The Covenant (19 page)

“What else?”

“I see Lonnie behind his plow.” She smiled and opened her eyes and there were tears on her thin cheeks.

“Who is Lonnie?”

“The first man I ever loved. He was one of our sharecroppers. He was thirty-three years old, with a wife and four kids. If ever he got a spare nickel he lost it playing dice.” She looked up at me, squinting against the sun. “I know what you're thinking.”

“I'm not thinking anything.”

“Yes, you are. You're thinking he took advantage of me. But times were different then, and I was no child. How could I be? I was already overseeing the farm and running our store. Daddy made the finest whiskey this side of Lynchburg, distributed it across five counties and three states, managed a fleet of illegal runners, all while operating five whorehouses. But he couldn't run this farm. He wasn't a farmer. I ran it for him. That's how I met Lonnie. He was the most beautiful man I ever saw. I was a grown woman of fifteen and I knew what I wanted and how I wanted it. I knew exactly what I was doing when I lured him down to Spring Lake.”

“Evening, Meemaw,” Holly said as she sashayed by in her pink and purple Bendito Romanni bikini, big lemon-yellow Hollywood diva sunglasses, and pink stacked heels by Vince Camuto. She dropped a white towel at the end of the boat dock, kicked off her heels, and dove into the lake with barely any splash at all. Twenty yards out she surfaced, backstroking hard, sleek as an otter, out into the boat traffic and apparently oblivious to the danger. I waited to see her run over and chopped to pieces by the props, but she lived a charmed life. By some miracle, she reached a small rocky island and climbed out, water streaming from her black hair.

Ruth said, “They call that island Holly's Spot. Thirty years old and she still believes one good fuck will fix her life. I tried to teach her to be a heartbreaker, but she prefers to wreck herself on the shores of love.”

“Mrs. Ruth, I believe you are a poet.”

She handed me her bourbon glass. “I can't take credit for those words. Bobby Darin sang them to me on my forty-fifth birthday.”

Holly spread herself out to sun on the rocks. The boats weren't passing so quickly now, but there were more of them, mostly full of shirtless boys and tattooed young men waving cans of beer in the air and shouting obscenities.

“Well, times are different now,” Ruth said. “And at our age we have the luxury of being choosy, don't we?” In her mind, Ruth was still a young woman, as young as me, at least. Not that I was very young.

“When you're fifteen years old and in love, every moment is so desperate. You just can't see how tomorrow will ever come. I remember the first time I saw Lonnie. He was splitting wood. Lightning had hit a sweetgum tree out behind his cabin and the storm blew it down on top of his hog pen, killing two of his sows. He broke his arm trying to get the others back in their pen. To compensate him, Daddy gave Lonnie permission to cut up the tree and sell whatever firewood he didn't need. He cut that whole tree up himself, sawed it one-handed into sticks with an old lumber saw Daddy had in his barn, then split every stick of it into firewood, lifting that eight pound maul in one hand over his head as easy as you pick up a back scratcher.”

She straightened up in her chair, pushing herself up on the arms. I leaned over the dock rail and looked down into the water at the minnows schooling around the wooden posts, and the green, moss-grown concrete piles beneath them.

“I was coming home, riding my Bayard, a big black horse with a white blaze on his nose. Daddy said he was too much horse for me but I loved him. I heard the fall of that ax, like the report of a rifle echoing across the meadow, regular and spaced out every minute or so. It wasn't hunting season so I turned Bayard into the lane beside Lonnie's cabin and rode around back. That's where I saw him first, with his broke arm hanging in the bib of his overalls like a sling. He lifted the ax with the other hand and swung it like a baseball pitcher with the whole of his body, and when it hit, the two pieces of wood flew apart like they had been split by a stick of dynamite, bouncing end over end across the yard. His boy would gather up the halves and set them up to be split again into quarters and then stack the quarters and stand up a new stick for his daddy to split. His wife was sitting on the porch watching him work, a baby latched on to her tit like a tick. I could see she loved him and knew she had the best man in the county but I didn't care. I wanted him. And I got him, eventually.”

Obviously, she hadn't married Lonnie. “Whatever happened to him?”

“Daddy finally caught us. It was bound to happen, but we just couldn't quit each other. He beat Lonnie half to death. Lonnie had crossed the line, you see. Oh, not the difference in our ages. I told you, those were different times. Daddy was trying to shake off his reputation as an outlaw and a hoodlum and set himself up as a respectable citizen. Lonnie was a sharecropper and I was the daughter of his landlord. Daddy had every right to beat him. He had to do it. He'd have been shamed if he hadn't. But he beat him so bad, Lonnie couldn't make his crop that year and pay the share he owed. So Daddy threw them out. I never saw Lonnie again.”

The sun crept toward the tops of the trees. I lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the gathering clouds. “Thank you, Jackie,” Ruth said as she patted her eyes with a bit of Kleenex.

“For what?”

“For helping me remember. Lonnie's hog pen was where the softball field is now. His little shack was right down there.” She nodded off to her right, at the bottom of the lake. “Me and Lonnie used to meet at night at the top of that hill.” She pointed to the island where Holly lay stretched out on the rocks.

Ruth slipped a hand under her leg and pulled out a silver hip flask. “Pour me another,” she said, “and one for yourself.”

“All your ice is melted,” I said.

“Who wants to drink watered-down whiskey anyway?” I poured half the flask into her empty tumbler, then took a sip for myself. It was strong but not unpleasant, cool in the mouth, exploding like a cherry bomb in the chest. It would have gone down better on a cold winter evening by the fire.

“I am eighty-seven years old, Jackie Lyons. We Stirlings are a long-lived people. Maybe it's something in the water around here that keeps us young. My father Gus remained virile well into his nineties. He died at the age of a hundred and two with a full head of hair as black as the day I was born. He was one-quarter Chickasaw, you know.”

I'd seen his sarcophagus in the tomb in the woods. I took another sip of her whiskey and felt it erupt around my heart. My father would love this stuff. He would love this woman, the old philanderer. He'd wreck himself upon her shores, as blindly as the drunken boys buzzing around Holly's Spot. Strangely enough, my mother would have loved Ruth, too, for very different reasons.

“Deacon mentioned to me that your mother had recently passed. I'm sorry,” Ruth said, seemingly reading my mind. It felt like years since we buried her in Pastor Corner.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Was she very old?

“Not so old. She died the same way as my grandfather, and about the same age.”

“Well, now you know how many years you have,” she said. I didn't find much comfort in that. There weren't so many years between me and my mother. “Count yourself lucky to have had a mother. I never knew mine. She died when I was very young.”

I tried to picture this tragic figure of a young mother. I wanted to see her standing over Ruth, her ghost watching and waiting patiently. I wanted to see her father Gus, or old forgotten Lonnie, left for dead seventy years ago, still crawling home across the dark bottom of the lake. But Ruth was alone, utterly alone, abandoned by both the living and the dead, frail in her chair, burning away in the sun before my very eyes. There was no room in her life for anyone else. I couldn't see their ghosts, but I could almost see her fierce, enormous spirit burning up the last of her flesh. The liquor seemed to be the only thing keeping her alive.

She went on, talking sleepily between sips of her toddy. “But I can't complain. I've lived a full life, a storybook life in many ways, a life some might envy and others would surely condemn. I was young and beautiful, and I remained young and beautiful well past the age when most women start thinking about grandchildren. I've been a movie star, an outlaw, a respectable planter, and a paid whore. I have loved and lost more men than I wish to remember.”

“Mrs. Ruth, I'd like to take your picture one day.”

She held out her glass and I topped it off from her flask. “Suit yourself. There's not much to look at anymore. But you'd better not wait too long.”

“You're still a beautiful woman,” I said.

“My body has betrayed me. Too many cigarettes, too much corn liquor. When I got my first gray hair, I knew the end was near. Now I am old and helpless with cancer. But that's not what is killing me. I am bored, Jackie, bored to death. You can't live the kind of life I've lived and be content to end your days surrounded by people so weak of mind they don't even know when they've pissed themselves.”

She finished her whiskey and I downed the last of her flask in one icy, incandescent swallow. A long sleek cigarette boat roared by close enough to feel the mist of its prop spray, dragging a long, skittering ski rope across the water behind it. There was no sign of the skier.

“Can I get you anything else, Mrs. Ruth?” I asked.

“To tell the truth, I'd betray Christ to the Romans for just one puff of your cigarette. Luther won't let me have them.”

I gave her one from my pack and dug a lighter from my pocket. The cigarette resting effortlessly between her long, frail fingers gave her hand a grace it had almost forgotten. She licked her dry lips impatiently and smiled.

“Turn off my oxygen, first. I don't want to set myself on fire.” I did as she asked. She pulled the oxygen hose down around her chin. “I don't really need this, you know. I just wear it because it's so damn sexy.”

 

27

T
HE FIREWORKS WERE SCHEDULED
to start around nine and every volunteer fire truck in the county was standing by to douse the least little spark, lest it burn down somebody's Maserati. It was getting dark and Deacon hadn't shown his face since supper. Mrs. Ruth was staying at Luther's house—they had hired a nurse to sit with her—so my transportation options were dwindling faster than the twilight. I looked around for a decent park bench to spend the night, but all I found was Luther's porch swing. That's where Jenny found me, curled up with a bottle of wine for a pillow. It was past my bedtime.

“Having fun yet?” she asked. Her glass was empty so I filled it. She sat beside me and kicked the swing into motion.

“Loads.”

“This is the first time I've gone to one of these parties alone,” she said. That confession hung out there like a slow curve over the plate, but I didn't swing. She played with her wineglass for a while. “I almost didn't come, but Cass and Eli wanted to see the fireworks.”

They could have watched the fireworks from her house, and I didn't see her kids anywhere. Something else had brought her out.

“Have you seen Deacon lately?” she asked.

“Not since dinner.”

“He's probably hiding from Holly. It's disgraceful really, the way she chases after him.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“Really?” She kicked off her sandals and tucked her legs under her butt, made herself comfortable. “We should be able to see the fireworks from here.”

Senator Mickelson seemed to have the same idea. He crossed the veranda and wedged himself between us on the swing.

“Jenny, my dear. So good to see you,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

“Just taking it day by day, Bill.” So she was on a first-name basis with the president pro tem of the Senate. This girl was full of surprises.

“Sam was a hell of a man and a good friend. I miss him.”

“So do I,” Jenny said. Even the good senator. I couldn't turn over a rock without finding another of Sam's closest friends. It was starting to look like the only way I would find his killer was if I moved in and became one of these people.

“It was good of Luther to invite you to his table. He tells me they're voting for a new treasurer at the next homeowners' meeting. I'm putting in a word for you.” Jenny's phone rang and she answered it. The senator turned and put his hand on my knee.

“As a resident, I get a vote. And what about you, my dear? Jackie Lyons, isn't it?” Like most politicians, he had a gift for putting names with faces. “I'm sorry if I seemed forward with you earlier. Ruth just told me you are her guest. Any relation to Reed Lyons?” Not just putting names with faces. He had a detective's knack for putting names with other names. It probably served him well when it came time to pry open people's pocket books.

“My ex,” I said.

“It's a small world, isn't it? Reed is one of my biggest supporters in Shelby County.” He massaged my knee with his hand. The mint in his julep barely disguised the dead animal reek of his breath. All his front teeth were caps. His back teeth smelled like they were rotting in his face. “How long have you two been divorced?”

“Not long enough,” I said as I lifted his hand from my knee. He nodded and stood, doffed his cap and ran a hand through his wavy hair.

“I hope I can count on your vote this November.”

“Do I have any choice?”

“The Republicans always run a token candidate to keep me honest.”

As he walked away, Jenny turned off her phone. “Senator Mickelson is something of a ladies' man,” she whispered.

“He's quite the little sailor.”

“That was Deacon,” she said as she dropped her phone into her purse and stood. “He's at my house. Eli fell asleep, so he took both kids home. Holly's with him, and he asked me to please hurry home before she takes her clothes off.”