The Patron Saint of Liars (16 page)

I shoved my hands in my pockets and started walking in small circles. "I'm saying that I'll do what You want me to do if You just give me some kind of hint about what that is. Do You hear me?" I was shouting, the snow was filling up my mouth. "Your will be done. Okay? Tell me what in the hell that's supposed to be."

"Rose!" a voice called.

I looked up but didn't see anything at first. I was hoping for a quick answer.

"Jesus, girl, I've been looking for you everywhere."

The figure that came toward me in the whiteness was huge, big enough to be the Son of Man. He who so loved man He sent His only Son.

Son took off his coat and wrapped it around me, bundled me like newspapers, firewood, and lifted me up. "Who were you talking to? What were you saying?" But I didn't answer him. I was watching the snow go past me, the dark bank getting closer. I was riding. Being carried. I am five feet ten inches tall. I had not been carried since the night my appendix burst, when the superintendent struggled under my weight to take me down the stairs to his car. It was summer and hot and I was burning up with fever and I felt him try to shift my weight in his arms, but now the snow beat down on us so hard it stung my face, and I was huge, two people in one, me and my daughter in those arms and the arms never faltered. They were bigger even than us. He took such giant steps. I looked down and saw the footprints rushing behind us, filling up with snow as they receded, being swallowed back into the smooth white landscape like we had never walked in this pasture at all.

We went to Son's house because it was closer than the hotel. Son laid me down on his bed and took off my shoes. He rubbed my feet in his hands, my hands in his hands. He pulled off his sweater and unbuttoned his shirt and put my feet against his warm chest. He rubbed my legs and covered me in blankets. He was full of motion, never stopped moving.

"Don't freeze up on me," he said to my calf. His voice was shaking.

And at that moment a little bit of me came back because I was worried about him. "I'll be all right," I said.

He looked up, embarrassed at being overheard. "You need to change clothes, get out: of those wet things," he said. "Can you do that?"

I nodded.

He brought me a shirt and a sweater and some long underwear and socks. Even in my present condition they would be too big. "Put these on," he said. "I'll get you in front of the fire."

I peeled off my wet clothes and tried to dress, but everything about me was slow. I couldn't think enough to make my hands work, to see the difference between shirt and socks. I worked my way slowly into the fabric, wrapping myself again and again in blankets. I had started to shiver. I could finally feel the cold and it was brutal.

Son came back in and carried me to the sofa, which he'd moved right in front of the fire. "You don't have any frostbite that I can see," he said, going back to work on my hands. "What could have possessed you to go out like that in your nightdress?"

"Beatrice," I said, but I didn't say anything else. I didn't feel like talking. I just sat and watched the fire for a long time and then went to sleep.

When I woke up, it was dark and the snow had stopped. Son was sitting in my chair, watching. He had stayed awake and kept the fire going.

"Angie's going to think I'm dead," I said.

"I went over there and told them. They said to just let you sleep for a while. They wanted to take you into the hospital, but I said you were fine. I don't think you were out there very long."

"Is it late?"

"No, no. Not even suppertime. But you've been asleep all day, since eight o'clock this morning."

My sense of time had been destroyed in the snow. This was still the same day. This morning was still connected to today. I sat up and shifted my blankets around me. You have never seen so many blankets in your life. "I don't know what I'm going to do," I said.

"About what?"

"The baby." I yawned and shook my head, trying to force the sleep out of me.

"What do you want to do about it?"

"Keep it," I said, out loud and clear for the first time in my life. "I'm going to keep it and I don't know how."

"Stay here."

"I can't stay here, they wouldn't let me."

"Stay here," he said. "Marry me and they'll let you stay."

I turned around and looked at him. He looked at the fire for a minute and then turned to me. "Marry me, Rose," he said. "I'm not going to try and talk you into something you don't want to do, but it makes good sense. We'll stay here. We'll bring the baby up together."

I thought about it for a minute. Maybe this was the way it was supposed to be for me. God was telling me He was right after all. I was supposed to be married, live a small life with a man I didn't love. My old life seemed so far away at that moment that I figured the last marriage had been erased somehow, that I had come far enough to negate it. "All right," I said.

Son looked at me, puzzled, then smiled. "Really?"

"Really."

He stood up, his head nearly touching the ceiling. The look on his face was so completely happy that I realized for the first time that he was in love with me. The dinners in the kitchen, the chair, that he was the one who went to find me in the snow. He loved me, and I was sorry about that. It would only make things harder between us.

"I guess I'll take you home then," he said. "We'll work out the details of all of this later."

"No," I said. "I want to do this now. Tonight. If you want to marry me, then marry me tonight."

"But there's no time to plan anything. You'll want to call someone, your family. You'll want to get a dress to wear."

"I don't need a wedding," I said. "I need to get married. I don't care about anything else."

Son sat down beside me. He thought it over. "I know there's a justice in Owensboro. If we called him now he might stay open for us."

"Then call," I said.

Son spent a couple of minutes on the phone and then came back. "He said he'd wait for us."

"Good." I got up and Son brought me his coat. "Do you have one?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, "I've got something in the back."

We walked out to his truck and climbed inside. My shoes were soaking wet and cold. "I'll drive you over to the hotel so you can change," he said.

"I don't want to change." I didn't want the time to stop or think. I just wanted to go.

"You're going to get married in my clothes?"

"It looks that way."

So we headed toward Owensboro. The road was covered with snow, but it didn't seem to bother Son. He was a little worried, happy about the way things were turning out, but took my clothes and lack of desire to plan as troubling signs.

"We can get a bigger place in town," he said.

"Later, maybe. Your place is fine with me for now. The baby won't need her own room for a while."

"Her?"

"Sister Evangeline told me. It's going to be a girl."

Son smiled. "A girl," he said. "That's something, all right." He looked at me for a second, me or my stomach, it was hard to tell. "I'd like to give her my last name, if that suits you."

"That would be nice," I said, and then thought about it for a minute. "What is your name, Son?"

"Abbott," he said. "Wilson Abbott."

"Wilson," I said, and nodded.

"You don't have to tell me about the father. That's your own business. As far as I'm concerned, we start from right now, right this minute. Whatever's in the past belongs to you. Private."

"I'd like that."

"So if you want, this baby can be yours and mine, you know, as far as she's concerned. I think that would be easier on a kid than knowing the truth."

"I think so."

"I've always wanted a baby, Rose. I'll be a good father."

"I know," I said. "That's why we're doing this." I should have been kinder to him. He was changing his life for me, some woman he really didn't know at all, but I couldn't seem to bring a kind word out of my mouth. I wanted him to know what this was all about for me, so that if he wanted to change his mind he could. I didn't want to think I was tricking him in any way.

The driving was slow because the roads were still bad, even where the plows had come through. I hardly ever got out at night. I thought about going to the movies as a teenager, out to dinner. I was getting married. I tried to remember something about my first wedding, but I couldn't, not even the dress I wore.

We weren't in Owensboro until seven. The judge told us he was just about to give up. "I've got a family," he said. "I can't be waiting around on folks all night."

When I took off Son's coat he stared at my stomach and then at Son. "So that's all the rush," he said. "Looks like you coulda got here a mite quicker."

"We just want to get married," Son said.

"Have to is more like it from where I'm standing." He was a man in his fifties who wore a dark suit and red tie. He was so happy to see scandal, so pleased for a little diversion. "Most times we see a girl like that she's got her papa holding a shotgun on some poor boy. But you're no boy, mister. You could be this girl's daddy yourself."

Son put his hand on the man's shoulder. The hand said, Remember how small you are, how easy this would be. Get about your business.

"I'll have to call my wife and my son over to witness," he said, dialing the phone. "They just live around the block. I told them you'd be coming. They're waiting on you, too." The man rang up his wife and by the time we were comfortable in our chairs they had arrived, a short, round woman with tight curls and a boy who was tall and thin and not bad looking. I wondered if they had picked him up at Saint Elizabeth's eighteen years before, as he bore no resemblance to his parents.

"Take your places here," the man said, and arranged us in front of his desk, Son and I standing together, his wife beside me, his son beside Son. They looked bored. They were tired of marriage, had seen it all before. The woman pulled at a thread on her dress which came out and out without end. She snapped it off and dropped it to the floor. She was trying hard not to look at my clothes, Son's clothes. I had a hand up underneath my sweater, holding up his long underwear, which was dingy from too much washing and a little frayed around the seams. The man opened his book and started reading quickly. I remembered those words. Dearly beloved. Honor and obey. Sickness and in health. Until death do us part. I had said them before and for that second I wondered if Son had as well. When the man asked me my name so that he could say, do you, Wilson Abbott, take, I said, Martha Rose Clinton, and Son looked at me surprised. He didn't know my name either and had been too polite to ask. I thought about giving my maiden name, Sloan, but I was used to Clinton. There were people who knew me by that name, and consistency is the most important part of a lie.

When the service was over the man started in on the paperwork, and his wife and son said good night and shook our hands and wished us luck. "It was a real nice wedding," the woman said to me. "Prettiest I've seen in a while." Her voice sounded like a record. Her kind words were part of what you bought. They were meant to leave a good taste in your mouth, so that for the next marriage you would remember to come back and try them again. The boy smiled politely but was quiet. Then they were gone.

"I'll need to see birth certificates," he said.

Son took his out of his wallet and unfolded it. I said I didn't have mine.

"Don't have it?" the man said. "Then what did we just go through all of this for? No birth certificate, no marriage. It's as simple as that."

"She's from California," Son said, by way of explanation.

"I don't care if she's from France. A person needs a birth certificate to get married in this state."

Son sighed and reached into his wallet. He laid five ten-dollar bills on the desk. The man touched them with his finger. "Plus the cost of the service. That's twelve dollars."

Son counted out twelve dollars. A five and seven ones, and put his wallet back into his pocket. The justice showed us where to put our names and then signed the paper with a flourish. "Done," he said. "Married."

Son and I stood out in the snow and looked at each other for a minute. "So," he said.

"Well," I said.

There wasn't much to say in the car going back. "Martha is a pretty name," Son told me.

"I never use it," 1 said.

"That was my sister's name, Martha."

I thought about asking him about his brothers and sisters, his family, where he was from, but there would be all the time in the world for that. I rested my head against the glass and watched the dark white world.

"Well," he said when we pulled up in front of Saint Elizabeth's, "I guess I'll see you tomorrow, dinner for sure."

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"Well, you're going to go to bed, right? It's getting late."

"I'm coming home with you."

"Tonight?"

"You married me, Son. I guess that's the way it should be, unless you'd rather I didn't."

He rubbed his neck uneasily. "No, no. You should do whatever you want. I mean, of course you're welcome with me. It's your house, too. I just thought you might not want people to know."

"We haven't done anything wrong. They'll all know sooner or later."

"Sure," he said. "You're right."

"I want to tell Angie is all."

"I'll wait for you."

"Go home," I said. "I may be awhile. I'll walk over later."

"I'll wait for you in the kitchen," he said, and we went into the Hotel Louisa through separate doors.

Angie was asleep when I came in, and I wondered if she had gone to bed early or if she had been asleep all day. I sat down on the edge of her bed and looked at her pretty face. Asleep she was a child. You could almost read her dreams across her forehead. I touched her hair. "Hey," I said.

She opened her eyes, blinked, and smiled. "I was so worried when you left," she said.

"I'm okay."

"Son told us he found you out in the snow. You must have gone a little crazy, huh?"