Cementville (24 page)

What kind of name is that anyway, he would think to himself. Augrey

Fourth Thursday she came and he was already inside his house. He had latched his screen door against Bett's ragamuffins annoying him. Nimrod sat eating yesterday's greens in front of the television set. A man moved across a stage with a microphone, telling sick people to stand and be healed. The laugh-out-loud girl tapped on the window screen.

“Mr. Nimrod, I'm here to sweep up, dust.”

He startled up and lightning shot across his eyes and he fell not unlike a great tower himself, straight to the floor. A light like a blast at the temple, his body suddenly all rigid, then just as quick, numb. Through the screen door, Nimrod could see her feet outside on the porch and she pulled and screamed like a banshee at the door. She smashed that screen straight through with her fist and lifted the latch and came in. She pulled him out straight as a board, cradled his head.

“Don't you worry, Mr. Nimrod, I'll get somebody to help us.”

Maybe his ears, like his legs, were failing him, but he thought he heard the girl sobbing.

W
HEN THEY HAULED HIM HOME
from the VA, there she was in his house. Two orderlies carried him inside and Augrey Ferguson pointed them to an aluminum chaise lounge she had unfolded and placed by the window. They laid Nimrod down in it and she messed about, covering him with a light summer quilt he recognized as one Madeer had pieced for him when he was a boy. It was freshly laundered and gave off the smell of new-cut grass. When Augrey turned to deal with the blue-uniformed lady who had followed them in, Nimrod noticed flecks of dried grass scattered over the quilt. The girl must have hung it on the porch rail to dry, then mowed his patchy dirt lawn. Borrowed her Aunt Bett's lawn mower, no doubt.

“Sure is nice your
niece
can sign the papers for you to go home, Mr. Grebe,” the VA lady hollered, staring down at Augrey's bare white feet. “Looks like she believes she can take care of you.”

That was when Nimrod spotted the pallet she had fashioned for herself in the kitchen corner.

“Welcome home, Uncle!” Augrey said, loud, like if she could say it with enough volume and conviction, the VA lady would believe this little tramp was related to an old black man.

Nimrod worked his lips around a few syllables but could not make words come out correctly. The VA lady leafed through a folder of yellow and pink papers.

“Mr. Grebe may regain some bits of his speech,” she said to Augrey without once looking her in the face, “if you're willing to work at it with him. The outlook on the paralysis is a bit less rosy.” She handed the girl a stack of papers and silently indicated the lines where Augrey should sign at the bottom of each one. It was supposed to be proof she understood how to take care of a stroke victim, how to lift and bathe and feed.

H
E WAS A PAPER HUSK
of a man, him a strapping hoddie who once built towers to the sky, light enough now to be lifted into his chair by a girl. She grew stronger every day, it seemed, grabbing him full around the chest, grasping him close to her and hoisting his body like a half-filled sack the way the VA lady showed her.

She had borrowed from her Aunt Bett the aluminum lounge chair, the kind with the little teeth in the arms so a person can sit up or recline. She arranged Nimrod in this chair by the window, no more free will left to him now than a big play doll. His legs had turned into lifeless things, hanging like ravelings off the bottom of an old coat. She propped his head on a pillow so he could see out the window to Bett's garden.

“Gobby supple,” Nimrod said.

“It is pretty, isn't it,” Augrey said. “Zinnias in every color.” She
kept up a stream of conversation, and she did get better at translating his efforts. When he grew frustrated, she wiped his eyes.

Every afternoon she did this: She put two fingers of whiskey into a plastic cup, the kind you give a child so he won't spill, with a cap and built-in straw. This she placed in his right hand, taping his knuckles around it so it looked like a bandaged claw strapped with bright blue painter's tape she had gotten from the Ace Hardware. Last she opened the Old Testament on his lap, turning to one of several favored tracts of Prophets.

“There, now,” she would say, getting him settled.

She never went back to the Chaney Farm, nor to Angus Ferguson's trailer.

O
NE NIGHT THEY WERE WATCHING
a western on television. Some gunslingers promised to protect a village of poor, frightened Mexicans and were shooting it out with the bandoleros who had been terrorizing the villagers. After the fighting ended on television, the sound of gunfire continued.

Nimrod and Augrey looked at each other and realized at the same time that the shots were not part of the movie. Augrey used the pliers to turn down the volume. She stepped out on the porch.

Levon was using the bird box in Nimrod's crabapple tree for target practice. Nimrod could not see her from his lounge chair, but he heard Augrey speak with her older brother. He struggled to get to his feet and nearly tipped the damn thing over.

“Go on home, Levon.” There was something Nimrod had never heard in Augrey's voice, something that was part anger and part fear.

“I
am
home, little sister. I'm staying with Bett.”

“Why ain't you staying with Ginny?”

“Bitch kicked me out again.”

“Good for her. Maybe this time she'll haul your mean sorry ass into court and get shut of you once and for all,” Augrey said. “Well, anyway, keep your goddamn gun off our property.”

“
Our
?” Levon said, and spit.

Augrey slammed the door, came inside. “Mr. Nimrod! You about fell out of your chair!” She pulled him upright and tried to make him comfortable again.

“Guh,” he said, nodding toward the chest of drawers.

“You need something from the dresser?” Augrey pulled open the top drawer and looked at him. Nimrod rolled his eyes at the bottom drawer.

“Guh,” he said again.

She knelt and rummaged through the drawer, holding up various articles for his inspection: some of Madeer's worn garments, candles and matches for when the electricity went out, dingy shirts he had not seen in a long time. Augrey reached into the back corner, then she froze. It was a long moment before she turned and looked at him.

“Mr. Nimrod, what do you want with a gun?”

“Shoo Leef.”

Augrey replaced the gun and closed the drawer. “I'm not going to let him hurt you. I won't let anybody.”

Nimrod looked out the window toward Bett's house. Levon was sitting on the porch rail smoking a cigarette, squinting at Nimrod through the window screen.

“He hur
yoo
,” Nimrod said.

“No. Not anymore.” Augrey took the pliers from the top of the TV and turned up the volume.

Villages like this, they make up a song about every big thing that happens
, the young hothead gunslinger was saying.
Sing them for years
.

H
E WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN
able to say with any degree of certainty—his useless hands had long since refused to write anything down in the little spiral-bound memo pads, and he had never been crazy for wall calendars as Madeer was, measuring time instead by
the cycles of egg-laying and gardening and the lengthening days—but for two months, maybe three, things proceeded in that fashion. Her feeding him in his wretchedness.

Bedsores blossomed, new ones overnight, it seemed. When feeling returned in the right leg, he was sorry it had. He had begun soiling himself in the night. How he hated for the girl to have to give him a sponge bath under those, or any, circumstances. But to complain would have been rank ingratitude. Madeer had raised him better than that.

One day, it came to him.

“Kill me,” he said, and she almost missed it, so interleaved was it into Nimrod's mumbled Psalms.

“You know I can't do that,” Augrey said, bending close. “Religion calls that a mortal sin, Mr. Nimrod. I love you too much to let you go.
God forbid, thou shall not die
.”

He rolled his eyes at her, tried for a smile. Her using the words of Samuel 20:1.

D
USTING SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, SHE
lifted the lid of the jewelry box on top of the chest of drawers. The tiny ballerina inside spun on one pointed toe to a tinny melody.

“Madeer,” Nimrod said, jerking his head toward the box. “Necklace.”

In the mirror, Augrey held to her neck the gold chain with a tiny pearl that Nimrod had carried home at the end of the war, a gift he never got to give his Madeer. He caught Augrey's eye in the reflection and gave her a nod. She clasped it under her flaming hair. He saw that the girl's blue eyes were swollen and red and he realized he had not heard her laugh out loud for a week or more.

That afternoon she bathed him and put on him a clean shirt. She scrambled and fed him three banty eggs. Then she taped his cup in his left hand, filled it with Heaven Hill, and screwed on the top with the sipping straw. She took from the chest of drawers the
single-action automatic pistol Nimrod had carried in Europe, and she wrapped it in his big blue claw of a right hand.

Before she left she asked, all business, was there anything else. Nimrod rolled his pair of dried-out eyeballs toward the window and she pulled the drape so he could admire Bett Ferguson's black-eyed Susies.

She closed the screen door behind her so it didn't make a sound. There was the soft flutter of her tennis shoes across the porch. Nimrod heard her brother Levon, sitting on Bett Ferguson's front porch, holler out to her as she passed. She did not stop to answer. Did not pick up a stick to toss. From his window Nimrod watched her walk up the road.

Just walking, walking, straight as the line of a slow bullet.

TWELVE

I
t didn't take long for Billy's room to start smelling like him again. Like the air outside, like goat and the woods with sweat mixed in. What was odd and unsettling was that his smell was the thing Maureen was most aware of, as an actual sighting of her brother was rare. Life was the opposite of what Maureen thought it would be. She had expected that Uncle Carl would move home from the nuthouse and hole up in the attic, the only hints of his presence being occasional spooky footsteps on the floorboards overhead. But Uncle Carl was always around, underfoot, if it were possible for a two-hundred-pound man to be underfoot. He seemed to be everywhere at once.

It was Billy who was nowhere.
Nowhere man
, like John Lennon sang about. She found excuses to walk past his room, hoping to catch him tinkering with some electric gizmo or sorting through his enviable collection of record albums from all the British bands he was so crazy about. (So far, thank heavens, he hadn't missed the Led Zeppelin album Maureen gave Augrey Ferguson in exchange for the confiscated Ouija board.) But Billy was rarely there. He slept through breakfast. He grabbed lunch at a mysterious hour when nobody else
was in the kitchen. Katherine was either involved with her vegetable garden or visiting people in town. Willis was always working. Maureen would be out on her research errands or writing outside at the picnic table with her new permanent shadow, Uncle Carl, never far away. By suppertime, her brother was already gone out for the night. At most meals now Uncle Carl, not knowing better, had taken to sitting in the chair that used to be Billy's before he went to the army.

Willis and Katherine sometimes argued about which of them should do something.
Talk to him!
Katherine's voice would rise from their bedroom late at night, and Willis's, deep and hesitant, would fall silent. Her parents were always arguing now. They did not seem to have adjusted to the new family configuration any better than Maureen had.

Not talking much was common for Willis, but Katherine too had gone strangely silent that first week or so after Billy got home in May. Over the next few months, Maureen tried to decode the blurry blank spots between the words coming out of her mother's mouth and the body language that vibrated off her whenever Billy was around. The words were the equivalent of,
Glad you're home
, but the nervous energy was,
Who are you?

It reminded Maureen of the days surrounding her brother's signing up to join the Army last year. At seventeen, he had needed a parent's signature, and their mother begged and pleaded with their father not to let him go. But Willis did cave, and once Billy was gone, Katherine cried for days and finally quit talking at all, except to Maureen. Maureen she treated like a three-year-old. Katherine made her snuggle with her on the couch and watch old Loretta Young movies. “I have homework,” Maureen would say. “I ought to go to bed.” Her mother just blew her nose and threw the Kleenex into the snowy heap on the coffee table and tightened her grip on Maureen.