Neverland (10 page)

“All that is Neverland.”

“All that is Neverland.” I felt the hook penetrate my skin.

“Now our blood is mixed, cousin. Now I’m in you and you’re in me. I will know if you break this, your most sacred vow.”

When he let go of my hand, I heard the blood pounding in my thumb like waves breaking against some shore of night. I stuck it in my mouth and sucked at the drying blood as though I’d been bitten by a snake and needed to spit out the poison.

While I still pressed my bleeding thumb against my lips, Sumter cried out, “Look!
Gawd
.” He pointed to a tamped-down patch of reeds. He waded through a stagnant pool and alongside some prickers, carelessly pushing them aside. I followed close behind, and the pricker branches sprung back at me.

He knelt down in the reeds, spreading them apart. When I came up behind him, he had a twig in his fingers and was poking at his find.

I squatted down, barely balancing with my hands on my knees.

Another bunny, but this one was dead.

Its black-and-white fur was matted with blood and crusted dirt. A gash ran down its stomach. While this wasn’t the first dead animal I had ever seen, it was the only one with its guts hanging out. My usual death sightings involved roadkill or animals much lower on the food chain, and certainly none as sweet as a bunny. “Lookit,” I said, my finger hanging just above the rabbit’s head. Half of one of its floppy ears had been chewed off. When you’re ten, death is less horrifying than it is fascinating. I would’ve been equally thrilled to have come across the corpse of a human being, and not in the least bit terrified.

Sumter industriously poked its guts back inside its stomach. “I bet everybody looks this way when they kiss off.”

“I wonder what got it?”

“A dog or something. Maybe a raccoon. Or a Gullah.” He dropped the twig and brought his hand down to the animal’s belly. Its eyes were
partially sunken in. Tiny ricelike maggots dripped from its nostrils. Sumter flicked at them with his fingers.

“Yuck. Don’t
touch
it, Sumter, you can get all kinds of
diseases
.” The maggots scared me more than the bunny. “What if we get
tapeworm
or something?”

“Then we get to drink chocolate milkshakes and cut the worm’s head off with scissors. Anyway, these’re just plain old grubs.” Sumter went ahead and stroked the bunny’s bloodied fur. “Not too warm, not too cold. Just died last night, I bet.” He took his T-shirt off over his head and swaddled it around the dead rabbit.

“Gross. Whatju want to do
that
for?”

“We’re gonna take it back to Neverland and see if Lucy wants it for a sacrifice.”

“Oh,
neat
.” I wasn’t being sarcastic. I
really
thought this
would
be neat.

 

ALL THE way back home Sumter pretended he’d slipped in the mud and had taken his shirt off because of the slime. This satisfied both his father and mine, neither of whom were much up for questioning either of us as to why we looked so guilty. They had caught nothing all morning long and apparently had gotten along like yellow jackets. Sumter flashed me a smile in the car, keeping his prize close to his pale stomach, hiding it behind his teddy bear; later we would find bloodstains on Bernard’s back. First chance we had, we raced out to the shed. Sumter tripped and would’ve gone splat down on the dead rabbit if I hadn’t stopped his fall.

Inside Neverland he wasted no time. He went over to the crate and knocked three times on it. “Oh, Lucy,” he said, “I have brought you a creature for your pleasure.” He unrolled his shirt. It was completely brown and red, with some of the bunny guts on it, too. He lifted the animal up; blood trickled from the gash down on his forehead. I felt my insides heave. Blood grossed me out in a major way.

“Lucy!” he cried out. “A sacrifice for you, a victim for Neverland!” His voice was theatrical, like the preacher at the Baptist church in town.

Then he gently laid the corpse across the top of the crate.

I felt a little silly, although I didn’t doubt that there was something to this sacrifice stuff. I was only a little scared, and more by the sight of bunny blood on Sumter’s forehead than this invocation to the god Lucy.

“Lucy is pleased,” Sumter said, opening his eyes again. “God feeds on the dead.”

I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the crate or the dead rabbit.

And then I heard the scraping from within the crate.

Along the sides of the wood.

An animal clawing slowly, slowly.

Then faster.

The wood splintered and cracked as it clawed.

“
Good, good
,” Sumter said.

The bunny had been dead when we found it, and dead when Sumter laid it before the crate. I’d seen some dead things before, I knew even a bunny couldn’t be alive with its stomach ripped apart and maggots squirming up its nose and Sumter poking its red-brown guts back into it.

But the noise.

No longer scraping.

No clawing.

A sound from its throat.

It sounded the way I would imagine a bunny would sound.

If it were screaming.

There are bluffs on only one side of Gull Island, to the northwest. Opposite them is a town called St. Badon, which is known mainly for its shopping malls. The southwest side of the peninsula is all gradually lowering slopes until you come smack dab into marshes and swamps.

The bluffs at the Retreat were our guardians against storms, and they cut our various paths down to the beach. They were not smooth, but corrugated with sandstone and chalk-white dirt. At dawn you could sit on the edge and watch the pelicans gliding just above the waves and then dropping into the black morning water as if reenacting some ancient struggle. In summers past, Sumter and I had thrown stones over the edge to occupy ourselves while domestic turmoil brewed back at the house. If you looked down to the south, you could just catch a glimpse of the top of the tattered roller coaster from Sea Horse Park, and if you looked to the west, beyond the tiara bridge and even St. Badon, you could see the place where the earth curved below the sky. But to the east there was only the house, the Retreat.

Often as not, the house was full of fights and squabbles. Usually it was Mama who was the angriest. She had a keener sense of injustice and
untold truths and things just beneath the surface, at least when it came to her mother and sister and husband and brother-in-law.

Sumter once said to me, “Don’tcha just get pukey when your mama starts to caterwauling?”

I had no answer. I could mentally put myself somewhere else, off-island, in a country where mothers never got upset and fathers only rarely cursed and walked off. Sometimes I thought of stories I’d read or movies I’d seen, and I would just pretend I was in that world and not this one. But I knew it was just pretend.

My cousin knew no such boundary. He would tell me about trips he’d taken to the moon or the shootouts he’d had with cowboys or what Bernard, his teddy bear, had told him.

At night, before I fell asleep, he said, “I know where we go when we die, and it’s a bad place. Lucy says we don’t have to go there if we’re faithful. Lucy says we can live forever in Neverland.” And rather than scaring me, this was a comfort as I fell asleep, covering my head with my pillow while I heard Mama and Grammy sniping at each other downstairs.

And then I thought of the screaming bunny.

The nightmares all began the same way after that.

They all began with a woman I didn’t recognize telling me that the bunny screamed, not because it was dying, but because it was alive.

Trips to Gull Island were never fun and games. Two years earlier we’d arrived during a tropical storm, which Mama was sure would end within a day or two, but instead lasted the whole two weeks we were in Georgia. The locals performed Gullah rituals, the evidence of which was scattered about the swamplands and down in back of the Holy Roller Church down at the West Side of the peninsula: dead chickens, their heads chomped off as if by geeks in a sideshow. Aunt Cricket tried to keep us from looking at the feathered carcasses, but Sumter kept piping up, “What’s the diff
if they’re Kentucky Fried or Gullah Chomped?” The local newspaper, a one-page mimeograph usually tacked up in the general store on the West Side, carried the headline: animals sacrificed in ancient ritual. I was so intrigued by that headline, I stole the paper; the rest of the article was a protest from an unidentified Gullah holy man who swore on a stack of Bibles that no Gullah was responsible for the dead chickens, but something far older than Gullah, even, something that slept beneath the island and waited for its Great Awakening. I told Sumter that
he
was what had bitten the heads off the chickens, and it was
him
sleeping, waiting to be awakened.

All during that storm, Mama and Grammy Weenie fought—over the way they dressed, the way they treated their families, the way they were brought up, other people’s mothers, all the things Aunt Cricket got as a child that my mother didn’t get. They even argued over the brand of peanut butter Grammy had in her pantry. Daddy drank a bit more than he usually did and ran interference when he wasn’t drinking by taking us kids to movies on the mainland when the arguments got too heated.

The second summer on Gull Island the weather was bad but not bad enough to stay indoors. Mama and Grammy Weenie were silent together, although you could see Grammy eyeing her when we all sat down to the table in the evening, looking for faults, finding them, and then keeping her silence. I used to think how happy we’d all be if Grammy Weenie just died. I didn’t particularly love her, although she was at least interesting, if peculiar. When she talked of her long-dead daughter, she didn’t call her Cindy, but “Babygirl.” This was the oldest of the children—my mother being next, and then Aunt Cricket being last. We children called this aunt—who had died the year after I was born—the “Mad One,” because she ended up in some kind of drying-out farm in North Carolina and died crazy. But she would always be Babygirl to Grammy Weenie. When Grammy spoke of her maternal grandmother, it was not as Leonora Bourgeois, but the “Giantess from Biloxi.” Grammy Weenie was putting together a family history, although some days she said that her
children and grandchildren weren’t worthy of this record at all. She would read it to us at night, and we would yawn and stretch and fall asleep to her grumbling voice:

“Of all things I am most proud of, it is of being a Wandigaux—Daddy was from the New Orleans Wandigaux family, originally from France, persecuted for their religious faith, who escaped the wrath of the Papists of their native land. And when I think of that name, I am reminded we are wanderers. I am from a nomadic stock, and Gull Island has become the end of the journey . . . Wandigaux I am, and all that I am is Wandigaux. My husband was a Lee of Culpeper. We raised three daughters, my Babygirl, Evelyn Jane, and Cricket, and so the blood continues. I have regrets, as all mortals must, and I have done things that I ought not to have done, but we must all answer to a higher law than the law of man: There is the Kingdom of God to which we are accountable. All around us is that Kingdom; it is in the Garden in which we live. I am a poor humble and erring servant, and it is true that I have not always tended the Garden. But I have done what I have had to do. I have done what I must . . . ”

The third summer on Gull Island we miraculously got along, and I completely attributed this to the fact that Sumter had been sent away to summer camp for the month we visited the Retreat. Aunt Cricket tended to cry every day because she missed her little boy, her “Sunny,” but Grammy was pleasant and made gingerbread men and read from Charles Dickens every evening. When she went through
David Copperfield
, she said, “‘I am born.’ Isn’t that marvelous? ‘I am born.’ Simple, direct, that Mr. Dickens knew how to
begin
, didn’t he? Beginnings are all, and what is well begun cannot be undone.”

Mama got a tan for the first time in years because she was finally able to squeeze into her bathing suit—she was never fat, but always said she was. Uncle Ralph and Daddy took us down to the Sea Horse Park, and although the roller coaster was still the unused dinosaur it had always been, and the Trabant and Whirligigs were closed, there were bumper cars and cotton candy. A long, thin black man with no arms and no legs rolled cigarettes
with his tongue and then struck the matches that way, too. He charged a buck per rolled cigarette, but it was great entertainment. Still, as always, we had returned home at the end of August with mosquito bites and bad tempers from the humidity.

My dreams those summers were about going back to school, about my parents fighting, about my little baby brother who would be born shortly.

My dreams the last summer on the island made me scream.

“Beau? You okay, honey?”

“Beau?” It was my mother’s voice that brought me out of the nightmare, not the face of that little black-and-white bunny, its whiskered muzzle stretched like an open sore, its eyes red with fury and knowledge of what was to come.

It was not quite daylight, but almost. She had turned on the lamp by my bed and sat next to me. With the palm of her left hand she felt my forehead. “You don’t have a fever.” I always smelled her hair first: It was like her shampoo, but also was like vinegar and lemon. The rest of her smelled like calamine lotion with only a hint of pine-clean gin laced in her breath. She’d been smoking cigarettes, which she bummed off Aunt Cricket, but only when she was very drunk. I liked that smell of ashes and gin from her lips. She was all smells that reminded me that she was my mother—I had known that perfume since the day I was born.