New Mercies (21 page)

Stopping in front of a drugstore, I peered at the window display of plaster reproductions of a banana split, a chocolate sundae, a pink ice-cream soda. Since I’d had nothing to drink since the coffee at lunchtime, I was thirsty. The store looked inviting, with its gleaming floor of hexagonal white tiles and a soda fountain of pink marble the color of melted strawberry ice cream. So I went inside, sat down on a swivel chair at the counter, and ordered a glass of soda water from a fountain man who greeted me with “
Hel
lo.”

After I drank the water, the young man said, “You most likely got the indigestion. Nobody drinks soda water ’less they got the
indigestion. I got it myself last night due to fish and green peppers.” He rubbed his stomach.

“Just thirsty.”

“I’m a real good soda jerk. I might could make you a New Orleans eggnog, if you want me to.” He was very eager. “You should try it.”

“I should?”

“Course you should,” he said. “Course you should.”

“What’s a New Orleans eggnog?”

“Vanilla ice cream, milk, egg.”

“Does it really come from New Orleans?”

“Ma’am?”

It sounded tame enough, and I ordered one, watching with a certain amount of apprehension as the soda jerk added cream, molasses, and nutmeg to the shaker. He snapped on a lid and placed the container in a green stand, turning it on. The eggnog jerked back and forth. When it stopped, the soda jerk poured the concoction into a glass, setting it down in front of me with a flourish. He placed a napkin and a straw beside it and grinned as I sipped it and pronounced it good.

“You thought you wasn’t going to like it,” he said. “It’s mighty damn fine.”

“Mighty damn fine indeed.”

“I can make a swell brown cow, too.”

I held up my hand.

“And there’s sandwiches. Most ladies like the cottage cheese, honey, and nut, but we got Roquefort cheese and Worcestershire ones, and westerns. That’s with chicken and egg and cream cheese.”

The combinations sounded ghastly, but his talk of food made me hungry, so I asked if he had peanut butter.

“You bet. You want sardines or bananas with that peanut butter?”

He was a good salesman, because the extras undoubtedly added a nickel or more to the cost of the sandwich. “Jelly. Grape jelly.”

“I ain’t seen you in here before.” He took two slices from a waxed sack of Fresh Maid bread and opened a jar of peanut butter, stirring it with a knife to mix in the oil on top.

“No, I ain’t been in here before.” I almost corrected my grammar but then decided he might think I was making fun of him. “I haven’t been in town long.”

“You one of them reporters.” He stopped long enough to take two sticks of chewing gum from his pocket. He unwrapped them, put one on top of the other, and fed them into his mouth, bending them in the middle as if they were ribbons.

“Reporters?”

The soda jerk went back to the sandwich. “They come here ’cause of the goat lady. You know about her?” Not waiting for me to answer, he continued. “She’s an old lady that lived out yonder about a mile. She could cast spells, I guarantee you. You ought not ever to go there after dark. She’s got an old colored man that’ll get after you. He could whip the devil round the stump.”

For an instant, I thought I should stand up for Ezra, but curious to see what the young man might say about Amalia, I asked instead, “What happened to her?”

He finished spreading the jelly on the bread and placed a second slice on top. Then with a butcher knife, he sliced off the
crusts and cut the sandwich in half diagonally. He placed the halves on a plate and added pickle chips and half a deviled egg. “She got herself kilt is what she did. You ask me, she cast a spell on the man what done it, cast it early and late. He lived over next door to her, and he raised Cain about them goats eating his yard. I never did unduly care for goats myself. One of those blessed nights, he went over and shot her dead.”

“And then killed himself.”

“Aw, you heard the story.” He put away the sandwich makings and washed the knife in a little sink across from the counter. Then he turned back to me with a sly look. “You sure you ain’t a reporter? You look like you might could be a reporter.”

I was using my tongue to get peanut butter off the roof of my mouth, so instead of replying, I shook my head.

“Well, darn it.” He worked the gum hard.

“Avoca was a swell place once. I’d like to pick me out something from there. It’s most generally known she had money hid all over.”

I should have taken Amalia’s jewelry with me, I realized. But if it had been safe at Avoca all these years, it would keep for one more night.

“I’m afraid of that colored man,” the soda jerk continued. He leaned forward and, using his tongue, slid the gum in front of his buckteeth. “He killed a man once, maybe more than one.”

“You know that for a fact?”

He shrugged. “Seems like he would of. There’s haunts out there. The goose bumps jump up all over me just to think about it. The goat lady herself told it about that the place had spooks.”

Amalia had been shrewd to give out such a story. It might have kept thieves and vandals away from Avoca.

“It’s a shame about you not being a reporter. I sure would like to get my name in the newspaper. I’d glory in it.” He watched me with a dopey grin on his face. “You’d tell me if you was, wouldn’t you?”

Although I had eaten only half of the sandwich, I pushed the plate forward on the counter to show that I was finished. Doing so, I noticed Amalia’s ring still on my finger. Ezra and Aunt Polly would have seen it, but what did that matter? “Yes, I would tell you. But I am not a newspaperwoman.” I paused a little, thinking my dramatics were not unlike Magdalene’s. “I’m the goat woman’s”—I almost said “granddaughter”—“niece. And I most definitely can tell you there are haunts out there.”

The fountain man’s jaw dropped as he started at me. “Is that a fact? You really kin to that old lady?”

“I inherited her ability to cast spells. I guarantee you.” I laid a quarter and three dimes on the counter.

“Well, kiss the damn dog’s foot!”

The bell on the screen door jangled as I went outside, then turned and waved at the fountain man, who was watching me through the window. Telling him who I was tickled me, made me feel more lighthearted than I had in ages. The soda jerk would embroider on my appearance and tell it around town, which amused me.

At the hotel, the desk clerk, friendlier than on the night of my arrival, asked, “The world treating you all right?”

“Just fine.” He handed me my key, along with three messages, an airmail letter in my mother’s handwriting, and a telegram. I slid open the telegram.
SORRY FOR LOSS MISS YOU KIDDO BEST LOVE
. It was signed
CAROLINE
.

“Bad news?” the desk clerk asked, and I wondered why people never asked what was in a telegram but only said, “Bad news?”

“Condolences from a friend.” And I thought again what a good friend she had been. She’d refused to be put off when I turned inward after the divorce. She alone understood my grief when David died. I wondered if Pickett might be that kind of friend.

The messages were from Mr. Satterfield, each one more pointed, asking when I wanted to go to Avoca.

“That Mr. Satterfield—he called three or four more times, saying you’re not to go to the goat lady’s house without you take him.”

“I’ve already gone. In fact, I was there all day.”

“Oh. You shouldn’t have done that. That Mr. Satterfield evermore will be put out.”

I eyed the clerk for a moment before I shrugged. “That’s just too bad. If he calls again, you tell Mr. Satterfield that he can just kiss the dog’s foot.”

W
ALKING TO MY ROOM FROM
the elevator, I whistled—something I thought of as common, like chewing gum and smoking on the street. Had I always been as proper as an oyster fork, or had my sense of humor died with my marriage? I used to be fun, a wit, had even been considered a cutup. Perhaps my friends—all but Caroline, at any rate—shunned me not because I was divorced but because I’d become a bore.

I intended to enjoy myself tonight, since the bellhop was bringing me a bucket of ice and a bottle. “In Colorado, the best whiskey is sugar moon from a town called Leadville,” I told him. David and I had gone there every summer to stock up. “Do you think you can you do as well?”

“We got white mule. Tastes like pure silk. That ’shine suits me.”

“Then your moonshine’s bound to suit me, too.”

While waiting for the man to return, I took out Amalia’s quilt diary. An unfinished block for a crazy quilt fell out, and I ran my fingers over the rich scraps of fabric, outlining with my fingernail a horse that Amalia had appliquéd onto one patch with tiny gold stitches. I rubbed the silk velvet against my cheek. My hands itched to work with fabric again. It had been months since I had made anything, and I missed the peace and sense of accomplishment that sewing gave me.

Perhaps I would take out my scraps of fabric and lace and create a picture of Avoca in all its faded grandeur and aloofness. The technique was one I had thought up myself. Peering through a magnifying glass, I used tweezers to pick up threads and scraps of fabric, some less than an eighth of an inch in size, and glue them to cardboard to create landscapes and portraits. The materials were so minute that people mistook the collages for watercolors. “You’ve created a new art form,” David had told me once, putting a brush into the paste pot, then spreading glue on the back of a fabric scrap for me. I realized there must be scraps of old fabric at Avoca that I could use.

After the bellman brought the bottle, I dropped ice cubes into my tooth glass and poured in bootleg until it was halfway up the glass, then sipped. The whiskey was strong, and I filled the glass with water, then took it to the desk and set it beside my mail and the carpetbag.

I ignored the messages from Mr. Satterfield, since it was too late to call him, and picked up Mother’s letter, which was just like her—optimistic, chatty, and a little bit gossipy. She had tucked in a clipping about an event next month to raise money for caps and mittens for children of impoverished miners. The headline read
CITY’S SOCIAL HEADS PLAN LUNCHEON
and under it in smaller print, it said, “Fete to be presided over by Mrs. Frederic Atherton Adams and Mrs. Arthur Ransom. Mother wrote that she’d run into Betsey Ransom, who had asked to be remembered to me. “Betsey said to be sure and call her when you get back. She’s such a lovely girl,” Mother wrote.

I finished the drink, which did not taste like liquid silk, but more like ground burlap, and filled the glass with more whiskey and water.

Betsey Ransom. No, I would not call her, not for all the tea in China, for fear of what I might say to her.

Staring at the brown liquid in my glass, I remembered when Betsey and Arthur were new in town and David had asked me to attend to her. I liked her, of course. She was a pretty little thing, with skin as white as aspen bark and pale yellow hair that frizzed out over her head like a dandelion gone to fluff. She had a mischievous smile, but in fact, life bewildered her, and her interests did not go beyond Arthur and her children. Arthur appeared devoted to her. He was a buyer at Neusteter’s, a women’s specialty store, and when he brought her presents—jewelry, perfume, clothes—she’d clap her hands like a little girl and squeal, “Oh, Artie!” as she squeezed her eyes shut and held out her hands for the boxes. Arthur dressed her in the slinky gowns that were popular, although David had remarked to me that they made Betsey look like an usher at a movie theater. David had had a nasty streak, but in this case, he’d been right.

She was easily frightened. On summer outings, Betsey stumbled over rocks and scraped her arms against branches. Once, as we stood on a rocky escarpment on a mountain top, she became
so dizzy that her legs buckled. David, who was standing next to her, swept her up and carried her away from the cliff, then set her down, propping her back against a lodgepole pine. While Arthur stood helplessly, David wrapped his coat around Betsey and rubbed her hands.

“Get some water,” David told Arthur, who looked around for a stream. “In my knapsack,” David added sharply.

Arthur simply stood there, looking stupid, so I grabbed the canteen and handed it to David.

“That’s the stuff,” David said as Betsey took tiny sips.

She ran her hands through her pretty hair and looked up at David with the trust of a child. “That was swell of you to catch me like that. I was awfully scared. You’re a peach of a fellow. I suppose now I’ve spoiled our day.”

“Oh, cut it out!” David told her.

“You hold on there,” added Arthur, who had turned manly again. “It’s a scary spot to be in. Why, any girl in the world would have passed out with fright.”

As I was a girl and had not grown weak in the knees, I was annoyed and perhaps a little jealous at the way the two men fussed over Betsey. “Now that everything’s back to normal, why don’t we have lunch,” I said brightly.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Betsey said, and David seemed to glare at me.

After that, I saw less of Betsey, but David became closer to her. “Arthur’s no good in a crisis, and Betsey does need looking after,” he explained, then added, “She’s about as entertaining as a piece of chalk. How have you stood her all this time?”

When Betsey got pregnant with her third child, David was as solicitous of her as Arthur was. When the baby was born, a boy
named James David, we were the godparents, and it was David who picked out the silver cup and had the baby’s name and birth date engraved on it. Once, I heard David say, “Oh, I could just eat you up.” At first, I thought he was talking to Betsey, but of course he’d directed the remark to the baby.

I began to think about children again, although we had put the hope of babies behind us years before, when the doctor said I wasn’t likely to have them. David had always said children didn’t matter because we had each other, but maybe he had changed his mind. One evening as we sat over cocktails, I brought up the subject of adoption. “It’s the perfect solution. We would have a child of our own, and we would save some poor foundling from growing up in an orphanage. When you look at it, it’s a selfless thing.”