Swan, page 17
J. J. spotted the gun cabinet part in an instant. He kept his own cabinet locked. Back then, no one did. He and Ginger were raised around guns and knew not to touch them. He read the report to Ginger, who was tearing off her thumbnail in her teeth. “Hell, there’s some explanation.” He looked at Ralph’s quizzical expression. Son of a bitch, he thinks Daddy did it. “My dad couldn’t have raised a hand against her. Is that what that fuckup said? You don’t believe that. That’s crap. All these years we’ve had a suicide. Now we have a father who’s a murderer? Do we get to choose?”
As he spoke, J. J. knew without hesitation which he would choose. Nothing could be worse than his mother shooting her heart out.
“Nobody’s saying that. Nobody’s accusing anyone. Yeah, the agent brought it up as a possibility. He doesn’t know your daddy from Adam. We don’t have a lot to go on, do we? Can I get you some coffee? Carol always makes a strong pot.”
Neither answered. “Also, Daddy is like a big baby now. He’s slumped over in a stupor half the time. He certainly doesn’t have the I.Q. at this point to break into her grave. It’s preposterous even to think of that. If there were any conceivable reason anyway.” She dismissed the question of Wills’s guilt from her mind as soon as J. J. raised it. Odd to think of Daddy’s I.Q. Once he was an idealistic young doctor, who’d refused to step into the family business. For as long as he’d been gone, Ginger had felt an irritated knot of anger toward him. He brought this on himself. But what happened to him went way beyond the bounds of just deserts. Other people had bouts of madness or drunkenness, recovered and went on with normal lives. It shouldn’t have happened to a dog. Ginger felt the same stunned glimmer of elation as J. J. A random crime was a whole different grief.
In the folded memory, Ginger still has her hand out, the immense calm of childhood about to be ended, she’s about to open the door but the memory cracks—she always called first, “Mama, hey, I’m home, let me in.”
Let me in! Always, always, her mother kept the screen door latched, ever since gypsies came through town and stole her underwear off the line. Almost everyone in Swan left their doors unlocked, even at night. Catherine locked hers. But the door swung open in Ginger’s hand. Her mother had unlatched the door for someone, a friend, a repairman, a neighbor. She blurted this out.
“Someone she knew. Or maybe she just left the door open this time.” Ralph was taking notes. Good. He would have some things to tell Gray.
“J. J., how could I not have remembered this?”
“Because of what was on the other side of the door.”
She could never remember her walk home from school that day. In memory, she left the playground, and then she was hit by the sight of her mother. She ran, she’s running still down the white road, Mrs. Rowen’s floury hands around her, then nothing else until the funeral. When she remembered the dark circle of blood, she was always twelve, wanting to bang her head on the floor.
J. J. kept reading. “Look here, Charlotte Crowder, Mama’s old friend, called up,” he read on, his finger following the words, “but there’s no follow-through here? What did she know?” Wills had cut off everyone after Catherine’s death, J. J. remembered. Charlotte sent notes and called at first, then she stopped. J. J. hadn’t thought of her in years. “I wonder if she confronted Dad, if Lily knew she’d called the sheriff.”
Ginger wandered into the outer office and came back with a mug of coffee. J. J. stared at the doodle in Ralph’s grandfather’s hand, something scratched over—he made out an S.
“We can speculate all day. Sorry to say so, but it’s the easiest crime in the world,” Ralph smoothly echoed Gray. “Husband goes after the wife and it’s your word against his. Nobody can prove a thing.”
“But how could he have thought Daddy could do such a thing?” Ginger became outraged. “Oh, Ralph, I know you can’t speak for him, but do you have any idea?”
Ralph didn’t want to continue Gray’s speculation about a lover in the wings, or to go into how his grandfather was indebted to Big Jim for swinging the sheriff’s election. “I’ll just be blunt. Your dad’s the only lead out there—it’s based on statistics, not on anything real. Why didn’t my granddad do a better investigation? I think he was in Big Jim’s pocket his whole life. He might have been grateful for certain things. There’s the possibility that he was protecting your family. Women, you know, they get unhappy, don’t see any way out—they kill themselves. A murder might have stirred up some old shame. God only knows.” Could his grandfather have been lame enough to think it just wasn’t polite to inquire too closely?
He shook his head. “We can go two ways—start investigating a murder or depend on solving this by finding out who, uh, violated the grave. From my point of view, I’ve got to follow up on the latter. I’m sure you’d want to pursue both,” or maybe not, he thought, “but the GBI agent says there’s no way to trace the killer, short of a confession, after this long. He said when a trail is this cold, finding the killer usually happens only if a surprise confession pops up, some old guilt working its way out. That may be years from now. Maybe never. Let’s just get her back in the ground, when she’s finally released on Monday, and hope to close the case.”
Ginger looked at the obituary from the local paper, with her mother’s photograph above it. She recognized it as her mother’s engagement picture, which used to sit on Wills’s desk at his office. She had an impressive forehead and direct eyes. Her lips formed the perfect cupid’s bow of her era. Around her neck was the flat gold necklace her father gave her when she was eighteen, against her mother’s wishes. Ginger could hear Mema, He spoiled her. She wants too much. Her mother always loved that necklace. Her gaze was serene; nothing ever could go wrong. She looked out from thirty-five years ago into a future that did not include her two puzzled children huddled in the sheriff’s office going over her file, her husband propped into a chair by a window overlooking the weedy tennis court of a nursing home.
HOLT WHITEFIELD USUALLY VISITED the cemetery with his mother on Thursday mornings. It was something for them to do together. Today she refused to go and considering the shock she’d had out there, he was relieved. Instead, he took her to the Three Sisters, so crowded this morning that they had to sit by the door. He read the Macon paper while she chatted with everyone coming and going. Catherine Mason was in the news, page one, a small article about the exhumation, but what, really, was there to say? No one had a single clue. Emily brought a platter of bacon and grits with a side order of limp toast that not even the homemade pear preserves could redeem. “Eleanor, bless your heart, what an awful thing to happen to you and Lily. Those children were in here this morning, J. J. scowling as usual and Ginger sweet as she can be.” On his way out, Father Tim Tyson leaned over to pat Eleanor’s back, and Holt saw his mother straighten her shoulders as though shrugging him off. The priest worked a toothpick between his molars, and a gray food fleck landed on the table.
Holt lowered the paper and stared at it, his top lip rising in disgust. Holt was no friend of the Episcopal church anyway, and he barely nodded to Father Tyson as he passed on by, with “Don’t be a stranger.”
“I double-dog-dare you to give him the finger, Mama.”
“Oh, Holt.” Then Eleanor was clasping hands with Rainey Grover, whose bulbous buttocks in pink stuck out so far you could rest a glass on them.
“I don’t know how you’ll ever sleep again.” Journalist or not, Rainey wouldn’t think of asking questions that might upset Eleanor. Rainey in her belle-hood had men from three counties swarming around her, a regular Duchess Hotspur. She worked for her husband’s Swan newspaper now; who would have guessed she’d end up with Johnny Grover? But who’d have guessed that Holt, with his I.Q. off the charts, would end up as local high school principal? Rainey’s small face, polished like a just-dried bowl, rose out of the body of an ancient fertility goddess. Holt remembered hearing years ago Buddy Perrin say a night with her would kill the weak and cripple the mighty.
Rainey looked down at Holt with God-given blue eyes. Holt had helped her boy get a scholarship to Mercer College. He’s not that old, she thought, and just look at those old-man suspenders and the way he combs that lick of hair over his pate. She smiled good-bye to Eleanor, showing wide white Chiclets, Holt noticed, smiling a tight smile to cover his own slightly back-sloping teeth.
“Would you like to ride around?”
Eleanor thought she would. “Ride by Billie’s. Let’s see the row of pines she planted down her driveway. Then we’ll stop in to check on Lily.”
“Mama, what do you think is going on with this Mason mess?”
“If they find the letter out there, then I think it’s probably a random piece of work by someone crazy. If they don’t, maybe someone wanted it—or something. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“What if Wills isn’t as damaged as he seems?”
“Lily would know if that were true, and even if it were, I doubt if he could have engineered this from the Columns. And why on earth would he?”
She did not ask what he thought. Just as well. Holt, after years and years, still was not about to erode Catherine’s trust. She never had betrayed his secret.
FATHER TIM TYSON DROVE the three blocks from the Three Sisters to the post office to mail his request for a new parish. Swan was a constant ordeal, especially after the two years in Newman over in Meacham County, where the people were more gracious and the rectory considerably nicer for his wife, Rosemary. Every month she complained when the Circle met for New Testament study. At least two members had to sit on straight chairs in the hall, barely able to hear, because the living room was too small. Five years here and he still didn’t feel accepted. Just now Eleanor Whitefield pure snubbed him and ditto that queer son of hers; everybody said he defied the teachings of Jesus and practiced sodomy. For a moment, he concentrated on what sodomy might be, exactly. Buggering, yes, he knew that, but he saw only biblical hordes led by Charlton Heston, pillaging and looting. Now he had to think about this disgrace with the Masons. He’d been told that Big Jim donated the chandeliers in the church years back and had his men build the pierced-brick serpentine wall around the Memory Garden, but the current clan donated a few hundred dollars a year, if they remembered at all. Lily still brought flowers for the altar on her parents’ birthdays, enormous sloppy bunches from her garden. J. J. never darkened the door, and when, as the new priest, he’d made his rounds, calling on the members, J. J. had offered him a drink of whiskey and told him not to expect him, as Sunday was sacred fishing time. Tim Tyson’s lips twitched in anger as he recalled J. J.’s cruel little smile. Had his own way of praying, he had said; that old excuse. As if we were meant to be solitary. As if the church were not about holding the community together, as this sinful one needed.
He stopped at the Pappas fruit stand and surveyed the bushels of corn and baskets of plums and peaches lined up along the sidewalk outside the shop.
“Mighty fine peaches, Father Tyson. Would you like a sample?” Tony Pappas seemed to smile all over his face. His large black eyes made him look like an icon painting from centuries ago. Everyone in Swan came to Tony. He lavished his attention on mounds of lemons and polished apples on his green apron.
“I’ll take your word. Give me a sack of those, please, Tony.” He pointed to the yellow plums Tony had picked earlier from along the roadside toward Osceola. Father Tyson had other things on his mind besides fruit for Rosemary’s pie and stared off into the middle distance as Tony examined each plum for bugs or bruises. The letter had dropped to the bottom of the mailbox with a thin plink. Maybe the bishop would send a young man just out of seminary to Swan. Trial by fire, he’d find. Highest suicide rate in the state, highest incidence of intestinal pinworms, and quite a few plain loonies. God help me, he thought, I’ve dealt with arson and stealing from the collection basket and pregnant twelve-year-olds. No wonder I could not face the uproar of finding that piece of paper on the ground. I did the sensible thing. I’m going to pray for them all, but I have enough on my plate.
Tony whistled as he bagged the plums. He threw in a couple of peaches for good luck and touched the blue eyeball he wore around his neck. According to his grandmother, priests sometimes cast the evil eye. Today Father Tyson looked hot enough to pop.
Yesterday, Father Tyson had just settled Mattie Tucker in the front seat, after helping her take a vase of glads to poor Ham’s grave. As he went around to his side of the car, an envelope lay at his feet. Small, dirty. In typed letters he saw the word Catherine. Under it, The last day. Around town they’d been saying Catherine Mason was buried with a letter in her hand. Here it was, blown to his feet, blown to the priest of the church to which she had belonged. Was that not auspicious, was not God sending him a message? He slipped it into his pocket and drove Mattie to her sagging house with several cats waiting on the porch. She was one of his saviors in Swan. She and four other women tended to the needs of the church as if it were their own home. Mattie, always immaculate in her brown or gray anonymous dresses, ironed the altar linen, baked cookies for the Episcopal Youth Fellowship, and sat in the third pew every time the doors of the church opened. She did not deserve for Ham to up and die like that, washing the car on a Saturday afternoon. Father Tyson did not mention to Mattie the envelope secretly shoved in his pocket.
When he got back to the church office, he took out the fragile envelope and pulled out what appeared to be a blackened-edge page ripped from a spiral notebook. In handwriting different from the envelope’s he read:
Beauty is a thing beyond the grave.
That perfect bright experience
Will never fall to nothing
And time will dim the [blurred spot] sooner
Than our full consummation [blurred spot]
In this brief life will tarnish or pass away.
He held the lined page up to the light. The paper was soft, speckled with mildew. A hard shudder ran through him as he realized it had been held in the hand of a dead woman under the ground for all these years. Beneath the watery blurs he made out moon and here. He dropped the page on his desk and wiped his hands on his pant legs. Time will dim the moon. Our full consummation here. Could they find fingerprints on something this damaged? He thought not. Since he was a man of the cloth and had no fingerprints on file anywhere, he knew he was exempt from the law. He wrapped the letter in crumbled tissue paper he pulled out of the wastebasket. Full consummation, that sounds sexual. His mouth turned downward. I will not speculate on the meaning of this, he decided. I do not want to be involved. He put the page under his sermon notes. I do not want to know. Yes, her life was brief, but killing oneself is surely to be condemned. Shame. Her family had to walk out of Eden, covering themselves. And look what they’ve become. More than any visitation, he dreaded the monthly call he made on Wills Mason, who looked at him as though he were a cockroach on the wall. He had trouble enough in the present. To meddle in the past was beyond the call.
That night, reading under a circle of lamplight in the corner of the bedroom, he waited until Rosemary fell asleep, her hair wound in tight sausages secured with rubber bands, a mask of pale green cold cream on her face. He felt more serene after reading the Book of Job. Rosemary’s eyes fluttered when he picked up the keys and he waited until she snorted and rolled on her side. He drove out Island 10, and on out to the Mason house, killed the lights, and stuck the letter in the mailbox.
When he coasted into his driveway, Rosemary was waiting at the back door. “Tim . . . at this time of night?” she was almost shouting. With the dim garage light shining on her green face, she looked frightening.
There was no lie to tell, nothing he could invent that she would not know was untrue by tomorrow or the next day. Any accident, death, emergency in Swan would be hers by noon. He told her the truth. “I just did not want to be pulled into their lives.”
She looked at him blankly. “But you could have offered them . . .” The night freight rumbled by two blocks back, muffling her words. Then she said something else and went back to bed.
He thought she said shame.
GINGER TURNED THE AIR VENT toward her face as J. J. raised a cloud of dust between them and Ralph’s office. She saw a lone figure in blue looking out at them from the upstairs barred window of the jail. She had an impulse to wave but did not. “If we just spring it on Daddy, maybe he will react in some revealing way.”
“You think this kind of news goes straight to the reptilian brain stem?”
“It felt that way to me.” Even going as far as to speculate that they might stun Wills into a reaction made her need air. Her throat felt too tight to breathe. She conjured the face of Marco, but his look, she realized, would be incredulous. Marco, she feared, could not follow this. Who could?—J. J. and I are the ones swallowed by the whale. Or do I underestimate Marco, automatically shut down? Easiest crime in the world, Ralph had said. “There’s a rational world to live in, isn’t there?” she asked, but J. J. only sighed and shook his head. I’ve been feeling my way toward one, she thought, and if this news is true, maybe we can reach around the past years back to the earliest world, where Daddy let me put his stethoscope to the hearts of my dolls and taught me to bandage their legs. At the very rim of her consciousness, she knew his warmth—he is running from rain, holding her, a red plaid umbrella over them, and he is laughing. Her small arm crooks around his neck and his face is next to hers. She hears and against her chest also feels his laughter. Not an ounce of her believes that her father could be a murderer. What colossal bad luck he’d had. “You look miles away, J. J., a stone on the moon, come down.”
“What strikes my brain stem is all we don’t know about what we know. You want to try talking to him, I’ll take you.” He turned in at the Gold Star Drive-In and ordered a beer brought out to the car, though it was only eleven o’clock. The Gold Star was a Mason building, but he almost never went in, just occasionally stopped to brace himself there en route to the Columns.
