Pay the Piper (23 page)

At dinner Daddy announced he had finished paying for painting done on her and Hal's house months before. She remembered holding her oyster fork in astonishment; her father never let a bill languish in the house overnight. Being a Delta planter maybe Daddy had a more relaxed attitude, or was short of cash. Only she recalled Hal's saying once, they were not considered to be Delta people, they'd come down here from Delton.

In looking back over those long months she waited for Hal, when finally her divorce was over and then his, and their relationship known, she visited him in prison and stayed overnight in this house so many times; it was then she began to love it, she thought. She believed she would always see herself a tiny figure traveling those interlocking rural highways alone. The times she was here Mama would be locked away too, having what Daddy called a nervous condition. Back then, Hal had said she would get used to Mama's “oddments” without being very specific, she realized now. She believed, too, that being as sexually aroused as she was by Hal, and alone for long evenings with Daddy as she was, it was inevitable that something would happen. She was glad they never indicated even by eye contact that particular evening.

Lock, stock, and barrel. God! That was just how she had moved a few days before Hal came home, and Daddy helped her set up the household. She had never before shopped in Sears where he took her to buy a stove. Her own was left in the house in Connecticut where William and Rick lived; better not to think about it. Yet she knew a moment never passed that she did not wonder what Rick was doing. He was right that Matagorda was too lonely a place to live, for him. But mostly he was intent on finishing out his boyhood in Soundport and deserved what he wanted. She had sensed in Sears Daddy wanted to be conservative and agreed the wallpaper in the master bedroom was fine. So they lived with Sallie's selection of ivy leaves and cabbage roses; only later had she started to wonder what memories they brought up for Hal. In the same way, did he ever think about sleeping in the bed with her where she had slept with William for fifteen years? In the wide bed, Hal looked so small. Maybe Daddy was strapped for money because of what Hal's defense had cost. Here her husband stood, a dependent still, in his late forties. It was a stunning surprise arriving in the emptiness of this plantation to learn Hal was not going to farm again, that he had never farmed but a fraction of Matagorda's acreage; a token job? In his third year in prison, she had not paid enough attention when he kept writing that Daddy was renting out more land. I'm beginning to feel set adrift, he had said. She looked into the orchard, thinking, Adrift? We are sinking.

Just as Hal was about to be paroled, Daddy rented the last land to Savano. She had wanted ever since to ask if he could not have saved the orchard for Hal. She was afraid to ask. Daddy's thinking of our future. She remembered the letter Mama wrote to Hal at the time, which he sent along to her. In Connecticut, she had not understood the full implication of Mama's words then. Those months they had waited were diabolical. Hal had said:
I
feel the way Scarlett did about Tara. Once we get home to Matagorda everything will be all right. Meanwhile we can only bend with the wind like bamboo. I guess that's the only way to survive under conditions of oppression
. Well, she had survived as she had told him she could:

I stood too much in my childhood and said to myself too long nobody and nothing will ever defeat me, and nobody and nothing ever will. William told me I was the toughest girl he had ever known. Shy with a streak of steel, he said. But in steeling myself, something else closed up inside me. Nothing has dissolved it until you came along.

With all the strength she possessed, she had fought to reach the safety and security of Matagorda, Hal, and Daddy. And here I am, Laurel thought.

Back on one of her visits, Daddy said he did not believe Hal had ever liked farming. She not only thought him wrong but that he had held Hal back. Then he said that evening, “I believe Hal's problem's been, he's afflicted with immaturity.” She had looked off, knowing Hal had changed in prison and knowing, too, how much he loved this land. He had told her that as a child, if he saw a boll weevil in the house he'd jump on it in a mad frenzy. And that evening she had looked out across the old grass tennis court which kept sprouting Johnson grass, so Mama simply set a birdbath in its center, and been amused.

That evening, Daddy excused himself to take a shower. She thought he went upstairs. What prompted her, what was in her, that made her sit there sipping continuously from a decanter of creme de menthe—until, sickish, she went to the downstairs bathroom? There Daddy was just stepping from the shower—upstairs, there was only a tub—wet and naked. He drew a towel up to himself. He smiled and said, “Come in,” and was not at all his usually extraordinarily shy self. She remembered that most clearly, his blue eyes laughing. Perhaps he was only able to pass off an awkward moment. She moved on forward, in a kind of blind but wanting manner. They only clung together there a moment, his wetness pressing onto her; she could feel the faintest stirring of his organ beneath the towel, like the waggling of a small boy's: two lonely, frustrated people. She reasoned that out later. She hurried upstairs to bed. He said that next morning they'd never mention the incident again. He had said, his eyes again holding the blue light of mischief, “You don't know how many planters I know, about whom it's said, his grandchildren are his children.” She understood that now, living on a plantation that was a world of its own and where there was so much proximity to one another.

On those visits Daddy used to tell her maxims he believed in: “A man on land is rootless neither in society nor the universe.” “A man not able to work land any longer loses the fundamental basis of his dignity and authority.” She then assumed he included his son. She and Hal were secure about having the answer to living—a life of intellect and the land.

In the orchard, Savano's tractor ground away over branches. We don't have either thing, she thought. The fact was as difficult to swallow as both gall and oysters.

When her moving van arrived at her house across the orchard, she was already exhausted from dismantling the house in Connecticut, with only her mother's anguished help. Wordlessly, day after day, they packed up. William had asked for mercy in what she took. She had said Hal had no money to buy furniture either. She ransacked the house, her loyalty with her new husband. Rick pleaded, “Not my bureau, Mom! I'll pay you for it. How much does one cost?” Her mother said, “You can't take his TV.” And she could wonder now how she had done all she had.

Daddy silently watched her moving van being unloaded. Then she heard his quiet voice. “You certainly took everything on trust, Laurel.” Seeing everything she owned being carried into that old farmhouse, her family left behind, not knowing a single person herself in the entire Delta, seeing herself through Daddy's eyes, she nevertheless wanted to say, But, Daddy, you are the MacDonalds. Who was it he didn't trust? she wondered later.

Once she and Hal settled into their own house, he said one night, “If it hadn't been for you, I'd have joined the Foreign Legion.” Along with Gary Cooper? she had wanted to laugh. What did he mean? That she had drawn him into a female spider's web and prevented him from going, to his secret regret? Or was it a compliment: if it had not been for her rescuing him, he'd have had no life but to cop out? She still did not know.

She thought back to prison, when he suggested their living in Delton. His friend Preston up there would give him a job in his hardware company. If he was going to live in Delton and sell hardware, she needed to rethink the whole goddamned thing! she told him. Didn't he realize that was the kind of life she left Delton in the first place to escape? Then he considered going there to work in the fine men's store where he ordered his jeans, Pettibone's. He liked clothes, he said.
That's all your ambition
? she cried out in another letter. Sheepishly, he reported he thought a job selling might lead to something in retailing. She was to let William and his family know she married a hardware or clothing salesman?
Jesus God
, she said.
What about farming?
He wrote he agreed, the answer to living would be “a life of intillect and the land.”
How did you get through Chapel Hill without knowing how to spell?
she finally asked.

That night in their farmhouse, he also said an uncle offered to get him a job on the Alaskan highway, where he had influence. Wanted to get you as far away as possible, she had thought, jolted. Why hadn't he told her? She'd have gone to Alaska. Hal had already begun to drink several weeks after coming home, and said in a half-tight sneer which infuriated her, “You wouldn't have left Rick-kk.”

“I did leave Rick,” she reminded him. She believed Rick had enough adventuresome spirit he'd have gone to Alaska with her. Women's lives could be formed so willy-nilly according to whom they married. “I'd have gone to the Peace Corps,” she said. Hal had not received the pardon he hoped for. Even his lawyer wouldn't go out on a limb for him, he had said, because Ben Wray wanted to run for Governor. She thought how many times she had checked
no
on applications to the question, Have you ever been convicted of a felony? without expecting ever to know someone who could answer differently. Now she was married to such a person.

With the land all rented, Hal came home to no job and had an idea. He would start a game preserve on Matagorda, a hunter's paradise, where people shot the kind of exotic animals he'd hunted in Africa, the way vast acreage in Texas was being used. She imagined now giraffes craning long necks up out of cotton and soybean fields. Mama and Daddy did not want hunters, eland, and elephants roaming the place. He decided then merely to start up a small zoo. But they did not want Matagorda opened up, either, to any Negro or redneck with a quarter. Who would put up the money for these projects? she had asked. And she remembered Hal's silence.

In prison, he had begun sending her correspondence from other people, without seeming to understand how revealing some of those letters were. She should have thought harder about his older daughter's letter, which said on her last visit to Matagorda, just before the tragedy, she had found her father to be a self-indulgent, self-pitying drunk and she hoped prison had made a man out of him. Pretty heavy stuff to write her father, she had thought. She tried to imagine Rick's having to write such a letter. After worrying about why Hal would show her that letter, she decided it was an act of penitence. You can make me into a whole and complete man, Laurel, he said. I've needed you for years. If we'd been married in the beginning, I'd be rich and settled and filled with self-satisfaction instead of poor and at sea and frustrated. No one but Sallie could have made me deteriorate that way.

Was it fair to blame another person? She stood worrying about her own deterioration, about Hal's drinking patterns. Her efforts to intervene had been perhaps too feeble. Wasn't this the truth? She did not want him to stop drinking completely because then she ought to. She had been such a different person, back in Connecticut, when he wrote her he phoned his older child early in the evening before he had a drink, and she had thought what a sad way to live: now it was her way. Only sometimes Rick phoned and caught her. She would hear the telephone ringing: Oh, don't let that be Rick. Don't let me answer. Then, propelled forward, she would hear him say, “Have you been drinking again, Mom?” Again? Again? She could not help but have pity for Hal. They lived free at Matagorda because the plantation was incorporated, but Daddy had to give him an allowance. They lived frugally but could run short. She had paid for all the groceries the months she had been here; that had begun to irk her. Now she had different expenses, like Rick's plane tickets. Oh, the hassles that came from divorce, she thought in irritation, were not worth it. She already longed to live again as innocently as she once had—as one family unit, no choice about which holiday your child spent with you.

When they ran short of money, Hal had to trudge across the orchard to ask Daddy for just ten dollars to get them to the end of the month. Daddy lived in the past about the cost of living; yet how could they complain when ordinarily his son would have been on his own by now? She had one unsettling memory: another letter of Mama's she wished she had not seen.
I'm sure, darling
, she wrote him,
you're not thinking of remarrying till you are settled and able to support a family. Daddy and I can't keep on and on supporting wives and children
. But couldn't Daddy see what he was doing to a man already filled with humiliation? Laurel wondered.

And a man who had no confidence in himself, she thought. Once she was free, she could not help but write him frantically about getting his own divorce. She had hated putting pressure on him, but Hal had understood:

If it's insecurity, angel, just let that be us because that's the way we are. I don't know what caused my insecurity. I've just always accepted it for what it was. I forced myself to fly, married to Sallie. It's why I have so many pilot ratings, because I was determined to do it without fear. I've never admitted this to a living soul and don't you tell anybody either. Just as I've never told anybody but you things we said in the library.

Laurel could be astonished by what Daddy, this gentle man, had weathered so late in life; by what a man so fine had come to know. Hal's trouble took everything out of my Hal, Mama had told her. Laurel had said about Sallie's divorce, it seemed unfair Hal was being unfaithful while locked up in prison, before Sallie was caught doing the same thing. Frankly, she thought under the circumstances Sallie had a right to do anything she goddamn pleased. She had had the thought then: When people's lives touched Hal's, they often ended up hurt. Sallie was reported at the Ramada Inn's bar late at night while Tina slept on a banquette, her schoolbooks at her side. The principal of her school wrote Hal she understood from others how he had grown in prison. She hated seeing Tina turn from a sunny, open child into a bewildered one. Sallie caused scenes at the school, and Tina tried to soothe things over. She was too young to understand the nature of her mother's behavior and why no children were allowed to come to her house to play. Laurel's heart went out to Tina, as she thought back to her own youthful traumas. The principal asked if Tina couldn't be sent to summer camp, if different living arrangements couldn't be made for her. She remembered being so glad his townspeople knew of Hal's change and proud the principal wrote to him. But what single thing had ever been done for Tina? It seemed to her she worried more about the effects of all that happened on the child than Hal did.