Southern Exposure, page 5
But one day William’s agonized cry was heard throughout the town. Elizabeth and her fifth baby died in childbirth, as romantically, as tragically, as the heroine of any novel. A half-smocked christening gown for the unbreathing newborn lay in her bureau drawer, and on her easel on the sleeping porch loomed an image of a forest fire. Her very best painting.
Six months later Harriet’s life began. William came galloping up to the farmhouse, thinner but just as handsome as the man Harriet had known before he married Elizabeth. He wore a black waistcoat and slapped his horse’s reins like a man come back from the dead. A week later he gathered Harriet up, lifted her into his wagon, and cantered back to Essex to whisk her inside the house built for an artist. The door opened for Harriet on that wood-fragrant morning and inside three boys scrambled on the floor, a baby girl lay gurgling in a cradle, and on the walls was written the history of the woman who preceded her.
Harriet walked among the rooms of her new house that day and studied the paintings she’d heard about. Her new husband put his arm around her and said, “As you know, my Elizabeth was an artist. These remind me of her so much. Aren’t they lovely?” The bride turned and looked at her husband but his eyes were elsewhere. Glued to a painting of a fire. “There was so much vitality in Elizabeth,” he whispered. The new wife stared at her husband and knew that on this, her wedding day, she had already lost the man she loved. In his eyes she discerned one thing she was powerless against: the idealized love of the dead. She drew in her breath, corseted her patience around her. She waited for time to pass, waited for the year to come when he’d suggest they take down some of the paintings and store them in the attic. She waited and waited, she waited almost twenty years. He went, the paintings remained.
So she lived among the visions of her predecessor. She walked each day in Elizabeth’s shadow. Harriet saw her children gaze longingly at the canvases on winter evenings and knew their minds were trying to remember, to construct a bridge to the mother they’d hardly known. Harriet was a presence upstaged by a ghost. She got her revenge in the town cemetery. But revenge, like incest, breeds itself. One son sensed her anger at his dead mother and rejected her because of it: he punished her, she finally concluded, by taking to drink and embarrassing her, by becoming a living reminder that she’d failed at stepmothering.
1944. That son’s body in the railroad car. The war still going strong. The oldest son also home from overseas, taking care of arrangements, leading her aside at the train station, apologetic look on his face: “They found a note with his things, Mother. He asked to be buried at our real mother’s feet.”
Elizabeth remained Harriet’s tormentor, for Harriet refused to make peace with her. She feigned an interest in the artwork, a fascination with one so talented. When she cleaned out the attic after William’s death and found more paintings stored there, she framed them and hung them on the walls of her house alongside the others. To ourselves we said it was a wonder, a mystery, the way Miz Harriet was so taken with Elizabeth’s pictures. The truth was Harriet would have slashed every painting in the house in an instant—had it not constituted such obvious proof that Elizabeth had bested her. No, Essex would never see her rage like a second-choice woman. So the paintings stayed throughout Harriet’s life, monuments to the self-imposed exile she lived within her own home. When her adult children came to visit and stared at the canvases, she knew they wanted them, wanted to have their mother’s legacy in their own homes. Yet she didn’t offer the first painting. When she died, the pictures would be divided among them and then they could forget her. But not until then.
Leaving the fire painting behind, Harriet walked slowly to her front door and gazed out the glass panes. Beyond her fence, change had become the prevailing speed of the world. When she’d almost adjusted to automobiles, along came jet planes to confuse her. When she’d figured out how to survive the Depression, along came the Second World War. When she’d stopped shuddering at women wearing men’s pants, along came miniskirts. The only thing out there that stood still was the live oak. Strong and sturdy, it was rooted to a past Harriet took comfort in.
Abruptly she stared past the trees to the house across the street. Tacked to Sarah’s porch was a sign forbidding entrance. Harriet closed her eyes. All her life the greatest danger had seemed inside her own house. But now? Now it was also outside and had claimed her oldest friend.
Three
It became the town’s Aaron’s rod, this murder. It descended, then turned into a thousand snakes. For years the people of Essex had smugly watched their televisions and dismissed disaster and crime alike: “Sure glad I don’t live there. Thank the Lord things are different here.” Now things weren’t different. And we began to act like people at risk. The local hardware store, a dusty wood-floor emporium, sold out of chain locks within four days of Sarah Roth’s murder and frantically ordered more dead bolts from their supplier. The man on the edge of town who raised German shepherds got so many calls that first week he took his phone off the hook. Families who normally threw their windows open to admit springtime kept the casements shut tight. Parents walked their children to school and kept them indoors during the long afternoons. Old ladies phoned each other and tied up the lines for hours talking about nothing, comforting each other through the interminable phantom nights. No one walked “upstreet” to the grocery store in the evening; they drove or they didn’t go at all. And those at home peered out from behind their curtains at the sound of each and every footstep.
On the following Wednesday morning Amos Tumley realized things were different. Retired now, the black man supplemented his income by picking up fresh fruit and vegetables at the large farms outside Essex for delivery to private homes. He took orders every week, then delivered what his clients wanted directly to their doors, as the grocery store had done when Amos was a boy. Since it was early spring, he didn’t have much produce this week, other than some early strawberries. He stopped at Miss Pris Bender’s house and left some pecans, then went on down Aiken Avenue to the Wallerman’s. Soon he was leaving the old part of town, heading toward the brick rancher where the Wilsons lived. The Wilsons were good customers; Amos had always liked them. Schoolteachers, both of them. Mrs. Wilson taught at the school for handicapped children in Ashboro and Mr. Wilson was head of the Science Department at Essex High. They had a daughter and one son. The girl was away at college but the boy had graduated and come home to work. Every week Amos would see that boy head downtown to the bank in his suit. Just like a big shot. Amos grinned. He could remember when that boy wasn’t tall enough to get down the back steps by himself.
Amos was thinking about the Wilson boy as he braked his bicycle and laid it down on the ground, carefully lifting the cardboard box of strawberries out of the wire basket. He walked onto the carport like he always did and headed toward the back door. At the back steps he leaned down to set the box of berries by the door. Then he heard the voice.
“Who’s there? Who is it?”
Amos looked up as the Wilson boy opened the door. Amos smiled. And stared into a World War II service automatic pointed at his head.
We had always been a simple town, one of an endless paper-doll of small crossroads strung between the sand hills of Columbia and the Low Country of the coast. Along with cattails and palmetto trees, even today these villages line the rusted railroad tracks like failed ballerinas, grown old and stiff now, standing at the barre awaiting instructions, despondent but not defeated yet. Taken together, they constitute a Synaptic South, a skipover between Gothic and Genteel, between Old and New. In Essex elderly ladies still went to the beauty shop every Wednesday afternoon, but there were no Bible salesmen with pornographic postcards, nor any chrome shopping malls with discounted Gucci handbags. In short, we lay in a tundra bypassed by movements and movers.
The town itself contained about two thousand inhabitants and had been settled in the early 1800s by a group of dissatisfied Charleston merchants who’d tired of the city’s snobbishness. In Essex they created a thriving railroad town, a convenient cotton stop between the ports of Charleston and Savannah. The community’s only claim to fame, however, came a half-century later with its greatest misfortune, that of lying directly in the path of William T. Sherman’s famed march to the sea. Thanks to a free-lancing patrol party that preceded the general’s contingent of 62,000, Essex became the only “Twice-Burned Town” in the history of the War Between the States.
Double-lighted fires altered the town’s landscape forever. No fine antebellum homes graced its streets now; there were no grand public buildings, nothing of Savannah or Charleston. Essex had, quite literally, been rebuilt during Reconstruction, and so most homes were modest, streets were narrow, buildings rarely more than two stories, church spires just tall enough to be seen three blocks away. Thus, the town exuded compactness, a cleanly functional lack of excess. Likewise, its no-nonsense people took pride in their stolid ability to survive. If nothing else, Essex was a tough little devil. It had come back from total devastation and, having done so, nothing much fazed it.
Until now.
The autopsy on Sarah Roth revealed little, except that she had suffered from advanced arteriosclerosis, but the attendant paperwork took a week, and it was another week before Sarah’s closest relative arrived from New York to make funeral arrangements. At Harriet Setzler’s insistence, a memorial service was held in the Essex Lutheran Church, with a private burial to follow one day later in the Jewish cemetery in Charleston where the Rothenbargers had been laid to rest for over a century. The Essex service was well attended. In our village, as in most like it, funerals were social events; your funeral was the last impression you left on everyone so it had to be good. Which must be the reason we spent so much of life’s energy planning for our deaths. Harriet Setzler, for example, had rewritten her funeral plans six times in as many years, her last instruction being that her casket should be pulled through town in a horse-drawn wagon so that people might stand in the street and watch her pass by. Something on the order of the rituals for John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt would do nicely. Had we known about this plan then, we’d have laughed out loud but, oddly enough, when the time came it happened just like that. Stoney McFarland saw to it. And we didn’t laugh. We stood stock-still as the wagon went by.
Of all those who attended Sarah Roth’s funeral, the most uncomfortable was Anna McFarland. Sitting in a white frame Lutheran church in a small town mourning a murdered elderly woman she hardly knew, was about the last place Anna had ever expected to find herself. She and Stoney sat on the fifth row listening to the bell in the tower somberly toll Bach’s “Jesu.” Anna shifted in the old-fashioned oak pew and stared at the kneeling rail at her feet. The interior of the church was elegantly simple: white walls and white woodwork offset by a rich burgundy carpet down the center aisle which led to the raised chancel with a red-globed eternal flame suspended from its ceiling. Beneath which, draped by a blanket of white roses, sat the bronze coffin. And on both sides of the sanctuary arched stained glass windows were raised to catch the breeze and admitted the hiss of pollinating bees and the pungent musk of honeysuckle.
“Everybody in town must have come,” Anna whispered.
Stoney nodded. “I guess so.”
He had lines around his eyes, she noticed. Sad lines. Could wrinkles appear on a man’s face in just a matter of days? His face looked ravaged, as though he’d lost a close personal relative in Sarah, a family member, someone or something he treasured deeply. He’d only known Sarah Roth casually, as children know their parents’ friends, but somehow he felt responsible for what happened to her. Even now he kept going back over to her house and staring at it in silence, as if he were to blame. Meanwhile, the other elderly widows in the neighborhood were dragging him out of bed almost every night to check on a noise or inspect a rusty door lock. They didn’t call the Essex police chief, they knew they couldn’t count on Jim Leland. Instead, they called Stoney McFarland and he went to their houses at all hours and assured them they weren’t about to be murdered in their beds. Or worse.
The service began and Anna sat back. A bee danced through the air and landed on her skirt; as she shook him off, her profile stood out in the sunlight spilling onto the floor through the open windows. People often said she was a study in contradiction; that she was a puzzle which, even when the pieces were put together, still didn’t yield an understandable whole. Even her looks didn’t mesh predictably. Her features were too sharply defined, like separate entities derived from dissimilar faces. Her curly black hair was still shoulder-length and was tipped on the ends with the silver that would one day overtake it. Her cheekbones were high and strong. By contrast, however, her eyes were palest blue, almost translucent, the delicate eyes more common to a blonde but far too fiery here, too penetrating. She looked out at people with a challenge; she didn’t so much see what she observed as she recorded it.
It was warm in the church and Anna wished she had worn something cooler than her pleated tuxedo shirt and long, flared skirt over red leather boots. Long and lanky in stature, she usually chose non-traditional clothes. Her bright hand-painted Tshirts and black leather jackets did not go unnoticed, nor unremarked, in a conservative town like Essex. She practically advertised she was “not from around here.” But she never looked totally at home in her clothes. Sometimes what she wore was more statement than covering. And like someone wearing an unfamiliar costume, she tended to button up necks designed to be left open, to cinch in waists intended to be left flowing.
As the funeral progressed, Anna gazed at the people around her: pewter-haired women and salt-and-pepper men, young mothers and fathers whose small children were blissfully unconcerned with final departures, in the second row the town council president Heyward Rutherford with his rotund wife, behind them a long string of elderly widows who constituted the garden club and the Essex Library Society, the police chief Jim Leland sitting next to the newspaper editor Stoney jogged with, a few blacks who mostly sat together except for Marian Davis who was alone, and of course Harriet Setzler in her hat towering over Sarah’s cousin in the family pew.
Despite two years there Anna had made no real friends in Essex and her least favorite person in town was Harriet Setzler. The octogenarian was the first person in Essex Anna had met. In fact, Harriet had appeared at the McCloskey house while Stoney and Anna were still unpacking; the old lady marched up the steps, tapped perfunctorily on the door frame, and waltzed through the open door as if invited. Anna peered out from behind a stack of boxes as Stoney introduced the visitor, who presented them with a welcoming plate of lime pies. Thanking her, Anna watched the older woman survey their belongings. Then Harriet looked up, said to Anna, “We’ll be looking for you in church Sunday. The preacher always likes to introduce new members.”
Anna, who referred to aggressive religious solicitors as “Ronald Reagan’s God Squad,” stepped out from behind the cardboard boxes. “I’m afraid we won’t be there, Mrs. Setzler. Thank you anyway, but we don’t believe in organized religion.”
“You have to go to church,” Harriet Setzler insisted. “It’s either us or the Baptists.” She spat out the last word like diseased phlegm.
“I can’t imagine choosing either, to be perfectly frank. As I said, thank you for the invitation, but we don’t go to church.”
Harriet Setzler gaped at the rudest woman she had ever met. Stoney stepped toward the old lady quickly. “Thank you so much for coming by, Mrs. Setzler. And for the lime pies. How’s your garden coming along this year?” After Harriet left, he turned to Anna with exasperation, “Couldn’t you just nod and go along with her? We didn’t have to go, but you didn’t have to antagonize her either.”
All over the church people were shuffling, coughing, shifting. The minister had launched into the eulogy. Anna gazed around the room again. She didn’t belong here and she knew she never would. She had spent her childhood in an Atlanta suburb, the only child of a divorced working mother before that was commonplace. Her parents had separated when she was ten. One day her mother loved her father and the next day she hated his guts. “He” had ruined their lives; a smart woman stayed away from men. Soon Anna was allowed to see her father only every other weekend.
As a result, Anna Reston grew to be very independent. She was alone a lot and she learned to rely on herself. Consequently, she often found herself at odds with her peers. In the middle-class suburb where she lived, in the huge high school she attended, Anna always stood out, an initially painful experience which eventually grew on her. A free-thinker stirred by the coming changes in the South, she espoused radicalism before it fully overtook her generation but she never participated in peace movements or protests in college: her allegiance was intellectual; she was not a joiner, a team player. Those who didn’t like her said she always covered her rear, talked a game of risk rather than playing one. At the University of Maryland, she no longer cared that she was out of step with her times, that she was studying while others fomented revolution. So she made her way through the late sixties and early seventies quietly, majoring in art history and later developing a passion for photography.
