The Patron Saint of Liars (20 page)

"I'm good," she said. "Good as you. Good as you ever were."

I rushed past the Mamie at the door and wondered for a second if she had been the one who drew Memphis on the man's leg, or if that story was from a long time ago, and it had been her mother. But I didn't ask. I hurried outside and into my truck and turned on the heater because it always made such a racket and I didn't want to hear what they were saying anymore.

2

B
EFORE ROSE
there was Cecilia. She came before Saint Elizabeth's and Habit and my daughter. I was not a young man when I married for the first time: forty-five is better than half your life and the folks who know me would say I seemed older than that. But the first time I was in love I was young, young like I can't believe now, seventeen.

Truth is, I was in love with Cecilia a long time before that. I used to say I was born loving her, on account of the fact I couldn't ever remember meeting her. She is in the very first days of my memory. I can see her sitting beside me in Sunday school at the Lighthouse Baptist Church, cutting out stars. Or I see her in the store with her mother, Mrs. Stewart, touching all the bolts of fabric she walks by. I see her at the Fourth of July picnic, not more than four years old, wearing a yellow dress that tied behind her neck and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Not that I always remember her being a child. Lots of times I think about her when she was seventeen.

I don't think of her hardly at all anymore. It just got less and less over the years and now it's been an awfully long time. There was a time if a man'd told me I would be able to go an hour, much less a day or week, without thinking of her, I would have said he was crazy. But truth is, months go by and she won't even cross my mind. Even in the shower, or while I'm getting dressed, and I know I must still see her name on my arm, I don't see it, or if I do, it's just letters. It doesn't tell me anything anymore. That's one reason, although, God, there are so many I could barely list them, why I didn't want Rose to name our daughter Cecilia. I thought it would stir things up, that every day for the rest of my life I would hear that name, I would speak it myself whenever I called her in to dinner or sent her off to school, and it would remind me of what I had worked so hard to forget. But it didn't, really. It became my daughter's name. When she was old enough to talk we would sit on the living room floor to try to get her to say Cecilia.

Cecilia would tell people she was five three, but really she wasn't a hair over five feet tall. She had a way of seeming bigger than she was, the way she walked with her head up and her shoulders back. Folks thought it was funny, me being so much taller than her. Course, then I wasn't nearly as tall as I turned out to be. I was only six two. I had another growth spurt later, not too long after I left Ashland City, Tennessee, when I was eighteen. Cecilia didn't mind about me being so tall, though. If anything, it was what kept bringing her back to me. She loved to be carried. Once, when we were fifteen, we were watching a fireworks show down by the river and she couldn't see, so I knelt down and she sat on my shoulder, just balanced there like a little bird. She was in heaven. She said it was a whole other world, being up so far. If she could have had her way I know she would have had me carry her everywhere, but she was worried about how it was going to look, so we saved it for special times, like when it was raining and she didn't want to get her shoes wet or when we were coming home late from a dance and she was wearing high heels and her feet got tired. And always when we were alone, always when we kissed. She liked me to hold her up in my arms like a baby. She liked for me to reach down and pick her up and carry her someplace else, anyplace, so that when she opened her eyes everything was different. Cecilia said it made her feel like she was important, special. She said it was the reason she always came back to me.

And I liked all of this just fine. Except that when I picked her up, when I held her, I could always feel how small she was. Just looking at her it was easy to forget. Cecilia was such a powerhouse, and don't kid yourself about who was calling the shots on things. I was always half afraid of her 'cause in a funny way she was just so big, but when I picked her up she was of the earth, if you know what I mean. She wasn't anything more than ninety pounds and I was the one who made every choice. It scared me, maybe because I could feel her as just a living thing, which meant it would be possible to lose her for good, or maybe I was afraid of hurting her somehow, like if I was to pick her up wrong I could break her accidentally. It's the same way I felt with Sissy when she first came home from the hospital. I would just barely touch my palm to her chest and I could feel her little heart beating inside her and it felt so small it would make me want to put her down and run away from her as fast as I could. But I didn't, not with Sissy or Cecilia either.

Folks that didn't know Cecilia very well all liked her, and the folks that did know her, like me and my family, liked her in spite of ourselves. She was sort of a silly girl, I guess. I can say that, looking back on things now. She'd change her mind a million times and always say she was right, and she was way too proud, considering we were all more or less from the same stock. But somehow you just couldn't hold it against her, like we all knew if we were her we'd be feeling pretty good about it, too. My folks tried their best to hate her. Truth is, they got pretty tired of the whole thing, me being happy or sad depending on whether or not Cecilia was coming around. They wanted her to make up her mind. They wanted me to have a little peace. Every time she broke things off, my mother would bake me a chicken with green peas and mashed potatoes. She'd call it comfort food.

"You're better off rid of her, Son," she said. "That girl's never going to settle. She wants to keep you hanging on, that's what she wants. You just can't give her the satisfaction."

I would just shake my head, trying to do what was supposed to come naturally: sit up, cut your food. I am forty-five. I have made it twenty-eight years in the world without Cecilia. But at seventeen it was impossible to think of a day without her.

Whenever she came back, smiling and forgetful, my family loved her with me. They tried not to, but Cecilia held them almost the way she held me. They all fussed over her smallness, her bright hair, her pretty hands. She was friends with my sisters. She drank iced tea with my mother after school and looked through pattern books. We all felt Cecilia gave something to us, and the price we had to pay was her constant leaving.

Our last year of high school, I was made fullback of the football team. It's funny to think how much that mattered then, to me and Cecilia both. You never think about getting old when you're seventeen. You never think about how it's all going to turn out, that you'll have a wife and a daughter and a job that takes up every waking hour. When you're seventeen, there isn't anything past a good spot on the football team. In a small town, it was as close as you were going to get to being God. I was just so much bigger than any of the other kids. I doubled up and played basketball, too, but it was the football that everybody cared about. Folks said straight out I was the reason we won. Not just big, but fast too. Cecilia would say some days it felt like there wasn't a place in town she could go where somebody wasn't talking about me.

"Not the team, not the game, just about you," she said.

That was the kind of thing that made her happy, made her hold to my arm in a crowd, which made me happy. She would sit on my lap in the front seat of my father's car late at night and let me kiss her, and I felt like nothing else ever needed to happen in the world. It would have been fine to stop everything right then. There was no other girl like Cecilia. There were girls who were prettier or less pretty, girls who were funny or bright, but at the heart of it, they were all the same, just like I was the same. In any crowd of people, Cecilia's face would always be the first one you'd see. It's almost like everyone else was there to be around her, arranged in such a way to set off her eyes, her mouth. I'm not even sure now that she was so beautiful, although then I thought she was. It was more that all of her ways were big. She'd built a momentum from being wanted by so many people, and the attention had made her kinder and meaner both.

For a long time folks talked about the war in Europe, and what Ashland City said was that we should just tend to our own. There would be no point in Roosevelt going into that, though Lord knows we would have done whatever he told us to. But in December of 1941, just as the football season was winding down, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and we all changed our minds. I left the house that Sunday without my coat, even though it was past freezing outside, and ran all the way to Cecilia's. Her family was sitting around the radio. Her mother was crying. When Cecilia saw my face she jumped up and came over to me. Everything about her looked wound up, not so much scared, but like she wanted to go and fight herself. We went out into the kitchen and held hands and I told her I was going to enlist.

She smiled at me. I never will forget the look on her face at that moment. I remember everything, the dim light in the room, the long table, the yellow wallpaper with the green vines on it and the set of brass canisters along the counter and Cecilia wearing a pleated skirt and a pale pink sweater with a stitching of flowers around her neck and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her face was pure light. It's just like a movie, a movie that doesn't leave out one single thing. It was as if the Japanese had bombed downtown, and I told her I was going off to get them, right then, before they got to her street.

"Then I'll marry you," Cecilia said. "As soon as you get back from training. We'll get married and that way you'll know I'm waiting here."

It was settled just like that, without my asking. I didn't need to ask Cecilia to marry me, because my whole life was that question to her. Everything I did was by way of asking her to stay with me. "Then marry me tonight," I said. "Or marry me first thing in the morning."

She smiled and touched the soft hairs on the back of her neck. "I can't get married tomorrow, silly," she said. "I've got to get bridesmaids. I've got to get a wedding dress. I'm not going to get married every day of my life, you know."

I leaned down and picked her up and she wrapped her arms around my neck and I put my arms around her back and I held her there, breathed in her smell and the smell of that pink sweater. Rose asked me if I loved the girl whose name is on my arm. She said I must have, that the name itself was proof, so yes, I loved her. At that minute, at night in her kitchen, holding her up off the ground, I loved her like I have never loved anything again in my life.

I didn't want to wait for Christmas. I didn't want to finish out the end of the football season. The thought of graduating from high school seemed almost embarrassing, the sign of a man who did not love his country, or did not love Cecilia and want to finish basic training fast enough to get back and marry her. I enlisted the next morning, Monday, December 8, in the United States Marine Corps.

"You the boy's parents?" the sergeant said to my mother and father, who stood with me in the small office, which was crowded with boys I knew and their mothers and fathers. We had been in line for nearly an hour.

My father said they were.

"You'll have to sign him over, then. Seventeen we need consent."

The sergeant handed my father a form, and my mother looked at me. "You're sure about this," she said, just like she'd asked me the night before and again that morning in the car driving over. Her voice wasn't nervous. It wasn't that she thought my signing up was a bad thing, she just didn't want me to do it if I didn't want to.

"Sure," I said. I felt everyone waiting for us to get on with it.

"Boy's doing right," my father said, and handed the form to my mother. "If I was a younger man. Hell, bombing Pearl Harbor."

"You'll have to wait till the first of the year," the sergeant said, pushing some papers toward us across his desk. "We've got a crowd."

The three of us went out of the office, saying excuse me a dozen times just to get to the door. Outside in the bright December light we saw a line of boys snaking up the street and around the corner of the block. It looked like every boy in Tennessee was there.

It made me crazy to wait because it put off coming back, but then three days later they called and said there was room in Parris Island and that I should report in less than a week. I took the money I had saved and borrowed a little extra from my folks to buy Cecilia an engagement ring for Christmas. It was a nice diamond with a small blue stone set on either side, and when she opened the box, two weeks early, she jumped to her feet and kissed me.

Everything was a promise that had yet to be made good on: I would go to war and we would win the war and Cecilia would marry me and we would be happy. I never separated them, either. One thing was the other, they ran together in my mind. But those few days between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the morning my father drove me to Nashville to catch the bus to Parris Island were the happiest I ever had. The news of the war filled every free second, and at seventeen it all seemed like a movie that I was about to have a part in. The war did something to Cecilia. She loved the whole idea of it, the soldiers and the broadcasts and the articles in the newspapers. I believe that during those few days Cecilia loved me in a way she hadn't all the time we had been together before. I was going away and leaving her a war bride. It was the best thing she could have hoped for. Every time she showed her ring the girls would fall around her in a circle, ask her how she would be able to manage once I was gone. But even when I loved her the most, I always knew Cecilia would manage fine.

"While you're gone you'll write me every day," Cecilia said.

"Every day."

"And you'll think about me. You'll miss me." Cecilia pressed against me and shivered. It was nearly midnight and we were standing by the edge of the Cumberland River and it was snowing. It was my last night home and we were pretending it was New Year's Eve. Everything had changed since I enlisted. Our parents never asked us what time we'd be home or where we were going. Everything we did was given a quiet blessing. "Pick me up," she said.