Swan, page 2
From the upstairs window she saw Marco kick the car door closed because his hands were full. He never arrived empty-handed. Striding up the path to the house—there was something of the faun or satyr about him—he was smiling. Ginger smiled to think of him with hairy haunch and goat feet. She loved his black, black curls and tanned skin. (“Is he olive-complected?” Aunt Lily had asked her, trying to be tactful.) Ginger had never known anyone whose natural facial expression was a smile. He must have been born laughing.
The candle she placed on the bedside table, meant to be lighted before a saint, would burn quickly. She smoothed the bed and scattered across the pillows wild mint and yellow sunflower petals from the basket she’d filled earlier. A tremor of joy ran through her. Like a prisoner, she explained to herself, who digs a tunnel with a spoon and finally breaks out in the woods—I’m free, I will be happy. While most women would look on the fulfillment of sex as a deep pleasure, her first emotion was pride, as though she’d broken the record for the hundred-yard dash, or accomplished a high pole vault. Her bare soles on the cool tiles made her want to dance.
Climbing down the ladder stairs to the kitchen, she saw the terrace doors opened to the early evening air and the slope downhill to the river Nesse. What they call a river in Italy hardly qualified as a stream back home in Georgia, but she loved the chuckle of water in the night. She’d rented the farmhouse because it faced the Nesse. All winter she’d slept with the window cracked just to hear the sibilant slide of cascades pouring over rocks, the sweet gurgle where water surged over a dam built by children in summer. Now the flow had slowed to a faint trickle.
Marco, handing her yellow and apricot roses from his mother’s garden, embraced her at the same time. “You’ve transformed! Your neck doesn’t have any more rings of dirt.” Her eyebrows flew up, two circumflexes, two bent wings. He touched her face with his palm: she felt as smooth as a holy-water font. He thought she sometimes hid behind her cameo-perfect face, but tonight, no, she looked vibrantly here. His sister-in-law criticized Ginger’s nose—bony, she said—but Marco thought it must be like an English queen’s nose. His lips brushed her ear, her raucous hair—a blaze he’d warm himself by anytime.
She felt his compact, muscular body as a jolt (the prisoner, now up and running for the woods), breathed in his soapy shaving scents. He smelled good always; even after hours of work in the sun he smelled horsey, like wet earth and oats. After making love, his underarms let out an acidic, lair odor. What a good animal, she thought, submitting to his arms. Good, she thought. I didn’t shy away.
He held a box up, almost out of reach. “Don’t open! This is for later.”
She grabbed and shook the box.
“No! Give it back. You’re terrible!” He took the box inside.
Ginger clipped sprigs of rosemary. “We’re having roast chicken with potatoes—surprise, surprise!” Ginger had a limited interest in cooking, though she loved to eat. Roast chicken with herbs was her idea of triumph in the kitchen.
“I could smell it from the car.” On the table, a millstone set on top of a thick stone column, she crisscrossed two grapevine cuttings and placed the plates and glasses. His feet up on the low terrace wall, Marco sipped the Campari she brought him and watched the swallows dip and glide, devouring, he knew, thousands of bugs. “Rondini,” he told her, “those birds—swallows. We watch for them because they are graceful. They fly high when it is dry, low after rain.” He only seemed to teach her nouns.
He watched Ginger against the darkening cobalt sky, where a mellow moon like a worn gold watch hung suspended over the mountains. As she moved back and forth from the kitchen to the table, he observed that she had an odd quality of just having landed, something like an annunciation angel, with coral robes barely settling as she pointed her lily toward the Virgin Mary. Other American women he’d met were solid and demanding; they knew what they wanted. Ginger was slippery. She seemed usually vivid at times, like now, whistling “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” He loved her legs, which he considered wholly American. (The one thing that irritated Ginger about Marco was his habit of stamping certain things generically American.) When he’d studied in Virginia for two years, he’d found the southerners exotic. Ginger had joined his Etruscan research group as an intern after her first year and a half of graduate work at Georgia, while she decided whether or not to continue. Some fear he didn’t understand seized her when she contemplated writing a dissertation. To him she seemed a born archaeologist, took in at a glance what other associates hardly saw after it was pointed out to them.
As they excavated the site side by side all day, he had his eyes on her—squatting in the dust as she brushed off an artifact, stepping over the rivulets that sprang from underground springs and ruined their work. American, he thought. It’s because she’s foreign that she’s familiar and unfamiliar—sometimes far from him, with her lower lip bitten and her chin angled up as if she were viewing him from the long end of a telescope. He loved her, but thinking of building a life together confused him. Maybe she was too different from his old girlfriends, from Lucia and Cinzia, his brothers’ wives, who moved into Bella Bella, his parents’ house, without a murmur and fell into the family as though they’d always been there. He could not see Ginger moving into the other side of the top floor—not that he would want that himself—blending into the rhythm that everyone in the house seemed to find. If Lucia shopped, Cinzia shelled the peas and did the laundry, while his mother presided over the kitchen. They all told the two children what to do, usually contradicting each other, so the children learned to choose among the instructions, essentially doing as they pleased.
As the only unmarried son, he was exempt from all operations of the house, though he helped his father in the vegetable garden more than his brothers did. The house, alive with smells of ironing and stewing, the boys’ sweaty hair, an array of boots in the cantina, various colognes and cleansers—the collective odor of family—would it admit the stoic posture, the diffident, aloof Miss America? He summoned a picture of Ginger standing in a doorway having to ask how she could help. No, that would not ever be the scene. They would have their own house, like this one, in the country, and make trips once a year to the States, where her family operated like the labyrinthine, plotless Faulkner novels, and trees grew out of dank swamps. When Cinzia watched TV on the divan, her head sometimes lobbed onto his mother’s shoulder. He’d seen Ginger step back from contact, but when the two baci on the cheek were unavoidable, she smiled afterward, touching her fingertips to her face.
After the chicken, Ginger brought out the salad. He stretched his arms and pounded his chest with his fists. “Luna, luna,” he shouted. “Moon, moon.” No hurry, he remembered, let it play. Let it loop and rewind and play again.
Tonight they were celebrating their team’s find—an intact Etruscan six-step stone staircase with a mythological head carved into the base. Gaetano, a classmate of Marco’s and a palynologist, had driven up in the afternoon from his work site at Pompeii to consult with him on the faint imprints of plants they’d also discovered. He brought Marco vials containing scents he had re-created from remains he’d discovered in a recently unearthed apothecary shop.
Ginger and Marco lingered at the table. She brought out a bowl of the season’s last cherries and a paisley bedspread so they could lie down and look as long at the stars as they wanted. “See that constellation.” She pointed. “That’s one of Hannibal’s elephants coming over the Alps.”
“That, amore, is Orion.” He dangled a cherry above her lips and she snapped at it.
“And that—you see up there to the left the Model T Ford? And there—the tilt-a-whirl.”
“What is tilt-a-whirl?”
“A tilt-a-whirl you ride at a carnival. It slings you round and round.” He doesn’t even know what a tilt-a-whirl is, she thought, and I’m so glad for all he doesn’t know. The vacant eyes of her father flashed through her. She could see the horizon in those eyes.
“Are you as good at anything else as you are at astronomy?” Marco rolled on his side and kissed her arm. She threw her other arm around him and moved closer. “Oh, wait a minute.” He ran into the house and returned with the box. “Gaetano brought these when he drove up from Pompeii this afternoon. You’d just left—too bad.”
He unwrapped tissue paper from around a vial, which she recognized as the cloudy aqua blue of ancient glass. She’d heard that Gaetano had found a cache of dried unguents, oils, and perfumes last year. He’d spent months analyzing and reproducing them. Marco unwrapped two more. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Behind her on the ladder stairs, he ran his hand up her leg, his fingers brushing the edge of her panties. She lighted the candle and pulled off her dress in one motion. He had no way of knowing what that action meant to her, but caught a flash of her pleasure. As Marco slowly unbuttoned his shirt, she thrust her arms under his arms, her head against his chest. “Let me hear your heart.”
“Let me show you my heart.” They lay crossways on the bed, which dipped in the middle where light from the moon pooled. Marco reached over for one of the vials and twisted the wax-sealed stopper. He held the opening to her nose. She inhaled the fresh scent of lemon with a smoky, burned edge behind the fragrance. He poured the gold oil into his palm. “Wait for me,” he said. He slid down and rubbed his hands together. She closed her eyes, her arms folded behind her head, and felt his hands around her foot, rubbing in the warmed oil. He pushed against each toe, pressed the ball and heel, and gently worked his palm against her instep. The other foot. Her feet stung with pleasure. She looked at Marco at the side of the bed, intent, as she sometimes saw him concentrating at work, but his body had a sheen of silver outline from the candle, and his mouth was parted like that of a small boy sleeping. Mitchell, we never, flitted across her mind.
He opened the second wax seal and waved the vial under her nose. She touched her finger to the mouth of the vial and he tipped it. “Grass and cloves.” They were kissing deeply, but he moved away, straddled her legs, and began lightly to brush the ancient scent onto her breasts, circling his hand over her nipples, then in larger concentric motions. The oil sent an electrical charge into her blood. Slowly, even the part of her she always held in reserve ignited. So this is what they mean. In the last instant of unyielding, she thought fleetingly, there must be life after death. She moistened her hands on her breasts and reached down to caress him. “I can’t take much more,” he said.
Ginger pushed him over on his back, opened the smaller third vial, and emptied the contents on his chest, quickly spreading the oil. The fecund, grapy heart of the wild iris steeped into her hands, running along his sides and down his body. Water falling over rocks. He heard the small cries that came from his throat. Startled by the new sound, he laughed, said “Bless Gaetano,” wrapped his arms around her back and up through her hair, and they had their love.
July 8
CASS DEAL TURNED HIS PICKUP into the gates of Magnolia Cemetery. He stopped at his caretaker’s shack for a cup of instant coffee. A scorcher coming up, he thought. The magnolias over in the Confederate Corner were heavily in bloom, sending out their sweet stench. He hated the smell. So many of the coffins that rolled out of the Ireland Funeral Home hearses held a single magnolia on the polished mahogany. Elegant, he’d been told, but he figured it was just cheap. Sure made cleanup easier. He poured hot water over the acrid granules. Not many of the grand funerals anymore. Just get them in the ground and go. People live too long these days, outstay their welcome. Cass, at seventy, did not put himself into this category.
He threw his rake and bucket into the pickup bed and drove toward the new part of the cemetery. Funeral Friday at two. He had a grave to dig and prepare before the funeral home people came out to set up their tent and rows of chairs, which tended to sink into the soft earth under especially heavy mourners. He rolled slowly along the grassy lanes, hardly glancing at the granite angel in the Williams plot, the jar of yellow glads on old man Conrad’s grave, and the diamondback stretched on the grave of the Adams child, who died of infantile paralysis. Collapsed lung, wasn’t it? The new part of the cemetery sloped toward a swamp. Snakes often came up to warm themselves on a convenient stone. He passed the Mason plot, the only one with a fence. The iron gate long since had rusted open, and the tangled roses that Wills Mason planted for his shameful wife always drooped in the heat. A mess and Cass was not paid extra for cleaning up, even though extra work was required here. They did sometimes send their own help out to prune. Just beyond the Mason’s, he spotted trash on the ground and stopped to pick it up. A smashed Dr Pepper can and a white handkerchief. Dirty, too. He threw them in his bucket and gunned the truck. He caught the flicker of ribbons from four standing wreaths. Raw red hump of dirt and Merrilee Gooding lying under it. Who’d ever think someone that pretty could up and die? They say Dr. Strickman took out a tumor the size of a football. Her blanket of red roses looked like dried blood. Just goes to show how quick it is from can to can’t.
Morning sun exploded through the slash pines at the edge of his domain. Rain two days ago. The ground would give easily. He’d long ago lost count of the number of graves he’d dug, but he knew to the minute how long it used to take before he got the Bobcat a few years back—five hours and ten minutes steady unless he encountered a limestone shelf. That was trouble. The Bobcat saved his back. Quicker now. Rake, level, drive the backhoe to the site, make sure the dirt lands in a neat clump. Then he’d get Aldo out to pour the cement liner. He knew everything about his job after forty years at it. That’s what he liked about the dead, he often said; you always know what to expect from them. Once he found two skeletons and some beads and broken pots about four feet under. A professor from the college over in Douglas had taken them away and no one ever heard any more about them. Creek Indians, he’d told Cass. He’d hit water sometimes. The Ireland people just hoped the bereaved didn’t see the coffin float for a second before the dearly beloved settled into the ground.
LILY MASON AIMED rather than drove her Lincoln out Lemon Street toward Magnolia Cemetery around nine o’clock. After Tessie had called and said she’d be late to work on account of a sick neighbor, Lily had bathed, dressed, and then put together her own breakfast of black tea and two chocolate cookies, a vice she permitted herself, along with a cordial in the afternoon before her nap and a strong gin martini before supper. Gin, she thought, tasted pure and clean, the way water ought to taste and didn’t. By quarter of nine, she had fed CoCo, her green parrot, and wandered in her garden among the larkspur, lemon lilies, invasive verbena, and rusty camellia bushes. She needed to tend to the irises on the slope down to the pond. The spent flowers had dried to ash blue on their muscular stems. CoCo squawked at her from his wicker cage. He had spent his early birdhood in a machinist’s shop, so instead of words he made car sounds, a metallic clattering and shrieking that amused Lily but no one else. The jessamine, she saw without any intention to do anything about it, tangled into the spirea’s drooping arcs of white blooms. This summer everything wants to escape its boundaries, she thought. Bridal bouquet, they called spirea, but no bride ever carried it down the aisle—too common. If she’d ever been a bride, she would have carried blue delphiniums, white roses, and trailing ivy. Ginger’s bouquet—but she didn’t remember. It must have been half-dead by the time she stood right here clutching it in the garden.
Lily snapped off two flowers to take out to her parents’ graves, imagining that she could show them to her mother as she used to. “Look at the white star inside this morning glory. Isn’t that something?” she might say, or “That daylily—it looks freshly dipped in yellow paint.” But she was not fool enough to speak to them aloud. She slipped her clippers into the glove compartment and laid a newspaper on the back seat. Her closest friend, Eleanor, was meeting her at Magnolia Cemetery to pick roses, then they were going to the Three Sisters Café for coffee and a chat.
ELEANOR LAID A BUNCH of purple foxgloves across her husband’s name carved in north Georgia granite, Holt Ames Whitefield. Four years ago, after his death, she’d fallen into the habit of visiting at his graveside every morning except Thursday, her beauty parlor day. She’d had a marble bench erected and she sat there a few minutes, sometimes reading to herself a daily meditation from The Upper Room, sometimes just remembering the trips they took to Haiti, Jamaica, California, and Alaska. Those frozen aqua waters and the ship cracking through ice, the sudden looming icebergs against a pure blue sky—she couldn’t help but think death must feel like that. It was still impossible to think Holt—Holt!—would not return. Sometimes when she took in the mail, she thumbed through the junk, half expecting a letter from him. The sudden red arterial hemorrhage from his throat after the surgery and he was gone. “His time was up,” Father Tyson had said, a remark that caused Eleanor to cut the contents of her donation envelope in half. She and Lily agreed on the subject of Father Tyson. Eleanor smiled to remember her friend’s dismissal of him as “neither useful nor ornamental.” But poor Holt. Who’s to say his time was up? When she was a fresh widow, she used to curl into the fetal position every morning when she woke to realize that he was not there. Finally, after four years, the sharp edge of pain subsided. Now she was at ease in the mornings and liked to look downhill toward the cypress trees standing in black water and the white floating hyacinths.
She was irritated to hear Cass Deal’s motor and to see his red machine charging at a grave site in the distance, lifting and dumping forkfuls of earth. Where is Lily? she wondered. She said aloud a few lines from a poem Holt liked—he had been the high school English teacher and she had been the math teacher—remembering as she said them that she used to be annoyed when he shifted to his oration voice and quoted verse.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
The candle she placed on the bedside table, meant to be lighted before a saint, would burn quickly. She smoothed the bed and scattered across the pillows wild mint and yellow sunflower petals from the basket she’d filled earlier. A tremor of joy ran through her. Like a prisoner, she explained to herself, who digs a tunnel with a spoon and finally breaks out in the woods—I’m free, I will be happy. While most women would look on the fulfillment of sex as a deep pleasure, her first emotion was pride, as though she’d broken the record for the hundred-yard dash, or accomplished a high pole vault. Her bare soles on the cool tiles made her want to dance.
Climbing down the ladder stairs to the kitchen, she saw the terrace doors opened to the early evening air and the slope downhill to the river Nesse. What they call a river in Italy hardly qualified as a stream back home in Georgia, but she loved the chuckle of water in the night. She’d rented the farmhouse because it faced the Nesse. All winter she’d slept with the window cracked just to hear the sibilant slide of cascades pouring over rocks, the sweet gurgle where water surged over a dam built by children in summer. Now the flow had slowed to a faint trickle.
Marco, handing her yellow and apricot roses from his mother’s garden, embraced her at the same time. “You’ve transformed! Your neck doesn’t have any more rings of dirt.” Her eyebrows flew up, two circumflexes, two bent wings. He touched her face with his palm: she felt as smooth as a holy-water font. He thought she sometimes hid behind her cameo-perfect face, but tonight, no, she looked vibrantly here. His sister-in-law criticized Ginger’s nose—bony, she said—but Marco thought it must be like an English queen’s nose. His lips brushed her ear, her raucous hair—a blaze he’d warm himself by anytime.
She felt his compact, muscular body as a jolt (the prisoner, now up and running for the woods), breathed in his soapy shaving scents. He smelled good always; even after hours of work in the sun he smelled horsey, like wet earth and oats. After making love, his underarms let out an acidic, lair odor. What a good animal, she thought, submitting to his arms. Good, she thought. I didn’t shy away.
He held a box up, almost out of reach. “Don’t open! This is for later.”
She grabbed and shook the box.
“No! Give it back. You’re terrible!” He took the box inside.
Ginger clipped sprigs of rosemary. “We’re having roast chicken with potatoes—surprise, surprise!” Ginger had a limited interest in cooking, though she loved to eat. Roast chicken with herbs was her idea of triumph in the kitchen.
“I could smell it from the car.” On the table, a millstone set on top of a thick stone column, she crisscrossed two grapevine cuttings and placed the plates and glasses. His feet up on the low terrace wall, Marco sipped the Campari she brought him and watched the swallows dip and glide, devouring, he knew, thousands of bugs. “Rondini,” he told her, “those birds—swallows. We watch for them because they are graceful. They fly high when it is dry, low after rain.” He only seemed to teach her nouns.
He watched Ginger against the darkening cobalt sky, where a mellow moon like a worn gold watch hung suspended over the mountains. As she moved back and forth from the kitchen to the table, he observed that she had an odd quality of just having landed, something like an annunciation angel, with coral robes barely settling as she pointed her lily toward the Virgin Mary. Other American women he’d met were solid and demanding; they knew what they wanted. Ginger was slippery. She seemed usually vivid at times, like now, whistling “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” He loved her legs, which he considered wholly American. (The one thing that irritated Ginger about Marco was his habit of stamping certain things generically American.) When he’d studied in Virginia for two years, he’d found the southerners exotic. Ginger had joined his Etruscan research group as an intern after her first year and a half of graduate work at Georgia, while she decided whether or not to continue. Some fear he didn’t understand seized her when she contemplated writing a dissertation. To him she seemed a born archaeologist, took in at a glance what other associates hardly saw after it was pointed out to them.
As they excavated the site side by side all day, he had his eyes on her—squatting in the dust as she brushed off an artifact, stepping over the rivulets that sprang from underground springs and ruined their work. American, he thought. It’s because she’s foreign that she’s familiar and unfamiliar—sometimes far from him, with her lower lip bitten and her chin angled up as if she were viewing him from the long end of a telescope. He loved her, but thinking of building a life together confused him. Maybe she was too different from his old girlfriends, from Lucia and Cinzia, his brothers’ wives, who moved into Bella Bella, his parents’ house, without a murmur and fell into the family as though they’d always been there. He could not see Ginger moving into the other side of the top floor—not that he would want that himself—blending into the rhythm that everyone in the house seemed to find. If Lucia shopped, Cinzia shelled the peas and did the laundry, while his mother presided over the kitchen. They all told the two children what to do, usually contradicting each other, so the children learned to choose among the instructions, essentially doing as they pleased.
As the only unmarried son, he was exempt from all operations of the house, though he helped his father in the vegetable garden more than his brothers did. The house, alive with smells of ironing and stewing, the boys’ sweaty hair, an array of boots in the cantina, various colognes and cleansers—the collective odor of family—would it admit the stoic posture, the diffident, aloof Miss America? He summoned a picture of Ginger standing in a doorway having to ask how she could help. No, that would not ever be the scene. They would have their own house, like this one, in the country, and make trips once a year to the States, where her family operated like the labyrinthine, plotless Faulkner novels, and trees grew out of dank swamps. When Cinzia watched TV on the divan, her head sometimes lobbed onto his mother’s shoulder. He’d seen Ginger step back from contact, but when the two baci on the cheek were unavoidable, she smiled afterward, touching her fingertips to her face.
After the chicken, Ginger brought out the salad. He stretched his arms and pounded his chest with his fists. “Luna, luna,” he shouted. “Moon, moon.” No hurry, he remembered, let it play. Let it loop and rewind and play again.
Tonight they were celebrating their team’s find—an intact Etruscan six-step stone staircase with a mythological head carved into the base. Gaetano, a classmate of Marco’s and a palynologist, had driven up in the afternoon from his work site at Pompeii to consult with him on the faint imprints of plants they’d also discovered. He brought Marco vials containing scents he had re-created from remains he’d discovered in a recently unearthed apothecary shop.
Ginger and Marco lingered at the table. She brought out a bowl of the season’s last cherries and a paisley bedspread so they could lie down and look as long at the stars as they wanted. “See that constellation.” She pointed. “That’s one of Hannibal’s elephants coming over the Alps.”
“That, amore, is Orion.” He dangled a cherry above her lips and she snapped at it.
“And that—you see up there to the left the Model T Ford? And there—the tilt-a-whirl.”
“What is tilt-a-whirl?”
“A tilt-a-whirl you ride at a carnival. It slings you round and round.” He doesn’t even know what a tilt-a-whirl is, she thought, and I’m so glad for all he doesn’t know. The vacant eyes of her father flashed through her. She could see the horizon in those eyes.
“Are you as good at anything else as you are at astronomy?” Marco rolled on his side and kissed her arm. She threw her other arm around him and moved closer. “Oh, wait a minute.” He ran into the house and returned with the box. “Gaetano brought these when he drove up from Pompeii this afternoon. You’d just left—too bad.”
He unwrapped tissue paper from around a vial, which she recognized as the cloudy aqua blue of ancient glass. She’d heard that Gaetano had found a cache of dried unguents, oils, and perfumes last year. He’d spent months analyzing and reproducing them. Marco unwrapped two more. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Behind her on the ladder stairs, he ran his hand up her leg, his fingers brushing the edge of her panties. She lighted the candle and pulled off her dress in one motion. He had no way of knowing what that action meant to her, but caught a flash of her pleasure. As Marco slowly unbuttoned his shirt, she thrust her arms under his arms, her head against his chest. “Let me hear your heart.”
“Let me show you my heart.” They lay crossways on the bed, which dipped in the middle where light from the moon pooled. Marco reached over for one of the vials and twisted the wax-sealed stopper. He held the opening to her nose. She inhaled the fresh scent of lemon with a smoky, burned edge behind the fragrance. He poured the gold oil into his palm. “Wait for me,” he said. He slid down and rubbed his hands together. She closed her eyes, her arms folded behind her head, and felt his hands around her foot, rubbing in the warmed oil. He pushed against each toe, pressed the ball and heel, and gently worked his palm against her instep. The other foot. Her feet stung with pleasure. She looked at Marco at the side of the bed, intent, as she sometimes saw him concentrating at work, but his body had a sheen of silver outline from the candle, and his mouth was parted like that of a small boy sleeping. Mitchell, we never, flitted across her mind.
He opened the second wax seal and waved the vial under her nose. She touched her finger to the mouth of the vial and he tipped it. “Grass and cloves.” They were kissing deeply, but he moved away, straddled her legs, and began lightly to brush the ancient scent onto her breasts, circling his hand over her nipples, then in larger concentric motions. The oil sent an electrical charge into her blood. Slowly, even the part of her she always held in reserve ignited. So this is what they mean. In the last instant of unyielding, she thought fleetingly, there must be life after death. She moistened her hands on her breasts and reached down to caress him. “I can’t take much more,” he said.
Ginger pushed him over on his back, opened the smaller third vial, and emptied the contents on his chest, quickly spreading the oil. The fecund, grapy heart of the wild iris steeped into her hands, running along his sides and down his body. Water falling over rocks. He heard the small cries that came from his throat. Startled by the new sound, he laughed, said “Bless Gaetano,” wrapped his arms around her back and up through her hair, and they had their love.
July 8
CASS DEAL TURNED HIS PICKUP into the gates of Magnolia Cemetery. He stopped at his caretaker’s shack for a cup of instant coffee. A scorcher coming up, he thought. The magnolias over in the Confederate Corner were heavily in bloom, sending out their sweet stench. He hated the smell. So many of the coffins that rolled out of the Ireland Funeral Home hearses held a single magnolia on the polished mahogany. Elegant, he’d been told, but he figured it was just cheap. Sure made cleanup easier. He poured hot water over the acrid granules. Not many of the grand funerals anymore. Just get them in the ground and go. People live too long these days, outstay their welcome. Cass, at seventy, did not put himself into this category.
He threw his rake and bucket into the pickup bed and drove toward the new part of the cemetery. Funeral Friday at two. He had a grave to dig and prepare before the funeral home people came out to set up their tent and rows of chairs, which tended to sink into the soft earth under especially heavy mourners. He rolled slowly along the grassy lanes, hardly glancing at the granite angel in the Williams plot, the jar of yellow glads on old man Conrad’s grave, and the diamondback stretched on the grave of the Adams child, who died of infantile paralysis. Collapsed lung, wasn’t it? The new part of the cemetery sloped toward a swamp. Snakes often came up to warm themselves on a convenient stone. He passed the Mason plot, the only one with a fence. The iron gate long since had rusted open, and the tangled roses that Wills Mason planted for his shameful wife always drooped in the heat. A mess and Cass was not paid extra for cleaning up, even though extra work was required here. They did sometimes send their own help out to prune. Just beyond the Mason’s, he spotted trash on the ground and stopped to pick it up. A smashed Dr Pepper can and a white handkerchief. Dirty, too. He threw them in his bucket and gunned the truck. He caught the flicker of ribbons from four standing wreaths. Raw red hump of dirt and Merrilee Gooding lying under it. Who’d ever think someone that pretty could up and die? They say Dr. Strickman took out a tumor the size of a football. Her blanket of red roses looked like dried blood. Just goes to show how quick it is from can to can’t.
Morning sun exploded through the slash pines at the edge of his domain. Rain two days ago. The ground would give easily. He’d long ago lost count of the number of graves he’d dug, but he knew to the minute how long it used to take before he got the Bobcat a few years back—five hours and ten minutes steady unless he encountered a limestone shelf. That was trouble. The Bobcat saved his back. Quicker now. Rake, level, drive the backhoe to the site, make sure the dirt lands in a neat clump. Then he’d get Aldo out to pour the cement liner. He knew everything about his job after forty years at it. That’s what he liked about the dead, he often said; you always know what to expect from them. Once he found two skeletons and some beads and broken pots about four feet under. A professor from the college over in Douglas had taken them away and no one ever heard any more about them. Creek Indians, he’d told Cass. He’d hit water sometimes. The Ireland people just hoped the bereaved didn’t see the coffin float for a second before the dearly beloved settled into the ground.
LILY MASON AIMED rather than drove her Lincoln out Lemon Street toward Magnolia Cemetery around nine o’clock. After Tessie had called and said she’d be late to work on account of a sick neighbor, Lily had bathed, dressed, and then put together her own breakfast of black tea and two chocolate cookies, a vice she permitted herself, along with a cordial in the afternoon before her nap and a strong gin martini before supper. Gin, she thought, tasted pure and clean, the way water ought to taste and didn’t. By quarter of nine, she had fed CoCo, her green parrot, and wandered in her garden among the larkspur, lemon lilies, invasive verbena, and rusty camellia bushes. She needed to tend to the irises on the slope down to the pond. The spent flowers had dried to ash blue on their muscular stems. CoCo squawked at her from his wicker cage. He had spent his early birdhood in a machinist’s shop, so instead of words he made car sounds, a metallic clattering and shrieking that amused Lily but no one else. The jessamine, she saw without any intention to do anything about it, tangled into the spirea’s drooping arcs of white blooms. This summer everything wants to escape its boundaries, she thought. Bridal bouquet, they called spirea, but no bride ever carried it down the aisle—too common. If she’d ever been a bride, she would have carried blue delphiniums, white roses, and trailing ivy. Ginger’s bouquet—but she didn’t remember. It must have been half-dead by the time she stood right here clutching it in the garden.
Lily snapped off two flowers to take out to her parents’ graves, imagining that she could show them to her mother as she used to. “Look at the white star inside this morning glory. Isn’t that something?” she might say, or “That daylily—it looks freshly dipped in yellow paint.” But she was not fool enough to speak to them aloud. She slipped her clippers into the glove compartment and laid a newspaper on the back seat. Her closest friend, Eleanor, was meeting her at Magnolia Cemetery to pick roses, then they were going to the Three Sisters Café for coffee and a chat.
ELEANOR LAID A BUNCH of purple foxgloves across her husband’s name carved in north Georgia granite, Holt Ames Whitefield. Four years ago, after his death, she’d fallen into the habit of visiting at his graveside every morning except Thursday, her beauty parlor day. She’d had a marble bench erected and she sat there a few minutes, sometimes reading to herself a daily meditation from The Upper Room, sometimes just remembering the trips they took to Haiti, Jamaica, California, and Alaska. Those frozen aqua waters and the ship cracking through ice, the sudden looming icebergs against a pure blue sky—she couldn’t help but think death must feel like that. It was still impossible to think Holt—Holt!—would not return. Sometimes when she took in the mail, she thumbed through the junk, half expecting a letter from him. The sudden red arterial hemorrhage from his throat after the surgery and he was gone. “His time was up,” Father Tyson had said, a remark that caused Eleanor to cut the contents of her donation envelope in half. She and Lily agreed on the subject of Father Tyson. Eleanor smiled to remember her friend’s dismissal of him as “neither useful nor ornamental.” But poor Holt. Who’s to say his time was up? When she was a fresh widow, she used to curl into the fetal position every morning when she woke to realize that he was not there. Finally, after four years, the sharp edge of pain subsided. Now she was at ease in the mornings and liked to look downhill toward the cypress trees standing in black water and the white floating hyacinths.
She was irritated to hear Cass Deal’s motor and to see his red machine charging at a grave site in the distance, lifting and dumping forkfuls of earth. Where is Lily? she wondered. She said aloud a few lines from a poem Holt liked—he had been the high school English teacher and she had been the math teacher—remembering as she said them that she used to be annoyed when he shifted to his oration voice and quoted verse.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
