Sweet Water (23 page)

O
nce Bryce was gone I
thought
he might be mine again, that it might be like it was in the beginning when he was only mine. But he pushed me away more than ever; he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t listen. I’d find him hunched over, crying in the bathroom, and I’d try to comfort him, and he’d tell me to go away and leave him alone. He’d sit on the porch for hours just staring off at the sky, and when I’d come over beside him he’d act like I wasn’t there. And then that night, that awful night, I’d had enough, I just couldn’t take any more, and I grabbed his arms and said, “Tell me! What can I do to make you love me again?” and he stood there in the bedroom staring at me with dull eyes and said, “I loved her so much I don’t care if I die.”

I reeled back as if I’d been hit. And then I struck him across the face as hard as I could and told him to get out of the house, to get out and never come back. He looked at me with tears running down his face and said, “You did it on purpose, didn’t you? You knew and you did it on purpose.” He sank down on the bed sobbing, and it was terrible, a noise like a donkey braying, and he was shouting, “You killed her! You knew, so you killed her!” and I just stood like a statue in the middle of the floor. After an eternity I said, “And what if I did, Amory? What if I did?”

He gave me a look verging on pure hatred and got up and left the room. I heard him ask Ellen for the keys, and then I heard him drive off in the bus. I knew he was going to get drunk; it was the only logical thing for him to do.
As
soon as he left I started shaking, and I couldn’t
stop. I knew that Ellen must have heard everything, and I couldn’t bear to face her. So on the last night of her life, with the two of us in the house alone, I never saw her, never left my room until I heard Amory drive up and honk, yelling that he’d take her where she needed to go. I heard the door slam and then the bump of tires, careless and fast, down that long grassy drive.

    
After that there was the sorting, the notifying, the clearing out. Her belongings were a ghost town, left behind to rot. I burned most everything; I couldn’t stand to have her stuff in the house knowing she’d never be back to get it. But when I found her diary I locked it in the box with the letters, the newspaper clippings of the drowning, the obituaries, the photo in the paper of the bus smashed to pieces. The diary seemed like a piece of her soul.

I hid the key, as I always did, on a little ledge underneath the bed frame, and I put the box in our closet. It stayed there for months on the top shelf, all my secrets gathering dust. But one evening I was up in the bedroom by myself, and I was thinking of Ellen and crying a little, and I remembered the diary and wanted to read it again. I located the key and then reached for the box. It was gone. It simply wasn’t there. I searched the closet, under the bed, inside the armoire where he hung his suits.

Amory was sitting out on the porch reading the paper, so I crept down the stairs very quietly and scoured the kitchen cupboards, the closet in the hall, behind the couch and chairs and a chest of drawers in the living room. I went down to the cellar and pawed around behind jars of preserves and pickled tomatoes. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Standing there with the single dim bulb swaying over my head, its pull-chain rattling, I felt as naked and exposed as it was. I suddenly became deathly afraid of going upstairs. I wondered how long I might be able to stay down here, living off canned beans and peaches.

I heard the screen door slam shut and Amory trudge into the kitchen. His footsteps paused at the open cellar door.

“Hello?” he called. “Clyde, you down there?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Hello?” He waited a moment and then clicked off the light.

I groped for the chain in the dark and turned it on again.

“Something wrong with you?” he said.

I looked at the swaying bulb and reached up to stop the motion, burning the tips of my fingers. “Where is it?”

“What?” He started down the stairs.

“Where is that box?”

He paused, and our eyes locked. “I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“It’s mine.”

“You will never know.”

Both of us were silent for a moment. I could hear him breathing, hard and slow. I looked into his face, and for the first time I saw pain etched across it as clearly as the path of a scalpel across flesh. Then he turned and went back upstairs, his shoulders slumped forward like an old man’s.

I stood in the cellar until there was no reason to stand there anymore. When I came up he was already in bed. I went out and sat on the porch in the early summer heat, watching the fireflies flicker above the velvety soft darkness of the grass.

I
t was Thursday afternoon and I was out in the field behind the house, digging holes for cement-block foundations. For several days, ever since Troy left, I’d been putting together the large hollow figures that would populate the field. One of them was almost fully assembled; she stood like a sentry in the dining room, guarding the smaller pieces still scattered on plastic squares. I’d been cutting little indentations in the separate pieces so that they’d fit together smoothly and could be taken apart without much trouble. But before I could move any of them outside, I needed to finish the foundations and let them settle.

As I knelt in the grass, fortifying the inside of a shallow hole with packed dirt, I heard Alice’s car coming over the ridge. So few people came to visit that I could recognize the hum and clatter of each vehicle. I stood up, brushing dirt off my knees. “Back here, Alice!” I called. A moment later she appeared, with an amused expression on her face and Elaine right behind her, teetering on high heels and clutching a piece of paper. Blue circled them, wagging his tail and panting.

“She insisted on me coming—,” Alice began.

“Young lady!” shrieked Elaine, shaking the paper in the air and walking toward me as fast as she could. She tripped on a small rock and her knee buckled, but she struggled to keep her balance. “I would never have believed it! Never! First it was May Ford tried to tell me she saw the two of you together, and I said, ‘May, darlin’, I
think you must be mistaken, that’s impossible, he’s been living in Atlanta since June and hasn’t even been back to visit.’”

Alice smiled at me. “Her friend Bernadette saw you and Troy getting cozy downtown the other day and was so kind as to drop Mother a note about it,” she explained.

“May Ford is one thing,” Elaine went on. “
Nobody
believes her. But to hear it
in writing
from Bernadette—” She brandished the paper in my face. “Can you even begin to
imagine
my embarrassment? What greater humiliation than to be informed by a neighbor that my own son is not only back in town, but he’s sneaking around with—with—” She lifted her arm and pointed at me. “Oh! I can’t even think of a word to describe you! And to think I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. When they said, ‘Don’t trust her, she’ll take what she can get,’ I just replied, ‘Judge not, that ye shall not be judged.’

“I fed you in my house. I brought you a casserole—and even a pie! You ungrateful little—” She bunched her fists and jammed them down at her sides, as if she were afraid she might strike. “And all that time you were”—red splotches showed through her impeccable makeup and down her neck, and her mouth was contorted with rage—”
whoring!
That’s what you were! There, I said it.” She put her hands over her face and started to cry.

Alice shrugged and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Mother, they aren’t hurting anybody. And besides, there’s nobody around here who should be throwing stones.”

“Well, it just makes sense that you would say that, Alice Marie,” Elaine sobbed, her voice rising shrilly. “Running all over east Tennessee with some sex-starved Knoxville banker when it’s as plain as the nose on my face that he’s nothing but a big dead end.” With the back of her index finger she dabbed at the rivulets of mascara streaming down her face. “At least you’re not breaking God’s laws.”

“Mother,” Alice sighed. “They aren’t breaking any laws, God’s or otherwise. They’re not even related. Don’t you think we should calm down and be rational about this?”

“DON’T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN! I AM CALM!” Elaine screeched.
“Just
wait
until Mother hears about this. It will break her heart.”

“Oh, lordy, you’re not going to tell Clyde,” Alice groaned.

“And do you think I have a choice? At the very least she should know what kind of—” She slowly wiped her nose with her hand and tottered over to me. “You know,” she said, standing very close, “your mother had a wild streak in her too. And then she went up there and married that hippie. That—that—Jewish hippie. Now that I think about it, I guess I’m not surprised at all.”

“You’re not surprised at what?” I asked.

“At how you turned out.”

I stuck my trowel in the ground. “Look, Elaine,” I said. “What do you want?”

“I want to know why you really came down here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“From the moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you’d be trouble. Running all over the place digging up dirt anywhere you could find it, playing people against each other, upsetting Clyde—”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Do you deny it?”

I took a deep breath. “Elaine—”

“I know why you came down here, Cassandra Simon,” she said in a quiet voice. “You came down here to destroy this family.”

Alice was shaking her head, a hand over her mouth.

“I didn’t have to come down here to do that,” I said. “You were doing just fine without me.” I stepped around her and headed for the back door, Blue at my heels.

Once inside, I stood trembling in the middle of the kitchen floor. After a moment I could hear Alice speaking in low tones to Elaine, and then the crunch of gravel and the slamming of car doors and the roar of the engine, and finally the muffled vibration of tires down the drive.

I stroked Blue’s head and scratched his ears. “You ain’t never been blue,” I whispered, “till you’ve had that mood indigo.” I held his muzzle and looked into his liquid black eyes. Then I went upstairs to get ready for work.

T
he night was dark and quiet and clouded over. Every now and then I could see a sliver of moon. I knew she wasn’t home, because Elaine had told me she worked Thursdays at that low-life bar that clings to the edge of town like a tick on a dog.

Before I left the house I put on black pants and one of Horace’s old sweatshirts and the big-heeled sneakers Elaine bought when she was trying to convince me to get some exercise. Looking at myself in the mirror, I felt like some batty contestant in the Senior Olympics they show on TV. I waited until nine o’clock, when most of the neighbors would have settled down for the night. From the front window I could see that the street was calm and empty. I let a few more minutes pass to be sure. I didn’t want to take any chances. The neighbors all knew that I was usually in bed by nine-thirty at the latest, so they’d suspect something was up if they saw me leaving the house at that hour.

From a drawer in the kitchen I got my big red flashlight, the one Horace had given me in case of blackouts, and then I went out to the garage and started the car. All of a sudden I felt a strange tingling mix of excitement and fear. I’d had so much time to search, to imagine; I had dug through my memory like I was mining for gold. I’d decided it was best to be systematic: I would start in the cellar and work my way up, room by room. I figured it wouldn’t take me long to find where she’d hidden it. I know that old house as well as I know my own mind.

I coasted down Red Pond Road with the lights off until I reached the corner of Webb, where I figured I was safe. My hands were shaking. I
hadn’t had my license all that long, and I still wasn’t comfortable driving at night. I’d never driven to the old house myself; I hadn’t even seen it since we moved out all those years ago. The road felt unfamiliar—I couldn’t remember where to slow down for curves, where to accelerate for hills. I crept along cautiously, as if on tiptoe.

And yet I recognized the old drive right away.
As
I made my way up over the ridge, the house appeared in a dim arc of moonlight, and my heart leapt. It looked small and still, shabbier even than I remembered. When I got closer I could see wild grass growing where planted flowers used to be. The porch sagged; paint was peeling from the eaves. Seeing it this way sent a pain through me. I stopped the car by the side of the porch, cut the engine, and retied my shoelaces while I tried to gather my thoughts. I left the keys in the ignition and started to get out.

All of a sudden out of nowhere came this black dog, barking and leaping against my door, scaring me to death. I yanked the door shut, my heart racing. After what seemed like hours the dog sat down, cocked its ears at me, and began to wag its tail, and I could see that it was still a puppy. I rolled down the window a bit and said, “Good dog.” I opened the door. “Nice dog,” I said, but it jumped up and I pulled the door shut again. It sat down again. Mustering my courage, I cracked the door and stuck out the top of one sneakered foot. It sniffed the new leather and looked up at me. I got out gradually, one leg at a time, and it came toward me, sticking its wet nose in my lap. I patted it on the head. “Good doggy. Quiet doggy.” It followed me up the creaking front steps to the door, which was unlocked, and then inside.

The house was a different place than I remembered. It smelled like the yard, like mud and wood and old dying leaves. Standing in the front hall—my hall—I shined the flashlight into the living room on one side, then the kitchen on the other. Every window seemed to be open; cheap muslin curtains flapped inward like ghosts dancing toward me in the dark. The living room looked bare. The dog was wagging its tail and kept brushing against my knees.

Since Amory had been so strange with me in the cellar that night, I decided to try there first. I passed through the kitchen, banging my hip
against a table that was never there before and didn’t fit. I pointed the flashlight at the far wall. Strange, weedy things were hanging from the curtain rod above the sink; old green mason jars of dried beans and spaghetti cluttered the counter. The place was a mess. A newspaper was scattered half on the floor, half on the table, where a paperback cookbook lay open, facedown and broken-spined, next to a crumpled cigarette package and a book of matches. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. Ellen smoked too.

The cellar door was stuck. After some tugging it suddenly gave, slamming me in the shoulder. Gingerly, rubbing my shoulder, I went down the stairs, shining the light in front of me like a ship’s beacon. At the bottom I swept the light around the walls, making giant shadows. An inch of dust had settled over everything: a battered toolbox, jars of rancid fruit, a bicycle Horace used in high school, cans of paint. Picking my way around the floor, I knocked on the walls behind the shelves for hollow spaces. I looked inside crumbling boxes, an old chest of drawers, under a mildewed mess of rags.

Nothing. The dog started whimpering and yapping and pawing the top stair.
“Hush!”
I told it, but then I took one last look around and scurried upstairs. I don’t know what I was afraid of; nobody around there could hear, and if they could they wouldn’t think much of it. Raccoons, rats, snakes—a dog barking for a reason in the country is like Peter crying wolf.

I moved across the hall into the living room, stumbling over a few chairs in the dark. With all the windows open the place was a little cold, and I pulled down the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I got down on my knees and went around the room, tapping on the floorboards. There wasn’t much furniture to speak of: a beat-up old couch that I think we might’ve left; an end table; a standing lamp. In the far corner I found a hand-painted cupboard she must’ve rescued from a trash pile. Groping around inside it, I knocked over a glass, which smashed on the floor, sending the dog skidding backward in surprise like an ice skater.

The dining room looked like a junkyard. There was no furniture except a wooden contraption with a seat on it in the middle of the
room. All over the floor large, strange-shaped objects squatted on heavy plastic and canvas spattered with paint. They were like the rocks I’d seen in pictures of the moon. Training my flashlight on each one, I could see that some were faces, some hands. Some were giant feet. When she said she was a sculptor I had imagined earthenware bowls like the one she gave me, candlestick holders, uneven pots. I thought of her sitting out here making teapots and mugs to sell at the Dinner Bell or maybe at a gift shop at the mall. But these pieces were ugly, nothing anybody I knew would ever want to buy. I touched one of them with my foot and pushed it over. I rapped on it with my knuckles, and the sound it made was hollow. I tried another, and another. All of them sounded the same. They reminded me of the piñatas we hung at Christmas in church. On Christmas Eve the kids all stood in a circle while one of them, blindfolded, beat the donkey with a stick until it burst. Candy flew from its insides like guts, and the children scrambled around on the floor trying to get as much as they could. I tapped one of the pieces again. Why were they hollow? Why were they so big?

All at once it came to me. I picked one of the faces up—it was fairly light, like a gourd—and felt for an opening, but there wasn’t one. I realized what she must have done, and my heart started beating like the dog’s tail, thump thump thump, and my head felt fuzzy. I shook the face and held it to my ear, listening for a swishing sound, the sound of paper. I looked around the room. There were at least a dozen pieces scattered on the floor—a dozen possibilities, a dozen hiding places. Now it all made sense: she found the box—she knew I knew she’d found it—and thought I might come after it. She made these ugly pieces to hide my letters in.

Cradling the face in one arm, I shined the flashlight at it. It was a flat face, a woman’s face, and it looked strangely familiar. It had a funny expression, not frowning, but not smiling either. I put down the flashlight and tossed the face in the air like a beach ball. When it landed back in my hands the weight of it drew me forward. I shook it again and heard a rustling sound. Then I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, lifted it above my head, and let it drop.

There was a loud, dull crash, and I jumped. The dog yipped, trotting around in a skittish circle. “Get out,” I said, raising my hand. “Out. Out!” It slunk back into a corner, looking at me. I could see its pupils shining in the dark. I grabbed the flashlight and pointed it at the floor. There was an eye staring blankly up at me, a broken mouth, an ear, part of a nose. I moved some of the fragments with my toe. A cloud of dust rose up. There were no letters.

The dog was whimpering now, circling the room, sniffing at the broken pieces. When it came close to me I hit it on the nose, and it shut up for a moment. Putting down the flashlight, I picked up a hollow, pillow-shaped piece with two mounds on the front and let it drop. It shattered.

Nothing.

The dog was really barking now. My heart felt like a marching band in my chest, THUMP THUMP THUMP. I kicked at the shards on the floor, then at the dog, but it jumped out of the way. I lifted another piece, bigger and heavier than the others, and hurled it down with all my strength, stamping on one section until it cracked in half. I seized a longer, thinner one, an arm or a leg, and swung it against the seat in the middle of the floor. My breath was coming hard now; I was covered with clay dust; my glasses were foggy. My whole body was trembling. I started coughing, choking on the dust. The dog ran after each piece as it broke across the floor. I stumbled around the room, not even thinking now, looking for those letters in the rubble.

By the time they were all smashed, I was so weak I could hardly stand. I leaned against the wall, mopping my brow, fanning myself with the bottom of my sweatshirt, trying to catch my breath. The dog sat down right in front of me, intent, quiet.

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could see everything. The room was a shambles. There was silence like the silence after a rainstorm. All at once I began to feel a spreading shame, a shame so deep it paralyzed me. There were no letters hidden here. This was her project.

“Oh my Lord.” The dog pricked up its ears. “Oh my Lord,” I gasped, hugging myself, crying, shaking. I turned toward the wall for a long
moment to steady myself, then stepped around a broken face and picked up the flashlight. I went through the kitchen to the hall. Gripping the banister, I started up the stairs toward the bedrooms, away from the dust and destruction.

I found the box in the closet in my bedroom, on the shelf where I’d left it, as if it had never been moved. When I saw it there I thought I might faint. Standing on my toes, I could barely reach, but I did, dragging the box toward me with my fingertips, with all the strength I had left. It was heavy, larger than I remembered. It fell into my arms with a thunk.

I carried it to the bed. For several minutes I just looked at it, running my fingers down the sides, clutching the corners like I was afraid somebody would take it from me. Then I opened it and beamed the light inside. The papers were jumbled, but it looked like everything was there.

The dog had followed me into the room and was lying by the bed with its front paws crossed. “Shoo, dog, you dumb dog.” I flapped my hand at it. I clapped, but it just lay there, watching me. I went through the papers in the box and lifted out Ellen’s diary. The leather flap had been cut. I remembered reading what she had written all those years ago. Amory must have read it too. The thought made me feel old and sad.

Replacing the letters and the diary, I gathered everything in my arms. I had to get back to my car and out of here before she came home. I hurried down the stairs, dropping the flashlight and almost tripping over it, recovering and then almost tripping over the dog, pausing for a second at the bottom to collect myself.

All at once the dog whined and raced to the screen door, wagging furiously. I followed, standing very still behind it, listening, barely breathing. Before I heard anything I could see the small bright headlights of a car way down below, coming fitfully up the long drive. The dog was scratching at the door. Almost without thinking, I rushed into the kitchen, grabbed the matchbook from the table, and slipped past the dog onto the porch. I shot down the steps and ran for the back.
When I rounded the corner I could hear the unmistakable asthmatic wheeze of her car as it crested the ridge halfway to the house.

In the backyard I set the box down and opened it, crumpling some of the papers on top, fumbling with the matches as I tore them off and tried to strike them, dropping each one I managed to light into the box. At first the points of flame burned like votive candles, one for each match. Before long, though, the dry papers were on fire, roaring and crackling, giving off heat. I could hear the dog barking its head off inside the house. Watching the blaze as it ebbed and then strengthened, turning the letters to ashes, I heard the car come to a stop in front. She called to the dog and then she called my name. The car door slammed, then the screen door, and then the backyard was bathed in weak yellow light. Smoke was getting in my eyes and nose and I was starting to feel light-headed when I looked up and saw her face in the dining room window.