The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (234 page)

But I guess I must not know art that well because Jones’s biggest painting,
Adam and Eve
, had a blue ribbon hanging next to it that said
BEST IN SHOW
. I stopped and looked at that one, trying to figure out why it was a prizewinner, my eyes bouncing from the blue ribbon to Adam and Eve in the all-together, except for the fig leaves he’d been decent enough to paint on their privates. Adam was reaching out for Eve and Eve was reaching up to pick herself that apple that would cast them out of the Garden of Eden. And this was curious: they both had gray skin instead of flesh-colored skin—as gray as cement. There were some ghostly-looking baby goats at their feet and cows behind them, and the snake was coiled up in the apple tree. A shiver ran through me when I looked at Adam’s and Eve’s faces. Despite that gray skin of theirs, Adam had Josephus Jones’s Negro face and Eve had Belinda Jean’s! Good God Almighty, I said to myself. If Claude sees this, he’ll go berserk. But when I looked from that painting to where I’d left him talking to that fellow he knew, I saw him walking straight toward me.

I reached him first and tried to turn him around. “Come on,” I said. “It’s hot out here and I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.” Except he
wouldn’t
turn around.

“Our car’s parked this-a-way,” he said.

I watched him look over at Jones, and then start scanning his paintings, snickering. But when he saw
Adam and Eve
, the smile dropped off his face. He went right for it, aiming to destroy it, I guess.

When he done that, Jones went right for Claude. The two of them rassled with each other and fell to the ground. Claude’s punches weren’t connecting, but Jones’s were. He was getting the best of Claude and then some. When I started screaming, a crowd come rushing over. And then the cops were there. They pulled Jones off of Claude and separated the two. One of the cops talked to Claude and the other talked to Jones. I could hear Jones say something about having a right to defend his work since it was under attack, and the policeman he was talking to kept saying, “Yes, sir. I understand, sir. He was clearly the perpetrator.” Claude was throwing around words like “nigger” and “kill the black son of a bitch,” and I was scared to death they were going to arrest him. But they didn’t, thank the Lord. They just escorted him off the fairgrounds with me hurrying behind them. If Claude came back to the art show, one of the policemen warned him, he’d be cooling off in jail for the night. “You can’t attack someone’s artwork just because you don’t like it,” the other one told Claude. Of course, it was about much more than that. It was about Belinda Jean and Joe Jones, naked as jaybirds in the Garden of Eden, on display for those crowds of people to see. And it was about
how
that painting got painted—who’d gotten naked with who, and why, and what else might have happened. Not that Claude told those police that “Eve” had his daughter’s face and body. He was mum about that, figuring, I guess, that he’d rather have them think he was a crackpot than that his daughter’d been with a colored man that way.

When we got back to the house, Belinda Jean wasn’t there, thank God. She and Peggy Konicki had gone down to Ocean Beach for the day. I tried to calm Claude down, but he wasn’t in any mood to listen to the likes of me. And when I suggested that maybe Belinda and me could go see Pastor Frickee and he could talk some sense into her, he grabbed my arm and squeezed it and said I was to leave that do-gooding minister out of our personal business or else. All day long, Claude kept walking around the house and out in the yard, short of breath and slamming things and mumbling to himself about “killing that black bastard.” I’d never seen him so mad, and I was scared skinny for Belinda Jean.

When Belinda come home around seven or so, she was wearing that terry cloth poncho I’d sewn her and her bathing suit underneath. He hair was in a ponytail and she was looking sunburnt and healthy. Claude come right at her, backhanding her in the face and splitting her lip. He called her “a disgrace” and “a coon’s whore” and told her to pack her things and get out of his house.

“And go where?” she sobbed. I was crying. She was crying. Claude was wheezing like he’d just run all the way up Jailhouse Hill.

“I don’t care where,” he said. “Plumb to Hell for all I care, because that’s where you’re headed sooner or later anyway. Or why don’t you go next door and live with those two niggers and that white slut they share.”

“Daddy,” she kept sobbing. “Daddy,
please
. We’re just friends, that’s all. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No? Letting him see you the way only a husband’s got a right to see his wife? Letting him make a dirty picture of the two of you and hang it up for everyone in town to ogle? I don’t know what devil spawned you, little girl, because you sure ain’t my child. Not anymore you ain’t. Now go! Get out of my sight! You don’t live here no more, period.” He wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t listen to reason. And so she put a few things in a paper bag and left.

I was sick to my stomach all night long with worry about her. Where was she? Was she safe? Should I call the police? I would have, but I was afraid it would set him off again. I didn’t sleep a wink all night with him in the other bed, wheezing and cursing and muttering terrible things about having a score to settle with the nigger who’d ruined his daughter.

Belinda called me the next morning after Claude left for work. What she’d done, she told me, was walk five miles over to Peggy’s house wearing just her flip-flops and her poncho and bathing suit underneath. She’d slept there the night before, and would sleep there that night, too. Then Mrs. Konicki got on the line and said something about how Belinda Jean’s problem reminded her of
West Side Story
. Whatever she meant by that I didn’t know, but I just agreed with her to shut her up. I was grateful to her, nonetheless. As long as Belinda was staying with the Konickis, I figured, she was safe.

It didn’t turn out
so
bad, though. Because on the third night, he let her come back home. See, she’d written him a letter and snuck back here and tucked it in the
Evening Record
, so that when Claude come home from the icehouse and sat down to read his paper, Belinda Jean’s letter fell out. I read it after he did. In the letter, she said Jones and her were nothing more than “acquaintances,” and that she had never disrobed in front of him, nor he in front of her. All that had happened was that he’d come into the library one afternoon while she was working at the front desk and drawn a picture of her face. A pencil sketch that looked just like her. She hadn’t even known he was doing it until he showed it to her, she said. She had no idea he was going to bring that sketch home and use it to paint her face on Eve’s naked body. Whether what she said in her letter was the truth or a lie, I couldn’t tell. But Claude took it as gospel. When I looked up from reading what she’d written, I saw something I’d never seen before: my husband’s tears. “Why are you crying, Claude?” I asked him.

“Because my little girl’s still pure,” he said. “He didn’t foul her after all, except in his filthy mind.”

I pulled the tucked-up hanky from the sleeve of my dress and handed it to him. “Here,” I said. He wiped his eyes, blew his nose, stood and shoved the hanky into the pocket of his overalls. Then he walked out the door.

When I heard him start his truck, and then heard those truck tires on our gravel driveway, I knew where he was going: over to the Konickis’ to bring his daughter back home. And while he was gone, I sat in the rocking chair, rocking and thinking about what I’d seen that day in the movie theater: their two silhouettes down below me in the middle rows. They were talking and laughing easily with each other, like they were more than just acquaintances. Then I thought about what else I’d seen: that picture of his, Eve reaching up to pick that apple. Well, I thought, if it brings us peace around here, then let him believe what he wants to believe. But in the Bible, that’s not the way it went. Once Eve bit into that apple and got banished, there was no coming back. Paradise wasn’t hers no more. Life was hard for her and Adam and all of us who come after.

Still, I figured it was over at that point. For the next several weeks, I thought that, and after a while, I stopped thinking about it at all. Except it
wasn’t
over. The worst was coming. Claude had just been biding his time.

It come on the radio first. The noontime news said how a local man, employed as a mason by building contractor Angus Skloot, was found dead on the Skloots’ property. Found stuck headfirst down a well. All afternoon, every hour on the hour, the radio kept saying that same thing, just those couple sentences in the middle of the rest of the day’s news. I was so scared that I couldn’t even get my housework done. I just walked around from room to room, letting everything go. Claude had been sullen the night before, but that was nothing new. Then he’d had trouble sleeping. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard him walking around downstairs. When I put the light on and looked at the clock, it said it was two something. I woke up later and lit the light again. It was quiet downstairs now, but his bed was still empty. But that didn’t prove anything. Claude had trouble sleeping lots of nights. One minute I’d tell myself no, he wasn’t capable of murder. The next minute, I’d start worrying that he might be.

In the morning, before I went downstairs to make Claude’s breakfast, I prayed on it—asked Jesus Christ Almighty not to let my husband have done what I was afraid he might have, and if he
hadn’t
done it, to please forgive me for even thinking along those lines. Claude didn’t say more than two or three words to me while he was eating his eggs and toast. Well, that doesn’t prove a thing, I told myself; he never
was
the talkative type in the morning. But after Claude went off to work, I decided to go out to his garage and look around. The work I did down at the Loew’s Poli made me a detective of sorts, didn’t it? I’d just go out there and poke around a little, like a detective would do. But when I went out there, I saw that he’d padlocked the garage door. Usually that lock just hung open unless we were going away someplace for the day. And when I went back in the house to take the spare key off the hook, it was gone. All our other extra keys were there except that one. By the time Belinda Jean come downstairs for her breakfast, I was good and worked up. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Not a thing. Why do you ask?” She shrugged and shook a little more shredded wheat into her cereal bowl.

She was working that day. It was her long day because the library doesn’t close until 8:00
P.M.
on Thursdays. From the normal way she’d been acting before she left, I could tell she still didn’t know about Jones’s death. But halfway through the afternoon, the front door banged open and I could tell from the look on her face that she knew. “I’m sick,” she said and ran right upstairs. Two or three times, I heard her in the bathroom, upchucking from the sounds of it. I made her a cup of tea, put some milk crackers on a plate to go with it, and went up there. She was back in bed, her face against the pillow. “Here,” I said. “This’ll settle your stomach.”

She turned and looked up at me, her face bright pink from crying. My heart was breaking for her, she looked so pitiful. “I had two friends in this whole wide world,” she said. “And now one of them’s dead.”

I hated to ask it, but I did. “Is that all you and him were, Belinda Jean? Just friends? Because I heard you vomiting. You’re not baby sick, are you?”

“No!” she shouted. “He was nice to me was all. He was easy to talk to and he said he thought I was pretty. That’s all there was to it.” She put her face to her pillow again and wailed.

After she’d quieted down, I said, “Drink your tea and eat a little. It’ll make you feel better.” Then I left the room. That was all we’ve ever said to each other about Joe Jones, from that day to now, four years later.

That night, the
Evening Record
run a picture. It showed Jones’s shoes sticking up out of that shallow well. And the headline above it—
FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN LOCAL MAN’S DEATH
—nearly stopped my heart. I held my breath as I read through the article. It said that it might have been an accident, that Joe could have tripped and fallen into that well headfirst, but that the victim’s brother was wanted by the police for questioning. They’d questioned Angus Skloot, too, it said, and he’d told them the brothers had had a violent quarrel after Rufus’s wife had took off and left him. The paper didn’t come out and say there’d been hanky-panky between Joe and Rufus’s wife, but I thought that was what it was saying between the lines. Well, good, I thought. If it was murder, it wasn’t Claude who done it. It was one brother killing the other brother, same as Cain had killed Abel in a jealous rage and been made “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.” The coroner, Mr. McKee, would be conducting an inquest over the next several days to figure things out, the paper said. There was nothing in that article about Josephus Jones being a picture painter. I was relieved about that. I didn’t want anyone who might have seen the scuffle between him and Claude putting two and two together and getting seven. As far as I recalled, when the police stopped their fight at the art show and walked Claude to the exit gate that day, they hadn’t even asked him for his name. That was a relief, too.

Usually, Claude finished work at five o’clock and was home by five fifteen wanting his dinner. But the day that story about Jones’s death broke, he didn’t show. I held his supper until eight or so, then wrapped it up and put it in the Frigidaire. By the time I heard his truck come up the driveway, it was after ten and I was upstairs in bed, staring into the pitch-dark and praying as hard as I could. It had been quiet down the hall for an hour or more, so I figured Belinda had finally gotten to sleep. I got up and went downstairs. Everything was still dark, but when I looked out the back window, I saw the light on in the garage. I went out there in bare feet with just my nightgown on.