Burnt Mountain (25 page)

Aengus goggled stupidly at her and took her outstretched hands. She leaned up and gave him a peck on the cheek. A wave of
something primal and floral perfume smote me. She turned to me.

“I’m Thayer O’Neill,” I said. “You’re nice to include us wives, Mrs. Mabry.”

She gave us both an enormous smile. It seemed to stretch into her jet-black lacquered hair and tangle with her diamond hoop
earrings. Suddenly I felt like a smudged and tattered child deep in alien adult territory. I actually caught myself standing
on one foot, hiding my other flat sandal behind it.

“Well, aren’t you the pretty thing.” She glistened at me. “Dr. O’Neill, I’ll introduce you around, but you, my dear, I’m saving
for Big Jim.”

She tugged us both across the porch and down the steps
toward the garden. This turned out to be a vast clipped maze of boxwood and cypress, with symmetrical ranks of tulips bordering
it and a gazebo in the middle. In the gazebo a knot of people surrounded the biggest man I have ever seen. He was at least
six feet, seven inches, and nearly as round as he was tall. His chins and face and bald head were red almost to vermilion,
with sun and perhaps general temperament, for he was laughing, a laugh that boomed out and, I thought, must surely reach the
river. He was, he must be, Big Jim Mabry.

Without turning his head away from the crowd he reached a gigantic arm out for me, and Precious Mabry pushed me into it. The
arm nearly crushed me, Aengus reached for me, and Big Jim turned to look at him, then at me.

“Dr. Aengus O’Neill,” he bellowed, his great moon face radiating cheer. “Know you anywhere, even with your clothes on. And
this must be your missus. Or maybe your daughter? Don’t matter; she’s a right armful, isn’t she?”

I saw blank white anger start on Aengus’s face and said loudly, “Wife, of course, Mr. Mabry. Thayer O’Neill. It’s a remarkable
house and garden. I’m so glad for a chance to see it.”

“Well, now, you come on in and I’ll show you the rest of it,” he boomed. “Got a pretty little doohickey behind the pool, think
my wife calls it a fancy.”

“Folly, Jim,” Precious Mabry said. Her voice was not glittering now. I tried gently to pull away from Big Jim, but he only
tightened his grip and widened his smile at Aengus.

“Get one like this, you gotta hold on to her, don’t you, son?”

Before Aengus could open his mouth, a woman’s slow, sweet voice spoke beside me.

“My dear, I’m Helena Carmichael,” the owner of the voice said. She was slender and suntanned and her dark hair was pulled
simply back, showing tiny diamond clips and a graceful neck. “I missed meeting you the other night, but Gibby told me about
you. We knew your grandmother, and we’re so glad to have you in the neighborhood. Jim, you let go of her now; I want her to
meet some of the rest of us wives, and she’ll never get away from you on her own.”

“Known me too long, haven’t you, Helena?” Big Jim chortled, and she said, “Much too,” and put her arm around me and led me
toward the pool, where a small crowd of women chatted and laughed together.

“What he needs is a spike heel in the instep, but he’ll get that later from Precious.” Helena smiled. “Your husband looks
like he can hold his own.”

“Thanks so much,” I said. “He can. I never know quite what to do when something like that happens. Not that it does, very
often,” I hastened to add, thinking how smug I must sound.

“I would think quite often,” she said. “It’s just that Big Jim has an inflated sense of his own charm, to match everything
else about him. I don’t think you’ll have to see much of either one of them. But your poor Aengus… it’s a full year until
the Olympics.”

“Well, I can’t thank you enough,” I said. “I was beginning to feel like somebody’s overdressed teenage daughter.”

“You
are
pretty young,” she said. “But there’s not a woman
here you couldn’t hold your own with. You look very much like your grandmother; I’m sure people have told you. A truly wonderful
woman.”

“Yes,” I said, my eyes prickling suddenly with the missing of Grand. “She was, wasn’t she?”

After an outdoor buffet presided over by a white-clad chef in the only real chef’s hat I had ever seen and served by pretty
aproned maids, Big Jim herded the men of the committee away into the house “to tackle the business. You ladies just sit around
the pool and look like water lilies.”

“Back as soon as possible,” Aengus whispered to me on his way inside.

“Don’t hurry.” I grinned. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

It was not an unpleasant evening. The pool looked lovely with its lights on and its little waterfall splashing over rocks,
and the sweet night wind brought the surrounding garden to us. Most of the women were agreeable enough; some I hoped I would
get to know better. We talked of what women always do when they are tighter in groups: children. Almost everyone had them.
Almost everyone was lamenting about some rocky rite of passage or other. Precious Mabry smiled around and said, “I just don’t
know what it is, but we’ve never had a minute’s trouble with ours. Nobody in Riverwood seems to. You’d think they’d be tempted
to get into mischief now and then; most of us… them… have enough spending money to do it right. But they’re angels, all of
them.”

Something flickered in my mind, something about the children of Riverwood. Carol Partridge. I could hear Carol’s
voice saying, somewhere and sometime, “Little zombies is what I think.” I was surprised. I would have thought that children
on this side of the river, especially Big Jim Mabry’s children, would be plentifully spoiled.

Pretty soon the men came out to the pool to join us. Every one of them had that end-of-the-party-let’s-get-out-of-here look
on his face. Some of the women rose to join them, but Big Jim held up his hand.

“I just heard Aengus O’Neill here tell one of his Irish story things, and I want the kids to hear some of them. Makes the
hair stand up on the back of your neck, he does. Precious, go round up those kids out of the basement and get ‘em out here.”

Aengus started to demur, but Big Jim overran him.

“They been down there all night practicing with their band. I want ‘em to hear what real entertainment is.”

Everyone clapped politely and sat back down. Aengus muttered something under his breath. Precious scuttled away to summon
the boys.

Presently she came back with eight boys behind her. I stared. For a brief moment I thought they were octuplets. They all seemed
to be about the same age, twelve or thirteen. All of them wore clean, pressed khakis and neat tee shirts, and all had clean,
shining, carefully combed hair. At close range they did not look at all similar, but in the aggregate they were so alike as
to be almost eerie. They nodded and smiled and spoke to everyone. Nobody shuffled or twiddled his fingers or twisted his baseball
cap. Nobody wore a baseball cap. They resembled no teenage boys I had ever met.

“I didn’t hear a peep out of your band,” I said to Big Jim’s son Jamie, who did not look as if he shared a single gene with
either his father or his mother.

“We try to keep it down,” Jamie said, smiling. “And it’s not a rock band. Actually we’re doing chamber music. We’re not very
good yet.”

“You’d be surprised at how good they are.” Big Jim beamed. “They even got me to a concert at Symphony Hall last winter.”

The boys sat down on the rocks fringing the pool and looked expectantly at Aengus.

“You guys don’t have to do this,” he said. “Go on back to your music; nobody ought to have to listen to this stuff on a summer
night….”

“No, sir,” one of them, a boy named Toby, said. “We all want to hear it. We studied the Celts a little last year in history;
I even named my dog Cuchulain.”

“Did ye now,” Aengus said, laying the brogue on like frosting. The boys all laughed.

“Then I will give you,” Aengus said, “the stories of Chulainn, Cet Mac Magach, and Conor Mac Nessa, lads all who were up to
no good as mere boys but who yet brought honor and greatness to Ireland.”

His voice slid, almost unconsciously, into the cadence I had come to think of as his fireside rhythm: It evoked fire; it lit
fires; it called down fire from heaven. The boys fell silent; none of them moved. Aengus’s voice rose and dipped and sang;
his hands wove pictures in the air; his blue eyes followed the movings of long-dead yet living men.

When he finished, the boys rose as one and applauded long and loud. Aengus smiled. Big Jim nodded and beamed.

The boys sat down again and leaned in close to Aengus.

“Are there books about them that I could read?” one of them said.

“Can you tell us some more another night, maybe?”

“I have lots of books about the Celts; I’d be glad to share,” Aengus said. “The library will have many more. And I’d be delighted
to come and tell you more sometime.”

I simply looked at him.

“I never saw such… adult young men, for their age. They’re extraordinary,” I said to Big Jim.

“They’re good kids,” he said. “All neighborhood kids. But you should have seen them when they were younger. Hellions. We thought
we’d be getting them out of jail by now.”

“Wow. What on earth happened?”

“Camp happened,” Big Jim said. “Maybe you’ve heard we’ve got this little old camp up on Burnt Mountain, to the north there.”

My head began to spin. Burnt Mountain. A camp on Burnt Mountain. A camp from which my father had never returned…

“Real old-fashioned camp this one is, none of this feel-good-about-yourself crap. Just swimming and boating and field games
and lots of contests. Hiking. Tracking. Woodcraft. You know. Good counselors. Good headman, does everything. Even drives the
bus.”

“I’ve heard the bus,” Aengus said, “and the kids singing.”

“Right. The damned Cannibal King. Know it by heart, I do. The head taught them that. Old Nog Tierney.”

Aengus raised his head and looked at Big Jim.

“Nog Tierney? An Irishman, then.”

“Don’t know about that. Didn’t look Irish. Looked like an ol’ Georgia upcountry redneck. Kind of hookwormy.”

“Tir Na Nog. An old Celtic land where you’re supposed to live forever. Pretty obscure. I don’t think anybody but an Irishman
would know it.”

“Well, that’s interesting. The camp is named Camp Forever. We got the land from the old man about thirty years ago, and he
gave it to us free on the condition that we name it Camp Forever. Beautiful land, wild and unspoiled, goes on forever on the
back side of old Burnt, where nobody else is. Got a big spring-fed lake. Matter of fact, I guess I’m responsible for it. I
was up there about thirty years ago hunting, just me and the dog, and ran into this guy. He told me it was his land, and I
said I hadn’t meant to trespass, that it was beautiful land. One thing led to another, and I told him I lived here in this
new community, lots of young families and children, and he said, ‘Make a good camp, wouldn’t it?’

“And that’s how we ended up with Camp Forever. I kept thinking that eventually he’d want some money for it, but all he ever
asked was to drive the bus and hang out with the boys. Finally I made him take fifty thousand dollars and sign a regular contract.
Free land just made me nervous. So I guess I own it now, but there’s no question of who ran it. He was a rough old guy, but
you’d be surprised at what all
he knew. More than an old dirt farmer, that’s for sure. All this stuff about the old days and the old times. I kidded him
some about going to college. Swore he never did. The kids flat loved him. And when they’d get back from camp, they were different
kids. Nobody ever had a scrap more trouble with them. When he got too old his son took over. He’s who we’ve got now, and just
like his dad he is. Even named Nog. I couldn’t have told one from the other if this one hadn’t been a sight younger. Kids
are crazy about him, too.”

“So this Nog number two is the camp head now?” Aengus said.

“I guess you’d have to call him that,” Big Jim said. “We’ve got a bunch of good counselors; kids fight to get on at the camp.
And we’ve got a director, or that’s his title, anyway. Been there several years, but I don’t think I’m going to keep him on.
He can’t get along with Nog, though I never met anybody else that couldn’t, and keeps running to me complaining about him.
Says he’s too ‘free with the boys,’ whatever the hell that means. I’ve stayed up there a week or so at a time and I never
noticed him being what you’d call free with them. He just knows so much about the place, and he tells them all these stories
about the land and the old folks that used to live on it. The kids love it. There’s just something about him that—I don’t
know—reaches out to you. Always interested in what you’ve got to say, laughs and jokes like a kid himself sometimes. But he’s
got plenty of sense, just like his daddy did. I guess you’d just have to know him to see what I mean.”

“I’d like to know him,” Aengus said. “I’d like to see that camp.”

Again, I stared at him in the silence.

“Love to have you,” Big Jim said. “Maybe come up now and then and tell some more of those stories. Be a real hit around a
campfire. We could put you up. We’ve got good dormitories. Want to give it a try, say this weekend?”

“Yes,” Aengus said, shimmering.

We rode almost all the way home in silence. Then I said, “Aengus, are you out of your mind? You know nobody we know hangs
around with that Riverwood crowd.”

“Tir Na Nog,” he said slowly. “The Land of Forever Young. Awfully obscure myth for an old Georgia mountaineer to know. I’d
just like to see what’s going on up there.”

“You’ll be sorry,” I said, smiling in the dark.

I’ve never forgotten that.