“I ride my bike a lot. And I’ve made friends with this man on the Turtle Patrol, Mr. Bolton. This year there’s a clutch of loggerhead eggs buried below my aunt’s boardwalk steps.”
“Marcus has taken quite an interest in our local history,” Lachicotte said. “Particularly the old Barbour cottage up at the north end. We went to the library to look up that poor family that was lost during Hazel, but he couldn’t find a single mention of them in the microfiche.”
“Well, I expect I can tell you more about them than anyone else still living,” said Coral Upchurch. “I don’t mean the Barbours, who still reside in Columbia as far as I know. And I don’t know much about the unfortunate parents, except that the father’s cousin sued the Barbours. But Billy knew the son. They were the same age. The boy was kind of a dark customer. Archie, my husband, made us leave the first weekend in October because he thought the boy was corrupting Billy. We usually stayed for the entire month of October. It was my favorite time. I would be by myself during the week, then Archie and Billy would drive down from Columbia on weekends. Archie had his law practice and of course Billy had school during the week. I was quite put out, having to pack up and leave—like we were being evicted or something!—and lose my favorite month just because of that boy.”
“Do you remember his name?” I asked.
“It was something simple, like Billy, only of course it wasn’t Billy. The family name wasn’t one you hear every day, but it was an Anglo-Saxon name. When I remember I will write it down for you. These days, Marcus, I have to put in requests to my brain, as one does at the library, and then a little worker takes my slip and disappears into the stacks. It may take him a while, but he always comes back with the goods.”
“How was he corrupting your son? If it’s not too rude to ask.”
“Billy came back with smoke and liquor on his breath. Archie said it wasn’t just any smoke, it was marijuana. You have to understand. Back in that era marijuana was considered the ‘stepping stone to heroin.’ It was way before the time when doctors started prescribing it to sick people. In the early 1950s the states were enacting severe penalties for narcotic offenses. And the boy was … peculiar … in other ways. He never went into the ocean. Billy said he never even took off his clothes or shoes. He just walked up and down the length of the island, fully dressed—that’s how Billy met him, as he was walking past our house, scowling. That would appeal to Billy’s open nature. Billy loved to reach out to scowlers. There’d been some hardship or setback with that family, as I recall, something to do with their house, and there was a problem with the boy as well. The father was employed by a coal company in Kentucky, some low-level management job, not a miner. Some friends of the Barbours knew of their misfortunes and felt sorry for them, and since the Barbours weren’t using it in October they offered their beach cottage. I don’t know if it was charity, or whether there was payment involved. But the Barbours certainly paid for it later. After the family got washed away in the storm—Dace! That was their name, Dace. My little worker just came back from the stacks! The boy’s name was Johnny Dace. Now where was I?”
“After the family got washed away,” I said.
“Oh, yes, even though no bodies were found, a cousin on the father’s side sued the Barbours. The cousin said the father was all she had left, and she only wanted her due. Money changed hands—the cousin even asked that the family’s old car and their personal belongings be returned to her!—and soon after that the Barbours sold the cottage. In Archie’s opinion, the proper defendant in the cousin’s lawsuit would have been Hurricane Hazel. It wasn’t the cottage’s fault. It’s too bad, really, that the Daces didn’t stay inside it during the storm. That house was built to last. They’d probably be here today. The only part that didn’t last was the south porch they say the boy burned down with his cigarettes.”
I felt like Barrett the dog on his tight leash, straining toward the beguiling waves. There my beguiler sat, approximately the same distance from me as the waves had been from Barrett this morning, and I wanted to plunge in and immerse myself in whatever she could remember about the boy. My list of questions piled up, but I was on my “company” leash: Lachicotte and I were paying a social call on an ancient neighbor and we each had to take turns telling our news. We had to drink our iced tea and eat the unusual cookies, so thin they demanded you eat more of them. Aunt Charlotte’s injuries were described and assessed, her recovery time speculated upon and wished for. Lachicotte brought Coral Upchurch up to date with island news, which at least touched upon the latest developments pertaining to the fate of Grief Cottage.
“The people who bought it from the Barbours should have either restored it or torn it down,” said Coral Upchurch. “But they ended up selling to someone else and then Mr. Coggins the realtor, the late father not the son, snapped it up and couldn’t sell it again. But I never understood why it was allowed to fall into ruin like that. Most townships would have forced the issue, was Archie’s opinion. Every year until Archie died he’d walk up to see the cottage and come back appalled. He said it was a disgrace to the island and made us all look bad. It was Archie who frightened old Mr. Coggins and the commissioners into putting up the wire fence and those warning signs. Otherwise, he told them, you are just shopping for injuries and lawsuits. And even then it took twenty years to force the issue. By that time it had become a genuine ruin. Everyone had long since been calling it Grief Cottage when that fence finally went up.”
“It was up when my aunt moved here.” A perfectly natural next question would be for me to ask if Billy had visited Johnny Dace at the cottage. “It was Grief Cottage that started my aunt’s painting career.”
“Yes, she told me that. Please, Marcus, take that last Benne Wafer. It won’t make you an old maid. That’s an expression left over from my generation, but it only applies to girls. It’s a sesame wafer. The slaves brought the spice with them from Africa. Benne is the Bantu word for sesame. Roberta can give you the recipe. She makes trays and trays of those cookies every year after Christmas when her family celebrates Kwanzaa. Do you know what Kwanzaa is?”
I had to admit I didn’t know, and thus Barrett and I were reluctantly parted from our beguiling waves while Coral Upchurch filled me in on the first African-American holiday, established back in the sixties, when black people were starting to take pride in their roots.
“You could see her beginning to flag,” said Lachicotte, as we walked back to Aunt Charlotte’s. “And she kept eyeing those cigarettes.”
“I wouldn’t care if she smoked.”
“Neither would I. I was raised inside a fog of parental smoke. But smokers nowadays have their individual rules of honor. Obviously hers are outdoors only and not in the presence of others.”
“Why not in the presence of others?”
“The hazards of secondhand smoke.”