Cementville (2 page)

N
early the end of May and the air is cool and damp with the threat of a storm trapped at the narrow end of the valley since sun up. The strange dry spring has hung on longer than usual this year, or so it seems to Wanda Ferguson Slidell, perched on the enormous limestone overhang that her grandfather christened Weeping Rock years before she was born. When Wanda was small, he held onto her ankles while she dangled over the edge of the cliff and cupped in her hands the spring water that oozed from the rocky wall. She lapped the water like a pup, splashing it over her face. Not until she was twelve or so did Wanda stop believing it to be the ice-cold tears of the earth.

She scans the undulating horizon of Juell Ridge across the valley, the gentle shape her grandfather said was a sleeping woman who, every spring, was draped in a velvet mantle of soft new leaf. Dogwood. Hardrock maple. Redbud. In winter though, it became a slumbering giant, the black trees against snow making the giant's grizzled beard; jutting rocks were his shoulders and elbows, his knees drawn up like an overgrown child.

Wanda would die living in town. The bustle of those thousand souls scurrying around in the fifteen or twenty-odd blocks that comprise Cementville, it would do her in. She is glad to be up here on this place her grandparents left to her and Loretta. This is hers, this knob of craggy land. It's where she belongs, clinging like some endangered raptor to this weeping carapace of limestone clad in a thin layer of poor soil. From her aerie, Wanda has the view of the entire Slidell Valley. She can trace the Louisville Road winding toward Cementville from several miles out, all the way to where it becomes Council Street and meanders southeasterly through town, crossing the river three times as it slaloms the valley floor. She peers toward the south to see if she can spy the hearses coming. Maybe they've already pulled in behind the Duvall Funeral Home. Once the mansion of some vanished founding family, it was converted decades ago to fit the needs of the grieving. The mortuary sits among the better houses in town, fine examples of eighteenth-century architecture as prized by their inhabitants as they are by historians at the state capital who are hell-bent on designating the area a historic district.

Halfway up Juell Ridge across the valley, Wanda can see the little frame house Jimmy Smith built for his war bride. Everybody in town had assumed when the mysterious Giang arrived here three years ago that she spoke no English, and they talked openly about her within earshot of both Jimmy and Giang, the strange-sounding name nobody pronounced right. “
Zsjang
,” Wanda practices out loud, as if to test her own worldliness. Charlene Cahill told Wanda about how the young Vietnamese woman interrupted the gossip of the Garden Club meeting at Happy's Soups, how with three elegantly crafted sentences she threw a dead silence over the entire gathering. Wanda has yet to meet Giang Smith but has rehearsed in her head what she might say to her on such an occasion.

At the south end of the valley, behind the distillery's big gray warehouses, Wanda can make out the rusted tin roofs of Taylortown, the neighborhood that until recently the whites called Coloredtown. After Civil Rights came, the old name wore off and the whites started
calling it what the blacks themselves had named it long ago, after a family of abolitionists who settled there. The Taylors shocked everyone by moving in amongst the shacks of the freedmen, paying no mind to the invisible line demarcating one part of town from the other. There is a story, never corroborated by any real evidence Wanda knows of, that a freedom tunnel runs under it.

She holds her hands in the air to make a cropping frame so the rectangle of palm and thumb block out the cement plant. The town would be picturesque without it. But she gives up finally, unable to ignore the slumbering dragon lying in the belly of the valley. Its old body, scaled in iron, yields the occasional smoky belch. She remembers creeping out here to Weeping Rock with her grandfather before dawn, back when the plant was operating twenty-four hours a day. How she and Poose loved to watch the lights, the fires blinking from under a score of brazen eyelids. It was nearly beautiful then, in a vaguely terrifying way, cloaked in the dying night. Wanda and Poose would wait for the sun to rise across the way behind Juell Ridge, lighting the tip of the smokestack so that it looked like a colossal match leaning over the town.

The plant is dark today, the town shut down in honor of the war dead. In seeming collusion with the mourning pall, the clouds had not allowed for much of a sunrise. No match lit, colossal or otherwise, except in the sanctuary of Holy Ghost Church. Father Oliver and the Altar Society would be already making the preparations for the multiple funeral Masses to come. Seven in all, spread out over the next week, all the families having insisted on individual funerals for their boys. Or is it eight? No, seven is right; seven Catholic dead from the National Guard unit that was never supposed to have gone overseas in the first place.

There is an eighth, a cousin she barely knew, a boy ordered to his slaughter by the draft's roll of a die. But there'll be no Mass for him, the Fergusons being of Scot Presbyterian persuasion, or were so persuaded at one time. It's doubtful most of them can be said to be any religion at all anymore, Wanda included.

Wanda's branch of the Ferguson tree had severed ties with the rest of the family before she was born. Her grandfather's determination to make something of himself had set them off as the uppity side of the family, long before Wanda's mother married a Slidell. And her late granny, Mem, never missed the opportunity to remind people. Johnny was the only legitimate landowner among the Fergusons, the rest plain sharecroppers, and bad ones at that.

The couple of sentences buried in the obituaries said Daniel Ferguson was in another part of that embattled little country, far from where the National Guard unit was attacked. “Killed in separate fighting,” the
Picayune
said of Daniel, out on some kind of night patrol. His body isn't due to arrive for a few more days. Nineteen years old, the paper said, drafted right out of high school.

Surely Loretta won't insist they attend the funeral service. Wanda flushes with embarrassment at her self-centeredness. But all those poor, sobbing creatures! Her heart thumps around her ribcage like a wounded rabbit. She grows light-headed at the thought of entering the suffocating rooms of the Duvall Funeral Home, walking down its dark central hallway, the horrid red wallpaper flocked with velvet swirls.

Wanda has to lie back against the mossy rock to get her breathing to ease.

She is glad this place is hers. She has earned this safe place on her windblown ridge: She has worked it, eaten from its soil, slept and dreamed in the small gabled room at the top of the house Johnny Ferguson built for his cantankerous Caroline. For Wanda, this soil, her hill, this house, her room, they are the locus of the beautiful plague of dreams that have shaped her life.

H
ER
P
OOSE
(M
EM HAD ALWAYS
called the old man Papoose, and Wanda's toddler lisp shortened it to 'Poose) gave names to everything as if the naming lent extra legitimacy to his claim of ownership. Around the farm were signs painted on bits of board
and affixed to outbuildings and trees, even stretches of fence and gate. For instance, the big tree that stands sentinel down by the road, planted in 1911 after Mem's sister sent her a copy of
Howards End
. Poose was illiterate in those days, and when Mem read the book aloud to him, he heard the name of Mrs. Wilcox's magical tree with protective powers, a
wych-elm
, and figured his newly purchased farm needed all the help it could get. He procured an elm sapling and stuck it in the ground at the mouth of his road and had a sign maker letter up a placard naming it “Witch Elm.” Mem enjoyed telling this story on him more than Poose enjoyed hearing it. “He'll soon be sticking it with hogs' teeth and chewing its bark like old Mrs. Wilcox,” Mem said. Her teasing was the goad he needed to finally tackle his illiteracy. When the tree not only survived the Dutch elm disease that ravaged elms around the county, but grew into an imposing sentry at the entrance to his farm, Poose felt vindicated.

Once he could write, there was no stopping him. He continued his labeling campaign. Their farm was Hanging Valley, after the way April rains washed numerous gullies across the rocky surface, creating small but dramatic waterfalls that noisily joined the river below. The house itself he called Maiden's Rest, commemorating the birth of their only child, Loretta, in 1923, and he nailed a board above the kitchen door declaring it so. Mem swore it put a curse on them, as baby Loretta never slept through the night again after the sign went up.

Poose claimed the right to a nomenclature with the tone of those great hunters who roamed the land before the whites: Cherokee, Shawnee, and the others, natives who supposedly called the area “Dark and Bloody Ground” because its wooded hills were rich with game. Poose's own people were Melungeon, he said, and so could claim all the races if they wished to, white, red, black, although perhaps not the Oriental.

“Melungeon my foot,” Mem would grumble when Poose went tearing off into his version of history and genealogy, and she would
point to the bright hair growing sparsely on Poose's head, in thick ringlets on Wanda's, and hanging in a gorgeous braided rope down Loretta's back, hair that ranged from the color of a blood orange on Wanda to ripe muskmelon on Poose to strawberry blond on Loretta. “Fergusons are Scots-Irish or I'm the Queen,” Mem said.

“Why, Uncle Bertram passed for colored in juke joints up and down the Mississippi!” Poose cried, and Wanda had to look away. She did not like to see her grandfather's eyes go watery, even when she was little.

“Humph. Bootblack, no doubt.” Mem, keeping her broad back to them, the clopping circles she dragged through the oatmeal on the stove never ceasing.

Poose nailed a board above the outhouse a few days later: Queen's Roost.

Wanda could take herself back to this scene and others from those days if she closed her eyes and concentrated. Mem busy over pots on the stove, steam from boiling mutton swirling above her. Wanda's mother, Loretta, might be spinning the batts of fleece from her parents' sheep, the prized wool for which their farm had gained a reputation, or she might be reading or otherwise occupied in her mostly silent pursuits. Poose would push on the arms of his recliner (new and shiny back then) and he was always startled when his legs went flying into the air. It had fallen to Wanda to pull his muddy shoes off when he came in from the fields; she rubbed his toes to get the blood circulating.

“It was the mouth harp he played. Everybody loved Uncle Bertie,” Poose would protest softly some minutes later, his gaze lost in the mug of thick coffee he held in both hands, all skin and bone and knuckle. And he would begin to hum some old tune. Poose, born John Knox Ferguson and called Johnny by everyone in town, had been the finest tenor in the county, highly sought after for singing at weddings and funerals.

“Tell how you got started singing,” Wanda entreated. “Tell about the Sacred Harp, and how Uncle Bertram taught you the old
songs from the Spanish Wars.” That was how she coaxed him away from his tears, and back to her.

S
HE LEANS ON HER ELBOWS
now, sinking into the green cushion of Weeping Rock's mossy surface, and lets her head fall between her shoulder blades so she has an upside-down view of the locust grove ringing the side yard. A breeze rushes up from the valley floor and the trees rain their creamy blossoms. A few catch in her hair as if kowtowing to her earlier musings and, releasing the spring of its debts, let summer in at last. By tomorrow the fragrant petals will belong to the soil, doing their part to feed the blades of new grass carpeting the grove. Old Jimbo gives a whinny from his pen next to the chicken house.

“I know, I know, you're ready for the dang-gom plough,” Wanda calls out to him. The garden should be in by now, but she has dreaded breaking into the hard ground, wrestling the clay into another year of submission. A heavy sky threatens to rupture over the valley. The sun has not managed to part the purple veil of clouds. She really should turn the soil today. With her luck, if she waits and it finally rains, the soil will go from hard and dry to too soggy to plough. Winter was mild enough that the cole crops from the fall garden didn't die off, and Wanda and her mother have enjoyed fresh greens every day to the point of being sick of them. A few root vegetables too, from seed she scattered in late February. But there are only so many knobby carrots one can crunch before a person will kill for the stinging citrus burst of a tomato in her mouth. The weather will turn hot soon enough.

Today is the last Saturday of the month, and normally she would have already driven to the A&P and back. It's up to her now to get groceries in since, for all practical purposes, the lupus has turned her mother into a cripple. They've worked out a system with the store manager whereby their grocery order is assembled and waiting for Wanda so she can pull into the parking lot a few minutes before the
doors are unlocked, rush in and pay, and rush out before any other customers have shown up. But even that feels like an impossibility today, given the arrival of the bodies.

Wanda shivers. Please, God, she thinks, don't let my mother take a notion that we ought to call on cousin Arlene, offer our condolences for the loss of her Danny.

Besides her cousin and the seven soldiers blown to bits at Blacksnake, there's another that will return today. A maimed POW is to be feted at a parade—though the coming storm may have something to say about that. The article in the
Picayune
said the soldier had lost a limb, had to be airlifted to a hospital in the Philippines after the Green Berets got him out. The war has made her nearly glad that she and Loretta have forgone the luxury of a TV set. Although, sitting in Charlene Cahill's living room, Wanda had watched, breathless, the coverage of the POW's daring rescue. She remembers Harlan O'Brien before he was a prisoner of war, a handsome, smart boy behind her by a grade or two. She was always too shy to speak to boys like him. As they say, he comes from good people.