, and I hadn’t been able to endure it.
What I was sure of was that I had seen. I was also sure that I couldn’t tell anyone. What I was not sure of was whether I was different from others my age. Could another person of eleven have had the same experience? But I didn’t believe another person would have had this experience. Why not? Here I strained to reason it out. Because the whole series of episodes that had led up to this morning was inseparable from myself, from my history, from my personality. The ghost-boy was related to my life, yet he was also an entity on his own terms. Yet how could that be? How could he be both? Didn’t something have to be one thing or the other, either real or imagined? Or could it be that the two things weren’t mutually exclusive?
There was no one to ask. What I needed was someone wise and experienced, a mature personality who could take all of my information and give me back a definition, a diagnosis, a concept large enough to contain it all. There were surely such people in the world—only, so far, not in my world. Maybe later there would be a special teacher, like Mom’s esteemed night-school teacher who had been so generous with his knowledge until he died, someone I could consult and look up to, who knew things I needed to know and if he didn’t know them could show me how to look for them.
XXIV.
I had never met a person as old as Coral Upchurch. I had never met a person of any age remotely like her. Lachicotte had promised I would appreciate her, that she was quite the raconteur, but I certainly never expected to hear the story she told that first afternoon.
Lachicotte came to get me at two o’clock, leaving behind a steak-and-mushroom pie identical to the one he was taking to Coral Upchurch next door. “Preheat your oven to three-fifty and put this in for thirty minutes,” he said. “Do not use the microwave or your (yoah) crust will be soggy.” He had been to the barber and smelled and looked like an older gent who had taken extra pains with his appearance.
During the seven hours since returning from Grief Cottage, I had been pretty busy myself. After a shopping trip to the island store, I had spent some quality time with the turtle eggs and done two loads of laundry. I had been neatening the kitchen shelves when Aunt Charlotte had burst out of her off-limits studio and asked if I had time to wash her hair before Lachicotte arrived. “I wonder if we should cut it first,” she said, frowning at herself in the mirror over the sink.
“You want me to cut your hair?”
“I don’t see why not. Unlike me, you’ll have the advantage of seeing the back of my head. All it needs is an inch off.”
“Should we do it after we wash it, or before?”
“Before. Just grab a clump and take an inch off. Then grab another clump and do the same thing all the way around.”
“What if I mess up?”
“I’d make a bigger mess if I tried to do it with my left hand. Start at the back. You’ll improve by the time you get to the front.”
I felt uneasy laying hold of my aunt’s wiry mop. It was barely long enough to get a grip on. I had cut Mom’s hair and she had cut mine, but that was another world from this. Seated below me, humbly baring her neck to the scissors, Aunt Charlotte looked defenseless. I could snip-snip carelessly and brutally and make her look terrible. I could go crazy and stab her in the back. All kinds of worrisome associations ran through my mind. The last time I had grabbed a clump of someone’s hair, it had been Wheezer’s silky roan locks, when I was holding him close so I could better hit his face. Aunt Charlotte’s neck was dead white and on the stalky side, like the ghost-boy’s. What if I should suddenly blurt, “Listen, Aunt Charlotte, I know how you feel on the subject of ghosts, but I had a sort of hallucination this morning and I need to tell someone.” Even imagining such a confession made me cringe. I could hear her alarmed thoughts: Oh no, when things were working out so well. Hallucinations are not something I’m equipped to deal with. He’d be better off going somewhere else.
On the other hand, the service I was performing for my aunt was one more way I could be of use to her: cutting her hair and keeping my hallucinations to myself. And after I had washed and dried it, Aunt Charlotte raised her eyebrows at herself in the bathroom mirror and told me I had made her look “formidably sleek.”
Coral Upchurch’s cottage was in another class from Aunt Charlotte’s “renovated shack,” as she liked to call it. The Upchurch cottage was one of the old ones, not as old as Grief Cottage, but built in the mid-nineteenth century by a family with money who took it for granted that their descendants would be enjoying it long after they themselves were dust. The kitchen was on the ground floor across from the garage; the main body of the house was above, resting on the sturdy bricked footing columns that supported all the old houses, only these columns were screened by a painted white trellis. Lachicotte imparted all this to me as we walked from Aunt Charlotte’s to Mrs. Upchurch’s. Her caregiver, Roberta Dumas, sat outside in the shade of the breezeway between kitchen and garage. Her fingers flew, weaving a very large basket. When she saw us coming, she rose from her stool, brushed bits of grass from her smock, and picked her way around a barrier of buckets filled with different shades of tall grasses. She was one of those heavy people who carry their weight lightly. Her skin was truly black, with highlights of blue and purple when she moved out of the shade into the sunlight. She wore a white pantsuit uniform beneath a colorful, flowing artist’s smock.
“Mr. Hayes, you always come bearing gifts.”