Sweet Water (17 page)

I glanced at my watch.

“I won’t keep you long.”

Reluctantly, I followed her to the small park across from the Eagle, where we sat on a bench next to the idle fountain.

“That’s much better.” She looked around. “I remember when this park was first built, in 1967. Beautification project of the Ladies’ Guild, which we all belonged to in those days. Back then they’d never have thought of turning off the water.” She leaned closer and whispered, “Of course, it was meant for respectable folks, and look
what it’s turned into.” We watched a grizzled old man on the other side of the fountain fingering a soiled brown bag. “Sad, sad, sad,” she said, shaking her head. After a moment she added, “Nineteen sixty-seven. That’s the year your mother died, isn’t it?”

I nodded slowly.

“How old were you, dear?”

“I was three.”

She put her hand on my knee. “It was a terrible tragedy, just terrible. We were all just sick about it. Ellen was so—lively, the liveliest one. It didn’t seem possible.” She shook her head again, clucking at the memory. “Two funerals in two weeks,” she said. “Terrible.”

“Two funerals?”

“Well, first Bryce and then Ellen.”

“Bryce?”

“Bryce Davies.” She looked at me closely. “You’ve never heard that name before?”

“No.”

She drew back. “Well, I certainly should not be the one to tell you. I guess I thought you knew.”

The old man across from us tossed his bag into the fountain, shattering the bottle inside, then got up and walked away.

“She was a friend of yours?” I asked levelly.

“I shouldn’t—” She fussed with her pocketbook. I could tell the temptation was getting to be too much for her. “Oh, well, what harm can it do?” She sighed. “We were both in the Guild. We had lunch together now and then. Doesn’t mean I
knew
her, really. When you get right down to it, who knows anybody? But sure, I guess you could say we were friends.”

“So what happened?”

She squirmed. “Lordy, it’s hot,” she said, fanning herself with her hand.

“What happened?” I persisted.

She stared intently at her lap, then shot me a quick glance. “Well, if I tell you that, I might as well tell you the whole story.” She exhaled
loudly. “Bryce Davies was not the nicest lady in the world,” she said, choosing her words. “Oh, she was nice on the outside—friendly, generous to a fault. And beautiful. Lordy, she dressed up this town. But there was something about her, you could just tell she was NTBT.”

“She was what?”

“NTBT. That’s what we used to say—Not To Be Trusted. I knew it from the day she moved to town. But Clyde—well, Clyde wasn’t what you’d call real savvy. She trusted too much. She didn’t want to know. And your granddaddy called the shots. If he said jump, then even if she had three kids clinging to her and lead weights around her ankles, she’d jump just as high as she could. But I thought it was strange from the beginning. Everyone did. Here’s this shy little mousy type, best friends with the hottest ticket in town.”

“They were best friends?”

“I think Clyde thought they were. They raised their kids together. But you know, I bet deep down your grandmother suspected something. She had to have some idea of what was going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Heavens, dear,
you
know.”

“With Amory?”

“I didn’t say it,” she said. “You figured it out for yourself. We all felt so sorry for her, but what could we do? Your granddaddy and Bryce were like two peas in a pod. They didn’t care a straw about anybody but themselves. Some people said they were truly in love. I don’t know about that. I do know they were mad for each other, though—you could see it on their faces.

“I heard it rumored Clyde got the goods on him once, a long time ago, when she and your granddaddy were first married. There was a big to-do about it, and then she thought it was over. So you just have to wonder what it was like to find out twenty years later that your husband and your best friend—your best friend!—were having an affair the entire time! I can’t imagine,” she said, pursing her lips. “But then, my husband never went out sniffing up trees on other folks’ property like some foolish dog.”

“Bryce was married too?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did her husband know about Amory?”

She shrugged. “He must’ve had his suspicions. It’s not like Bryce was the most discreet person you ever met. But you know, we all see what we want to. He didn’t want to see it.”

My mind was racing. “How did Bryce die, Mrs. Ford?”

“It’s all in the papers.” She paused dramatically. “You should probably just go look it up yourself.” She watched my face, but I didn’t respond. “Well,” she said, “Bryce drowned at the swimming hole down behind the old house. The house you’re living in.”

“I didn’t know there was a swimming hole.”

“They’ve closed it off now, there’s a barbed-wire fence around it. Nobody swims there anymore. It’s dangerous—there’s a whirlpool in it. That’s what happened to Bryce, I guess—she got caught in that whirlpool. Or so they say. Your grandmother was the only witness.”

I took a deep breath.

“And then, less than two weeks later, your mother was dead too, bless her soul. As a matter of fact, they’re buried right next to each other, up on the ridge at Pine Crest Cemetery. It was all anybody could talk about at the time. But after a while it died down, as these things do, and everybody went on with their lives. Nothing ever happened about it. I mean, there was never an investigation or anything. There wasn’t any evidence of wrongdoing, of course”—she sounded like she’d been listening to a lot of detective shows on TV—“and nobody went looking for any. I think folks just wanted to forget it fast as they could. But your grandmother and granddaddy were never the same. And to be honest, none of us could look at them the same either. Each of them responsible for the death of a living, breathing human being, even if they were both accidents—and maybe they were.”

I stiffened against the bench and said nothing. My silence flustered her.

“Oh, dear, I didn’t
want
to bring this up, you
made
me tell you. And now you’re upset.”

“So the story is that Clyde drowned Bryce because she was having an affair with Amory,” I said stonily, “and then Amory got drunk and smashed up the car and my mother to get back at Clyde. Is that right?”

“I’m not saying that’s what I think.”

“But that’s the gossip you’ve been spreading around.”

She sat up indignantly. “Look, Cassandra, I just thought you might appreciate knowing what everybody’s been saying about your family all these years. I thought it might help you to understand some things.”

“Oh really.”

“Come on, now,” she said. “You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed there’s something wrong with that family. A blind person could see it. They’re all eaten up. If you’d stop hiding in that big old house and start paying attention to the people around you, dear, maybe you’d learn something. Ask Clyde about it.” She rose to leave. “Ask Clyde about Bryce Davies.”

I watched her make her way out of the park to the sidewalk, her head held high. Pulling my knees up to my chest, I pressed my back into the hard bench and looked up at the pale expanse of sky. I closed my eyes and saw orange shapes, felt the heat of the sun on my eyelids. For a moment I imagined I was on a beach, bathed in sunlight on a big towel, making a mold of myself in the golden sand. When I opened my eyes I had to shut them again; the world was too bright, it was overexposed.

W
hen he died it was not so much sorrow I felt as relief. The door had closed between us long ago, so long that sometimes I forgot what I hated him for, though the hatred was as real and as strong as when it happened. Under my raging cold eye he first was broken and then hardened and finally a drunk again, as if that was the only identity he could hold on to.

The last time I saw him alive he was standing at the front door in a white Hanes T-shirt, his trousers bagging around his narrow hips and his suspenders hanging down around his knees like swinging bridges. Lazy and disheveled and a little anxious. Bald pink head. “Clyde, where’re you going?”

“Don’t you worry, I’ll be back in an hour,” I hollered from the driveway.

“What?”

“Got to get some curtains.”

“Why?”

“Who cares why?” I was irritated. He was like a big baby, for God’s sake. “It’s springtime and I need some curtains for the den. The ones we have are too heavy.” I opened the car door.

I watched him out the windshield, standing there in the doorway like he was lost. Then he turned around with a shrug and went back inside the house.

I didn’t have any premonitions as I nosed down the driveway and steered our green Oldsmobile through the development, past all the houses that outsiders say look exactly the same. I was thinking how
much I liked it here, how it was so sensible and friendly and clean. How all the wallpaper matched perfectly at the corners. How all the closet doors shut flush with their frames. Paved driveways sloped up toward built-in garages with doors that opened like magic. The shower units were all of a piece. You knew you’d see your neighbor every day when you went to collect the mail, and you knew your neighbor was counting on seeing you too.

I didn’t think about him at all on the bypass. I opened all the windows with the button on my armrest, and the wind whipped through my thin white hair and cooled my neck. I thought of the curtains I would buy—blue or floral?—and wondered whether Kathy was bringing dessert when she and Horace came for dinner that evening; she had mentioned something about fresh peaches going bad on her kitchen counter, but I wasn’t sure what that meant.

They had changed around the floor plan in Sears, and I wandered the aisles noticing merchandise I’d never seen before. You become accustomed to things; you make routines for yourself, and after a while they’re habit. I bought some kitchen towels in Housewares and contemplated a crock pot, and then, moving through Furnishings, I calculated what it would cost to reupholster the couch in the living room. I bought throw pillows as a compromise. The store was almost empty and smelled like the inside of my refrigerator, and the salesladies were indifferent and hard to locate, but I didn’t much mind. I settled on blue curtains—they shade you better from the sun—and eventually made my way out the automatic doors to the parking lot, which was like a huge baking tray.

When I pulled into the drive the house was quiet. I was humming “Three Times a Lady”; it must have been playing in the mall. When I think back I don’t know why I didn’t suspect something: it was so still, so silent. But I went in the door humming and pushed it shut with my hip, juggling my packages.

“Amory!” I called. I wandered back to the bedroom, looked into the darkened living room—I keep the shades drawn so the couch won’t fade more than it already has—and then went into the kitchen.

He was sprawled out on the floor behind the counter. I guess I knew
right away. He was on his back, his face turned from me, and I ran over and knelt beside him, pulling at his shoulders. It was a sight I would never forget: his mouth was open, blood running out of it, and his neck was practically black; his eyes were wide and glassy. One hand was gripping the pullout coupon section from the
Sweetwater Gazette,
and the other a pencil. Later on, when I was cleaning up, I looked at the glossy sheet and saw he’d circled the ones he wanted to save: Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh Biscuits, Minute Maid Orange Juice, Wonder Bread English Muffins. He knew I made biscuits from scratch; why did he want store-bought? That’s nagged at me ever since.

There wasn’t anything to do but call an ambulance. I sat on the floor next to him, unclenching his hands and smoothing them out, wiping the blood from his chin. I looked into his face and saw lines I hadn’t noticed. He had even less hair than I thought. I closed his eyes with two fingers of one hand, the way you see them do it in the movies. I didn’t cry. The top of his white T-shirt was damp, the color of raspberry juice and darkening. The cuckoo clock Elaine and Larry had given us struck three, and the silence of the house absorbed the sound like a sponge.

In those moments I think I felt closer to my husband than I had in twenty-four years. I think in that quiet space I almost forgave him. After the shock of seeing his face pale and distorted and helpless, I studied it with something verging on sadness, and I saw age spots and small white hairs growing out of his nose. His face in death was kind. I thought of how he had looked a few hours before, standing at the front door, wanting me to stay, and I wondered if he had somehow known and hadn’t wanted to face it by himself.

I learned a long time ago that you can’t bring back what’s gone, but the problem is that everything happens when you’re not looking, when you’re at Sears thinking of curtains and there’s no chance to say, You are not alone, and maybe I forgive you. Amory and I had moved with and against each other, mostly against, for over fifty years. We had acted roles so long they had become part of who and what we were together. In the end we had become brittle, statues, stuck in poses we’d long forgotten the meanings of.

T
he smiling man at the cemetery gate looked up the names and pointed me toward a ridge off to the right, section E7. “If you get lost just follow the main road,” he said, making a circular motion with his finger. “It’s a loop. Either way will bring you right back to the front.”

“Is everybody who died in the same year buried in the same section?”

“Well, that all depends.” He wiped his neck. The sun was hot, directly overhead. “We try to keep families together, but sometimes it just ain’t possible. Lot of times a husband and wife will buy a plot and ask us to save the spaces around them for the kids, but we just can’t do that without money down. What happens if a kid decides to get buried someplace else, next to his wife’s family or something? Then we’re left with one open space in G, and we got to let it go for a special price.” He shook his head. “Folks don’t understand what all goes into it. Accidents, family tragedies, you never know what’s going to happen. That’s why it pays to plan ahead.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, thanks.”

“No problem at all. Enjoy your visit with us, hear?”

Driving on the white gravel road through the grounds, I passed new graves mounded with dirt, straggling mourners in high heels carrying flowers, a man on a riding mower cutting a swath across the hillside. The place was peaceful and quiet and clean and smelled of grass. High on a slope, people were gathered for a service. I drove
slowly, reading names on tombstones. Neat white rows of them, like baby teeth, stretched out in the distance as far as I could see.

Halfway up a broad, flat-topped hill I came upon a green wooden marker with a large white
?
painted on it. I parked the car on the side of the road and got out. I wandered through E1, up to E3 and over to E6, and then I saw E7. For a moment I stared at the marker, unsure whether I wanted to keep going. Maybe it was enough, I thought, to know where the grave was, to know that it was there.

I had looked for my mother in a lot of places, but never in a place where she might actually be. The prospect of finding her was terrifying. The name and the dates etched in stone, the narrow plot of land with grass or gravel over it, tombstones on either side, all of them alike. Having never seen the grave, I had been free to nurture the small, secret fantasy that she might still be alive, that she might even come back one day.

“How do you know for sure she’s dead?” I’d asked my dad once, when I was ten and questioning everything. “Did you see the body? Maybe there was a cover-up. Maybe she just ran away.”

“I wish she had run away,” he said. “Then we could try to get her back.”

“Do you believe in God?” I asked suddenly.

He gazed at me for a long time with vacant eyes, as if he were looking through me. He touched my hair, my cheek. He put his hand on my shoulder until I squirmed away, uncomfortable. “Sometimes. When it helps,” he finally said.

Standing on the hillside, I saw the other tombstone first.

I felt dizzy. This much, at least, was true. I looked over at the adjacent stone, and there she was.

“Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows, remembers, believes,” I whispered to myself. I knew it by heart; it was one of my father’s favorite passages. He taught it to me long before I had any idea who Faulkner was or what he might have meant by it. I used to lie in bed saying the words aloud, turning the shapes of them over in my mouth like lozenges.

“Knows remembers believes.” I felt light-headed, delirious, short of breath. I looked back and forth at the tombstones. Bryce Lee Davies. Ellen Clyde Simon.

Each of them responsible for the death of a living, breathing human being.

May 2 to May 13, eleven days.

If you’d start paying attention to the people around you, maybe you’d learn something.

I stepped back, stumbling over an arrangement of plastic flowers, banging my knee on the sharp edge of a tombstone, words jumbled in my head:
Believes longer than recollects. A blind person could see it.
I made my way to the car and fumbled for the door handle, wrenching it open, and sat in the sweltering heat of the driver’s seat.
A blind person could see it.
People walking by glanced in at me, curiosity on their faces. I wrapped my arms around myself and closed my eyes.
Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
I sat in the car until the voices subsided. Then I turned the key in the ignition and headed for home.