Cementville (39 page)

The two women shift under the weight of mutual grief.

“Katherine, you aren't thinking . . .?”

“Why not?” Katherine's eyes are glistening, and Wanda, out of respect, casts her own eyes to the table. She reaches over and rubs Katherine's arm.

Wanda unfolds and studies the board for a minute. She holds the plastic pointer and glances at Katherine. She cannot gauge from the tense line of Katherine's mouth whether she is serious about this, whether her friend really believes they can summon dead soldiers or murdered girls. Billy is still at the veterans hospital in Louisville, and while Katherine does seem confident that he's getting better, she also seems to want to swallow the burden of all the town's grief into herself. Wanda feels bad that she hasn't been able to bring herself to go with Katherine and visit him. She has told Katherine that her own
condition
—even named it aloud for her friend—is improving too, and soon she will ride into Louisville and walk into the VA hospital. She will sit and talk with Billy Juell and wish him good health.

She folds the Ouija board back into the box.

Katherine hugs her arms tight to herself, but the fire blazes and crackles in the cast-iron stove in the corner, maybe even a little too hot for real comfort.

“I'm thinking about taking a trip!” Wanda says brightly. The way Katherine raises an eyebrow reminds Wanda eerily of her own mother. “London, I think. For starters.”

“For
starters
—Wanda Slidell!”

“Can you feature me even saying such a thing?” How Wanda wants to believe this to be true. But she feels the shrill disbelief in her voice. She clears her throat, puts a hand over her chest, regains control. “Lots of libraries. I think my grandmother fancied the idea of me surrounded by all those dead poets. Maybe you could come with me. You and Maureen. Our little chronicler.” A sense of floating, a momentary dizziness, weaves in and out of her undulating threads of thought, visions of this new translation of who she is now, the woman of the world her grandmother envisioned, and somehow Wanda rights herself, the floating sensation gone. She has the sense of alighting in her chair by the window like a homing pigeon who always knows the way back.

They sip their coffee in silence for a bit.

“I expect I won't be going anywhere for a good long while,” Katherine says. “I'm waiting. You know. For Billy to get home. And I've got Maureen, she's really becoming a handful—” she comes as close to a laugh as Wanda has seen from her, making Wanda think that perhaps Katherine is glad to have a somewhat surly, perfectly normal teenager around the house. “And, well, there are too many animals to feed to think about going anywhere. Willis is talking about buying a horse!”

Katherine seems to lose herself for a while in the flame flickering through the stove's glass door. “They want to watch him a while longer. It really is the best place for him. At least he's safe there.” Katherine tries to smile. “Willis and I, we'll go on.”

“That husband of yours doing okay?”

“He isn't the kind to grieve out loud. You just know the sadness by the way he doesn't look at anything straight on.”

“Men,” Wanda says.

Outside the kitchen window, one of the barn cats startles a
flock of grackles that had settled in Wanda's straggling autumn garden. The birds shoot into the air as one winged body against a field of blue.

T
HE SUN IS GOING DOWN
, setting fire to the sprawling cement plant in the center of town. Wanda walks out to Weeping Rock and sits, gathering her skirt around her legs. When she was small, she and Poose would sit on the outcropping overlooking Cementville and watch the evening clouds roll into the valley. Poose would make up stories about the gargantuan structure that stretched like a bony reptile over the valley floor, how it had once been a great dragon, but a good witch had turned it into a cement factory so the people could have jobs. Only he and Wanda knew, Poose said.

“Not even Mother?” Wanda had asked him.

“Not even your mother. You and me, we're the only ones brave enough to stand the knowledge that a spirit walks this land,” Poose would always say. Then he would sing in his good clear tenor, a different song for every night of the summer. That showed Wanda how many, many songs he knew.

“Look at me, Poose,” Wanda says out loud. Jimbo brays softly at the sound of the name he still remembers.

AFTERWORD

O
n the night of June 19, 1969, a thunderstorm fell hard on a hillside fire support base in Vietnam. The base was shared by a platoon of infantrymen from the 101st Airborne Division of Fort Campbell and National Guardsmen of Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 138th Artillery from Bardstown, Kentucky. The storm's racket provided the cover needed by the North Vietnamese Army to overrun Fire Base Tomahawk. Using rocket-propelled grenades and satchel charges, which they threw into the bunkers where American soldiers slept, the NVA managed to destroy four of the six Howitzers belonging to Battery C. When the fighting was over, the Battery had lost nine men. Nelson County, of which Bardstown is the county seat, had a population of around 30,000 in the 1960s. During the Vietnam War, the county suffered the highest per capita loss of any community in the United States.
*

When news of the tragedy reached my hometown, the loss was palpable everywhere. The husband of the second-grade teacher at my elementary school was one of the Guardsmen who came home alive. My older sister's best friend wasn't as lucky. More than one new bride lost her young groom on that hillside near Phu Bai. The husband of another friend survived, but his brother did not. Not everyone in our rural community had lost a relative or close friend, but no one seemed immune to the sense of communal grief. Over the coming years, the war brought more tragedy. A celebrated POW would come home, more changed and damaged than anyone could know. He would later shoot dead a neighbor in a dispute over tractor parts. Some of the boys I had known would serve their time and come home belligerent and addicted or smoldering and withdrawn. My older brother, a paratrooper of the 101st, would be discharged from the Army and wander for a time on the streets of some California city. We'd had photographs from him: of a sky raining young men hanging from parachutes; of the side of his head bloodied by the debris of an exploded grenade; of him with an Asian wife we never met, a tiny, beautiful girl who died from a ruptured appendix, just outside the doors of an Army hospital. I put notes in my father's letters to him, begging him to come home.

People who write novels are often asked whether a particular work is autobiographical. With varying degrees of equivocation, we generally respond, No. But many of the events that have occurred during my lifetime—both to me and to people close to me, and even far off events—have stuck with me. They go into the making of who I am and sometimes provide the germ of an idea for a story. Beyond the obvious parallels between the historical 1969 war tragedy that occurred for the very real people of Nelson County and the fictional tragedies that affect the fictional families of the fictional town in this book, all direct relationship to real places, people, and events comes to an end. This maker of stories asks that readers please keep in mind the nature of fiction, an enterprise of imaginative exploration into what it is to be human.

*
Detailed information about the June 1969 battle at Fire Support Base Tomahawk can be found in John M. Towbridge's book
Kentucky Thunder
(2010); in Jim Wilson's
The Sons of Bardstown: 25 Years of Vietnam in an American Town
(Crown Publishing, 1994); and in the
After-Action Report—Attack on FB TOMAHAWK
, dated 7 July 1969, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 138th Artillery.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
irst recognition for what lies at the heart of this novel goes to those who have lost loved ones to fighting everywhere. Men and women for centuries have marched away from home, either under force of draft or to defend what they believed was right. I honor them. I also honor the people they left behind, people like the families who live in the pages between these covers.

This book would not have been written without the generous support of the Artcroft Foundation, Aspen Writers Foundation, the Bedell Foundation, Key West Literary Seminars, the Meyerson Family Foundation, Ox-Bow Artist Residence, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. I am especially indebted to Maureen and Robert Barker whose noble hearts sustained me during long visits at Artcroft, their magical farm and artist residence in the Appalachian foothills.

Thanks to fellow writers who have read for me, listened to my blather, or simply were there to tell me to keep going. Among them: Lisa Birman, Mary Cantrell, Jane Hill, Patricia Grace King,
Aryn Kyle, Dylan Landis, Anna Leahy, Michael Poore, Max Regan, Christopher Rosales, Claudia Manz Savage, Christine Sneed, Evelyn Spence, Cheryl Strayed, and Rachel Weaver. Grateful acknowledgment goes to writers who have encouraged me in countless ways, and whose work has taught me to see with new eyes, among them: Richard Bausch, Robert Bausch, Mark Childress, Marcia Douglas, Brian Evenson, the late James D. Houston, Pam Houston, Laird Hunt, Stephen Graham Jones, Tim O'Brien, Christine Schutt, Elisabeth Sheffield, Lee Smith, and Mark Winokur. Joshua Kendall, thank you for telling me at just the right moment not to stop.

My agent Michelle Brower was willing to sink her teeth into this thing and push me and prod me to make it the best it could be. The brilliant guidance of my editor Dan Smetanka turned the hard labor of revision into an adventure. The fine staff at Counterpoint Press has showered this book with attentive care: Megan Fishmann, Kelly Winton, Ryan Quinn, thank you. Michael Kellner is responsible for the beautiful cover.

My children, Rachel Lambert, Lesley Lambert, and Graham Kirsh, have given me the kind of support about which most parents can only fantasize. You three, I adore you.

The dear man with whom I have the blessed fortune to share this life deserves much more than my skimpy words can muster. David Kirsh is my light, my partner, my knight, my love. May this book be worthy of the unfailing support and belief he has put into me and my work. There is no woman luckier in love.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P
aulette Livers is a Kentucky transplant to Chicago via Atlanta and Boulder, where she completed the MFA at the University of Colorado. Her work has appeared in
The Dos Passos Review, Southwest Review, Spring Gun Press
, and elsewhere, and can be heard at the audio-journal
Bound Off
. Selections from
Cementville
were awarded the Meyerson Prize for Fiction, Honorable Mention for the Red Hen Press Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.
Cementville
is her first novel. Visit her website at
www.PauletteLivers.com
.