The day after my trip to the cottage, the rain began. “I’m surprised it didn’t come sooner,” remarked Aunt Charlotte at the end of the second day. “June is always the wettest month. I hope you’ll be able to amuse yourself, Marcus.”
The first two days of the downpour were a gift. I wasn’t ready to repeat that walk to the cottage. And it was a relief to have some indoor time when I wasn’t expected to act like a boy pleased to be at the beach. All I had to do was give the appearance of amusing myself. This turned out to be easy. I could lie in the hammock on the covered porch and watch the tides going in and out. I liked the aches all down my legs from the day before. I doubted I had ever walked that far in my life. The aches were a reminder that I had made it. I liked to go back over the moment when the sunburnt man, bouncing south in his little white truck, gave me a thumbs-up. During the rainy days, I was to see the white truck bouncing up and down the beach but couldn’t tell if it was him inside. When it rained, there probably wasn’t as much trash in the yellow barrels. I wondered whether he thought of me. But then I had to remind myself that he knew nothing about me, except that I had set out to walk north that day, that I was out of shape, and that I was later seen still walking north—probably farther than he had thought me capable of walking. He didn’t know I lived here full time: for all he knew I was a one-day visitor with a backpack.
I had Aunt Charlotte’s two books by the local ladies. One was called Chronicles of a Legendary Island and the other Our Island Then and Now. I kept both books with me in the hammock so I could be seen looking into them on Aunt Charlotte’s sporadic trips to the bathroom or to the refrigerator to grab a yogurt or uncork a fresh bottle of wine. Though my back was to the house, I was conscious of her checking on me through the window. Just as when I lay turned away on the porch of Grief Cottage and had been conscious of something checking me out from behind. The only difference was: one was an everyday occurrence, the other implausible—maybe just a lonely boy imagining something “in order to sound psychic or special.”
First I leafed through the books looking for illustrations. In both there were lots of old maps and reproductions of records and deeds in old-fashioned handwriting, mostly dating from the 1800s. Transfers of property dated as far back as 1791. There were rough line-drawings of the island with the names of owners printed out on little numbered squares representing the lots where the first houses were built. Both ladies’ books had this same map, labeled Courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society.
The first numbered square at the north tip of the island had belonged to a family called Hassel. Then, some pages later in the Then and Now book, there was a map where the squares bore the names of later owners. #1 Hassel was later sold to Wortham, who later sold to Barbour. But there was a star next to #1, which led to a footnote saying that since Hurricane Hazel, this property was now the site of a ruin “slated for demolition.” The Then and Now, published in the 1970s, said the demolition was already being announced. Aunt Charlotte had come to the island in the late seventies. Neither book contained a photograph of Grief Cottage, though some other old houses were often included as a backdrop for blurred family pictures: a group of women picking shrimp on the porch of “Sunrise Cottage”; men in hats standing beside a Model-T; women with bathing suits like dresses and men in costumes like long johns setting out for the beach. At frequent intervals there would be a posed snapshot of a black person in apron or overalls looking up from work to grin at the camera.
The only mention of “Grief Cottage” was at the end of the “Fierce Storms” chapter in the Legendary Island book. After pages of blow-by-blow descriptions of houses floating out to sea and entire families and their servants dropping one by one from trees into the engulfing waves of the 1822 and 1893 hurricanes, a single paragraph was devoted to Hurricane Hazel (“the most devastating storm since 1893”), which struck with merciless fury in 1954, “the year before the island got telephones.” But due to an efficient neighbor warning system, most of the islanders made hurried escapes to safe places on the mainland. The only missing people had been a fourteen-year-old boy and his parents, an out-of-state family staying in the Barbour cottage after the summer season. No one knew their fates for sure because their bodies were never found. It had been a sad tale of out-of-state people underestimating hurricanes, the book said: the parents having gone out in the storm to search for the boy and the boy possibly having gone out in search of the parents. The house itself, the oldest on the island and tucked safely behind its dunes, withstood the tempest, all except the south porch, which was destroyed by fire before or during the hurricane. Since then the cottage had remained empty and been allowed to fall into ruin. Islanders had taken to calling it “Grief Cottage.”
I was glad to be able to report my findings to Aunt Charlotte. “It was an out-of-state family, but it didn’t give their names or mention anything about a cigarette.”
“I must have heard that part from the locals, then. Did both books mention this out-of-state family?”
“No, just the one. The same one that had that story about the turtle eggs.”
“I’ll bet the Confederate ghost made both of the books.”
“Yeah, they had the same painting of him walking along the beach.”
“That painting has become an industry all by itself. You can order it in a variety of sizes, either as a framed print, a metal print, or a canvas print.”
“What’s a metal print?”
“When the painting is reproduced on a thin sheet of aluminum. It gives a very high gloss effect. Looks good on large walls in offices.”
“But they don’t get to have originals. The artist doesn’t paint it fresh, over and over again, like you.”
“He can’t. He died in the 1930s, shortly after he painted it. His heirs are still raking in the bucks from that one picture. He was an excellent landscape painter. I saw a local retrospective once. That painting was the only time he ever put in a human figure. What would he think if he knew his one gray guy would make him famous?”
“Do you ever think about being famous?”
“As I said, Marcus, I’m thankful to have this fluke of a talent. It’s my livelihood and I enjoy it. When you’re painting you don’t dwell on old miseries. There’s something about the smell of pigment and the way time becomes meaningless when you’re painting.”