Then I reread for the umpteenth time old Mr. Forster’s To Whom It May Concern accolade to Mom. (“… this young widow … exemplary work habits … bringing up a son on her own … uncompromising values…”)
For the first time cynicism raised its ugly head. If I had been the grandfather of a boy who had almost lost an eye, who had stopped breathing, wouldn’t I praise to the skies a factory worker whose son had done the deed in order to get her out of town?
Next I looked through the photos Mom had chosen to save from those we had taken over the years. Until now her small collection hadn’t excited me much, because she was still in the world and we expected to be taking many more pictures. As it turned out, our bleak time in Jewel had offered nothing we thought worth memorializing on film. The photos she had saved had all been taken back in Forsterville. Most of them were of me: “graduating” from kindergarten in my white cap and gown; standing on a stone wall looking down at her like I owned her; caught studying unaware in my pajamas under lamplight (her favorite). We had become expert with our Kodak throwaway cameras. Learned when to use the flash, when to move someone out of direct sun, when they were overshadowed. The sunshine was never too harsh at the Forsterville Cemetery because we walked there after my school day or in summer evenings after Mom’s shift. I particularly liked the one I had taken from the top of the hill looking down on all the graves. It had just rained and there was a glowing mist over the landscape—it looked almost like a painting. There were several shots I had taken of Mom, sitting in front of some upright gravestones at the top of the hill, hugging her skirt close to her knees, her head tilted, smiling shyly to herself.
“Why don’t you move over to that weeping angel and stand next to it?” I asked.
“I like it here,” she said, patting the ground in front of her. “The view is nicest from up here.”
“But I’m the one who’s supposed to be picking the views!”
To oblige me, she stood by the weeping angel for a couple of shots. But either her eyes were closed or the body language was wrong: she had not kept those pictures. She did look best on top of the hill, though that whole upper section was filled exclusively with Forster headstones.
“Well, of course,” she said, when I pointed this out. “They were the first people to get here, so naturally they picked the choicest spot.”
The island market where I shopped every day stocked those throwaway cameras. If you turned in your camera by five P.M. you could have your photos back by noon the next day. It was popular with islanders and tourists who couldn’t be bothered to drive to the mainland for the one-hour service.
I bought two cameras with twenty-four exposures each and set out the next morning with them tucked in my saddlebag. It was too chancy to wait until Aunt Charlotte got her cast off and I had mastered the complexities of her digital camera. The cottage was falling apart atom by atom, minute by minute. I would kick myself if I showed up one morning to find it razed to the ground or cordoned off by a sizzling electric fence. OUT! THIS MEANS YOU, MARCUS. YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.
For a start I took distance shots of the cottage. Sky above and behind, dunes on either side, roofs of other cottages receding to the south, a wide expanse of empty beach in the foreground. If I angled the lens craftily I could make the wire fence all but invisible. From this distance my subject could pass for a tumbledown cottage rather than a hazardous wreck. I stood at the water’s edge, near the spot where I had met Barrett. For a last panoramic shot, I removed my shoes and stepped back into the water up to the line of my biking shorts until I could include the mirrory surf.
As I was wheeling my bike toward the cottage to hide it in its usual spot behind a dune, a figure appeared atop this dune and began a cautious descent. Waving his arms for balance, he partly stumbled, partly slid down the steep incline until he pitched sideways into the waiting spikes of a Spanish bayonet. His sun hat flew off and rolled downhill ahead of him. I was close enough to hear the outraged string of expletives though not the specific swear words. Now he was scrambling to his feet and patting his behind for damage. It was Charlie Coggins, the realtor. He looked around furtively to see if anyone had witnessed his disgrace. I jumped on my bike and pedaled in the other direction so he wouldn’t know I had seen. Shit. I should have come an hour earlier.
By the time I approached him openly, walking alongside my bike, he had brushed off his pants, shaken the sand out of his docksiders, and restored his sun hat to his head. He had his back to me, surveying his real estate, so I called out a good morning in order not to startle him.
“It’s Lachicotte’s young friend, isn’t it? You’ve gotten so brown. Did you ever tell me your name?”
“Marcus.”
I indicated the empty spot in the sand where his strange land-and-water vehicle had been parked last time. “Where’s your amphibian today?”
“At home in its custom-built hangar. I use it mainly to impress out-of-town clients. I drove up by the road in the company car. Took a right smart spill getting down that blasted dune. You want to avoid those evil Spanish bayonets at all costs.”
“My aunt already warned me about those.”
“The artist. Broke her arm, right? Last time we met, you were going to come back with a camera and take some pictures for her.”
“It was her wrist, but it’s still in a cast.” No use complicating matters with the ankle as well. “Today I brought some cameras. The cottage is getting worse by the day.”
“Tell me about it! When I hear a siren at night, you know what I pray for? That some firebug will have burned it to the ground before the trucks get there. Every time I come here I run through my litany of ‘why didn’t I’s: Why didn’t I sell it to the highest bidder before the roof caved in? Why didn’t I keep the empty lot next to it and donate the cottage to the Historical Society, claim my gift deduction, and let them deal with property taxes and hazardous structure policies and erosion engineers’ fees until they got fed up and torched it themselves and had the state put up a nice historical marker? Why didn’t Pop sell it back in the sixties after he bought it from the people who made a mess of the renovation and then ran out of cash? What were we at Coggins Realty thinking? That it was going to magically reconstruct itself one night while we were sleeping, and we’d wake up to find the pristine new cottage as it looked in 1804, with the shoreline of 1804, and assessed at twentieth-century value?”
“I thought I’d better get some pictures while it’s still standing—so Aunt Charlotte will have something to go by when she can paint again.”
“What kind of camera do you use?”
I took my throwaways out of the saddlebag and showed him.
“These do everything you need if you know how to use them. You can get the prints back from the island market overnight. I brought two cameras so I’d be sure to have enough exposures.”