Slow Heat in Heaven (20 page)

Tricia thumped her fists on the column. "Well, I won't have it. She's provided us even more reason to get away from here. Belle Terre," she sneered. "A pretty name for
. . .
what?" She waved her hand to encompass the lawn and beyond. "A pile of dirt. Trees. A stinky old bayou that's good for nothing but breeding mosquitoes and crawfish. The house isn't even an original. It's a replica of one the Union army burned down when they were done with it. There's nothing special about it."

"Except that Schyler loves it." Ken gave his wife a calculating look. "Which I believe is the very reason you insisted we live here."

She counterattacked. "Well, I haven't heard you complaining. You haven't had to pay rent, have you? You haven't had to buy groceries. Not one red cent of your money goes into keeping up the place. You've had it pretty damn good for the six years we've been married." She paused before playing her trump card. "Up till now that is."

"Don't threaten me, Tricia."

"Take it as fair warning. If you're not careful, Schyler will replace you, sugar pie. She'll barge right in and make you superfluous. You'll be deadwood around here and Cotton won't hesitate to cut you off."

Because she teased him with his greatest fear, Ken got up and headed for the front door again. As he went past her, Tricia caught his arm and detained him. Changing her tactic, she snuggled against him and laid her cheek on his chest, disregarding the sour smell.

"Don't go huffing off, baby. Don't get mad at me. I'm telling you this for your own good. Our own good. Talk Schyler into getting rid of Belle Terre. What do we need a great big old house like this for? We're sure as hell not going to fill each bedroom with a grandbaby like Cotton expected us to. With our share of the sale money we could buy a modern condo in any city we want. We could travel. We—"

"Tricia," he interrupted wearily, "even if Schyler agreed, which she won't, what about Cotton? He will never agree to selling this place."

"Cotton might die." Ken stared down into his wife's face. It was cold and unfeeling enough to make him shiver. Her expression softened only marginally when she said, "We have to prepare ourselves for that eventuality. It could happen any (lay. Now, will you approach Schyler with the idea of putting Belle Terre up for sale or not?"

"I've got a lot on my mind," he mumbled evasively. "But I promise to think about it."

He disengaged himself and went inside. Tricia watched him go, despising the dejected manner in which he climbed the stairs, head down, shoulders stooped, hand dragging along the banister like a lifeless appendage.

By comparison, Tricia felt like a kettle about to boil. Flattening herself against the wall of the house, she clenched her fists and clamped her teeth over her lower lip to keep from screaming in frustration. She wanted and wanted and wanted and never got any satisfaction. She thought the people around her, especially her husband, were so unambitious and dull.

No one seemed to care that life was passing them by with the speed of a zephyr, while they had no more forward motion than the waters of the bayou. They were willing to settle for so little when there was so much out there waiting to be had. They seemed content to rot in Heaven.

Her impatience to get away and change her life was so strong that her skin itched from the inside.

Heart patients were robbed of all dignity.

Spending weeks in a hospital ICU had made Cotton Crandall expertly familiar with humiliation. His body's weakness, assisted by powerful medications, had kept him drifting in and out of consciousness. But he knew that having his ticker on the blink was as debasing and emasculating as castration.

He pretended to be woozier than he actually was while the nurse exchanged IV bottles because he was only mildly curious about what was being dripped into his veins. His thoughts were more with the nurse. She wasn't one of the bossy nuns who ran the place like military generals. She was young and pretty. From an advantageous angle, Cotton could appreciate the shape of her breasts while she took his blood pressure. He wondered what she would do if he tented the covers with an erection.

He wanted to laugh at the thought but couldn't quite garner the energy, so he satisfied himself with a smile that never quite creased his lips.

There was little hope of an erection, though, since he had a tube running up his cock to drain his bladder for him. "Shit," he thought scornfully. He wasn't even able to piss by himself.

Satisfied with his current condition, the nurse gave his shoulder a kindly pat and left the room. He was left in peace, if not in silence. The computerized machines that monitored all his vital statistics beeped out their information on small, green screens.

How long before he could leave? How soon could he go home to Belle Terre?
God, at least grant me the blessing of dying there,
he prayed.

But he seriously doubted that God, if there even was one, remembered Cotton Crandall's name.

Still, he hoped. His dream death had him sitting on the veranda of Belle Terre, a tall glass of neat bourbon in one hand, his other arm around Monique.

The beeping signals faltered. He heard the glitches before he even felt the palpitation inside his chest. To be safe, he pushed the thought of Monique aside.

Instead, he thought about those living at Belle Terre. As usual his thoughts centered on Schyler. Her name evoked profound love and glaring resentment. These two emotions warred within him, each so strong as to cancel out the other and leave him numb.

When he had regained enough of his faculties to realize that she had come home, his ailing heart had swelled with gladness. But his heart attack hadn't erased his memory. When he recalled why she had gone away, all the bitter anguish returned. He couldn't forgive her.

He thought it was odd that she kept coming to see him. Even though he never acknowledged that she was there, she faithfully visited him each day. He didn't want to admit it, but her visits were the brightest spots of his endless days for in this place there were no sunrises or sunsets. The hours were measured not by the position of the sun in the sky, which couldn't even be seen, but by the switching shifts of nurses and technicians. One could spend months in the hospital and never know the seasons had changed.

Perhaps a season was too much to ask for, but he hoped he lived to see another sunset at Belle Terre. Jesus, he remembered the first sunset he'd viewed from the veranda like it was yesterday.

He had been working for old man Laurent, the stingiest bastard ever to draw breath. The wages he had been earning as a saw hand were paid out in scrip, which could only be used at the company store. The system stunk, but he had been grateful for the job.

Macy Laurent had pulled up at the landing one day in a sleek red convertible. She epitomized forbidden fruit. With her blond hair and banana-yellow sundress, she looked ripe for the picking. But there might just as well have been a barbed wire fence around her since no one of Cotton's caliber could even get close to her. She didn't notice him any more than she noticed all the other loggers who ogled her while she weasled her daddy out of a crisp twenty-dollar bill, more than most of them earned in a week.

Cotton credited fate with the flat tire that crippled Macy's red convertible a few days later. He'd been walking to work from the boardinghouse he lived in—it was also company owned—when he spotted her on one of the back roads. She was wearing a swimming suit. Her legs rivaled Betty Grable's, and he'd been a big admirer of Miss Grable for years. He offered to change her tire. Even though he would be docked in pay for being late to work, he considered this good deed an investment.

It paid off. Macy was impressed by his tall, brawny build and intrigued by his pale, almost white, hair. For changing her tire, she offered to pay him a dollar. He declined. So she invited him to her house for fresh peach ice cream that evening instead. He accepted.

"Anytime after supper," she had said, giving him a wave as she sped off.

Supper was at six o'clock at the boardinghouse. He didn't know that rich folks didn't eat until seven-thirty, so he arrived much too early. A massive black woman of indeterminate age—he was later amazed to discover that Veda Frances wasn't nearly as old as he had initially thought; her bearing was more indomitable than some of the sergeants he'd served under in combat in France— sternly told him to wait for Miss Macy on the veranda. He was given a glass of lemonade to quench the thirst he'd worked up on the long, dusty walk from town.

Sipping from that tall, cool glass of lemonade, he had experienced his first sunset at Belle Terre. The colors had dazzled him. He had wanted to share it with Monique, but she was back in New Orleans where he had left her until he could send for her.

Then Macy stepped out onto the veranda and spoke his name in a drawl that was as thick as honey and soft as a feather and he forgot all about Monique Boudreaux. Monique was as vibrant and vivid as a red rose. Macy was as sweet and subdued as a white orchid.

Her skin was just about that translucent, too. He nearly burst with the protective, possessive instinct that seized him. She was so slightly built, so ethereal, that she barely disturbed the air as she moved to one of the fan-back wicker chairs and gestured him into the one beside it.

The first time he kissed her, which came little more than a week later, he told her she tasted like honeysuckle. Her laughter tinkled like a tiny bell. She called him a foolish poet.

The first time he touched her small, pointed breasts, she whimpered and told him that she felt faint and that if her daddy caught him at that, they'd have to get married.

And Cotton said that was okay with him.

News of their engagement rocked the town, of course. To placate their dainty as china, but stubborn as a mule, daughter, the Laurents allowed her to marry Cotton Crandall. To save face, they created a past for him that included a clan from Virginia. The fictitious family history was rife with calamity. Poor Cotton was the sole descendant of the unlucky bunch.

He didn't care what the Laurents told their snooty friends about him. He was in love, with Macy, with Belle Terre. He didn't care that Macy's mother retired to her room in the evenings to keep from watching him desecrate the hallowed rooms of Belle Terre with his white trash mannerisms and rough language. When she died, he didn't moum her passing, nor that of his father-in-law only three months later.

Like a well-greased piston, Cotton slipped into the managerial slot of the logging company. The first thing he banished was the scrip system. He sold the company store and had the ratty boardinghouses condemned. When the board of directors unanimously disapproved his innovations, he solved that problem by disbanding the board.

He promised the loggers that he would always put their interests first. They were wary but soon came to learn that

Cotton Crandall was a man of his word. His promise was as long lasting as gold. The name on the company letterhead was changed as a sign of Cotton's sincerity and the dissolution of Laurent's autocracy. Considering the immensity of the changes in company policy, the transition was made smoothly.

The same was not true in the mansion. Cotton discovered that his fair lady was accustomed to and fond of being pampered. To a man who had grown up believing in a strong work ethic, whose next meal depended on whether or not he did an honest day's work, her idleness was incomprehensible.

Equally as puzzling to him was Macy's aversion to sex. In that respect, she was as different from Monique as night to day. Of course Monique hadn't been a virgin. He had met her in a seedy nightclub in the French Quarter during the closing days of the war. The place had been crawling with soldiers and sailors, but she had picked him out.

She flirted vivaciously; he offered to buy her a drink. He boasted his feats in battle; she'd acted suitably impressed. They made love that first night. Godamighty, she'd wrung him out. He had never met a woman with so generous an attitude toward sex. She loved fiercely but faithfully. From that first night Monique's bed was reserved for him.

They had set up housekeeping in a rundown apartment house and hadn't spent a night apart until he had been forced to leave to look for work. By that time they had lived together for three years. The subject of marriage had never been broached. She didn't seem to expect or require it for her happiness.

And in the back of Cotton's mind, he had known that something better was in store for him.

He thought he had found it in Laurent Parish. The irony was that Macy hadn't been exaggerating when she told him his caresses made her faint. She almost fainted on their wedding night when he, after hours of unsuccessful persuasion and coercion, forcibly consummated their marriage.

While she wept, he remorsefully promised that the worst was over. But it never got better. No matter what he did, she never liked it. Intimate foreplay repulsed her. She refused to touch him "there" because it was so ugly and nasty. She either accepted him with scathing contempt or sacrificial stoicism. He distinctly remembered the day Macy cut him off completely.

"Cotton?"

"Hmm?"

It had been raining, so he wasn't at the landing. His head had been bent over the ledgers on his desk in the study behind the stairs at Belle Terre.

"Would you please look at me when I speak to you?"

He raised his head. Macy was standing in the doorway. Her slender form was limned by the light in the hallway. "I'm sorry, darling. I was lost in thought." He laid down his pencil. "What is it?"

"I moved your things today."

"My things?"

Nervously, she clasped her hands at her waist. "Out of the master suite and into the one across the hall."

He never recalled a time in his life when he was angrier. "That'll cause you a helluva lot of trouble, my dear. Especially since you'll have to move every single goddamn thing right back where it friggin' belongs."

"I've asked you not to use profanity—"

When he lunged out of his chair, it went rolling backward and crashed into the paneled wall. "What the hell are you trying to pull?"

Her narrow chest rapidly rose and fell with indignation. "Mama and Daddy never shared a bedroom. Civilized people don't. The kind
of. . . of. . .
nightly rutting you're accustomed to is—"

"Fun."
He stamped across the room and loomed over her. "Most people think it's fun."

"Well I find it revolting."

That cut him to the quick. He admitted that one of Macy's attractions had been her unattainability. That was probably most of his attraction, too. He'd been different from all the smooth-talking college boys who had courted her. It was the Cinderella story in reverse. He had thought he had scaled the walls of the castle and won the princess, but he hadn't. To her, he was still a redneck saw hand, uncouth and unprincipled—in a word, revolting.

His ego wouldn't allow her to see how deeply she had wounded it. "What about children?" he asked coldly. "What about the dynasty we want to establish?"

"I want to have babies, certainly."

He lowered his face to within inches of hers. "Well, to have babies, Macy, you gotta fuck."

He took perverse pleasure in watching her face drain of all color. She swayed as though he'd backhanded her. He had to admire the grit it took for her to stand her ground, though he wasn't surprised. One of her ancestors had been a Confederate hero.

"I'll let you know the days each month when I'm fertile." Without a sound, without a rustle of her clothing, she left him.

A few months later, he discovered the abandoned house on the bayou. He sent for Monique. To this day, he recalled that lusty afternoon when she arrived with her boy. It hadn't all been rosy. She'd pulled a knife on him and threatened to cut off his pecker when he broke the news that he was married. But he'd talked his way clear, and the fight had only heightened their passions.

Naked as jaybirds and sleek as otters, they had loved away that afternoon in the sweltering upstairs bedroom. That was the last time he ever made love to her without using a rubber. All his seed had to be conserved for those periodic visitations he made into Macy's unresponsive, rigid, dry body.

Cotton had never gone into Macy's bedroom without being invited. After they adopted the girls, he never went into it at all. He kept his word to Macy even after she died. Monique had lived according to the conditions he laid down the day of her arrival on Belle Terre.