Neverland (24 page)

This was the drawer I would open.

It was like exploring an unknown universe, like digging into someone’s thoughts, their private parts. The drawer was swimming in gold and green paisley scarves, and more pantyhose, some of it still in crisp packages. Loose cigarettes, too, and jewelry. I picked up an earring: It was a tiny red and yellow ceramic antherium flower. A stack of square black-and-white snapshots, mainly of Sumter when he was a baby. Sumter’s first Christmas. Sumter walking. Sumter sleeping. Sumter and his teddy bear on the porch of the house in Marietta. Sumter on his mama’s lap.

I dug down deep in the drawer and found sunken treasure: a small wooden box. An engraving of a Japanese dragon was on the lid. I opened it. It was crushed velvet inside. There was a string of pearls and a silver ring with a blue stone. A charm bracelet with three charms on and two fallen into the velvet. One of the fallen charms was a seal, another a schnauzer. I reached into the velvet to see if there were any more, and in doing so, discovered another layer beneath this one—I greedily lifted it.

There at the bottom of the box was another snapshot and a small green pin. I looked at the photo: a skinny man, not quite a grown-up, but almost. He wore boxer shorts and a grin. His hair was short and slicked back, and his ears stuck out like Dumbo’s. Behind him, a lake. Uncle Ralph had never been that thin. I turned the picture over. Scrawled on the back:
The day you hid my clothes and I had to wear underwear or nothing—what would Rowena say?
What looked like dried blood smudged across the words. But it wasn’t blood—it was lipstick.

I held the green pin between my thumb and forefinger and squinted to see what was engraved there. ΛΧΑ.

My father was a Lambda Chi Alpha, and I’d seen that symbol on one of his baseball caps. Had Uncle Ralph been in that fraternity, too?

From downstairs I heard singing.

Julianne was back.

She was singing “My Baby Does the Hanky-Panky.” Water ran in the kitchen sink.

I put the pin and photo into my pocket and closed the box. I laid it back beneath the scarves and hose and shut the drawer.

“What are you doing?” Julianne asked as I came down the stairs.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t nothing me. Your mama know you’re up here?”

“I had to use the bathroom.”

She stood there in the hall, her hands soaking red. She noticed me looking. “It’s from the meat. We’re barbecuing tonight. The steaks are runny.” She wiped her hands across her apron. “Blood as warm as swamp water.”

That night, for the first time, we had our meeting after bedtime. We all faked falling asleep, and then around about two a.m. Sumter shook me by the shoulders. Missy and Nonie stood around my bed, shining a flashlight in my face. My circulation was acting up again, and they massaged my feet and my arms to help speed things up.

“Will you hurry up?” Nonie whispered to my toes. “You weren’t
really
supposed to go to sleep, you know.”

“Lucy said she wants to cure you,” Sumter said.

 

WE SAT in a circle and smoked Aunt Cricket’s Salems. I felt light-headed, but not sleepy at all. When the time came to pass around what we’d stolen that day, I brought out the snapshot and the pin. “From a box in your mama’s dresser,” I said.

Nonie stared at it a good long while before passing it to Missy, and Missy barely glanced at it. “It’s Uncle Ralph,” she said, “in his boxers.”

But Sumter grabbed the picture from her. “It’s not
my
daddy. But I know who this is. I’ve seen Mama go through her box when she thinks no
one is looking. She puts on her earrings in front of the mirror. She looks at this picture and she starts crying. She bawls her eyes out sometimes when she thinks no one’s looking. Sometimes she
kisses
it like this.” He pressed his lips against the photo and smacked his lips. Then he nodded his head toward me. “You done good. Lucy is much pleased.” He went over and got a hammer and tacked the photo up on the wall. “This is a better steal than most, ’cause it means a lot to someone.”

“Oh,
I
know who it is,” Nonie said. “It’s our daddy. Big deal. Everybody knows your mama has a thing for our daddy.”

Missy, shocked by her casual use of the Neverland password, let out a squeal and then giggled.

Nonie, looking weary and unsatisfied, asked, “Why can’t Lucy show herself?”

I was about to say
Sometimes she does
, but felt an invisible hand go over my mouth.

Sumter clapped his hands. “You have no faith. Your faith must be tested. And the way to the test is through the first principle of the universe. And the first principle of the universe,” Sumter told us, “is sacrifice.”

Our first assignment was closer to animal experimentation than to sacrifice.

The next morning Sumter caught a skinny lizard from the bark of a tree with a small string noose. “If you cut off its tail, it’ll grow back.” Sumter had a small steak knife from the kitchen, adding to his cache of stolen items. Rather than just slice the tail off, he hacked at it like he was trying to machete his way through a jungle. The tail came off in his hand and thrashed about, while the terrified lizard ran off for a corner of the shed. “If we cooked it, it would taste like chicken,” he beamed proudly, waggling the tail in Missy’s face.

Nonie rolled her eyes. “Grotesque.”

“To Lucy I dedicate this lizard tail,” he said, dropping the tail into the crate’s opening. “Now where the hell did that lizard go? We got to sacrifice it to Lucy, too.”

 

MISSY became fond of taking fat black ants and popping their abdomens into the back of her throat. She said it tasted like honey. Then she would take ants and put them in the freezer. After about a minute she would pull them out and watch them move slowly around. She found that if she left them in the freezer for more than a minute, they never recovered. So she caught a small chameleon lizard and tried freezing that, too, only she went off and forgot about it. This we sacrificed to Neverland, too.

I went with Nonie one afternoon to buy some bait down at Shep and Diane’s, and she got a Cayman lizard and some goldfish. We spent a late evening in Neverland feeding the fish to the lizard. Although I felt sad for the fish, they were just fish, after all, and I ate them all the time.

“It’s the law of nature,” Sumter said wisely. “Eat or be eaten. I mean, which would you wanta be? The Cayman or the goldfish? You eat cow, don’tcha? You eat pig flesh.”

 

THEN it was my turn for some kind of sacrifice. I didn’t really want to take part in this ritual, but I figured I’d have to. I was sitting out on the bluffs one day by myself trying to come up with something a little less disgusting than killing lizards and goldfish. Because sacrifice was supposed to be part of our devotion, I knew I’d have to kill something.

There was one kind of animal life at the Retreat that I was never very fond of.

Field mice.

Or more specifically, the field mice that entered the house from cracks in the chimney at night and ran across the kitchen counters. If I woke up in the night and decided I needed a glass of milk, I would flick on the kitchen light and get the tail ends of the small gray-brown mice all skittering
for cover. Uncle Ralph had put out traps and caught a few, but there were always more. Mice are like that.

Unlike other children my age, I had no affection for them. I didn’t see them as Stuart Littles or Mickeys. I saw them as disgusting. And I was always afraid that one of them would pass their mouse germs to Governor while Mama changed his diaper on the cutting board.

So I would have to figure out how to catch a live mouse and take it to Neverland. I came up with the age-old trap: a cigar box, propped up on one side with a small wooden dowel from the toilet paper holder in the bathroom. Attached to this, a string. What I figured on doing was smearing some bread crumbs with peanut butter and then when the mouse crawled inside for a bite, pull the string and trap the mouse.

For two nights I lay in the kitchen, wrapped up in a sleeping bag from the attic. The grown-ups thought it was adorable that I was hunting mice. Only Grammy Weenie suspected I was up to something that might not be as sweet as catching a live mouse for a pet. “All life is sacred,” she told me, but she’d been the one who got Uncle Ralph to put the mousetraps down in the first place.

Finally, the second night, just as I was about to fall asleep on the linoleum, a mouse ventured into my cigar box. I tugged on the string and the box came slamming down on its lid.

I had my mouse.

I heard it scratching and squealing, trying to get out. I turned the box over, keeping the lid down tight. I went up to my bedroom and piled several hardback books on top of it. Remembering Missy’s dead hamster, Pogo, I poked holes in the lid so the mouse could breathe. I tried to sleep, but could not. Every time I began to drift off, I thought of that small mouse and wondered how it must feel to be trapped like that and not know what was going on.

I expected the creature to be dead from either fear or exhaustion by morning, as I myself was well on my way. But, shaking the box, I heard still another squeal, so I knew my mouse was alive and well.

“Beau caught himself a mouse last night,” Missy whispered at the breakfast table.

Daddy and Uncle Ralph had risen early to go fishing out on Rabbit Lake, and since there were only four days left to us on Gull Island, I dropped all pretense of wanting to bait hooks and swat mosquitoes out on that swamp. All the grown-ups seemed to have elongated cocktail hours in the evenings, during which they’d carp at each other or just sit in stony silence. The mornings were full of gray hungover faces downing tomato juice and talking about how peaceful the Retreat was. Grammy sat across from me and wrote in her composition book, occasionally thumbing through it to mark a section. Julianne Sanders had made hush puppies and eggs, and we greedily wolfed these down. Mama was distracted, as she had become increasingly since our arrival on the island, distracted and distant. Occasionally she would shoot me a look that scared me and she’d say, “You children are up to something, and I don’t think I like it one little bit.”

Only Aunt Cricket was chipper, and what a nightmare that could be. “I think I’ll take you girls down to the beauty parlor with me today. You’d like that, just us girls?”

Nonie wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think so, Aunt Cricket.”

“Leonora Burton Jackson,” Mama said, snapping her fingers, “you be polite to your aunt.”

“No one ever listens to me,” Missy whined. “I
said
, Beau caught himself a mouse.”

We ate the rest of our breakfast in silence.

The world of grown-ups became the world of shadows. I began to hate them, to want to cut myself off from them as much as possible.

After lunch I took a nap, setting the cigar box trap with its skittering occupant down on my dresser. I awoke after a spell to some noise: footsteps
in the hall, Governor’s
dit-dos
. I lay in bed, rubbing my legs with my hands—getting my defective circulation going, cursing my unhappy birth. Next I heard
clumpaclumpaclumpa
, the sound of something falling downstairs. I knew immediately what—or rather who—it was, before he even started wailing: Governor. The sounds of other footsteps, and then my legs were well enough to carry me out into the hall. Mama was crying, holding the baby at the bottom of the stairs. She looked up at me and said in a whisper, “Beau, oh, Beau, sweetie. I just set him down for a second.” I bounded down the steps almost tripping until I was beside them. I looked into my baby brother’s pale eyes. He had stopped crying.

“He’s made of rubber,” I said.

Mama’s face was a sickly yellow, even with her sunburn. Her eyes were dark like a raccoon’s. She was wearing a long white slip beneath her robe. I couldn’t look back up at her face.

Governor seemed fine. “See? Governor’s okay. Puppy-dog tail Governor, the bouncy baby bumper boy.” I grinned at him and caught his nose in my hand and pretended to make it disappear.

“He tried to walk,” Mama said. “I just went away for a second. I didn’t know he’d get to the stairs. Oh, Beau.”

“He’s just fine, Mama, don’t cry.”

“This means something,” she said, straightening up a bit. “I should’ve been watching him, this means . . . I’ve misplaced the car keys this week—twice. Sometimes I get so mad at him, Beau, and he’s just a little baby; he doesn’t know why I get mad at him.”

For the first time in my life, I looked at my mother like I had never seen her before. She seemed a stranger.

“I just left him for a second. Less than a second.”

“He’s just fine.”

“No, I don’t think so.” She held him up over her head. “He’s got a bump. I think something’s wrong with him. Or me. My sister, what she did to her child . . . ”

“Governor’s okay. It was an accident.”

“He’ll have a bruise now.” She brought my brother’s face down to hers and gave him a kiss. “My beautiful baby with a bruise. It’s this place, this house. This is no place for children. It never has been. It’s all
her
. Grammy. She’s a monster. What she did. . . . You don’t want to hear this, do you, Beau?”

“Mama?”

“Whenever we’re here we always fight. Governor never falls down the stairs at home. He never falls. I never get mad at him at home. I never lose things. You like your grammy?”

“I guess.”

“She does this to me. She makes me like this. She makes everyone like this. What she did—what my sister did—and what
she
did—and my sister, with her child—not your cousin—
yes
, your cousin, but the
child
, the
child
, I never saw, but I heard, Beau, I heard.
She
told me,
not
my sister. . . .” She began babbling hysterically. I didn’t know what to say to my mother once she started talking like this—quickly, nervously, as if she were afraid someone was spying and then she’d get in trouble. Of my several fears, one was that my mother might turn insane and they’d take her away. She was only insane around Grammy, though; she only drank like a fish at the Retreat.