The Covenant (6 page)

I took a sip of wine and swirled it around in my mouth, remembering that I didn't like wine. Lorio was taking me at my word about what I had seen, even though I couldn't have actually seen Sam Loftin walking anywhere. “Did you find anything?”

“Just this. I think it belongs to you.” It was my cell phone. “It was down there by the water's edge between two rocks.”

I thanked him. “How did you find it?”

“It was ringing.”

I checked the last call received. It was from my mother. She had phoned a dozen times since this morning. Her normal routine was to phone me every other Sunday, never on a weekday, except when she found some nice gentleman from her church who was about my age and had just gotten a divorce and was available if I wanted to meet him and settle down, preferably back home in Pocahontas—the small town in Arkansas where I grew up and where she and my father still lived together in nominal matrimony.

“I'm sorry about what happened to you yesterday.” Lorio pulled up a tuft of dry grass and shook the loose, dry dirt from its roots. “It's hard to believe it's only been one day.”

“Y'all were friends?”

He took a deep breath and nodded without looking at me. “Sam called me from the office. He was working yesterday morning.”

“On a Sunday?”

“Sam worked all the time. He wanted to meet after my shift ended. We were gonna watch the Cardinals game at his house. That's why I was the first one at the scene—I was already in the neighborhood. Then, when I saw you standing here, I just knew…” He took his hat off and and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.

“What did you know?” I asked him.

“That Sam had killed himself.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Yesterday…” he began, then sighed and pressed his hat on his head. “Sam's oldest daughter, Reece, drowned herself at this same spot, five years ago yesterday.”

 

8

W
E ALL SAT DOWN TO A
dining table practically groaning with food: Jenny and her kids, Deacon, Holly, Nathan, Officer Lorio and me. My seat was at the end of the table, opposite Deacon. A large picture window to my left provided a view of the pool and boathouse. The preacher thanked the Lord for the bounty provided by Jenny's neighbors at this, her time of need, amen. Jenny passed around a box of cold fried chicken bought at a local convenience store.

“Doris Dye brought the Jell-O salad,” Holly said.

“I wouldn't eat it,” Nathan muttered with his mouth full. “It's probably poisoned.”

“There is good in all of us. Even Mrs. Dye,” Deacon said as he took the plastic container and passed it to Jenny.

“Doris is our neighbor next door,” Jenny explained. “She calls the police on us almost every weekend, accusing us of hosting loud parties at all hours of the night.” She still spoke about
us
and
our
as though her husband were still alive.

Holly passed me a bowl of peas. “Doris is crazy. Daddy's got her number blocked on his cell phone.”

Jenny explained, “Holly's father is Luther Vardry. He's the president of the homeowners' association.”

“Pastor Luther Vardry?” I asked.

“You've heard of him?”

Luther Vardry was pastor of one of the largest Baptist churches in the state of Tennessee. They used to broadcast his Sunday-morning church services on local television, back when I was married and still went to church every other month or so.

“Of course, Daddy's unofficially retired now,” Holly said. “He doesn't preach anymore, but he still does his
Benedictions
commercials on the radio.”
Benedictions
were these trite little one-minute sermonettes, basically infomercials that Stirling Baptist Church bought on all the top radio stations in Memphis. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man who reminded us that we may all be God's children but only the Baptists were getting into heaven.

I ate as much as I could stomach and remain ambulatory. Holly had already finished her bird's portion and gone off to sniff some diet powder up her nose, but Deacon and Nathan were just getting their second wind. I pushed my plate away and set my wadded napkin beside it. “Are you sure you got enough to eat?” Jenny asked. I noticed she mostly just shifted the peas and mashed potatoes around on her plate without tasting any of it. “There's enough to feed an army. If somebody doesn't eat it all, I'm going to have to throw it away.”

“I'm stuffed.” It wasn't a lie. A half a sandwich would last me all day.

“Jackie has agreed to shoot my photographs for me,” Deacon announced.

“I'm so glad!”

“I'm just happy you were able to recommend her.”

Jenny smiled and touched my hand across the table. “I believe these things happen for a reason. There's a connection between us. God keeps bringing us together for a reason.” I smiled back as sincerely as I could manage, which wasn't much, but she didn't seem to notice. Whatever God had in mind for the two of us, He hadn't bothered to pencil it into my calendar.

I stood and pushed the chair back from the table. “I was hoping we'd have a chance to talk before you left,” Jenny said.

“Just callin' my mom.” I held up my cell phone as proof of my intentions.

“OK. But you need to eat some dessert when you're done. I hope you'll take some of this home.”

French doors in the dining room opened onto a deck big enough to hold a square dance. The deck had two levels that hugged the rear angles of the house, with the higher level overlooking the lake. I found a hot tub in one corner, glowing and bubbling like a witch's cauldron. The last light of sunset was still bright on the lake. The levee was dark and empty, not even a ghost of a ghost. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at the sky.

I hadn't really intended to call my mother. I only wanted a chance to get away from everyone trying desperately to be brave in the face of death. I almost would have preferred some obnoxious display of grief to all this onward Christian soldiering and bold stiffening of the upper lip. But while I was sitting on the edge of the hot tub, Mom called me. I stubbed out my cigarette in a potted plant so I wouldn't have to lie to her when she asked me if I was smoking.

I was surprised to hear my father's voice on the line. He never phoned me. He never phoned anybody. He always had Mom do it, then stood beside her and told her what to say.

“Jacqueline, you need to come home.”

“Dad?”

“Tonight. Right now.”

I didn't ask why. I already knew why. I could hear it in his voice. He never called me Jacqueline. “I've been trying to reach you since yesterday. There's money waiting for you at Western Union. Use it to fill your gas tank.”

I didn't bother saying goodbye to anyone. I just jumped the deck rail, circled around to the driveway and hopped in my car. As I pulled away from the house, I looked back and saw Jenny standing at her front door, as still as a pillar of salt.

 

9

She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.

—N
ATHANIEL
H
AWTHORNE,
T
HE
S
CARLET
L
ETTER

O
NE OF THE FIRST THINGS
I had to do was buy a decent dress. My father wore the same black suit that he only wore to funerals. He'd bought it several years ago, when it seemed like every other week someone he knew was dying. “I've had a lot of good use out of this suit,” Dad said as we rode in the limo behind the hearse. “As you get older, it's a good idea to invest in a decent suit of clothes appropriate for the occasion. And when it's my time, you can bury me in it.”

They buried my mother next to my brother in Pastor Corner, a small, cedar-fringed garden in the oldest part of the Masonic Cemetery in Pocahontas, Arkansas. Somebody at the funeral said, “Lucy will be happy now,” and I thought, yes, she would be. I didn't believe there was a heaven where she and Sean could finally be together again, but no doubt as the arterial bubble in her brain ruptured and the fearful darkness closed over her head, she probably consoled herself with that thought—
Soon I'll see him
. My little brother had died too young, and not once since the day of his murder had I seen my mother truly, completely happy. Sean had been her baby.

There were only two empty plots remaining in the corner where they buried some of the first pilgrims to settle in Pocahontas. Dad and I were all that was left of the old family name of Pastor, which was really Pasteur. Lyons was my married name, though I was no longer married. I don't know why I kept my ex-husband's name. Maybe I didn't want to go back to being a Pastor. That name didn't belong to me anymore. I didn't know why I couldn't just give myself a new name without having to marry into it. But it wasn't worth dealing with the courts and the Social Security Administration. Even if I changed my name, I'd still be Jackie Lyons. Jackie Pastor had passed away a long time ago.

The funeral was held at the church where Mom and Dad were married. I hadn't sat in those pews in over twenty years. Some of the faces were new, but the church hadn't changed at all, except that everyone was a stranger to me, even those I should have remembered.

None stranger than my father. He took it all in perfect stride, a picture of Southern gentility, dressed like a don in his black suit with the black armband and the white carnation in his buttonhole. The only sign of grief he showed was when we were waiting for the service to start. He leaned over and whispered, “It wasn't supposed to be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Your mother going first.” As the first song began, he added, “We had it all planned out,” and winked at me with a tear in his eye. Just one. That's all he had for her.

When I was ten years old, I had sat in this same church pew looking at my grandfather's shark fin of a nose sticking up from his open casket. I was too short to see anything else of him. A few years later, my brother's casket sat in the same spot, but it was closed. Both funeral services were pretty much the same as this one. The same songs, the same litany, the same praises and exhortations to celebrate a life lived well in the service of God Almighty whose wisdom is never-ending and whose ways are as mysterious as the stars and the sea. Only the names changed, meaningless names, one funeral blending into another as the years between shrank into nothingness.

Yet there was some subtle difference to my mother's funeral that I couldn't nail down. It started to bother me even before the final amen. At first I thought they had shortened the service. I remembered it being much longer, but back then I was just a kid, when ten minutes seemed a lifetime. Still, something was missing.

I couldn't let it go.

We sat at the dining room table because all the furniture in the living room was crowded with people, most of them women dressed in funereal black, perched on the arms of couches and chairs like crows. The church organist, old Mrs. Passwater, sat at the table next to me and sketched with her finger on its undusted surface the recent history of deaths and divorces in Pocahontas. The Passwaters were another of those indigenous town families like the Pastors, older than the oldest houses, older even than the trees that dropped dead limbs on their roofs when it stormed. Mrs. Passwater had played the organ at my parents' wedding, and she'd played it at my mother's funeral. Old Mr. Passwater was killed in Sicily during the war, fighting for General Patton. He had never been old, but that's what we called him. Mrs. Passwater still had the general's letter where he said her husband was a hero and a patriot, writing:

The meek and pious have a place,

And necessary are,

But valor pales their puny rays,

As does the sun a star.

Every Sunday service before Memorial Day, she read these lines to live by. She had never remarried, keeping the memory of her hero husband Corporal John Passwater foremost in her heart.

It turned out that most of the women fussing over my father were either widowed or divorced. They took it in relays to bring food from the kitchen or freshen his drink any time his ice looked like melting. Sometimes they even brought me a nibble. I watched my father wolf down a bowl of peach cobbler as though he hadn't eaten in weeks. As soon as it was empty, the bowl was replaced by a slice of apple pie. I said, “This is less a funeral than a holiday.”

“It's a celebration of your mother's life.” He sucked a bourbon toddy down to the ice and set the empty glass on the table. It was immediately whisked away, hey presto, like magic. “She would have wanted it this way. Besides, there's no sense in wasting good pie. Or good bourbon, thank you, Melanie.” This was to the redhead who brought him a new drink.

“That's pretty near her real color, too,” Mrs. Passwater whispered.

I couldn't help noticing the difference between this house and Jenny's. Two small towns, two untimely deaths, yet this one really was a celebration, as contrived as that always sounded, while Jenny's was … what? Here, there were people constantly in and out of the house, kids playing in the yard, men on the porch smoking and drinking, widows in the kitchen conducting cold-war evolutions against each other as they plotted angles on my father. At Jenny's, her neighbors had dropped off green-bean casserole and buckets of fried chicken, but none had stayed to comfort her. Her kids had no friends their own age to play with (Nathan didn't count) and help them forget their grief, even for a little while.

My mother seemed too young to have died of a stroke, but when I mentioned this, Mrs. Passwater said, “Your grandfather, Dr. Pastor, was your mother's age when he died, and his was a stroke, too.” I had always thought of my grandfather as ancient, only slightly younger than the hill upon which he perished. In my mind he was this frightful old dentist, with smelly breath and clean fingers, who still haunted the upper precincts of the house and used to wake me in the night with his ghostly pocket watch ticking in my ear. My mother was still the young woman who used to dress me up in pretty things and send me out to play, only to discover me naked and swinging like Jane in the neighbor's trees.