Camp Nine: A Novel

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 To understand the story, one must understand the place, for the events could not have transpired anywhere else. Just as the beginning of life itself was dependent on the peculiar environment that made possible its first spark and flash, the story of Camp Nine is a product of the surroundings in which it occurred. The afternoon it happened, in July of 1942, my mother and I had taken our dinner of watermelon and toast on the porch. Both the menu and the location were, in themselves, manifestations of that custom known as summer, where conversations were shorter and slower. The heat, a tiresome, unwelcome guest in every room, drove us outdoors into the shade whenever possible, and dictated a conservation of energy from the earliest hours. It spread over us at sunrise, informing our dreams before we’d even roused from sleep, and sapped our strength at noontime. By suppertime, few philosophies were so keenly felt that one could be compelled to expend the breath to argue. Even our nighttimes, spent tossing in our beds, were made fitful by the heaviness of the air. I was an odd child, tall for my age and gangly, the color of October wheat. My plain features were not improved by my uneven, homemade pageboy haircut. I might have found comfort in having inherited the exotic black silk of my mother’s hair or the patrician blond of 7 my father, but I was dealt instead a mousy and unremarkable brown. My eyes were the deepest, impenetrable black, the kind that took in light but reflected nothing in return. Everything about me seemed to fade into the wallpaper around me. I studied my beautiful mother’s habits, observing her closely for clues on how I, too, could be as fine a lady as she, but it seemed then impossible to attain. I could follow her, but only as a shadow. She was a lovely woman, despite the gray, shirtwaist dress she wore as regularly as a uniform. In those days before Camp Nine changed everything, gray and black were the only colors I recall her wearing, as if she were still in mourning for my father, who by then had been dead for more than five years, or trying to mask the fact that she had once been, and still was, regarded as a great beauty. Her dark eyes were the shape of almonds, and her thick brows were curved and peaked, giving her the appearance when she spoke of being extraordinarily attentive. She wore her lush hair pulled back loosely, the ends curling slightly across the plain fabric on her shoulders. Mother and I took our dinner in small, languid bites. My thoughts at that moment are frozen in time: I was studying a red wasp navigating the spiny crown of a purple coneflower. I don’t know what Mother was thinking. She was probably already contemplating what we would have for our supper. In any event, the last normal, ordinary thing that happened was that my grandfather’s black Lincoln Continental emerged from the cypress bend in Rook Lane and barreled past in a cloud of dust. The wall clock inside our living room sounded once to note the hour. Mother shook her head. “Dinner time in the big house. You can set your watch by Walter’s stomach.” No matter where in the county he was when dinner time approached, my grandfather appeared every day precisely at one o’clock, as if he had internal springs and dials. The Lincoln slowed and bounced up into the concrete drive across our gate, disappearing from view behind a grove of oaks. Mother and Grandpa feuded famously, about things trivial and 8 — Vivienne Schiffer important alike. Though she was only his daughter-in-law, I now realize they were more alike than not, but at the time that was one of the many things about which I was unaware. I was just twelve that summer, but Mother often treated me as if I were much older, probably because she had no one else with whom to share her thoughts. She had confided in me that her latest quarrel with Grandpa was over Hammond Ryfle, our plantation foreman. Mr. Ryfle was supposed to have already cleared Mother’s hundred acres upstream of Black Bayou, but spring had come and had passed without him attending to it. He was, instead, occupied with...