The Paperboy (50 page)

T
HERE WAS A BOWL OF
champagne with flowers floating in it at the club, and I found a spot next to it where I intended to stay for the entire reception, to drink all the champagne and perhaps eat the flowers. Ward was in another part of the room, cornered by my father’s newspaper friends, who were talking solemnly of their own trials as young reporters.

My father was freshly shaved and smelled of cologne, and his attention moved from his bride to his friends to the band to the weather, unable to settle anywhere for more than a second or two. He drank as much of the champagne as I did, although he took his from the waiters who walked the room with glasses of it on silver trays. He hugged a lot of people; he kissed Ellen Guthrie with cake still in his mouth.

And the storm blew its way through.

“This is the happiest day of my life,” he said, offering one of many toasts.

Another toast:

“My wife, my friends, my dear, old friends, my sons … ” He looked for his sons and found Ward and hugged him. He turned around then, saying, “Where’s Jack?” and came face-to-face with his bride before I could move toward him, and hugged her instead.

Her smile was looking a little practiced by now, but the storm had not diminished, and dinner was stalled in the kitchen. I took a plate of hors d’oeuvres from one of the waiters and ate everything on it.

The lawyer Weldon Pine passed by, smiling. I did not recognize him at first, as he had clearly been sick and was perhaps half the size he had been when we’d visited his office. I returned the smile, and crumbs fell out of my mouth. He walked with a cane now, and nodded at me, although it was impossible to say if he remembered me or not.

Hungry and drunk, and carrying a champagne glass in each hand, I wandered back into the kitchen to find more food. I went through the swinging doors backwards and was hit by the heat of the place—it was at least ninety degrees in there, where the outside room had been almost cool—and then stood for a minute watching half a dozen people at work at different stations, preparing dinner.

A wild boar was lying on an oven rack while two cooks basted it.

The cooks were both black women, dressed in white coats and white chef’s hats, and it took a moment, because of the costumes, to see that one of them was Anita Chester. She looked up from the pig and saw me standing in the kitchen, holding my drinks. Her eyes stayed on me one moment, and
then moved, without any sign of recognition, back to her work.

I broke into the kind of smile I only find when I am drinking, and moved through the other kitchen workers to her side. She looked at me again quickly, and a moment later I could smell her, familiar and clean, like shirts you get back from the laundry. I stood by her side while she worked on a boar, collecting his juices in a ladle and pouring them back over his skin, the liquid catching the overhead lights as it rinsed over his face, and glistening there, as if the animal had just come awake.

“You missing your party,” she said.

“I brought you a glass of champagne,” I said, and handed her one of the glasses.

“Thank you,” she said, and set it on the table near the stove, and then looked quickly toward the other end of the kitchen where a white man with clouds of black hair on his arms and neck was overseeing the preparations.

He glared at her and at me, holding a long-handled spoon that he was using to taste the soup, imagining that I was some kind of trouble. I smiled at him, and he turned back to his soup, checking a moment later to see if I was still in his kitchen.

“How have you been?” I said.

She finished basting the boar, put down her ladle, and pushed the pig back into the oven. When she closed the door I saw sweat beading in her hairline. She wiped her hands on her apron and went to check on some pies in another oven. I followed her over, happy to be around her again.

“You work here now?” I said.

She bent into her pies, testing the ones in the farthest corner of the oven. “I do unless you get me fired,” she said.

I looked again at the white man with the hairy arms and
then smiled at her, to tell her he was harmless. She closed the oven door and stood up, wiping her hands on a towel.

“Ward’s outside,” I said.

She nodded, indicating that this was not entirely a surprise, and then looked me squarely in the face. “You got to get out of the kitchen,” she said.

“Come say hello to Ward,” I said. “He and I still talk about you down in Miami.”

“It isn’t a comfortable situation,” she said.

“I’ll go talk to your boss,” I said, “tell him you’re a friend of the family …”

“Don’t do that,” she said. And when I smiled at her again she said, “I’m no friend of your family, Jack. All I did was cook and maid. I did that and now I do this, and when they don’t need me anymore, I’ll do something else.”

“You’re part of the family,” I said, and finished the drink in my hand. Without it, I felt suddenly out of place. “It wasn’t my father,” I said. “He wasn’t the one who fired you.…”

She walked past me again, back toward the oven which held the wild boar. I noticed more people watching now; I felt the embarrassment I’d caused her, but perhaps because of that I couldn’t leave it alone. And then the big man with hairy arms stopped what he was doing on the other side of the room and walked over to where we were standing.

She saw him without looking; her eyes dropped a little, not to meet any of ours. He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head a little, waiting.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said to me, sounding strangely formal, “you’ll have to excuse me to do my work.”

The man nodded, as if he were not quite satisfied with that, even though it was the right answer.

“You belong out there in the other room,” I said.

“No, sir, I don’t,” she said, and she walked away. I understood
she was afraid, and didn’t follow her any farther. I looked at the man and said, “She’s an old friend of the family,” and he nodded as if we both knew that wasn’t true. As if in another place—a bar, say, or a restaurant where he was not working—he would take me outside and teach me to stay out of his kitchen.

And I nodded back, thinking of my famous headlock.

I
WALKED BACK INTO
the main room looking for my brother to tell him that Anita Chester was working in the kitchen. I found him sitting near the front door where a photographer was taking pictures of my father and Ellen Guthrie with various arrangements of family and friends.

Before I made it over, the electricity quit, and at four o’clock in the afternoon, the room—one whole side of which was a wall of windows overlooking the golf course—was dropped into a darkness like night.

When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I sat down next to my brother. There were several glasses of champagne still on a tray, sitting in front of him on the table. The storm blew sheets of rain into the windows.

“Guess who’s in the kitchen,” I said, taking one of the glasses.

He stared at the ceiling, as if he were trying to understand what had happened to the lights.

“Just like that,” Ward said. I saw him smile.

“Just like what?” I said.

I drank that glass, and then another, but the taste had turned sweet.

“Just like that,” he said again. He coughed, and at the end of it there was a suggestion of a laugh.

“Anita’s in the kitchen,” I said.

Somewhere in the room a woman’s voice rose and fell, and gradually the hum of conversation returned, not as loud as it had been before, but still filling the room.

My brother coughed again, and then laughed out loud. People turned, and he caught himself momentarily, and then he was laughing again. It was a strange kind of laughing; it built on itself, taking him over, and in a minute or two he was holding his head in his hands, howling like he was crazy.

“Just like that,” he said.

I went out into the rain and wind and was sick on the lawn.

H
URRICANE SYLVIA PASSED THROUGH
Moat County headed east and north, following the course of the St. Johns River, blowing through Jacksonville and then back out to sea.

It dropped eleven inches of rain on Moat County in less than nine hours, raising the river to flood levels and submerging some of the small islands that dot the wetlands along its western shore.

When the water receded, the shape of some of these islands had changed. Parts of them broke off and were lost to the river, exposing the root systems of their trees, and some of them simply disappeared, along with the small hunting or fishing cabins on them.

It was a bass fisherman in a flat-bottom boat, working the holes along the west side of the river, who found the bodies. They were bloated and floating, hidden from the river itself by some trees which had fallen in the storm. The current had brought them into a sort of pocket in the wetlands, where they rose and fell with the debris from the storm,
bumping each other as dragonflies hung in the air over their heads.

The fisherman finished working his holes, then returned to the boat landing and called the sheriff’s department, and the bodies were recovered.

One was a woman, the other three were men. According to the county coroner, all but the woman had been dead a year or more, one of the men having succumbed to cancer of the liver. The woman had died from knife wounds of an unmentionable nature.

The bodies were found within the boundaries of Moat County, a mile or more from the house occupied by Tyree Van Wetter, and were presumed to have come from a small plot of flat, high ground nearby where the Van Wetters had buried their dead for all the generations they had occupied this part of Florida.

The piece of the cemetery which had washed away was nearest the edge, and represented the most recent deaths. It was the observation of the sheriff’s deputy who investigated that the Van Wetters were running out of burial space. He estimated the plot of ground—less than half an acre—held another hundred and forty graves, but could not count them accurately as most were unmarked, or marked only with bricks.

A few headstones had also been placed in the ground, but they had been stolen from Allen’s Mortuary in Palatka, and carried no inscriptions.

Charlotte Bless was identified through her fingerprints, recorded at the post office in New Orleans when she began work there as a letter sorter.

A
WEEK LATER
, Hillary Van Wetter was arrested for the murder after an unidentified member of the Van Wetter family gave his whereabouts to members of the state police, who had been called in by the sheriff, and swarmed through the small encampments along the river in numbers the Van Wetters had never before seen, threatening to exhume the entire graveyard.

And in that way the Van Wetters gave Hillary back to the state, and in compensation were left alone to live as they had.