Cementville (11 page)

“Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. You went through that all alone. I am so sorry.”

Evelyn is about to let her leave, then, “No, no, Martha, it's me who is sorry. I have not said all week how sorry I am about Donnie Ray.”

“Yes, you did—”

But she stops her, stops this large-hearted woman's protestations, and Evelyn Slidell gives to Martha Goins the lies she needs.

A
FTER THE DOOR IN THE
hall downstairs clicks shut, Evelyn sets the dinner tray aside and returns to her box. She riffles through several diaries and disintegrating albums of snapshots until she stops at a large, blurry photograph. It is a spring day, the weather not unlike what swept through the valley last weekend. A blustery wind plasters the women's long dark dresses to their legs. The sky behind the buildings looks ominous. There she is, Evelyn herself, at
five or six years old, near the front, partly obscured by her father. She is wearing a white pinafore, and Lewis, holding onto her hand, is beside her in a dark suit with short pants. They glare out at the camera together, Lewis and Evelyn versus the world. The men all stand with their hands clasped behind their backs or arms folded, all their faces pointing in one direction. It is the beginning of a new era for the town. Evelyn's father, the Vice President of the new operation, has stepped aside to make way for Melburn Slidell, Lewis's father, who is cutting the ribbon on the gates of his spanking-new cement plant. For the next century the main ingredient for modern building would be churned and ground and belched and breathed into the very lungs, powdering the pores, clothing, food, and even the roots of people's hair. To celebrate the town entering the industrial age, they changed the name to Cementville in an extravagant ceremony meant to sanctify it with prosperity. It is this that the photograph documents. All the men not engaged in farming or whiskey-making found jobs with Slidell Cement.

But this photograph is not what Evelyn is looking for. More digging, and there it is at the bottom of the box, something that had flitted through her mind as she seethed on Freeman Hume's rickety stage this afternoon. A yellowed tract from Twain—a piece he composed in the midst of the Philippine War—torn from a magazine. Was it Lewis who had found its bitter irony so appealing, and intended to hang onto the clipping, maybe to pass it down one day to a son or daughter? Stanley had been spared ever knowing conflict. Born after the First World War, dead before the Second. How Lewis had loved Mark Twain. Still, he had left her to go off to the Great War. Such things he saw over there. Such things he brought home with him.

Maybe some long-lost version of Evelyn herself had clipped the article from
Harper's
. She runs the tips of her fingers over the slick page, feeling the impression of the type. Evelyn can imagine her own younger simulacrum, thin and already embittered, cheated, though she was not quite sure how, stealing into the library and ripping out the page and folding it to fit in the bodice of her dress, keeping it
there like some kind of talisman against war ever blighting their home again. She reads the whole story now, her dry lips whispering each word. In it, a preacher delivers a fiery exhortation to the God of war to deliver an obviously deserved victory. Then a hoary stranger ascends to the pulpit and cautions the congregation to be prepared to accept the consequences of what they pray for. He holds forth to their stunned ears what he says are words given him by God. It is this portion of the story that Evelyn needs.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle
—
be Thou near them! With them
—
in spirit
—
we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen
.

With scissors from her sewing basket, Evelyn clips out the tract, refolds the paper, soft as silk, along its creases. She fits it into
an envelope that she will slip into the mail slot of his front door tonight while the Judge and his wife are gone to dinner at the country club.

“We always fight ourselves, Freeman,” she says to the empty room, the empty house. Why hadn't she been able to say that to him as he handed her down from the platform today, instead of giving him a vacant nod? Evelyn imagines her friend's confused face tomorrow, opening the morning mail. Unable to help herself, she feels her mouth draw up in the rictus of a wide grin.

FIVE

W
hen Lieutenant Harlan O'Brien comes home from two years in a bamboo prison, dead eyes sparking an ice fire, his stiff shoulders square and strong—they have their man. And they decorate their manikin, a purple medal directly above the heart. They fling flakes of colored paper as he straddles the mayor's black-as-midnight mare in full dress blues, Irish eyes unsmiling at his hero's welcome.

If the young lieutenant cannot imagine the life stretching in front of him, it may be that the howling jungle he recently left has so cleanly swept away his past. The town's desperate insistence on the life they need him to have holds him upright in Judge Hume's good leather saddle, squeaking now beneath his meatless buttocks.

They take down their big toy soldier and fold him into a metal chair in the church cafeteria, his medals clinking rin-tin-tinny. They shove him up to the table groaning with German potato salad steaming with vinegar and pink-singed bacon; kale greens in brackish pot likker; white navy beans glistening with bloated chunks of fatback; banana croquettes and banana cream pie and banana pudding built of
layers of yellow puffy cream and wafers and more wafers; blackberry cobbler, crust bruised blue; tender catfish flayed and fried; sliced tomatoes and mounds of legs and thighs and necks and breasts and backs and hearts crisped brown and crunchy the way he remembers.

All you want! All you can eat!
they sing. All he wants, shoveling it in right then, is his clay bowl of gray rice speckled with twitching legs of grasshoppers, headless, wingless bodies lolling, lidless eyes clinging to the sides of the bowl and mingling with the browner grains of rice. (
Brown is better for you
, his mother had always stressed,
being whole food straight from the hand of God
.) He misses that crunch between his molars, now unfortunately loose.

He rides home with distended belly in the backseat of his mother's Pontiac, to the future they have imagined for him, to the house of his father. Harlan O'Brien stretches out that night beneath the rigid tin roof, rain beating a Taps tattoo. He stares, sleep-starved, at the ceiling memorized in boyhood, blood beads leaking from under his thorn crown.

* * *

A
T THREE, THE PAIN AT
the small of her back snakes up to the base of her skull. Giang Smith rolls onto her left side, but it won't do. Her husband, a warm rock in the middle of the bed, produces sonorous booms, letting go the tissues in the back of his throat, his arms and legs thrown wide on her side and his. Jimmy Smith has slept harder and longer lately since the Phenobarbital. Some nights Giang sleeps through the racket coming from her husband's mouth. Others, she lays staring at the brown stains in the ceiling, raggedy islands in a dirty sea.

She tries to put her finger on when the aches started. The persistent twinge between her shoulder blades came from swinging the sickle in her father's lowland rice fields. She remembers a burn
lower, in her hips, after she and her sister went to work in the city, from legs spread too wide, too long.

These new aches have their own source.

Giang rises from the bed and downstairs makes strong tea, folds herself into her husband's big chair by the wood stove. She fishes a diary from under a pile of
Field & Streams
. She doesn't worry about her husband reading her private words.

Looks like a chicken danced over the page
, Jimmy always says of the wild characters and diacritical marks swimming across the leaves of her cloth-covered book.

Zzhhaaang
, he drawls at night, drawing it out to make her laugh when he's feeling good, the Phenobarbital coursing through his blood. An office boy for a general, Jimmy was lucky to not see real combat, unlucky to be driving an explosives-rigged jeep, a bomb meant for his boss.
Read me some poems
, he'll say. Several times a day, Giang rubs sweet oils into the skin where tiny scraps of metal still freckle his ribcage and back; she is grateful for the training Saigon gave her. She and the drugs and the occasional poem give him some relief. It's the least she can do, considering what he did for her.

She lights a candle each morning at the little Buddha altar she has made here in this strange country. And each morning she calls to memory the day Jimmy Smith came for her, how he appeared at the brothel door with a fistful of money, intent on buying her way out of there. She lays flowers before the statue of Quan Âm, the bodhisattva of compassion, and marvels at how her simple obligation has become comfortable habit, how the duty and debt to one's savior, fed and watered, ripens to something like love.

He came home from work on the second shift at the cement plant last night and woke her. “It's the summer solstice, baby, get up!” he said, and they had stayed awake until one in the morning trying to make eggs balance on end, laughing like children at the kitchen table. “Why won't it work?” Jimmy guffawed as one rolled to the floor. “There goes breakfast!” She does so love him at times like this. Giang
tells him about
Ha Chí
, the name for summer's apex; today, June 21, is the middle of summer in Vietnam, the time to make offerings to the god of death so that loved ones will be safe from malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
Tet Duon Ngo
is the time for “Killing the Inner Insect Festival,” she tells him, and this makes him burst with laughter all over again. She does love him. She does.

Jimmy has tried to correct the
Geee-ang
his bumpkin friends call her. He brags that Giang's mother was
boi tai
, a high servant in a French household, fluent in both Vietnamese and French, governess to the sons of a Parisian diplomat. Years later she would teach her twin daughters to form the words for both languages.

Restless day and night, Giang has taken to walking along the river at all hours. She returns to find her untouched tea cold and throws it down the sink. Hours still before she will pad upstairs to draw Jimmy's bath. From the dark of the kitchen window she watches the eastern sky, its tinge of blood seeping from the bottom edge. A cloud is on fire.

Giang bends over the kitchen sink and, stretching an arm overhead, lets the muscles pull sharp at the waist. She breathes into the pain at the base of her spine, imagines herself an arabesque, pliant and muscular, a tight coil ready to spring. She reaches her hand into the fruit bowl and draws forth a plum, rubs a thumb over the skin's powdery bruise.

The floorboards creak overhead and Giang knows her husband will stumble down the hall soon. She should go and draw his bath. She keeps her eyes closed for a minute more, a finger holding the page where yesterday she copied a few lines. Beneath the
nôm
, the traditional Vietnamese characters of that watery land, an ancient poem flows. This one tells of the river and its inhabitants, and of lost love:
Stepping into the field, sadness fills my deep heart. / Bundling rice sheaves, tears dart in two streaks. / Who made the jerry's leaving? / Who made this shallow creek that parts both sides?

Giang tries to write a poem per day, from memory.

There are poems that cause a startle—in them she sees a double
of herself, whether she reads them once or a hundred times. The first time it happened she was thirteen, the last year her mother was alive, the year before their village was relocated. The words drifting around her, she was both the fish and the river. Like the promise of her given name, the river constantly keened toward the sea, struggling against the crags and banks and the men who tried to hold it back for their own purposes.