Cementville (32 page)

Nor had she gone to the funeral of Giang Smith, or her audacious little cousin Augrey only last week. At no time would she have said out loud that her grandmother was
working
on her. But that
must have been it. Getting to know Evelyn Slidell, a helpless and lonely elder, during all those visits into town had wrought something of a change, a
translation
of the woman Wanda was.

Now she sat in Alden Wilder's office. Loretta had declined to come along, having rarely ventured far from her bedroom since Evelyn's funeral.

“You're aware that Mrs. Slidell has left everything to you.” Mr. Wilder carefully placed his half-eaten fried egg sandwich on top of a wedge of paper towel on his desk, its runny yolk and faint sulfur smell creeping toward her. Wanda struggled to keep her eyes off it. Packed and labeled boxes sat stacked against the office walls, ready and waiting for their owner's retirement.

“Yes,” was all Wanda could manage at first. The threat of arrhythmia lurked in her chest, the slightest flutter of stamping feet, that sure marker of an oncoming panic attack. But as quickly as it threatened, it diminished, as if some stronger part of her had come out of hiding and yelled
Boo!
to the frightened rabbit in her. “But I'm not sure I know what that means.”

“Well, there's the house. I don't know if you'll want to list it for sale, auction it off, or move into it. I can give you as much or as little help as you wish on any of those options.”

That was a lot of information. She tried to create an outline in her head. Roman numeral one. The House.

Capital A. List it.

B. Auction it.

C. Live in it.

“May I have a piece of paper and a pen?” Wanda said.

The lawyer rummaged through an open cardboard box on his desk and pulled out a yellow pad. He slid an elegant cup of pens to her side of the desk. “I apologize for the condition of my office. I'm afraid this box is my temporary supply cabinet. I'm supposed to retire next week.”

“Oh, don't mention it. I can't begin to say how much I appreciate you helping me out.”

“Now. There are several accounts,” he said. “Eight fifty in Farmers Bank right here in town. The mutual fund, which we might want to get out of—the thing is tanking right now—my man tells me this bear market isn't likely to move for a while—your mutual fund is worth about six and a quarter. I'll have Mrs. Slidell's accountant calculate the value of the stock portfolio, and you can decide how you want to handle that. No rush.”

Wanda scribbled the figures in a column. She relaxed and let out a pleasant exhale. “So there's about fourteen seventy-five, plus whatever the stocks are worth,” she said. She wondered if it was the first time she ever used the word
stock
as a noun to refer to anything not on four legs.

“Fourteen hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, yes, that's right. A million, four hundred and seventy-five thousand. The portfolio is probably another million. Give or take.”

The last thing Wanda saw before she lost consciousness was the top of Alden Wilder's shiny head as he reordered papers in the fat file representing Evelyn Slidell's earthly possessions.

T
HE LAWYER COULD NOT HAVE
done a single other thing to make the execution of her grandmother's will go smoother. He routed the paperwork through the bank to combine the myriad accounts her grandmother had set up. He put Wanda in touch with a financial planner in Louisville who would personally drive out to Wanda's house and help her sort through the stock portfolio, all the buying and selling and what not. He arranged a trust that would issue a modest check on a regular basis.

All of Alden Wilder's paper shuffling uncovered the circuitous ways the old woman had helped Wanda and Loretta over the three decades since Stanley Slidell's untimely death. The full ride to Saint Brigid College, which Wanda had been led to believe was from some nebulous foundation, was only a portion. Wanda remembered times when Kirshbaum's store in town notified them that there had been
a mistake and there was a credit on their account, usually around the end of the year—the only way Evelyn could secretly manage a Christmas gift for her grandchild. Then there was the money that had appeared every month—the bank called it a “death benefit” from Stanley's life insurance.

“Why couldn't she have just come out and said to my mother, ‘Here, let me help you'?” Wanda wondered out loud. Alden Wilder had no ready answer, but Wanda imagined they had similar thoughts about it. Evelyn Slidell couldn't feature such a public connection with Ferguson blood.

When the last pesky pieces of paperwork had been stuffed into their manila envelopes, Mr. Wilder reached into a desk drawer and brought forth a pocket-sized silver flask. He pulled two cone-shaped paper cups from the dispenser above the restroom sink and he filled one with bourbon and handed it to Wanda. He filled his own and tapped it to hers with a muffled chink. Wanda had never tossed back even a thimbleful of pure liquor before, but she mimicked Mr. Wilder's fluid motion that ended with a decisive flick of the head. The gag reflex she expected never came. The bourbon trickled down, its fiery honey warming her tonsils and esophagus and her entire chest. Wanda smiled.

S
HE PULLED THE
P
LYMOUTH
F
URY
up to the farmhouse and sat there for a while in the idling car, trying to figure how to tell her mother about the unfailing kindnesses Evelyn Slidell had secretly thrust into their lives. She cut the engine and went inside.

None of Wanda's mental preparations included a provision for Loretta breaking down altogether. Her mother kept her spine straight at the kitchen table while her face came apart like a crushed box. When Loretta's silent weeping was done, Wanda helped her to bed. She fetched tea and a paperback her mother had tried to read the day before. Loretta, propped on pillows, feigned reading from the middle of
Pride and Prejudice
then let her head fall to the side.
Wanda closed the door behind her and went downstairs to take care of the lunch dishes. Then she took a bowl and a knife and went to the garden to cut kale.

Loretta stayed in her room all that day. An hour before suppertime Wanda tapped on her door and stuck her head in. “I'm going to fry those catfish Carl Juell brought over here this morning. How does that sound?” There was nothing her mother preferred over fresh fish. Loretta began struggling wordlessly to extricate herself from the bedclothes.

“Pete's sake, Mother, it wouldn't kill you to ask for help now and then,” Wanda said.

Loretta rolled her eyes. They had always related most comfortably in this chiding way. Everything was right between them again; they were past whatever riffs Evelyn's interference in their lives had caused. The money wasn't going to change anything.

“That young man is still sweet on you,” Loretta said. “Look at how he pitches woo. Catfish.”

“Mother, Carl and I are thirty years old.”

“You're not saying you're too old to be romanced.”

“Stop it now.” Wanda felt herself blushing.

Supper was simple: Carl's catfish dredged in cornmeal and green onion-flecked hushpuppies. Sliced tomatoes, the kale braised with a little bacon. Wanda offered her mother some ice cream. She had picked it up after leaving Mr. Wilder's office, popping a Certs in her mouth before heading into the A&P. The last thing she needed was to add drunkenness to the buzz about her that had Cementville in a subtle quiver. But Loretta said no, she'd skip dessert tonight.

“Have to watch my girlish figure, you know.”

Wanda, surprised and delighted at this rare foray into humor, let loose a horsey laugh. A breeze ruffled the edge of the curtain. They played Crazy Eights a while. Her mother was in bed again before the sun went down.

Wanda went out walking for a bit before turning in. It was already cool. A gibbous moon warped itself into a lopsided ball
of yarn, lighting up the fringes of three clouds snagged on Juell Ridge. On the limestone slab that marked the beginning of their driveway she sat down and folded her long legs under her. She leaned into the mailbox post. She considered how all the things that had happened over the past few months were bearing down and threatening to topple her into an impossible future. Wanda tried to see herself traipsing through London or the Louvre, sketching in the details of the mad fancy that Evelyn Slidell had indulged on her behalf. She thought of the poets who lay under stone slabs in Westminster Abbey. She could walk the places where they had walked, the landscapes of dream-country, as Hardy called it.

She remembered walking their road with Poose at night, frightened by the haunting shapes of fence posts and trees. The memory of Death's little visit floated in the space around her, wavering, vaporous, his friendly grimace transmogrifying like an out-of-focus snapshot.
When I was a child, I thought like a child
, she recalled from Paul, Corinthians. She would claim to have long ago put away childish things, but then again, it was only a few months earlier that she'd actually entertained the notion of Death's little visit being more than what it surely was, the product of a dream fog. Was that what Eliot meant, when he called life a
dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
? And what did it say about her, that the liveliest character of her dreams had been a needling Father Time, a polyglot Chronos with an agenda?

“Come on back here, you old troublemaker,” she said to the fencepost across the road. Wanda shook herself and whispered, “Talking to shadows—what's next?”

She jumped when a voice answered.

“I'm not intending trouble.” In the dark, in the middle of Crooked Creek Road, a thin form wavered.

“Are you drunk, Angus Ferguson?” She wasn't sure how or when it happened, but somewhere along the way Wanda had let go of being afraid of her great uncle, of his natural gift for hurting women.
Angus had to be—what, seventy, eighty?—after all. A shuck of his former dangerous self, any damage he might inflict already done.

“Reckon I've been soberer.” He toed the gravel built up in the center of the road. “Though I can't remember when.” He har-harred lamely, and in lieu of the old sense of peril Wanda felt nothing so much as pitying irritation.

“Truth is, Wanda Viola, I'm missing Johnny something fierce tonight.” Old Angus sat down in the road and blubbered, out of which Wanda made a word here and there. “Little Daniel . . . blowed all to hell . . . nothing in that pine box in the ground but maybe a foot, little piece of ear . . . poor little Augrey . . . all chewed up by Levon's good-for-nothing hounds.” Blubber blubber.

Angus and Poose hadn't spoken since the night before Mem's funeral, when Poose held the rifle to Angus's head. After his brother's death, Uncle Angus tried to ingratiate himself with Loretta and Wanda, the branch of Fergusons that had “done good” by marrying into Slidells. He showed up whenever he felt like it, never invited. Angus Ferguson represented the disreputable blood Loretta wished did not flow in her own veins. And now he had doubtless gotten wind of the inheritance. Wanda couldn't imagine there was a single person in Cementville who didn't have all the details of her recent fortune.

She stalked wordlessly into the house and came back carrying a plate of leftovers to where the old sot waited between two poplars out by the road. Loretta had forbidden him on the property after he tried in a blind-drunk stupor to climb into bed with her one night after Poose died. Although they hated to, they took to locking the doors at bedtime after that.

While he wolfed down the last of Carl's catfish filets, Wanda took the opportunity to say, “I am truly sorry about Daniel and Augrey both, Uncle Angus. They were too young. No family should have to suffer two such tragedies so close together.”
Not even yours
, she did not say.

He polished the plate of fish with the side of his hand and licked his greasy paw clean. He handed the dish to Wanda. The moon cast
his eyes in shadow under the wiry brows, white now with no trace of the famous Ferguson red. She hoped she detected a speck of gratitude there. But he wasn't a man to stand on ceremony. With the barest nod, he wobbled down the road in the direction of town.

“Git, Angus,” Wanda whispered after him.

She thought of checking on her mother once before she went to bed but didn't want to risk waking her. In her own room, she threw a summer quilt over her legs and opened
Slaughterhouse-Five
to see what all the fuss was about. Wanda read late into the night, pulled to Billy Pilgrim's plight, to his time-traveling solution to the dilemma of free will, to his ridiculous optimism and acceptance in the face of war's outrages. She had to read the words of the dying hobo on the train several times.

You think this is bad?
the hobo said.
This ain't bad
.

When she put out the light, the black sky behind the Juell house across the valley was touched at the horizon with pink, the last star fading.

S
HE MIGHT HAVE ONLY SLEPT
an hour by the time the sun warmed her cheek. Wanda woke to the odd sense that she was not in her own house. The forms of the curtains, the chifforobe, the desk and chair, things she had seen when she opened her eyes every morning of her life, might as well have been the furnishings of a strange hotel room. It caused a startle in her and, just as quickly, she knew: Her mother was dead.