Uncivil Seasons (15 page)

“I heard they divorced.”

A long, low growl bubbled past his lips.

“She’s lived out at the lake since she came home?”

After Cadmean puffed his cigar tip bright red; he stared at it in disgust. “It’s hers,” he grumbled. “Like a fool I gave it to her mother and like a fool her mother left it to her. Baby hasn’t set foot in her own home for five years and seven months. My own flesh!” His fat palm thudded on his chest like a priest’s mea culpa, except Mr. Cadmean had given no indication that he believed the cause of their estrangement lay in him. Then, with an abrupt jerk, his body shook off the subject as he pushed out of his chair and refilled our drinks. “Hell. Women! I truly love women. Truly love them all, big, little, white, and black. I love textiles,” his twisted forefinger waved around at the room’s evidence, “and I love women, certainly do. Any kind of woman except a loose one. That sort I’ve got no use for. None. I had two divorces with women that turned out to have the morals of a cat, and both times I was as shocked as a baby with his finger in a light socket. How come you aren’t married? I had half a dozen kids when I was your age.”

“I lived with a woman in law school I thought about marrying; she decided she’d rather be a judge.”

“You don’t
think
about marrying. You do it. Judge, hunh? Shit. Isn’t that good whiskey? Here, hold this.” He handed me his drink while he prodded the fire into a roar. “Justin, let me tell you this. Women are going wrong. Men, shit, men are nothing but rooting pigs and hogs grabbing in slime, always will be. But women, now. Women are the dream, son. The grail. They’re what the war’s about, what you’re beating your brains to get your snoot out of the swill and look up at something better for. Come to America and what do you see? That’s right, you see the Statue of Liberty. Hunh? A woman. A dream. A whore’s worse than the worst man ever lived on this earth, because a whore’s fallen down from the
sky
, son.” He raised his huge arm and let it plummet to his side; then he reached over and took back his glass. “From the sky. Am I right?”

“I like women too.”

His yellow eyes squinted at me. “You just have to remember one thing. One thing. They’re all crazy.”

“Is your daughter-in-law, Joanna?”

“As a loon!” His head nestled back and forth in the tufted leather. “Now, tell me, is that what you wanted to see me about? If Joanna was nuts? You could have saved yourself some gas.” He leaned across and patted the air as he would have patted my knee if he could have reached it. “But I’m appreciative you came out in all this ice, because I am truly enjoying our talk. Folks think I’m some kind of misanthrope or senile fool or whatever they think because I’ve got so I can’t abide standing around someplace with no chairs listening to a bunch of phony society goats suck up to me and nose their hands in my pockets. I’ll do what I do. And one thing I’ll do is take care of my own. Because I love my own.” He grinned. “And I enjoy talking to my own on a winter’s evening. What did Joanna want?”

“She has a feeling about who killed Cloris Dollard. She thinks it’s connected to Bainton Ames’s death.”

“That so? Crazy as a loon” He threw his cigar into the fire. “Who does she think did it?”

“I’d rather not say.”

He nodded. “Never any sense repeating geese gabble. I thought you already caught your man. Some East Hillston jailbird.”

“No, sir. Actually, Mr. Cadmean, what I wanted to ask you about was some technical papers of Bainton Ames’s that Mrs. Dollard brought over here to you shortly before her death. Do you have them?”

The old man pushed his forefinger in at the bubble of his lips. “What papers?”

“As I understand it, designs for something called an inertial loom.”

Cadmean looked at his drink, then put it down. “No, I haven’t had a talk with that woman in years, except in a goddamn reception line. What are you getting at, son?”

I told him what my mother had said about Cloris making the copies, and he went to straighten a picture frame on the wall. “Well, hell, I don’t know what Peggy thought she heard about these papers, but either she didn’t hear right or Cloris changed her fool mind. Cloris wouldn’t know a technical paper if she blew her nose on it, besides. And Bainton Ames worked for me ’til he died, you know. Whatever he designed, I’d already have anyhow.” He crooked his fingers now. “You know what this is? Come over here.”

Behind glass on a mat was a collection of faded checks with an etching of the original Cadmean brick mill printed at the top. He tapped the glass. “This is real currency. See what they say? Three dollars. Twenty dollars. The Cadmean Company. Back before the War between the States, we paid with our own money! Printed it and paid with it. Just as good as a bank’s. Better! Who the hell knows you at a bank? What do you want some old papers of Bainton’s for?”

“I just wonder if there’s some connection between them and Cloris’s death.”

His palm played its scraping rhythm on his wide cheek. “Oh, shit, son. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. Bainton’s been dead for almost twenty years.”

“Well, almost fifteen. Are you sure you can’t recall any such conversation with Cloris Dollard? Do you know what textiles people might be interested in papers like that? Mother said some men asked Cloris about them.”

“I can recall plenty of conversations with Cloris. That woman ran her mouth like an automatic bobbin loader. But none worth listening to and none anytime lately.” He tapped an old photograph. “Now, look at that factory there. Isn’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw? It broke my heart to have to pull that building down. And you know what? We found some old gold-shafts under the foundations! Isn’t that something? Going back to colonial times. You heard how people say they were sitting on a gold mine!” His chortle stopped as suddenly as it began. “Now my board’s trying to stick up something so ugly it wears down my soul to have to look at it every day.”

His arm crooked in mine, he led me around the room as if it were an art gallery. I stopped at a photograph of Cadmean shaking hands with Franklin Roosevelt. “Parachutes,” he told me. “Yep. Overnight, we switched from ladies’ hose to parachutes, working our fannies off, and here’s Mister Frank thanking me personally. All his boys were jumping out into thin air hanging on to my parachute. Wearing my B.V.D.s.” His laugh rumbled down along the arm pressed against mine.

“You go in everyday, then?”

“Damn right I do. Day I don’t, send the hearse and start digging a big hole. I love work. Work is love, son. Am I right? I love every shuttle, every bolt, every man and woman that works at that place. Hell, some of them have been with me longer than you’ve breathed the air. Loyalty. That’s what work is. I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve got a bunch of young snots pushing at me now, who, you unscrew their heads and you’re looking at a goddamn computer inside. Shit, telling me we got to cut back and lay off and get out of cotton. Conglomerating this and importing that and union diddling and tax diddling. That’s not C&W.
This
is C&W,” he tapped first at an old magazine advertisement claiming that a boy who’d walked barefoot to school had built a factory that now put socks on America’s feet, and then at a photograph of a dozen women, half of them black, on an assembly line, each face turned obediently to the camera. “Whites and Negroes, sitting side by side! So listen here, don’t say I’m against progress, because that’s a lie.” He steered me to a complicated model on a table by the wall. “You’re wondering about Bainton Ames? Bainton Ames was progress. And I grabbed him like
that
.” His fingers snapped. “I didn’t like the icy son of a bitch, but I grabbed him. I bet you don’t anymore know what this is here than those young deal makers like Lawry Whetstone who wouldn’t know a shuttle if they got their balls caught in one.”

“It’s a loom.”

“That’s right. What kind?”

I shrugged. “Did Bainton Ames design it?”

“He did. Yep. He did indeed, right before he got himself drowned. This pretty thing was our first high-speed shuttleless loom. A rapier loom.” He shoved the miniature steel rods in and out on the model. “You know what a shuttle loom does? Shakes. Breaks down. Uses a lot of power. Makes a lot of noise. People go deaf. I went stone-deaf myself once for six goddamn months. Shuttleless loom purrs like a little kitty, compared. No, I don’t hate progress, long as it’s real. But I’ll tell you this. Most of it’s a pile of acetate.” With a grinning nod, he rubbed my wool jacket cuff between his fingers. “I’m back on my goddamn coal, now the Arabs are squatting on our faces, and if I’d had my way, I’d never gone off it. Nice jacket. I bet you understand me, Justin.”

“Well, I don’t like acetate.” I sat back down with the drink I’d left on the table by my chair.

“You don’t look like you do. See this?” He tapped a piece of the model. “Bobbin loader. Used to be, back in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, when they wound the yarn around a skein, they called it a bottom. I saw you in that Shakespeare play. Just had to go, with so many of my acquaintances in the cast. Bottom the Weaver. I noticed that, an old weaver like myself. You did a good job; I laughed out loud. That Bottom, he got himself into quite a fix, didn’t he? Hunh?”

“Yes, sir, he had a most rare vision. I thought I saw you in the audience. Maybe Cloris mentioned something to you there?”

“Never saw her. That place was jam-packed, wasn’t it! Hillston sticks by its own.”

“Why’d you hate Bainton Ames, Mr. Cadmean?”

“I didn’t hate him.”

“I’m sorry. I understood you to say you did just now.”

“I didn’t like him. There was nothing in his head but ideas.” Bent over behind the display table, Cadmean kept working the moving parts of the loom model. “Ideas are fine, truly fine, on paper, but they don’t warm the bed. A man who lives by ideas will betray his brother. ‘But a faithful man who can find?’ Proverbs.”

The tiny machine clicked and rattled. Squinting over it, he looked at me awhile. “Leave all this old mess alone, son. Bain-ton’s dead and gone. And Cloris left her fool house open to trash and trash got in and killed her. It’s happening more now. Even down here. I hate it. But she’s buried now. You let Rowell get through his troubles in peace. He’s got a primary coming up before long. You’re his people.”

The fire was hot on the side of my face; I loosened my tie. “I work for the same state as he does, sir. I realize he has a primary. But I have a murder.”

Cadmean stopped the loom suddenly with his palm and came slowly back toward the fire, his small lips puffing in and out. “Let me say something. Everybody’s got a little shit on their shoes, son. Everybody. People like us don’t track it into the parlor and wipe it on the rugs. That’s all. You know what I mean?” His stiffened fingers reached across me, picked up my glass, and held it in front of me.

I knew what he meant.

“Now, you excuse me. I’ve got to go see about that little princess I’m baby-sitting. What do you want to bet she’s no more sleeping than a hoot owl? Selma’ll bring you your coat. Truly nice seeing you again. You look like your daddy. Take care driving on that ice, now.”

Shuffling past, his fingers squeezed an instant into my shoulder, then ruffled the back of my hair. I couldn’t imagine how his hand could be so cold in that room. The fire spat back when I flung my ice at it.

Oh, I knew what he meant. He meant all the things that our kind of people were too polite to say in Hillston—just as they had been too polite to say Cloris was not faithful to Bainton Ames.

He meant me to translate his parting remark out of the code. “You look like your daddy. Take care driving on that ice, now.” He meant me to think about my car accident on Catawba Drive in the snow six years ago, the accident that had brought on my father’s second stroke.

“I thought I heard you didn’t drink” was code too.

He meant me to remember I was a Hillston Dollard, blood kin to men of high degree, and I was bound in a circle of courtesy, and I was closely guarded there.

Just as my mother’s family, when they arranged to have rescinded my expulsion from a New England prep school, never let it be said in Hillston that I’d been expelled for getting a girl intoxicated and keeping her out all night.

And when I dreamt and drank away my college years, Dollards arranged to degrade an arrest for drunken driving to a speeding ticket, and they never told Hillston I had a drinking problem; they said the late sixties were demented.

And when drinking got to be the only dream I cared about—being a dream of magnificent swaggering prerogative, coarse and bountiful, unshackling me from my future and pillaging my days like a corsair—my people never told Hillston my problem had gotten worse.

And when I dreamt to hear voices uncivil as the times, when ghosts dashed against my windows and whispered to me, when ghosts could fly faster than I could floor the car, my people told Hillston I was too ill to accept my ROTC commission. They did not say that the pleasant Blue Ridge Mountains hospital to which they’d taken me boarded only those addicted like myself to the heedless seductions of drink.

A year later when they came to take me home, we all kept on keeping silence. Only my younger brother, Vaughan, said openly that grief over my commitment had caused my father’s first stroke, and Vaughan, everyone knew, cared nothing for Hillston, or even the state. Whenever I’d complained to Rowell, “Pick on Vaughan. Let
him
go into politics,” Rowell had impatiently frowned. “He’s not a Piedmont man. It’s got to be you, Jay. All Kip has is daughters. And I don’t have anyone. There’s just you.” Whenever I said to my preoccupied father, “Please get Uncle Rowell off my back,” he told me, “Shrug your shoulders. He’ll fall off.”

I went to the law school where Rowell arranged to have me admitted.

And two years after that, certainly no one let it be said that drink had made me crash the car while driving my father home from a Christmas party. They blamed it on the snow. And when, in the spring, my father died, Rowell brought me down from the Blue Ridge Mountains hospital to which I’d been sent, so I could stand with my people at my father’s grave.