served tacos and we discovered that we all loved them more than any other lunch food at Field School. For some reason, Rick felt compelled to trade his prized red-and-blue Richard Petty Matchbox car for Goose Fraser’s unwanted taco and chivalrously presented it to us. We showed our appreciation by sharing it with him, after which the three of us raced through the wide halls back to the classroom in spite of the No Running rule, screaming, “I love tacos!”
Even today I can almost smell the chalk dust in the air as I remember how, under Miss Davison’s stern eye, we laboriously wrote “I will not run in the hall” a hundred times on wrinkled notebook paper with our stubby pencils. In the back of the school bus on the way home, we unanimously agreed that ILT was our shorthand for I Love Tacos. On the reverse side of one of the “I will not run in the hall” papers, the three of us added our first initials to ILT so we’d have names that rhymed. Rick became Rilt, Martine was Milt and I was Tilt. The password to our secret club was “Burrito,” and that was what we also named the club goldfish, which belonged to Rick.
I was the introvert, my nose always stuck in a book. Rick was outgoing, the kind of guy everyone liked. And Martine—well, she was artistic and creative, mercurial, flighty and fun. It wasn’t long before we discovered that we worked well together. Never a dull moment, Dad would always say, but it was clear that he doted on Rick, and soon, he considered Rick to be the son he’d always wanted.
By the time summer arrived, the three of us were inseparable and our parents had become good friends. We all lived in a new country-club subdivision grandiosely named Windsor Manor and populated with big two-story brick houses where professional people like my dad, a criminal lawyer, and my mother, a volunteer in local charities, lived and reared their families.
Windsor Manor abounded in vacant lots lushly shaded by tall and fragrant loblolly pines as well as a goodly number of oak trees cloaked in wisteria vine. The three of us claimed these lots for our own. Our tree house, erected in the low fork of an oak in the woods not far from our house, was the neighborhood gathering spot for all the kids.
Martine and I were raised Southern, my parents’ families both having settled South Carolina before the American Revolution; Barrineaus and Woods fought for the Confederacy in what we were taught to call the War of Northern Aggression. Our grandmother, Claire Dawson Barrineau, signed Martine and me up for the Daughters of the American Revolution the day after we were born, and Rick’s father’s most prized possession was a copy of the Order of Secession, signed by one of his ancestors. He hung it over his desk at Carolina Gas and Energy, of which he was president.
That summer after Rick arrived was the first year that we three spent time together at Tappany Island, an unspoiled barrier island off the South Carolina coast reachable only by a picturesque side-swinging drawbridge. Rick’s mother usually spent the whole summer there with Rick and his elder brother, Hal. Boyd McCulloch, Rick’s father, drove down on weekends, and the first time we were invited to the cottage, Martine, our parents and I accompanied him in his big Roadmaster station wagon.
After a wonderful weekend, Mom and Dad departed on Sunday night with Boyd, but Martine and I stayed for the rest of the week. We settled happily into a guest room connected to another by a bath. Our room was decorated with antiques, heirloom quilts and hand-crocheted dresser scarves. We loved the ornate iron bedsteads, delighted in the wispy, drifting curtains that could be looped back to expose the view of the dunes with a slice of blue ocean beyond. Ever after, that was our room when we stayed at the cottage.
I mean to tell you, Sweetwater Cottage was no palace. It was an unpretentious old grande dame of a house, built high off the ground but not spiked up on stilts like the ones they build in flood zones today. The cottage was surrounded by a veranda, which we always called the porch because, Rick’s father said, veranda sounded much too granda for a blowsy old lady like the cottage.
Rick’s grandfather, Harold McCulloch, built the house on several oceanfront lots back in the 1940s when land was cheap, and the cottage sat far away from its neighbors. Over many years, the original three rooms were expanded into the present L-shaped structure with the Lighthouse room on top. The shingles on the outside have been painted many colors and were, in my childhood, a milky blue. Lilah Rose, Rick’s mom, who delighted in decorating and redecorating both the cottage and her house in Windsor Manor, had the shingles painted yellow some years back, and she’s the one who skirted the space under the house with white lattice.
Spreading oak trees shrouded in wispy curtains of gray moss shaded the house; dried fronds of palmettos at the edge of the dense woods across the road clattered in the breeze. The island abounded in roads of white sand, fine as sifted sugar; glistening salt marshes sheltered all manner of wildlife; tidal creeks wended their pristine, unspoiled way through the island. And best of all, we had the wide majestic ocean with its many moods.
Across the road was the river and the marsh, home to a variety of creatures both large and small. I loved to watch the birds—dapper little crested kingfishers, diving from tree limbs to catch their dinner, ospreys soaring and wheeling against the brilliant blue sky, graceful white ibis stalking the shallows. But we saw lots of animals, too, raccoons and otters and turtles. Even a couple of alligators.
I guess you’ve figured out that Tappany Island was a kids’ paradise. Our primary playmates on the island were the innumerable nieces and nephews of Queen, who cooked and cleaned for Rick’s family during the summer. Queen invariably arrived for work accompanied by a gaggle of beautiful brown-skinned children. When these happy denizens of the island weren’t available to fish with us or play tag or join us in pestering Queen to whip up a batch of her wonderful featherlight waffles, the three of us, Rick, Martine and I, often rode bikes to Jeter’s Market at the crossroads of Bridge Road and Center Street.
The store was fragrant with the smoky scent of the barbecued pork that the Jeters made in the wooden shed out back and with whatever fresh fish local fishermen brought in that day from the nearby public docks. Old toothless Mr. Jeter never minded if we kids read comic books without buying them, perhaps because while reading, we consumed great quantities of boiled peanuts and Gummi Bears, which he charged to the McCullochs’ account.
We walked every one of those winding roads. We yanked untold numbers of blue crabs out of the marsh and poked curiously at jellyfish stranded on the wide sandy beach by the tide. So happy were we during our first summer there that we vowed on both spit and blood to meet on Tappany Island every single summer of our lives as long as we lived.
Making such a promise exhilarated us, gave the stamp of permanency to our extraordinary friendship, and was the occasion for Lilah Rose to snap a picture. We’re nine years old, arms flung around each other, eyes squinting into the bright sunshine and wearing T-shirts with our club names Rilt, Milt and Tilt emblazoned across the front. Martine is sticking out her tongue at the camera, and Rick’s fingers are forked behind my head, giving me devil’s horns.
That’s how it started for Rick and Martine and me. Later, after I read The Three Musketeers and we watched the movie video together at my insistence, we adopted “all for one, one for all” as our motto. It was unthinkable that anything would ever come between us.
Unthinkable—but inevitable. What we didn’t know is that it would be one of us.
As I said, we were all best friends, but I first felt something special for Rick over and above friendship the day of our class picnic when were in sixth grade.
Our middle school was located across the street from a city park, and at the end of the school year, the room mothers brought fried chicken, potato salad and brownies and spread the food out on the picnic tables there. After we ate lunch, we ran wild, playing Crack the Whip and Red Rover while the mothers chatted with the teacher nearby. The boundaries were impressed upon us: no leaving the picnic area, and a buddy system was strongly enforced.
For
