“The first three letters of Jesus’s name in Greek,” she said, and Lachicotte obligingly spelled out the name for me: I-h-s-u-s.
We had gone back and forth about choosing the appropriate stone to lie on top of Johnny Dace’s grave. Aunt Charlotte and Lachicotte and I were dividing the cost among us.
“But if we just put his birth and death dates, it’ll look like any old boy who was born in 1940 and died fourteen years later,” I reasoned.
“Yes, but when in doubt, less is usually more,” said Aunt Charlotte. “We want to stay away from the maudlin.”
“What’s maudlin?” I asked.
“Smarmy, sentimental, melodramatic, like for instance, ‘Lost in Hurricane Hazel, 1954, Miraculously Found, 2004.’ That still doesn’t tell enough and it uses far too many letters.”
“Let’s think what he would want,” Lachicotte finally suggested, “if he were here (he-ah) to give the order himself.”
By the time Lachicotte and I headed south in the Bentley Derby to the monument place, we had settled on the simplest information.
“That’s probably enough,” I said. “When Mom and I used to discuss our funerals and burials, she said all she wanted on her stone was ALICE HARSHAW, and her dates. She didn’t even want her family name on her stone. I still haven’t decided.”
“Decided what?” Lachicotte asked. “What you want on yours?”
“No, I haven’t ordered Mom’s stone yet. My ad litem back in North Carolina is going to take care of it when I decide. The money’s all set up to pay for it. All I have to do is say what I want on her stone.”
The young woman at the monument place sat down with us and made some sketches. JOHNNY DACE with birth and death dates. She showed us the possible fonts on a chart. We both liked the name in square capital letters. “It looks like a Latin inscription,” said Lachicotte.
“I wish we had something more,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Well, like those monks have. Something above themselves to watch over them.”
“There’s always the good old STTL the Romans put on their gravestones,” said Lachicotte. “Sit Tibi Terra Levis. It means ‘May the earth lie lightly upon thee.’ ”
“I love that! It’s perfect—especially for him.”
“Latin was the one thing I loved at my boarding schools,” Lachicotte said.
“But maybe we should just have it in English, so people around here will know what it means.”
“We can do that,” said Lachicotte.
“And you know what? I think it would be the right thing for my mom’s stone. Only maybe both the Latin and then the English underneath. My mother had a special thing about Latin.”
“You can do that, too,” said Lachicotte.
***
Aunt Charlotte was to become what she called “an intermittent recoverer.” At first she tried to limit herself to a bottle and a half a day. She did her hand exercises religiously and began to paint again, though according to her not ever with the same range of motion. The publicity surrounding the Johnny Dace remains brought her a flurry of new commissions for paintings of Grief Cottage. She worked from my photos, and from her memory of her earlier paintings. The cottage was demolished soon after the publicity died down, and Charlie Coggins quickly relieved himself of the two lots to an eager buyer. Then the new owner’s neighbors, which included Ed Bolton, advised the man to call in erosion experts before he started building. The experts found that the north tip of the island was dissolving at such a rate that any structure he built would probably be washed away by 2025.
Aunt Charlotte tired herself fulfilling the new commissions and when she was back up to three bottles a day, she let Lachicotte and me talk her into going on a month’s retreat at a very nice recovery villa in Savannah. Lachicotte moved in with me, making my breakfast, driving me to school, and leaving the toilet seat up. After that she made it through a two-year dry spell, during which she built an addition onto her cottage: a bedroom and bath and a north-facing deck where she could paint outside without people spying over her shoulder and making stupid remarks. After she had her “deck-studio,” her painting underwent a significant change. Small canvases, though not as small as four by sixes. You looked at them and thought, “Oh, she’s become an abstract impressionist.” But if you kept looking long enough you thought, “No, wait, that square of grays and lavenders is a close-up of a cloud after sunset, the way it looks when the artist has penetrated the mass and shape of its vapor. No, wait, that’s the surf at high tide, the way it looks when the artist has gone beyond the outline of the waves and is among the droplets.”
We lost a third of my trust in the crash of 2008. Aunt Charlotte continued to draw her “nice stipend,” which she deposited straight over into my college fund. “Look at it this way, Marcus. When we were in clover, I was able to draw on my old savings to build my addition, and you got four years with your expensive psychiatrist. We’re going to be okay. Whatever happens, you’ve proved yourself smart enough to walk away with a hundred scholarships, and my ‘droplet and vapor’ paintings, as you call them, aren’t doing half bad. People can live with them. I like them myself. They’re both soothing and strange, and they enlarge beautifully on aluminum prints. A lawyer in Columbia bought six of them for her office.”
Lachicotte’s sudden death in 2013 sent her back for an extended stay at the villa in Savannah. In exchange for reduced rates to cover her stay, she gave art lessons to other guests, demonstrating the therapeutic values of painting with the non-dominant hand. (“You will uncover all sorts of things about yourself,” she promised her fellow recoverers. “Your unpracticed hand will waver and wobble into places your controlling hand would never let you near.”) It turned out she hadn’t needed to barter, as Lachicotte had divided his worldly goods between “My dear niece, Althea,” and “My good friend, Charlotte Lee.”