Isis - Douglas Clegg [3]
He had eyes that always seemed red and smudged with sleeplessness, and his lips were thin and drawn back over an uneven row of teeth. He seemed perpetually smeared with a slight layer of coal dust, as if he’d been rooting around in the cellars. He rarely wore anything other than a gray coat, and beneath this, a stiff white shirt with a heavy white collar, both of which the maid had to press daily. His shoes and trousers were gray, as well, and he carried the Bible with him, though it was worn and its binding crackled and threatened to turn to dust each time he opened it.
“To spill thy seed,” he often warned Spence and Harvey, “is to invoke the wrath of God.”
To me, he would say (even when I was eleven or twelve), “Woman, thou art a temptation to Man. Clean thyself and thy thoughts. Scrub the unholy places of thy body, and bind thy flesh that it may be secret from our eyes.”
His mania did not limit itself to us. He waggled his finger at my mother, declaiming verse and psalm and invoking the deity as if the Lord were his personal servant. My mother had enough, and by the end of our first year at Belerion Hall, she locked her father-in-law into the North Wing of the estate. While servants might go there to care for him, we children could only see him on Christmas and on his birthday.
Still, we heard his shouts of wrath and brimstone and Babylon from the windows of the North Wing, often late into the night. The Gray Minister stood there in the smear of light from the flickering lamp at the window and cried out ungodly things upon our heads or upon the heads of the kings of the world.
“When your father returns,” my mother told me as she tucked me in one night when I had been agitated over my grandfather’s caterwauling, “we will find your grandfather a proper place. He is not himself. His memories are gone. This ceaseless rain must also prey upon him. We must pity him.” She kissed me on the forehead, and we said our prayers together as my grandfather continued crying out at the top of his lungs from the windows of the North Wing, “The Whore of Babylon rides upon the King of Hell! I have seen her! I have seen her! The Great Harlot! The Devil’s Dam!”
I loathed the place in the rainy times. My mother had a peculiar ailment that seemed part sorrow and part silence and grew worse when the weather grew rough and cold. In the winters, she took to her bed for weeks at a time, only seen by a nurse and the girl who took her supper. My mother’s headaches increased then, and she had begun getting deliveries in the afternoon from a druggist in the village whose boy dropped off two packages of tincture of laudanum, three times a week; and if the boy on the bicycle did not come, Mrs. Haworth sent Percy, our gardener’s son, into the village for a small bottle of Dr. Witherspoon’s Vita-Health Tonic, which smelled distinctly of rum.
Once or twice I slipped in to see her while she ate, and she would stare off at the ceiling and run her fingers through my hair and talk aimlessly.
“Your father is important, you know that. He must be away. He must be. But it is hard sometimes. We all miss him,” she said with a faint smell of tonic on her breath. “Your hair is pretty. It seems golden. In the summer, we can go to London. Wouldn’t that be fun? Yes, it would be. Perhaps your father will meet us there. We can go to the theater or to the shops and have high tea, if you like. We can hire a driver. Or the train. Perhaps the train.”
I did not see her much during the stormy days, for it saddened me more than the mad cries of my grandfather at the upper windows.
2
When the sun came out—for the summers at Belerion Hall were often long and pleasant—I saw the distant stone arches out along the tidal island that seemed to float atop turquoise waves. I could sit near the cliff’s edge on a beautiful summer’s day and imagine the white sand below the cliffs to be full of pirate