I felt like the turtles’ guest. I wanted to be unobtrusive so as not to upset their progress. As they approached their hatching time, I talked to them in a wise and soothing murmur. I told them stories of what to expect, from the moment each used the little egg tooth on top of its snout to rip through its leathery shell and then stretch its body out straight (“Remember, you’ve been curled into a ball for two months, so you’ll need to do this. And while you’re wriggling around getting straightened out, your body will knock against the shells of your unhatched brothers and sisters and stimulate their breakthroughs…”)
This July was a “two-moon month,” Ed Bolton had informed me. Approximately every three years there would be two full moons in a calendar month. We’d had a full moon last Friday and we would have the second one on the last day of July. The second full moon was called a blue moon, which referred to a rare blue coloring, which usually wasn’t seen, caused by high altitude dust particles. Tonight’s moon was a waning gibbous—gibbosus was hunchback in Latin. The curve inside the gibbous moon did look like something hunched. But when the moon shrank to its last quarter the hunch would straighten up. Ed Bolton had given me the turtles and the moon. I would have liked to have been in his high school science classes. He made everything in the natural world sound like it mattered to him—as it would to you, if you saw it right.
How sickening that I had missed Billy Upchurch by one year! He could have answered the really crucial questions. I would have asked him, in gradual increments, what they talked about. Johnny may have told Billy about the Dace family hardship Coral Upchurch had referred to. And she said there had been a problem with Johnny Dace, too. If he wasn’t in school in October, maybe he had been kicked out of school. He would have told Billy why he never took off his clothes at the beach, or made up an excuse. And I would love to know why Billy had picked him out when he was walking the entire length of the beach and back, something I had yet to do myself. I would have asked who spoke first. My guess was Billy, who was attracted to scowlers. And did Johnny invite him to the cottage or did Billy invite himself? And when they got there, what did they do together?
If the ghost-boy had lived he would be sixty-five, like Billy, unless he had died before Billy.
I still hadn’t become used to the beauty of the island. You are one lucky boy, the foster mother had said, when it was firm that I was going to live with my aunt at the beach. I did feel lucky, though the feeling wasn’t free of remorse and guilt. If Mom hadn’t died, we would probably still be living in that awful upstairs apartment on Smoke Vine Road with the downstairs landlady from hell. Though Jewel was set in the midst of beautiful mountains, for me its very name would always evoke shame and poverty. Mom had to die so I could get out of Jewel and live at the beach. How sad that we hadn’t shared beauty in any of our surroundings. Forsterville (pop. 10,000+) was a piedmont town with a furniture factory and railroad tracks, a few adulterated rivers and streams, and a manmade lake, where prominent citizens had summer cottages, fifteen miles away. The closest to a beautiful setting Mom and I had shared was the quiet cemetery on the outskirts of town with its cypresses and well-tended grass, where we could walk and she could inhale air that didn’t smell of sawdust and chemicals and shellac. We strolled among the headstones—many of which bore the name of Forster, the founding family—and played our funeral and burial game. The clothes we would wear in our coffins, the hymns and psalms we wanted. (“We should probably attend church more often,” Mom would say. “Then there would be more of a crowd at our funerals. But I don’t think God grudges me my Sunday morning sleep-in.”) Mom was cheerful and serene when we walked in the Forsterville cemetery.
Things would now be different between the ghost-boy and me. I knew that. Everything in his presence and posture said: You summoned me. Here I am. Now what are we going to do? But I had failed the test. I was certain he would not appear to me again. If only I had remembered the rules that were spread all over the ghost stories Wheezer and I used to devour. The living person was either up to the challenge or he was not. If you wished to keep the connection going with the ghost, you had to measure up to the moment of testing. Wheezer and I had often discussed it: if we were ever fortunate enough to meet a ghost, like in one of the stories we loved where the living person measured up, what would we do and say? We were always adding to our rules for ghosts.
“That is, for the ones you feel deserve your help,” Wheezer once stipulated, “not the other kind.” For the worthy ghosts, you had to stand your ground even if your legs were shaking and ask: What do you need? What can I do for you in the land of the living that you can no longer do for yourself? Is there a message you want conveyed to a living person? Is there a wrong that needs to be righted before you can rest in peace? If so, I’ll be your errand boy.
“But how would you know the difference between a ghost worthy of your help and the other kind?” I asked Wheezer. He thought it over. “Maybe you wouldn’t, at first,” he said, “until your intuition kicked in. Then you’d feel either sought out or creeped out. If it’s creeped out, you’d better cut and run.”
But facing my ghost this morning I had felt sought out and creeped out. If only I had stood my ground and asked him, What do you want of me? What can I do for you in the land of the living that you can no longer do for yourself? Maybe if I hadn’t cut and run I would have experienced an advanced stage of human consciousness.
I needed to ask Ed Bolton to explain more about the problem of time. In school we had been prepped with just enough rudimentary Einstein to unsettle us. Yes, boys and girls, after your brains develop some more you’ll have to deal with concepts of time beyond the clock and calendar.
I had been zipping through too many kinds of time to keep track of: waking and dreaming time, outer and inner, since yesterday’s dreaming of my mom opening the door of her beautiful apartment and telling me I had an older brother to this afternoon’s meeting of a very old lady who was able to tell me the first and last names of the ghost I had seen that very morning.
XXVI.
“Archie and I were married ten years before we had Billy. We concluded we were going to be a childless couple, and to be honest we had a good old time. We went places we wouldn’t have gone if we’d had small children, and we developed an intimacy that might not have flourished otherwise. I was just twenty when I married and quite ignorant and provincial in lots of ways. Archie was eighteen years older and he said it was like having a daughter and a lover all in one package. I’m not shocking you, am I, Marcus?”
“Oh, no. My mom was married a long time before I was born. Her husband was a lot older than her, too. He died before I was born.” Not a single lie in those three bare statements. As long as I kept them bare.
“Are you hungry? Roberta has stocked my little minibar over there with nice things.”
“I’m not really hungry. Could I get you something?”
“I’m not a great eater, but thank you.” Her downward glance at the cigarette carton was barely a flicker.
“I wish you would go ahead and smoke.”