Charles Grant - Night Songs
"Lilla, wait. I'll get some of the others-"
"No!" she said, the child-woman gone in the snap of the command. "He is mine, Colin. If this thing has to be done, I will take him myself.
He opened his mouth to protest, but it was too late, and something about the darkness that seemed to shift just over the threshold kept him from following. He felt embarrassed. He wanted to look back at the others and lift his hands to say I tried. Lilla spared him the moment; she returned with the body cradled easily in her arms, and he fell in beside her, holding her elbow to prevent her from slipping. The stench was gone.
* * *Silently, swiftly, the boats were filled and pushed into the surf. They moved directly east toward the fog's boundary, stopping when they reached a point a mile beyond the jetties' tips.
Colin's arms arched as he rowed the heavy craft, Lilla sitting at the stern, Gran lying between them. But he felt no compulsion to be first at the spot; after all, he thought with a barely stifled laugh, they sure as hell couldn't start without him. The levity shamed him, and he refused to meet Lilla's gaze. He ducked his head and pulled around the already circled boats until he could slip stern first into his place at the top.
The oarlocks were silent, though the oars had been left half submerged in the water. No anchors were thrown, no lines were connected, yet each of the craft maintained the same spacing without needing adjustment. And the dark water in the center was calm, low, as if the ocean were a lake, windless at dusk.
Reverend Graham Otter, standing at the circle's base with his back to the shore, glanced around him once before slipping off his jacket, his black cassock and white collar in startling contrast. He folded his hands at his waist in an attitude of waiting. A moment later he nodded. Lilla rose, turned to face him. Colin followed, watching as the rest of the congregation moved to its feet. There was no struggling for balance, no ripples, no splashes; the boats were still, as were the people in them.
Colin was nervous. Though he assumed he had performed his part well thus far, he suddenly decided this wasn't fair at all. It was his first island funeral, and he should be in one of the other boats, observing, learning, trying to feel the solace that obviously affected the others. But somehow, without his knowing it, he'd been chosen pallbearer, Charon, and God only knew what else. It wasn't fair; he didn't like it; suddenly he turned his head away, blinking aside the flaring afterimage of a match the minister had struck against the shaft of a torch he'd taken from his boat. The cleric held up the flame until it nearly scorched his fingers before bringing it to the cloth soaked almost a day in treated oil. Blue fire, red, spiraled upward and twisted about itself as though it could be bound. Then he handed the torch to the man in the boat beside his, who lit his own torch and passed the first on around the circle until it reached Lilla. She held it close to her face, but Colin could only see the flames rising above her head. When her pause lengthened to a full minute, he thought she would douse it and he swallowed his relief when she finally passed it to her neighbor.
Once it had reached full circle, all the torches were placed in gleaming brass brackets bolted to the sterns. They burned low, with an incessant crackling like dry wood, dark smoke in dark curls rising far above the dark surface.
Blue fire, and red, and pale faces reflecting.
The breakers were muted; no lights on the shore.
The fog began crawling between the boats to the still water.
"Gran," Reverend Otter said then. "Gran, it's time."
Colin saw Lilla's back grow rigid, and he braced himself to grab her in case she changed her mind again. But when she only brought her hands up to take hold of her upper arms he relaxed and tried to listen to what the minister was saying. But he couldn't. He couldn't take his gaze away from the shrouded body, from Lilla's back, from the fingers of fog slipping over the sides.
Reverend Otter droned on; there was a hymn softly sung; yet Colin couldn't help feeling that the others were just as uneasy as he. Garve had told him stories-as had Peg and Annalee, and even Bob Cameron-the highlights of which dealt with the joy of the songs that rose above the sea, the genuine belief there was a better world farther on. That feeling was absent now. And he saw signs of impatient shifting- knees bending and locking, arms swinging, heads nodding.
They want to be gone, he thought, and not just because of Gran.
Then he saw Lilla bend her head for a moment, and realized the reverend had stopped his preaching. Colin waited, wondering if there was something he was supposed to do and cursing Garve for not telling him, staring when Lilla suddenly knelt beside her grandfather and kissed the shroud where his mouth would have been. A slight gesture behind her to keep him where he was, and she slipped her hands under the body, her expression set and her mouth slightly parted. She lifted, shifted, held the dead man against her chest and whispered something to him. Colin strained but couldn't hear her. Then she turned to face the cleric and let the gray bundle slide from her hands into the water, effortlessly, soundlessly, as if it were little more than air.
And despite the weight lashed about its feet, the body floated for several long seconds. Turning through the lacing of fog without disturbing it, sweeping in a complete circle like a compass seeking its direction… until it stopped in front of Lilla.
Then nothing moved but the fog.
Finally, the shroud began sinking, slipping smoothly into the black ocean without leaving a ripple behind. Instantly, it was over, and beginning with Otter the torches were thrown after the body until only Lilla's remained.
And when she suddenly whirled around, he ducked instinctively as she hurled the torch as far as she could toward the horizon. He had no idea why, but he knew what she'd done was wrong. Yet she only turned around to wait for him to row her back to shore.
* * *Matt knew Mom was restless, and suspected she might come up to join him. She'd like the movie, too-
James Bond again in The Man with the Golden Gun. It wasn't so much the shooting and the fights he liked in this one, but the co-star, Christopher Lee, who he knew in real life was Count Dracula. It made the dialogue silly, and sometimes had him giggling hard into his pillow.
When it was obvious she wasn't coming, he slipped off the mattress and wandered around the small room for a minute or two before returning to the bed. There were papers scattered over the quilt from his sketch pad, a handful of felt-tip pens, and a notebook he used to keep track of his drawings. On the walls were a number of pastels he'd done this past summer, taped and tacked and pinned to the white plaster; in the far corner next to the curtained window was an easel that straddled a palette and a case of oils he hadn't yet had the nerve to use; on a single shelf over his bed were two wood carvings that were supposed to be seals but he knew they looked like something no seal ever did; and on the desk were his schoolbooks, already belted together for grabbing in the morning.
He pushed the papers aside and sat, ignoring the flickering from the portable television on the desk. His head shook in dismay. All night he'd been trying to capture the sand castle, and every one of his efforts was a dismal, amateurish failure.
"Nuts, goddamn," he said, and swept the papers to the floor. It was something he hadn't learned yet that was keeping him from doing it right, something he would have to ask Colin about the next time he came to class.
He stretched out, cupped his hands beneath his head, and wondered, not for the first time, if there was something wrong with him inside. Colin had said no, and so had his mother, but if that were true why wasn't his room like anyone else's? There were no pennants on the walls, no cowboy guns in the closet, no footballs or baseballs or an outfielder's mitt. Tommy Fox even had pictures of naked women hidden under his mattress, and he was Matt's age.
But nobody, not anybody put the pictures they drew in school on display in their rooms.
And they definitely hated going to museums-except of course, for the one in New York that had all the dinosaur bones in it, and the stuffed elephants and lions.
No matter what his mother said, he knew he was different. He had to be. And he hated it, hated it a lot. Like when Gran had shown him how to carve things with a knife; he'd done it, done okay for someone who didn't know what he was doing, and it was neat to see how Gran smiled at him in a way he knew no one else got-except maybe Lilla. But the other kids thought it was silly, making things from dead wood. Hated it, like today when the other guys kept poking fun at him while they were building the castle. He didn't say anything to Mr. Ross, but they'd been doing it all afternoon, and even though he was nearly ten he'd almost cried-until Mr. Ross came along and made everything okay.
He remembered the day this past summer that he had told Mr. Ross about, the day with Gran at the luncheonette. There was something funny about the old man's breath that made his nose wrinkle, but Gran was telling him how he used to be a great prince in the island country he came from, and how he bossed everyone around and no one dared laugh at him for being different.
"Good times," Gran had said, picking at his nails with the point of his knife. "They the good days, when I was a young man and had all my teeth." He laughed and slapped his knee. "I tell you, boy, you go with me when I go back and we be king together."
Matt's eyes had nearly popped he opened them so wide. "Yeah? Really?"
Gran had smiled, the true smile he saved for Matt and Lilla. "Oh yes, boy, you believe old Gran when he tell you this is true. Some people here, they don't believe old Gran, but they don't know anything, not these people. They don't know nothing at all what it is like when you be king."
"A bunch of sunburned people in shorts had walked by then, had looked at them, and Matt had heard one of them say "nigger."
Gran heard it too. The knife was jabbed deep into the bench.
"They're stupid, Gran," he'd said quickly, wanting to chase them and give them a karate chop, just like James Bond.
But Gran had put a hard hand on his leg to hold him down, and it was a long time before he spoke again.
"Stupid, yes. But they"-and he waved a hand to include the whole island-" hurt you too. I know. They got no imagination, but I know what you got in here." A bony finger thumped the side of his head, keeping Matt from asking how he knew when no one else did. "We be kings together, okay? Okay?"
Matt agreed readily, and they laughed together. He'd wished he really were a king so he could do something about people who hurt other people. For real, not like in the movies. He wasn't sure, but he thought he'd even kill someone before they could hurt his mother and his teacher, maybe even before they could hurt Lilla. He wasn't sure. But he thought so. If he were a king like Gran said he could be.
But Gran had turned strange, would talk to no one but Lilla, and he guessed the old man was crazy after all.
He shivered and looked over to the window, and wrinkled his nose when he saw the bottom sash still raised. Too cold for that, for sure. On the other hand, if he closed it he wouldn't hear Lilla's singing-if, that is, she sang again tonight. It had been going on for almost a week, and though it spooked his mother, he kind of liked it. One night it would sound like it was coming from the cliffs, and the next it would be coming from the woods on the north shore by Fox's Marina. The night wind took it all over the place. It was sad and it was fast and sometimes it was so lonely sounding he couldn't stand it and wanted to crawl into bed with his mother. She wouldn't let him, though. So he had to stay by the window and look at the backyard and wait until Lilla was happy again.
