13
GREAT-GRANDMOTHER LEROY was ill for months, but I didn’t realize how seriously ill she was until Grandfather moved her downstairs from her rooms in the attic. She moved into the room across the hall from what had been my father’s bedroom when he was a boy and was now the bedroom I used when I visited. She never left the bed. For several weeks before she died, she didn’t speak. Sometimes when I visited, I sat beside her bed for an hour or so and talked without even pausing for a response. I knew that she wasn’t going to say anything, so I just talked on and on, quicker and quicker, to keep the silence from settling over her like a shroud. When I ran out of events at school, episodes with my playmates, things I had learned, and things I had heard or seen, I recounted for her episodes from the Larry Peters books, and when I came to those gaps between scenes, between chapters, when the action in one chapter ended and the action of the next, set somewhere else, hadn’t yet begun, I filled those gaps, as, years earlier, I had filled the gaps in my understanding of the Leroy family history when I had recited it for her in her attic rooms, with sawdust—that is, with episodes that I made up on my own, as one uses sawdust to fill the cracks in the bottom of a wooden boat. Throughout all my chatter, Great-grandmother never said a thing.
But then, one afternoon, Great-grandmother suddenly interrupted me, as if she had heard enough at last. I was startled by her voice. I hadn’t expected to hear her talk at all, but I must have had in the back of my mind the idea that if she were to speak, her voice would be as thin and tired as her face had become. Instead, it was nearly as strong as it had always been, and it deceived me into thinking that she had suddenly gotten better.
“Peter,” she said. “I have a present for you.”
“You do?” I glanced around the room. “Where is it?” I asked.
“Upstairs,” she said. “You go up and get it.”
I went upstairs and opened the door to her rooms. Something strange had happened to these rooms while she had been out of them. Left alone, the things there had begun to claim ownership. The chair where Great-grandmother used to sit and carve coconuts to represent Leroys had become the strongest personality in the room now, and it sat in command, dark and heavy, in front of the windows, silhouetted against the curtained light. I looked around, but for a while I couldn’t find anything that looked like a present. Then, on one of the shelves that held the coconuts, I saw a box, nearly cubical. The box wasn’t wrapped, or even tied with ribbon, but it was taped shut, and when I took it from the shelf, I found, written on the top, in pencil, the words FOR PETER.
From the heft and size, I was certain that the box held a coconut. A lump formed in my throat, and tears filled my eyes. I decided at once that Great-grandmother had carved a coconut to represent herself, and that by giving it to me she was telling me that she expected to die. I lifted the lid gravely, slowly, holding my hands symmetrically, palms parallel, fingers extended, raising the lid directly upward and slowly setting it down to one side, for I had begun to serve as an altar boy at the Babbington Episcopal Church and had developed an exaggerated sense of ceremony. Great-grandmother’s coconut heads looked so like one another, and I was so completely prepared to find one carved in Great-grandmother’s likeness and to feel grief at the sight of it, that for a moment or two I didn’t recognize that the coconut represented me. Not only had Great-grandmother carved the coconut in my likeness, but she had carved me laughing, though the faces of the other Leroys were tight-lipped and stern. I hurried downstairs, smiling.
Great-grandmother was chuckling when I came into the bedroom. “I always meant to get around to you,” she said.
“Thanks, Grandma,” I said. “Is it all right if I take it home with me?”
“Of course it’s all right, Peter,” she said. “You can have all of them.”
This gift brought with it a pleasure so buoyant that it was dizzying, almost frightening. I kissed Great-grandmother, and as soon as I left the room where she lay I could feel the lightness of my delight lifting me from the floor, feel myself drifting upward as easily as a soaring bird, up the stairs to her room, where I spent the rest of the afternoon drifting on the air there, so dense with memories and dust, and playing with my heads.
WHEN I CAME DOWNSTAIRS much later, with the head of Black Jacques under my left arm and my own under my right, the door to the room where Great-grandmother lay was locked, and my parents were in the living room with Grandfather and Grandmother, making plans for the funeral.
THAT NIGHT I lay in bed, wakeful and anxious and hurt. Everything seemed wrong. Everything seemed confused. My thoughts were turbid, roiling, like wrack stirred up by a storm. I couldn’t make sense of them, and I couldn’t drive them away. Then, at last, I saw through the murk a heartening yellow light, and after a while I could see that it was coming from the windows of the Peterses’ living room, where everyone was gathered to trade wisecracks after dinner, where no one good was going to die, where things were as they ought to be, and since there was a rowboat handy, I stepped into it, shoved off, and began rowing. With each stroke, my mad and disappointing world receded, and from Kittiwake Island I could hear Lucinda calling me, calling me to come in now, to come in off Murky Bay and join them in the living room, and she was calling me Larry.
In Topical Guide 199, Mark Dorset considers Silence: As Sadness; Silence: As a Vacuum to be Filled; Sawdust: As Filler; Death: As an Absence; Traits, of Character, of Personality; and Rowboat: Man in a from this episode.
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🎧 199: Great-grandmother Leroy ...