Swan, page 23
After Big Jim up and died, even a branch scratching against the window made Aileen gasp. Then one morning, Sonny had appeared at her door, opened the screen, and walked in. All her fears during his four-year absence suddenly took the form of his real shape. It was as if his raid on the office were continuing. She was terrified by his bushy white run-together eyebrows, the distant look in his eyes. By then Big Jim was dead a year, the wife was dead, too. But Sonny, just out of the army, had come home still ranting about revenge. He yanked her hair back and spit in her face. “You pussy bitch. You stinking whore. He’s dead but he deserves to be drawn and quartered. His father fucked my grandmother. Who do they think they are? You’re not worth killing. But I’m going to get that family, all of them, those sorry motherfuckers. That puffed-up doctor, I’ll see how he likes somebody doing his woman.”
Out of fear, she lied. “It was never how you thought. Big Jim wanted me but I didn’t. Those things you found were because he was trying to get me. You never trusted me, ever. Now he’s dead. And we’re divorced, for God’s sake. You were dead wrong. Leave me alone. Forget it.” She wanted to kick and spit at him but remained still and controlled.
Sonny sat down. To hear the name Big Jim still enraged him. He banged his fist on the kitchen table. He looked at her, wide-eyed, grinding his teeth. He slung his arm across the table, sweeping the jelly and salt and pepper onto the floor.
“Please. Go. Please leave, go. Leave those people alone—they never did anything to you. It’s over, he’s dead.” She put her head on the table and cried.
He laughed. His eyes darted and he blinked over and over. His top lip raised like a dog about to snarl. Suddenly he slammed out of the house “Okay. Okay. You win, you slut. I’m going out West to Arizona, and you’re not ever going to see me again.” He said it like a threat, emphasizing each word. He jabbed the air with his middle finger.
Aileen breathed out. To placate him, she said, “Well, I hope your life goes better now. I never meant you no harm.” She rubbed her head where he’d pulled her braid. She closed the door and slid the bolt. She wished he were dead. She imagined slashing him with the turkey knife.
A month later, the night when she’d heard of Catherine Mason’s suicide, she got in the car and drove forty miles to her sister’s. Sometimes in the years after that, she’d imagined Catherine Mason wondering what had brought Sonny, a millworker who was sometimes sent there for repairs, to her door. Aileen imagined his attack, Catherine grabbing a gun, and Sonny turning it on her and firing, pausing only to arrange the gun in her hand while her life dripped out on the floor. But Catherine was a suicide. Sonny was long gone. Over time, her memory of Sonny receded. She began to leave her doors unlocked, like everyone else in Swan. She had not seen him since that day—nineteen years. After that long, can something still fester? Had he done this trick at the cemetery? Her mind would not stop whirling. Remembering his vacant eyes, she would not put it past him.
Aileen glanced at her face in the window’s reflection. “I’m plain gaunt,” she said to herself. When her face and lips had been kissed and kissed by Big Jim, she looked full and rosy in the motel mirror. Twenty years had sculpted her so that now her high cheekbones stuck out, concaving her face. Her lips looked pinched. I look like I suck lemons, she thought. Her hair remained thick and lustrous. She managed to sip the coffee, managed to light a cigarette and blow out smoke toward her own face in the glass. She looked at herself again. Her eyes looked wild. She saw a fox face, something on the edge of the woods with shining eyes—she could be Sonny’s twin.
She decided she would just drive on over to her sister’s in Tyler. She would have to figure out how she could go to the sheriff, Hunnicutt’s grandson. She knew she should, but should, would, could, blended together in her mind. Could she think of how not to tell the whole story? She did not want her carefully hidden life to be more shamefully exposed than Catherine Mason’s rotten body. And Big Jim, the bank president, mayor, owner of the mill. She would just wait and see what came to light.
Her sister, a widow now, would be glad for her company. They could make blue plum jelly, and Jeannie could help her sew. She could buy the few things she needed. If Sonny paid a visit to the mill village, there’d be no one for him to hit. Then she thought of the other Mason women—if Sonny was that crazy. But she didn’t really believe he had come back after all these years. Maybe she would talk to someone. She liked the preacher in her sister’s Primitive Baptist church. He spoke the gospel while looking at the sky, then would lower his head and bear down on the congregation with burning eyes. Aileen liked his unruly brown curls and the ropy cords in his neck. She imagined sweeping her hair over his sinless body. Last time she heard him, she’d gone to the verge of feeling saved.
I’ll go, she thought. I’ll get up from this booth and go. She left the newspaper on the table, Catherine Mason’s photo faceup for the next reader. She walked across the street and bought the lace and pearl buttons she needed.
RALPH’S PHONE AT HOME and at the office would not stop ringing. With the news hitting the morning papers, reporters from all over the state and as far away as Tallahassee and Mobile kept calling for information. Gray, with backup from the GBI staff, was conducting his own investigation. He’d walked out of the Columns after interviewing Wills convinced he had nothing to do with the exhumation. “Old fart could barely brush his teeth. Now, whether he pulled the trigger years ago, we’re just not going to find out unless something breaks open from an unexpected quarter,” Gray said. Ralph had combed the cemetery and had found no letter. Nothing. Gray had asked him to check up on J. J. Embarrassed that he would have to phone and ask J. J. where he was last week, he stopped in Scott’s store to verify their fishing trip to St. Clare’s.
Scott was wiping down the sweating sides of the ice cream freezer. He was hoping J. J. would stop in to go over some orders he wanted to make. “Yes,” he told Ralph, “we chartered a boat down there, fishing for marlin.” Scott gave him names and numbers, without mentioning that he’d slept on deck both nights because J. J. picked up a twenty-year-old girl named Gay Nix at the tackle shop, and they were rocking the cabin. That was nobody’s bidness. A big girl, who’d brought on board a sack of fried catfish and hushpuppies from her mama’s fish fry stand next to her daddy’s tackle and bait place. She’d kept up a shrieking laugh, and Scott had concentrated on the slap of waves against the bow. Usually, J. J. didn’t spin off like that on their trips. Had to be mighty hard up to go after that big-kneed gal. Far as he knew, she never asked them their names. J. J. kept calling her Sunshine. No need to tell the sheriff any of that.
Somebody down in St. Clare’s was mounting two fish they’d caught. Scott showed Ralph the receipt. Plenty of contacts. A relief. Ralph had no reason not to believe him, but for God’s sake somebody had to have dug up that body and maybe it was J. J. and this loyal buck. He didn’t want to be like his grandfather, who let the Masons slide by. He had to admit, however, that no motive presented itself, aside from pure craziness. Whatever he was, J. J. was not one drop crazy.
Mindy up at the register cut her eyes at Ralph. He is cute, plenty cute, she thought. That slash of scar all down his arm is from Vietnam. Who was it said he’d been left for dead and had to walk at night through war zones to get back to his troop?
Ralph picked up a bottle of Dr Pepper and some peanuts. “Well, Miss Mindy, how’s everything?” She wore a scoop-necked lavender T-shirt and he gazed down the great divide between her pushed-up breasts. She saw his look and reached to pin her hair, the gesture of raising her arms lifting her breasts. Ralph pulled on his earlobe and looked down at the change on the counter.
“I’m just fine and dandy, Ralph.”
“You sure are. Hey, you want to go out to the Shack tomorrow night? They’ve got a band.” He hadn’t danced in years. This Mason mess made him want to hit balls, run, dance, fuck, drive fast. Anything to remind him that the world was not going crazy again. He looked into her pert face. She wouldn’t have any idea about war or the horror of corpses. Ever since the war he’d been amazed by people’s innocence. He looked over at the rows of dish soap and detergent to block the sudden vision of Tommy Melton crawling beside him one moment, his head blown to bits the next, blood spurting from what had been his neck, his face like a run-over cantaloupe in the mud. Mindy’s old husband, Holy Roller now, with one leg two inches shorter than the other, never got drafted, like so many others—like J. J., come to think of it. Some said Mason contacts had fixed that, but Ralph didn’t see how he could, with the military offices way over in Dannon.
“Let me see if my sister will keep my little girl. I think she will. You know where I live—the sea-foam-colored house in the mill village.” She kept looking right into his eyes. He imagined rolling that T-shirt right off, the explosion of her flesh into his hands.
“Mindy,” he said. “What’s that short for?”
“Just Mindy. Mindy Marie.” She would wear her low-cut white eyelet that buttoned up the front. With her Saturday paycheck, she’d buy those fuchsia sandals with wedge heels in the window of Buster’s Shoes. She liked his square teeth and his golden chest hair in the V of his shirt. She hoped he didn’t have furry hair on his back like her ex-husband. Who would wait around for J. J. Mason to turn up? Not her. “Mama named me after her mama, Sugar Marie, and her granny, Mindy Lou.”
“That’s right nice. And much better than ‘Sugar Lou.’ Although, come to think of it, that’s a good name, too. Around eight tomorrow?”
He is damn cute, Mindy thought. Sugar Lou, who would have thought of that?
RAINEY GROVER PUSHED BACK HER CHAIR from her desk at The Swan Flyover. The famous doctor’s diet promised that she wouldn’t feel hungry between meals, but her stomach was roaring, as if it were trying to digest itself. After two weeks of starvation, she hadn’t lost but one pound. She’d expected five by now, hoped for eight. She opened a drawer and took out a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter, 125 calories apiece. She closed her eyes and ate one of the little sandwiches slowly, throwing the rest in the wastebasket. She had forty pounds to lose. At the conservative estimate according to the diet book, she would be down to her slinky best by February. Immediately, she wished she had not eaten the poisonous-looking orange crackers spread with evil peanut butter. At lunch she would skip the allowed piece of fruit.
She’d spent the morning calling people she met last March at the newspaper conference in Atlanta. She was bone-sure that no Mason had disrupted a grave. When, since the fabled Big Jim, had they ever shown enough energy for such an exploit? Her husband, Johnny, agreed. She wanted to be the investigative force for the case. That Lily or Wills could engineer a grave-opening was ludicrous. J. J.? But why? And besides, he was off fishing, playing the nature boy as usual, with that muscle-bound black stud who worked for him. J. J.—Swan’s answer to Tarzan. Only Ginger was on the move, and she went from pillar to post, without ever settling on anything. The news that their mother didn’t shoot herself must have rocked them all the way back to the cradle. When her own mother simply died of sugar diabetes, Rainey had been outraged. For years she half expected her mother to call or write.
Her colleagues scattered around Georgia were wildly curious about the case in Swan but had nothing to add, no similar activities in their towns. “Must be Martians,” the editor of The Cleveland Ledger said. “I wish something exciting would happen here,” others lamented. Rainey walked over to the long windows looking out onto the sidewalk and Main Street. Passing clouds reflected on the glass. Cliff Bryant, walking his two spaniels, Stevie and Clarkie, made her smile. His own doggish muzzle made him look as though he, too, might yap instead of speak. Agnes Burkhart, who with her cropped hair and laced, square-heeled shoes looked as though she’d been picked up by the wind from a street in old Europe and set down in Swan, came out of the drugstore with a little bag, probably medication for her sister’s fits. Francie Lachlan slammed on brakes and got out of her new yellow convertible with three boys. Pied Piper of, where? Hamlin? Watch out, Francie, she thought. Rainey had been the honeypot of her day, though she’d never had the pleasure of a daddy who bribed good behavior with fancy wheels.
Such a normal day. Cusetta Fletcher, new-rich in town, swaggered into the furniture store. She waved to Bunky, her neighbor, who caught her eye as she drove by. The slow flow of cars seemed to move through a dream. Rainey loved Swan. All her life it had seemed the best place on earth to live. Even as a girl, she’d felt she never could leave. She liked working downtown with Johnny, her desk looking out at the Oasis, the noon walk over to the Three Sisters, where she picked up most of her news. She even liked the tentacular gossip, rampant in any place where no news is no news.
She looked at her watch. Another hour until her carrot, chicken soup, and small salad. The sisters would commiserate as they plunked their coconut pies onto the sideboard. She pushed in the basketball bulge of her stomach, despising herself for fantasizing a slice of that tall, creamy pie sliding onto a plate. Now she and Johnny never made love with her on top. Too tactful to say so, he felt squished, she knew, when not many years ago, Johnny could span her waist with his fingers.
J. J. SLEPT IN, for once. It was almost nine by the time he lowered himself into the river. Four turtles, one a pretty substantial snapping turtle, sunned on a log the current had wedged against the dock. They regarded him without interest. He would let Ginger sleep as late as she could. She’d polished off the fudge at five in the morning. When she got up, they would call Charlotte Crowder in Macon. He’d already called Scott and found out that green pulpwood trucks belonged to Tall Pine Company thirty miles down the road in Flanders. That was the company to whom J. J. had sold cutting rights. He’d called Andy Foster to let him know he’d never get another tree from J. E. B. Stuart County unless they dealt with the bastard who almost ran down his sister yesterday. “Squirrelly little guy, we just hired him last week. I’ll sure see about it,” Andy Foster told him.
J. J. swam out to the sandbar and back, then lay flat back on the dock, his feet in the water, and looked at the sundogs and rainbows between his wet eyelashes until he fell asleep again under a clean sky.
STONEFIELD’S ONE AND ONLY MAIN DRAG, thought Charlotte, looked like one of those dreary WPA pictures from the Depression. Leaning, tin-roofed stores with throwback names like Bunny’s Dry Goods. As opposed to wet? The wide street accommodated a sleeping hound in the middle, which the few passing cars swerved around. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what to do. She went inside a small dime store on the corner. It smelled of stale popcorn and parakeet cages. Charlotte thought purgatory, if it existed, would be something like a dime store in a small town. Her eye was caught by the wall of embroidery threads, the skeins in figure eights silky and bright. She picked out damson, scarlet, spring green, rust. As she paid, she asked the clerk, “Do you know of a Larkin here in Stonefield?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not from around here. I’m from Lux.” Lux was all of eight miles away.
Charlotte walked down one side of the street, crossed, and started back up the other. Three codgers sat outside the barbershop, chairs tilted back, their cheeks puffed with snuff. She glimpsed a soda fountain in the drugstore. She ordered a milk shake and the boy who made it whistled, to her joy, the Academic Festival Overture. “Do you know of any Larkins in town?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Austin Larkin still owns a place off the highway out east of town, but he doesn’t live here. Hasn’t for a hundred years. Comes back now and then. He lives out West somewheres. Place is falling apart.”
“Where’s his house? Is it far? I want to leave something for him.” What a lie. What could she leave, skeins of thread?
“You go out to the red light”—he pointed—”then go about a mile and you’ll come to two big pines. Turn in there, and the road, nothing more than a pig track now, leads up to the house.”
Charlotte found the pines, with a leaning mailbox underneath. She opened it from the car window and saw only a clutch of leaves and a thick spiderweb.
Branches and palmettos slashed the sides of the car. She crept forward, the car bottom scraping, and stopped under a pecan tree. Austin’s house was a sprawling two-story farmhouse with wraparound porch and a round turret. Flaking white paint revealed a yellow coat underneath, probably from a happier time. Charlotte thought those who painted their houses yellow were optimists. From an open door on the right side’s lower wing, a tall black woman looked out. “Hello,” Charlotte called. “I’m an old friend of Austin Larkin. Is he here?” She walked up to the woman, who held strips of willow in her hand.
“Nome. He ain’t here. He done been gone a long time.” She gestured Charlotte in out of the heat. The table was covered with stripped willow branches. Charlotte introduced herself and the woman responded, “I’m Edwina, living here to take care of Mr. Austin’s home while he be gone out West.”
“You’re weaving?” Charlotte looked on the benches around the table and saw a fine egg basket and several small round ones, perfect for bread—no, for her collection of old marbles. You could dip in your hand and let them run through your fingers. “How beautiful.”
“Yes’m. I pass the time. It’s lonesome out here. My husband’s gone all day.”
“I’m sorry. At least it’s peaceful.” Charlotte waved her hand at the window, a neglected garden with some half-dead geraniums around a birdbath, weed trees, an overgrown field swaying with grasses and black-eyed Susans. “Do you sell them?” She lifted a basket.
“Oh, no, just give them to my chirrun. They use them for this and that. Nobody would pay good money for a little ol’ basket like this.” She waved a taut oval basket woven from osier. “It’s just a old habit I got from my granddaddy.” Her long fingers looked as supple as the willow wands she wove.
