The Maid's Version (2 page)

The explosion happened within a shout and surely those in the house must have heard everything on that bright evening, the couples arriving, strolling arm in arm or as foursomes, the excited laughter, the cooed words, the stolen kisses on the way to the dance, all carrying loudly on that blossom-scented night between the wars, here in the town this was then of lulled hearts and distracted spirits. A Saturday of sunshine, the town square bunched with folks in for trading from the hills and hollers, hauling spinach, lettuce and rhubarb, chickens, goats and alfalfa honey. Saturday crowds closed the streets around the square and it became a huge veranda of massed amblers. Long hellos and nodded goodbyes. Farmers in bib overalls with dirty seats, sporting dusted and crestfallen hats, raising pocket hankies already made stiff and angular with salt dried from sweat during the slow wagon ride to town. In the shops and shade there are others, wearing creased town clothes, with the immaculate hankies of gentlefolk folded to peak above breast pockets in a perfect suggestion of gentility and standing. The citizenry mingled—Howdy, Hello, Good gracious is that you? The hardware store is busy all day and the bench seats outside become heavy with squatting men who spit brown splotches toward the gutter. Boys and girls hefted baskets of produce, munched penny candy, and begged nickels so they could catch the matinee at the Avenue Theater. Automobiles and trucks park east of the square, wagons and mules rest north in the field below the stockyard pens, and after supper folks made their way downhill to the Arbor … and just as full darkness fell those happy sounds heard in the surviving house suddenly became a nightmare chorus of pleas, cries of terror, screams as the flames neared crackling and bricks returned tumbling from the heavens and stout beams crushed those souls knocked to ground. Walls shook and shuddered for a mile around and the boom was heard faintly in the next county south and painfully by everyone inside the town limits. Citizens came out their doors, stunned, alarmed to stillness, then began to sprint, trot, stagger in flailing and confused strides toward this new jumping light that ate into the night.

A near portion of the sky founted an orange brilliance in a risen tower, heat bellowing as flames freshened in the breeze and grew, the tower of orange tilting, tossing about, and the sounds dancers let loose began to reach distant ears as anonymous wails and torture those nearby with their clarity of expression. There were those who claimed to have heard words of farewell offered by victims in the air or in the rubble, and some must be true accounts; so many citizens crawled into the flames to pull at blistered, smoking bodies that turned out to be people they knew, sisters, uncles, sons or pals. As with any catastrophe, the witness accounts immediately began to differ, as some saw dancers blown three hundred feet toward the stars and spreading in a spatter of directions, while others saw them go no more than a hundred and fifty feet high, give or take, though all agreed that several fortunate souls were saved from death by the force of their throwing, landing beyond reach of the scorching, pelted with falling debris, yes, and damaged, but not roasted skinless, hairless, blackened and twisted on their bones.

The nearest witness to survive and offer prompt testimony was eighty-nine-year-old Chapman Eades, an ex-Confederate, veteran of Pea Ridge and the siege of Vicksburg, who lived in the Alhambra. He did not see well and could not follow a conversation in his own little room without the aid of an ear trumpet. The next day Mr. Eades said to the West Table
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, “I don’t know what they was arguin’ about. They was over behind the back wall and I never seen them as nothin’ but shapes standin’ in shadows. But they was arguin’ about somethin’ awful lively, then the music struck up again and all hell came callin’ soon after.”

Throughout that summer human scraps and remains were discovered in gardens two streets, three streets, four streets away, kicked up in the creek by kids chasing crawdads, in deep muck at the stockyards halfway up the hill. That fall, when roof gutters were cleaned, so many horrid bits were come across that gutters became fearsome, hallowed, and homeowners let a few respectful leaks develop that winter rather than disturb the dead.

My mother was never poor until she married. She was born a Hudkins, her place in the world was not Alma’s, and she’d first met my father when he was the paper boy and she swooned for his dimples and blue eyes. She would’ve been around eight or ten (depending on what her true birth date is, for several have been claimed) and he was fourteen or so. The house had been given a name, even, called Hudkins, a large and comfortable old home with a full city block for a backyard, all fenced with white rails, two horses grazing or snuffling from the trough, a serviceable pickup truck parked in the dirt drive, a new sedan in the garage, the gray walls of the cemetery ever visible just beyond the farthest rails and across one street. Mother pestered Dad with friendly comments and he suspected mockery, mockery of everything about him, from boondockers held together with twine to his bib overalls that fit him better a year earlier and his sullied name, so he stooped to ground and raised to throw rocks at her without trying to bruise or come too close. She never forgot the excitement of having his full attention. Years later, while Dad was home on leave during the final hours of World War II, they locked eyes at the Echo Club, she in a pink sweater and saddle shoes, he wearing his navy hat cocked saltily, the band playing swing, and both remembered the rocks. Nature did the rest and they married soon. Her father, Harlan Hudkins, never forgave Dad for knocking her up so young (Mom would lose the first two babies and feel doomed until a robust boy survived to be born in 1950), or her for being weak to a goddam Dunahew, no matter how sweetly he danced, and he had his ways of making everybody pay, even his only blue-eyed grandson, though I was always told to feel welcome, just come on by, and did visit happily many, many times. He was a big rugged man with a fabled past in athletics, wearing a Stetson hat colored pearl, a Roi-Tan cigar chomped between his teeth, owner of a feed mill, a few rental properties and several tracts of timberland. Harlan hunted often, for quail locally and pheasant up north, and kept bird dogs, three or four at a time, penned out behind the house. After the marriage of my parents he named every dog he had, or would ever have, Buster, the nickname of Alma’s husband. Both of my brothers could step into a Hudkins family photo from any era and blend—I am all Dunahew in appearance, and Harlan noticed. I had a choked, complicated regard for him, he was a powerful presence with so many qualities boys admire, but I identified as a Dunahew in my bones and attitudes, grandson of a drunken bum and a maid who couldn’t read a grocery list, and said so often. Harlan heard me.

The Black Angel standing over the unidentified dead started to dance in 1989. Folks laying wreaths saw the angel shimmy her hips just a little and called for more witnesses and there were indeed more small attempts at divine dancing observed, so the newspaper was notified. The tombstone the angel stood atop was as long as two men, crowded with names chiseled into marble decades ago, but still shiny. The Black Angel towered and held a torch overhead, in case, I suppose, Truth tried to sneak past in the dark. The flame had also turned black.

My dad was in town, visiting Harlan, now all alone in a big house, and I helped the old man to the cemetery where everybody he ever loved but one are buried. His heart was shot, he walked on flimsy legs with short careful steps, and I carried his cigarettes, flask of Cutty Sark and a folding chair for him to rest on. An article in the
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attracted a pack of goth and stoner gawkers, spiritualists and ghost hunters, relatives of those below, and a lady reporter from the biggest Springfield television station. This assembly spent two evenings there, next to the monument, with big lights lit, reading over and again the names of the dead dancers spread chiseled into three columns. The names were yet known to many (great disasters being so diligently committed to memory and passed on) and kin to a few of us gathered there, the pious or merely hopeful holding candles and runt crosses while the scientific fiddled with special cameras and infrared doodads.

During the first night the congregated dead below had been made bashful by so much strange company and not stirred a bit. Those present remained good-humored and interested, learning the repeated names (Powell, Mulvein, Breen, Gutermuth, Campbell, Steinkuhler, McCandless, Shelton, Shelton, Shelton, Gower, Bullington, Bullington, Boardman, DeGeer … ) until the roll call became a chant sung by a diverse crowd, then disbanded shortly after midnight.

Dad had a great time with the crowd and told as many stories as he heard.

At the second vigil the litany of names began again at dark and soon acquired a lulling meter, a pacifying drone that was maintained for two hours, until we all suddenly saw the same thing and popped to our feet. The crowd gasped in unison like a practiced choir. The Black Angel jigged an inch left, jigged an inch right, then ever so slightly to and fro. There was a general rush toward the hem of her skirt. I walked to the monument and rested my head against it, fingers tangled across all those names, palm flattened flush against Ruby’s. They’d been down there so long—why dance now? They surely did feel to be dancing, though, the angel trembling above as those souls below did the Lindy Hop, an aggrieved variation of it, I would suppose, but their young rhythm and spring could be felt through the stone and decades.

Dad shoved up from his chair, limped to my side, laid his hand over mine.

The spiritualists and goths beamed haughtily as though publicly vindicated, the stoners cackled until told to hush, the gathered relatives seemed to slump in recognition of an old responsibility to their own lost kin that they had long ago put aside when frazzled apathetic by too many mysteries and myriad angles, but might now need to resurrect. The scientific debunkers held forth about karst topography and caves riddling our hillsides but the big lights were extinguished even as they spoke.

As the crowd departed and we wended through the ranks of dead, then began crossing the street to Hudkins, Dad rested a hand on my shoulder, squeezed as strongly as he could but weakly, then said, “Tell it. Go on and tell it.”

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he hated that she fed another man’s children before she fed her own. She cleared the supper table, the plates yet rife with food in this house of plenty, potatoes played with, bread crusts stacked on the tablecloth unwanted, meat bones set aside with enough shreds on them to set her own sons fighting one another for a chance to gnaw them clean and white. Her own sons sucked cold spuds at home, waiting. The Glencross kids, Ethan and Virginia, both handsome and bossy for their years, dawdled over their suppers with great disinterest until released from the table by their father. In the kitchen Alma took the bones and rolled them inside a page of newspaper, tucked the paper under her dress and into the thieving belt she wore hidden. Her own sons waited. She used the blade of her hands to shove the leavings from the plates into the slop bucket and carried the slop out back, across the big grand yard to the wire dog pen, bent and poured it into the rusted bowl as lonely Kaiser Bill licked her hands.

The kitchen had been cleaned, made orderly and plain, and she was about to sling the wet rag over the faucet to dry and be off and away, when Ethan and Virginia clomped into the kitchen and told her they were famished, suddenly terribly famished, and would Alma oblige them each with another plate of supper, and heat the cowboy gravy again, please. Alma set out plates she’d just washed and dried, scraped at with fingernails while dunking her hands into chilling water, then opened the icebox and felt about for bowls of leftovers. Her own sons waited at home, stomachs pinging, hoping tonight there’d be food that had a bone in it, or at least food that had once lived on a bone. A flame sparked, the pots went on the blue rings of fire, and as she stirred with a wooden spoon the kids wandered into the parlor, then she heard them climbing the stairs, going to their rooms, doors clicking shut.