Up Island: A Novel by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 0061715719
Publisher: Avon A
Published: 1997-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

THE DAY I MOVED WAS THICK and gray; last night’s

wind had blown in a canopy of low clouds that

promised rain. The drive up island was dun-colored,

but the beginning colors of autumn were oddly enhanced by

the dullness. The stand of beetlebung trees at the crossroads

in Chilmark was beginning to redden a leaf here and there.

Livvy had said that in the autumn they were one of the

Vineyard’s glories. My first New England autumn: I felt as

excited as a child going on a vacation in new territory. It was

how I would live, I thought; how I would create a new life

up here: I would taste as fully as I could each new experience,

new sight, new sound. I would leave my baggage at home.

I did not want to waste any time on regret and pain. The

great stew of unresolved emotion over my mother and my

marriage would just have to simmer on the back burner until

I got around to it.

Moreover, if I were going to make a fresh life in this place,

I had better get on with it right away. For the first time I felt,

on that drive, an urgent sense that my time of being was no

longer limitless. The sense left a residue of sucking blackness,

as if a curtain had parted briefly and let me look into an

abyss. “Mortality,” my mother used

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UP ISLAND / 249

to exclaim. “You can’t live until you confront your own

mortality.” But somehow she had never confronted her own,

probably not even when it happened. I dumped the mortal

blackness into the stew pot with the rest of my ghosts and

slammed the lid down.

The first thing I did when I drove into the glade was to

stop by and look in on Dennis Ponder. Get it over with; set

up a routine; lay a firm foundation of quick, impersonal, no-

nonsense contact. I would, I thought, try checking on him

first thing in the mornings and late in the afternoons. That

way, if he needed anything, I could get it during the daytime

and deliver it to him before dinnertime. Like feeding the

swans, I intended that the care and feeding of Dennis Ponder

be as efficient and nominal as I could make it. I did not

imagine he wanted me hovering over him any more than

Charles and Diana obviously did.

No smoke curled from the chimney of the larger camp this

morning, though it was considerably cooler than the day

before. I walked up the steps and across the porch, and lifted

my hand to knock, then saw that the door was ajar. I was

instantly uneasy.

“Mr. Ponder?” I called, halfway expecting to hear nothing,

as I had before. But a voice called out, “Come in. Back in the

bedroom.”

I walked through the big living space, seeing that a fire was

laid but not lit, and that the stove in the kitchen was unlit,

too. There was a wood box beside it like the one in my kit-

chen, this one filled with neatly hewn logs, and the stove’s

black-iron door stood open, but no fire burned inside. There

was no coffee or tea on the counter, no sign of breakfast.

Either he

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