The Lost Saints of Tennessee (19 page)

Thirty-Two

1985

During the next riding lesson, I trot around the ring for the first time, almost making it up to a canter.

“Not bad,” Elle says.

Diamond snorts loudly, offering his own praise.

Feeling full of myself, I invite Elle to dinner.

“With you?”

“Yeah,” I say, as surprised as she is. Elle thinks for a minute, holding on to Diamond's bridle and patting the soft space between the horse's eyes.

“Where?”

This is a level of detail I haven't considered. I stall by dismounting from the horse.

“Where would you like?”

She leads Diamond back to his stall. “Michael's. Best restaurant in town. Pick me up at seven o'clock tomorrow night. Don't be late.”

How it went from me asking her out to her asking me out I don't get. But I don't care.

Cousin Georgia's face lights up when I tell her about dinner. Michael's is nice but not fancy, she says. Slacks, shirt with tie, no jacket. Given my lack of funds, I should ask my cousin if the place takes Visa, but I'm too embarrassed, so instead I fold my last fifty dollars into my wallet and pray that plastic will work. I wear the black pants I got for my father's funeral and a white shirt with a blue tie that Cousin Georgia picks out from Osborne's closet. The truck gets a bath with the hose by the stables. As I ease out of the driveway, Cousin Georgia says she doesn't know who sparkles more—me or the truck. Tucker sits at her feet, watching me go with only mild interest. He has become Georgia's shadow, an arrangement they both seem to enjoy.

Fall descended on Bailey earlier in the week, dropping the temperature down to the midsixties during the day, high forties at night. Driving over to Elle's, the sky is a midnight
blue backdrop against the dark green of the foothills. Her
property is smaller than the Laceys' but still rolls on for acres. A large barn and riding ring can be seen beyond the small, white house. When I ring the doorbell, Elle calls from inside to come on in. She pokes her head around the hallway corner, the collar of a pink bathrobe visible, and says she'll be ready in five minutes.

I make a show of looking at my watch. “I thought you hated late.”

“Other people. I hate other people being late.”

I take a seat on the leather couch, not liking the slick feel of it beneath my hands. Four different horse magazines are strewn across the coffee table. I leaf through one, putting my feet up on the table before thinking better of it. Five minutes pass. Then five more. It is now ten minutes past seven. I rest my head against the back of the couch, closing my eyes for just a second.

“Don't fall asleep at the start of the evening, Zeke. It's rude.”

Elle appears in the living room, dressed in pants the color of a well-oiled saddle and a light green blouse that matches her eyes. Red lipstick colors her mouth. The feeling of weariness falls off me. I stand up.

“You look great.”

She cocks her head. “Is that so?”

I nod, shoving my hands into my pants pockets to restrain their urge to touch her mouth, to feel the fullness of her lips beneath my fingers.

She reaches up to straighten my tie. There is only about a four-inch difference between our heights. Jackie is a good foot shorter than me and always had to stand on tiptoe to kiss standing up.

“You clean up nice, too.”

I'm not quite sure how it happens, who leans into whom first. But it does. We are kissing, her mouth opening beneath mine in the sweetest way. I put my hands around her waist and let them travel downward, running along the sides of her hips. She moves closer, the softness of her body pressing the length of mine. It has been a while, a very long while. After this goes on for a few minutes, I push away.

Elle's eyes are large and open in a way I haven't seen them before. “Are you hungry?” she asks.

I smile a little.

“For food?”

“I could wait.”

She nods. “Me, too.”

We both stand there, facing each other, unsure. Who moves first will be the one we blame afterward
. If you hadn't started, we would have gone to dinner
, she or I will say. The two-step distance between us feels canyonlike. We are at the edge of an action we will not be able to take back or forget. It occurs to me that she, too, is weighing what will happen next, deciding if the inevitable complications are worth the risk.

Elle turns and begins walking away from the front door, toward the hallway. I watch her go, uncertain if she means for me to follow. She stops, looks back.

“What are you waiting for, Ezekiel?”

I consider the question. Waiting is all I've done for years. For what? To die? To see Carter again? To feel something besides hurt?

Elle is real. Right now.

My fingers work at the small buttons on her shirt. She pushes my hands away and does it herself. As we walk down the hall, pieces of clothing flutter to the ground behind her. We reach the bedroom. I scoop up her naked body and gently set her on the bed. She is more fine boned than I imagined—the sharp edges of collar and hip bone balanced by the roundness of small breasts and hips.

My mouth follows the arch of her foot, up along the inside of her thigh to the spot where her legs meet. The tangle of hair is smooth against my lips and my tongue explores deeper, within the soft folds of her labia. When Elle puts her hands on my shoulders I think she wants me to keep going but instead she pushes me away.

“Stop. Before I come.”

Her hips flex upward to meet my mouth. She goes still—her whole body suspended, breath quiet, and then small shudders overtake her.

I run my hands along the long muscles in her thighs—strong from the years of riding.

“You don't listen very well,” she says.

“I wasn't listening to your words.”

She pulls me up so we can kiss properly. As I guide myself into Elle, she eases her legs open. And just as I'm about to forget everything but the feel of her beneath me and around me, something within me is dislodged, making way for the pure joy of the feel of us together.

Elle gets up, despite my attempts to pull her back down, and lights two candles on the dresser. She pauses at the window. Stars press against the inky darkness of the night sky.

“It's going to get cold. Not a cloud up there to keep the day's heat in.”

The light over the garage filters through the window framing Elle. A quilt is wrapped around her shoulders. The glow from the candles warms her face, highlighting the heat on her cheeks and the swollen roundness of her mouth. When she catches me staring, she smiles.

“Guess we're not making it to Michael's tonight,” I say.

“Next time.”

I nod, grateful that there will be a next time.

“Look at that.” She taps lightly on a glass pane. “Northeast of Orion, you can see Gemini up there. First time I've been able to find it this year. Come check it out.”

The comfort of bed does not invite leaving but she waves me over. The motion drops the quilt from her shoulder and reveals a curve of breast before she covers it again. Standing behind her, I find that she fits neatly within the circle of my arms, and I breathe in her scent—she smells of soap, a touch of jasmine perfume, and loving.

“Gemini makes me think of you and your brother.”

“What do you know about my brother?”

She turns around, peering up. The house is quiet; only the soft ticking of a clock on the nightstand can be heard.

“Georgia told me he drowned about ten years ago. That you were twins. See, that's the story of Gemini. The two brothers in the sky—Castor and Pollux. They were twins, too. Castor was mortal and Pollux was immortal. When Castor died, Pollux was so devastated that Zeus placed the two in the heavens, side by side, for all eternity.”

The notion of Carter's and my story having played out thousands of years ago, written by an ancient Greek guy, does not sit well.

“Why are you telling me this?”

She shrugs. “Just thought you might like to know you're not the only one to feel the way you feel.”

Coldness creeps into the room. I turn away from her to throw on my clothes.

“Look, everybody's got a closet full of hurt tucked away somewhere,” she says. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

“If I wanted to talk about this, I've got three sisters just waiting for me to call.” One boot is missing. The heel sticks out from underneath the bed. “Tonight was about us.”

“Where are you going?” She follows me down the hallway. “Stop, Zeke. Please? Just stop.”

I keep walking. The front door is a few steps away when she grabs my arm.

“Look at me.”

There is nothing Elle could say that I want to hear.

What she doesn't know is that tomorrow is our birthday. Forty-third. I avoid calendars in the month of October. The day is no longer one worth celebrating. Being with Elle tonight was the one chance I had at forgetting about tomorrow.

The smack of the screen door ruptures the night's silence outside. The truck is too cold to start but finally catches after I pump the gas. Elle's shadow can be seen in the doorway. I glance in the rearview mirror and see her walk back into the house. The glow from the living room lights disappears, throwing the house into darkness.

Thirty-Three

December 1960

The memory of life in Virginia faded to black that night at the state hospital. Obeying my brother's wishes not to have me in his room, I wandered through the woods next to the parking lot. The temperature had dropped steadily, and each breath exhaled a fine smoke into the air. The hospital's outdoor lighting threw shadows at the trees, creating a skeleton forest. I should have known something was wrong with Carter. I should have known my brother needed me. I should have asked Georgia for permission to call home and find out why he hadn't written. The truth was that I had been too selfish to care enough.

The cold became unbearable and I headed back inside. Carter's nurse passed me in the main entryway and let me know the sleeping pills had worked their magic.

“Visitors aren't allowed to stay in a patient's room past
visiting hours. But,” she said, gathering her sweater closer
around her shoulders, “we're short staffed tonight, so we won't have time to be checking on everybody.”

She waved off my thanks but I could feel her watching me as I walked back to my brother's room.

In the circle of light from the small lamp on the nightstand, I watched Carter. Several times he stirred, twitching, a look of pain creasing his face. I would cross to the bed and hold his good hand in mine until he relaxed again. The privacy of a single room was a luxury. Most of the patients were housed in large, dormitory-style rooms. The time from evening until dawn was filled with the muffled opening and closing of doors and the occasional cry from a patient, the noise filled with enough despair to leave me chilled despite the steaming radiator.

It would be nice to pretend that I didn't hesitate about doing what needed to be done for my brother. But in the darkness
of the long night, hope about my own life wrestled
with Carter's needs. The shimmering image of the university ­library—its wide steps, columns, and miles of books meant to teach everything there was to know—hovered in my mind. The wind picked up outside, scraping brittle leaves against the room's high window. I did not sleep, not even for a few minutes. There was only one thing I was sure of—a desire to ­reset the clock. To turn it back to August and somehow stop Mother from taking Carter to the theater, leaving my brother unharmed, my future intact.

When the morning nurses arrived for work, fresh and chattering, Carter woke up. He turned his head toward my chair, searching as though he sensed someone was in the room. I met his gaze, fearful he would send me away again.

Before he could say anything, I spoke. “I'm so sorry I didn't come sooner. Nobody told me what happened, Carter. I'm sorry.”

His gaze danced away from mine and he looked down at the blankets.

“I been missing you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Carter placed his hand across his face. Great gulps of air escaped like he'd been holding his breath since the day I left for Virginia. I crossed to the bed and put my arms around him, hanging on to him as tightly as I could.

I ran my fingers across the spiky top of his head, making a bad joke about the haircut.

“Ready to get out of here, buddy?”

Learning everything there was to know would have to wait.

The nurses said Carter couldn't be released until one of our parents signed the papers. Mother appeared as I was packing Carter's clothes.

“Zeke, it's so good to see you.”

Like my brother, she, too, seemed to have diminished during my absence. The blouse and skirt swallowed her small frame. The clothes were not perfectly pressed, a sign that she must have hurried over. She moved to hug me and I turned away, tucking a pair of my brother's pants into an old duffel bag.

Still bent over the bag, I said, “Carter is going home today. You need to sign the papers.”

“Ezekiel, please.”

A nurse walked in with another cup of pills. The tiredness and the mad swept through me. “Get those away from him.”

The nurse looked to Mother. “He's scheduled to receive a dose.”

“He's going home today,” I said.

“I don't have those orders in front of me. I only have the orders that tell me it's time for him to get his next dose.”

Without thinking, I walked around the bed and grabbed the small cup from her hand, throwing it against the wall. Two shiny pink pills fell to the floor with a soft click, spinning like tops on the linoleum. The nurse moved to pick them up. Mother put her hand on the woman's back and asked her to give us a minute.

“I'm not staying here, Momma,” Carter said.

Her face softened. “You look good today, son. Your brother and I need to talk outside a minute. You rest, okay?”

Carter reached for my hand, grasping it tightly. “I'm going home, right? Today?”

“Yep,” I said.

Orderlies in white uniforms filled the hallway, each one glancing at Mother as they walked by, her beauty still obvious enough to garner attention. A nurse pushed a wheelchair with a man in a straitjacket toward the elevators. He spit on my shoe as they went by.

“Jesus,” I said, shaking off the spit.

Mother opened her mouth to speak and I held up my hand.

“I can understand how you thought you were doing the right thing by not telling me. It makes an awful kind of sense. But this?” I threw my arms out. “How in the hell did you convince yourself this was the right thing for Carter?”

She stared through me for a moment, looking off into a place I could not see. “Your brother was very, very sick. I couldn't take care of him, Ezekiel.”

“You didn't want to. He needs to go home. He'll get better there. I'll take care of him.” The fuzzy edges of a plan
emerged, one that would require my father's help. “We'll
make the shed behind the house into a place where the two of us can live. I'll find a job in town and Violet can keep an eye on him during the day.”

She shook her head. “Sweetheart, I won't let you sacrifice your life for your brother's.”

“You should've thought of that before you put him in an insane asylum.”

The determination on her face was familiar. I'd
watched it manifest itself over the years—the absolute, unshak­able faith that her will could make things she did not want to happen go away. When black storm clouds gathered in the distance and thunder cracked not two miles away, she would stand out on the front porch, the first drops of rain beginning to fall, and face off against the storm, daring it to touch her house, her children, her town. Daddy would call out,
Lilly, get the hell in this house
. Peering out through the screen door one stormy afternoon, I asked what she was doing.
Reckoning with God,
she said. Half the time the storm would pass us by and she'd come in the house and say,
I told that storm to go away and it did. Sometimes things are just that simple.

She put a hand to her throat. “You cannot give up UVA. You know that. I won't let you.”

“Did you ask me if I would
let
you commit my brother? Better yet, did you ask Carter? What did you tell him, Mother? That this would be a nice place? All sorts of kind nurses and big orderlies to take care of him? And you'd come see him on Saturdays after you got your hair done? You found him a swell place.”

Nurses began to look our way, and I knew I was losing control but couldn't stop myself. Didn't, in fact, want to.

“You should be in here, Mother. Not Carter.”

Her hand slammed across my face.

My cheekbone hummed with the blow. It was the first time she had slapped me. Slaps were a rare disciplinary action, reserved for the worst displays of disrespect. Daisy caught more than a few of them. But not me. Never me.

She looked at her hand as if surprised by it then lowered it to her side.

An orderly no older than eighteen approached us.
“Folks, let's move this outside.” He tried to take my mother by the elbow but she shook him off. Carter was visible through the
room's doorway. He had fallen asleep sitting up. His head
slumped forward, a thin line of drool easing down one side of his mouth. The nurse must have gone ahead and given him the pills.

I faced my mother and the orderly, “Bob,” according to his name tag. “Bob, my mother is not herself. She's
very
upset about my brother in there. I'm sure you understand?”

He glanced at both of us and then shrugged, drawn away by the more immediate need of a guy down the hall swinging punches. Mother snapped open her purse and lit a Lucky, blowing the smoke by the side of my head. This was new territory for the two of us. In many ways I had been like my father over the years, choosing not to fight instead of going to war with her. All of those concessions, inconsequential on their own, now piled on top of one another to form a small mountain.

“You ungrateful child,” she said. The words came out in a low, controlled tone. “Do you have any idea what the past months have been like? Any idea how many nights I've sat at your brother's side? How many bandages I've changed? How many bed pans? The tears I've cried over those bastard Smith boys doing this to my boy? Who do you think fought to get him this room all by himself so he wouldn't have to deal with the crazies? I didn't want to put him here, Ezekiel. I
had
to. I didn't have anything left to give. Can you even begin to understand what that feels like?”

Her eyes were wide and desperate. I was eighteen at the time. How could I possibly have understood what she had been through? The only thing I could see was that she had made the wrong choice. Two wrong choices—not telling me what happened and commiting him. Now, with children of my own, I have a certain empathy for her. But not forgiveness. Because I know I would never do to my girls what she did to Carter.

“I only want what's best for you. I'll take care of Carter. I'll bring him home. I'll figure it out. All right? And then you can go back to school? What do you say?”

She smiled at me then, a sweet, oh-don't-you-want-to-forgive-me smile, and I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my jeans to stifle the urge to choke her.

“Do you really think I'd leave again and let you put him right back here when you've had a hard day? You're not his mother anymore. No decent mother would have done this.”

Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and began to spill over. They fueled my anger instead of dampening it. She turned her head away.

“You don't understand,” she said. “I love Carter.”

I lowered my voice, conscious of the people around us, listening. “The way you love is like sucking all the air out of a person's lungs and then telling him you'll breathe for him.”

She stood there, dressed in the too-big Sunday skirt and blouse. Something lit in her eyes and then died. She opened her mouth to speak but no sound came out. You could almost hear the chasm split open between us, the childhood years of love and affection tumbling inside. We were now on opposite sides, she and I. She stepped around me to enter the room. I watched her place a kiss on Carter's forehead, then whisper in his ear. She sat next to him on the bed for a moment before leaving.

“I'll sign the papers.”

When she brushed past me, the air between our bodies went still.

The Smith boys spent four nights in Hardeman County jail for what they did to Carter. My father and Mr. Smith worked out a gentleman's agreement that neither family would cooperate with the police investigations in the hopes that nobody's children would end up in jail. Daddy wanted nothing more than to see Jed and Earl locked up, but not if it meant sending his baby girl off to juvenile hall. The McNairy County district attorney gave up on the arson case pretty quick, since the only person to see Rosie near the house the night of the fire was Jed Smith, and his mouth was firmly shut.

Bob Little, the DA of Hardeman County, took up Carter's case like a crusade. He interviewed everybody who was within a mile of the Downtown the night of the assault. But word got around that the Smith family would take it pretty personal if people spoke unkindly about their sons. To some, this meant no more deals on Mr. Smith's famous Midnight Special moonshine, and to others, it meant nighttime visits on their front porch from Mr. Smith with a shotgun thrown over his shoulder. Nobody talked, so finally Bob Little let the case go.

The desire to make Jed and Earl Smith feel some portion of Carter's pain began to fester. In school, I'd only fought if directly attacked or if somebody messed with Carter or Rosie. The next step here was clear.

A few days after we brought Carter home, Preacher Dawson came by to check on us all. He asked me to step outside for a minute, and we stood in the front yard, away from the commotion of present wrapping and Christmas cookie baking.

“Ezekiel, I am surely sorry for what happened to Carter.”

Rosie had given Carter an early present—the new Johnny Cash album,
Ride This Train
. “Going to Memphis” was his favorite, and it played over and over again at top volume. The muffled sound of the song carried out to the porch, even through the shut windows.

I nodded, unsure about why he wanted to see me. Preacher Dawson pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and pressed it to his mouth. Years of leading Clayton's small congregation had worn him down and he looked ten years older than he was.

The man who had poured the holy baptismal water over Carter's and my head looked up at me without speaking. He knew what was on my mind. From inside the house Mother yelled, “Dinner.” I pulled a Lucky Strike from the pack in my back pocket and lit it. I had never liked the taste of cigarettes before, but now they seemed to calm me down. As I inhaled, the smoke warmed my lungs before disappearing into the cold evening air, tendrils curling around the bare branches of the oak tree.