Night Songs Read Free Page A

She's not really my babysitter, y'know. She's the housekeeper. I'm too big for a babysitter."
        "Right," Colin said quickly, laughing silently without showing a smile.
        "Mrs. Wooster," the boy said a shade louder, "she thinks it's silly anyway. She says people oughta be buried in the ground, not in the water."
        "She isn't island, Matt. She thinks we're strange."
        "She eats pits. Peach pits and plum pits and orange pits." He giggled. "That's weirder than burying people in the water."
        Colin admitted the boy might be right, though it was easy to understand the housekeeper's attitude. There were no provisions for the dead on Haven's End. The nearest town was ten miles inland and had the only cemetery within easy driving distance. None of the island locals bothered to use it. They had lived here for too long, for too many generations, and those who'd first settled here during the Revolution had chosen the Atlantic to be their graveyard. It was illegal, but even those who'd left for the rumored excitement of the mainland were able to find a certain indefinable comfort in the slow trail of boats that would slip through the twilight, form a tight ring from bow to stern, raise high the torches, and break into a deep-throated jubilant hymn as the enshrouded corpse was eased into the current. There were rumors, of course, among the busybodies who sat in the park in Flocks: that the island's inhabitants were obviously immortal since none of them seemed to take sick and die; that rites of foul cannabalism and satanism were performed during the hours of the darkest full moon; that vampirism flourished; that they were nothing more than a colony of ghouls.
        Haven's End didn't care. The balm for its grief was stronger than gossip.
        
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        Matt paused to shift the hamper from right hand to left, and hitched mightily at his trunks to keep them high on his hips. Then he looked up into the trees, off to one side, a quick check to be sure Colin was still there.
        "Pits. Ugh."
        Colin smiled.
        "Did… did you know Gran D'Grou?"
        "Sure did. He was one of the first people I met when I came here." A short laugh for the memory. "He said I didn't draw so hot but I had good hands."
        "Did you like him?"
        He frowned and pulled thoughtfully at a vagrant curl tucked around the back of his left ear. Gran was a black pipe cleaner twisted into the vague shape of a man, with an afterthought lump of black clay for a head-eyes gouged, mouth gouged, cheeks thumbed in, and a surprisingly aquiline nose. Only the old man's hands seemed carefully planned, long-fingered and dexterous, more expressive than his eyes. When he spoke, he whispered as if from the back of a sea cave, and when he wasn't working at the family luncheonette, when he wasn't doing his carving on the bench out front and laughing with the children, he was walking the cliffs and the woods with dark rum snug around him.
        But had Colin liked him?
        Gran, as more than one person had been eager to tell him, had arrived penniless and frightened from the West Indies with his infant daughter, saying little except to let them all know he was determined to take advantage of what he called America's vast pot of gold. He wasted no time establishing the luncheonette. He charmed the ladies with his French-Caribbean accent, and fascinated the men with stories of the islands he had visited as a young man. In time, his daughter found a husband who had no objection to taking Gran's name; in time, there was a granddaughter who worshipped the old man and became his constant shadow.
        And in time Gran knew he would never be rich.
        Why he had believed money would fall into his hands no one knew; why he refused to visit the mainland was a mystery as well. But he did, and he did, and eventually he turned to drinking, to the children, and to his carving.
        In time his