Where We Are Now (10 page)

Lucius met me at the hospital in Franklin.

“I'm glad you're here. George's accidents have left him in bad shape.”

“I didn't know he had more than one.”

“Oh, yes. After he ran into his gatepost, he mended pretty well. Then he bought a new tractor. He was out fooling around with it when he fell off trying to go through a ditch, and the tractor rolled on him. Dave found him and brought him in to the hospital. His chest was almost crushed. You didn't know about that?”

“They don't tell me everything.”

He glanced sideways, hesitating. “He … he's decided to be baptized. I thought maybe you'd showed up for it.”

“No. Fergus just told me he was ill.”

“It's a little complicated, Marianne. George insists on total immersion … says he promised Miss Kate if he ever joined a church he'd get dunked … be immersed,” he corrected himself.

“Is he joining Miss Kate's church?”

“No. That's the complication. He's joining Jean's, the Methodist. You know they just sprinkle. There's the Baptist chapel out on the road to Columbia. The Baptist minister will loan it to the Methodist minister, Brother Graver. He's a nice young man, went to a seminary in New York.”

I had no great wish to see Uncle George baptized. However Lucius was so earnest and had gone to so much trouble to make arrangements, I wanted to do my part. First I had to check on George.

I discovered him propped up in his bed drinking bourbon and water at ten in the morning.

“Bottle's in the nightstand, honey. Pour yourself a drink.”

He still had an arrogantly handsome face with high cheekbones, more prominent in age, a long straight nose, clear blue eyes though red around the edges, thick wavy white hair. He'd combed it though he hadn't shaved that morning. Dave, waiting in the hall until I left, would be in to do that. George was seventy-two. How old was Dave? He had a young-old face with a heavily creased brow, the face of a person trying to remember every day exactly what he was supposed to be doing.

“I sold my farm, honey.” Tears rolled to the corners of his eyes.

I nodded. His and Jean's farm had been sold for over a year. Time, for Uncle George, was no longer linear. His mind seemed to circle and glide.

“Broke it up into lots and sold them every one. Notes are paying good interest. How are those little girls? Bet they're pretty.”

That's all he ever said about Sally and Kate. They must be pretty or sweet. It was all he knew to say. Both of them were struggling through adolescence; Marshall and I were struggling along with them. They were both smart and would be pretty enough. Neither would ever be the luscious flirtatious sort of woman Uncle George had in mind, the sort that wanted to please a man more than anything else in the world. There was no use telling him this. Instead I talked to him about other women.

“Your first wife … Aunt Lula, was she pretty?”

“She was … had dark hair, dark eyes….”

“What happened to youall?”

“We got divorced … '37 or '38, I guess. We couldn't get along. We could have if I'd tried. I didn't. She wasn't a bad woman,” he said equitably. “She just had a mind of her own, and so did I.”

“And Marguerite?”

“Well, you know Marguerite drank….” A grin spread across his face. “You never knew whose bed you'd find her in next. I found her in my own once. Marguerite was generous. Her daddy left her rich. She was generous on her own. The summer after the war ended, we went to Hot Springs together. She told me, ‘George, you've always wanted to meet a rich widow.' She was an old friend of Jean's. They were roommates in college.”

I remembered a picture of Marguerite I'd seen on the stairway at the farm. Much younger than I'd ever known her, dressed in a gypsy costume, a strip of bandanna across her forehead, bright metal discs fringing her skirt. One hand was on her hip, the other was outstretched and she was smiling. It was a smile of a woman enjoying herself, an incongruous gesture among the stiff photographs of female Moores wearing too much lace and male Moores looking as though their ties choked and their collars scratched.

“That picture of Marguerite dressed as a gypsy….”

“She gave it to Jean before she took off. Said she didn't want to be en-cum-bered.” He rolled the syllables out. “I had an auction for Marguerite after she left. Sold every damn thing and sent her the money.”

“Didn't she go to California?”

“I warned her, ‘Marguerite, you're hurting the property value of this place.' She'd let it go so it looked like a Goddamn horror house. That's when she said she was going to California. Told me she'd sell me the house and I could worry about property value.”

“What happened to Ada and her husband and all that family?”

“I don't know. Maybe they went with Marguerite. She was always leaving and coming back and leaving again. A wandering woman. She didn't come back from California. Killed herself with a bottle. Got that liver disease.” He sighed. “That was Marguerite. Set on doing everything her way.”

For a moment he looked at me as if to say he had no choices left. But I was only reading ideas in his facial expression. Uncle George's choices were to go on living as long as he could, to count his interest—he loaned much of his money—to remember the women he'd had, and, I suspected, to hope to find another.

His hand shook as he put his cup of bourbon and water down on the bed. A little sloshed out. I got up to get a towel.

“I spill my whisky. At nights sometimes I wet my bed. Goddamn it! And I cry a lot. Nearly anything gets me to crying. I'm a wet old man.”

I pressed the towel down on the bed beside him.

“Leave it, Marianne. Just leave it. Smells better than pee. The nurse will get it anyway. They got some sweet little old girls here.”

He grinned at me. In his eyes though, I could see tears.

“I kept that gypsy picture. It's over there somewhere in the apartment Lucy and Phillip moved me into. It's in a drawer somewhere. You go look if you want it.”

“No. Thank you.” There had been too many deaths in my family. I had already sifted through hundreds of pictures of people whose names I didn't know and too many of those I knew well.

“I had an auction out there. I sold my mules.” His mind circled from Marguerite's sale to his own final days at the farm.

I left him to his whisky. As I started down the hall, I could hear him shouting, “God-a-mighty! Dave, you dumb ass s.o.b! You shave a man with hot water!”

“Sorry, Mr. Moore. Sorry.”

George was howling at everyone around him just as Fergus had warned me. “He's mad at Mother, Daddy, me, Dave. He accuses everybody of stealing, of lying, of making him miserable!”

As I was leaving the hospital, Dr. Walters walked in. Tall, well tanned, he had on cowboy boots as usual. His color, the boots, and his expansive nature reminded me of Marshall a little. I was thankful he was there, thankful he and Lucius were the ones in charge of Uncle George. I asked him if George was well enough to be baptized that afternoon.

“I don't think it will hurt him. Sometimes after a conversion people are more peaceable. It seems to ease their minds.”

“His is pretty uneasy.”

Walters smiled. “George has called all the old ladies in town and asked them to come live with him. Some are shocked. Some are flattered. Some are just after his money.”

“He probably wouldn't mind a gold-digger if—”

The doctor gave me a long look. “Tell your family not to worry. George's interest in women is mostly appetite.” He shook my hand and waved me on.

The chapel, a small white wooden building with a square bell tower instead of a steeple, stood in a low place by the side of a creek. Light green leaves were beginning to curtain the opposite bank. The ground around the chapel had been cleared. There was no attempt at landscaping, none of the familiar bridal wreath or roses. Nor was there a name above the door. Bare and functional, the chapel seemed a statement of southern fundamentalism. Here religion was stripped to its core. Here the large necessities—baptisms, weddings, funerals—were attended to. As for the rest, you were on your own with your faith.

On the slope of the hill I saw a small Confederate graveyard. There were only three or four soldiers from that old war, buried after a skirmish maybe. The anonymous back pew Lucius had offered when I met him at the front door seemed wrong. If I was going to be there as a witness, Uncle George needed to know it.

He didn't seem surprised when Brother Graver showed me into the room adjoining the baptismal tank. I found him sitting on top of a small stepladder. He wore a white robe that looked like a hospital gown except it tied in front. Dave and Lucius were on either side.

“Marianne, I'm glad you're here. This is the closest it looks like I'm going to get to joining a church with this idiot Dave helping. I can still get around some, but these damn steps—”

He'd climbed or been boosted up three. Three matching steps on the other side led to the tank, a zinc-lined rectangle sunken behind the altar, a place as unadorned as the chapel's
exterior. One light bulb, stuck under an old fashioned circular metal shade, glowed on the water.

“Here,” said Lucius. “Let's get on with this. Dave, you stay on that side.”

George must have been heavier than I supposed. It took them several minutes to lead him down the first step, then with a lurch, he fell forward in the water.

From the front Brother Graver's voice rose, “George Moore,” he spoke in obvious haste, “I baptize thee—”

Floundering and splashing George rose, his white gown billowing around him. “This is the coldest God-damned water in the world! Get me out of this God-damned thing!” His voice rang in the cool spring air. “Dave! Lucius!”

Brother Graver, his eyes closed, continued praying.

Ignoring George's shouts, Lucius pushed through the door to the church.

I looked out to see him patting the minister on one shoulder. “You forgot to temper the water, I think. And you forgot to push his head under.”

“To what?” Graver turned to face him.

“You didn't run any hot water in there, did you?”

“Well, no. I didn't think—To tell the truth, I've never baptized anyone this way.”

“Never mind! Run some hot water in, and don't forget to dunk him. Total immersion means total. Hold his nose and put your hand over his mouth like this.” Lucius demonstrated the method used in his church.

“Lucius!” George wailed, both hands on the ladder.

“We'll pull you out, George. But you've got to do it again without the curses. Not a single one. You asked to be baptized. I won't let you make a mockery out of it!” He had always been a deliberate man. I had never seen him so hurried. Without waiting for consent, he and Dave heaved George to the second step above the water.

“Marianne, this is going to kill me.” Uncle George shivered.

Before I could answer, Lucius interrupted, “No, it won't George.”

Hot water poured in. This time he slid easily into the tank. Brother Graver pushed his head down firmly while Lucius, Dave, and I watched from the front pew. This time only the ritual words were repeated while clouds of steam swirled upward.

“He's going to be good now,” Dave whispered.

“I doubt it,” Lucius said. “But he will be baptized.”

I stayed long enough to help Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip return George to the apartment he'd moved to after his farm was sold. Pleased to be home, he crawled in his mahogany four-poster that had been my grandfather's and grandmother's.

“I feel pretty good,” he told me. Then he leafed through his mail which was largely circulars and catalogues. Checks were mailed directly to his bank. Now and then he stared out the window at some fields and knobby hills, all beginning to turn green. He didn't want to read anything, nor did he want to look at TV. I turned it off when I saw him giving it no attention. Perhaps he had the same reaction to television as my grandmother had when she was in the nursing home. Perhaps, to him, it was only a black chattering box full of shadows and sounds. Whatever he saw there had nothing to do with the realities of his life, with the value of land, the taste of whisky, or the pleasure of women.