Where We Are Now (2 page)

He got little Howie, the only one of us left at home, to come down from Kentucky and stay with Kate while he went to see Richard in jail. Rich was stuck in the habit of making moonshine, kept on making it till it went out of fashion. He needed to see Edgar. Said he wanted to straighten some things out. I don't know what. His life was about as ordered as it ever was going to be in the penitentiary. He needed no one—never did. I know. I grew up under him. Sis, he and Edgar called me. Could have called me anything. Blood kin and could of been called Sal or Sary. They didn't care about a girl, the only girl in the family. Edgar cared, pitied Rich in jail with a broken arm. Broke it in a jail fight.

So Edgar called on young Howie to come keep Kate company. She didn't want to stay out there by herself. She was raised in a place about the size of Franklin, the town of Lexington in Virginia where Stonewall Jackson used to live. Country scared her. Too open. Kate wanted people around, the sounds and sights of others living. She liked the sounds of doorbells and conversations, not the wind sighing or a hen cackling. Howie rode Pa's old gelding to the train station, I bet. Took off. Crops were in. Fields fallow. Winter still. Spring would appear all of a sudden. Howie got on the train to Franklin, and Kate met him there. Edgar was already gone, left the day before. Maybe it would have been different if he'd stayed home till Howie got there at least. He could of seen them together then, seen the married look on their faces.

Instead there was Kate alone waiting half-hidden in a buggy. I guess he knew it was her by the rig, by the horses. Edgar would have told him. Like him—to tell all about the matched pair of chestnuts and the hooded buggy and say only that Kate would be waiting. Probably he forgot that Howie was twenty-one himself, never pausing to consider his little brother was bound to have grown some in the years he'd been absent. Grown to manhood with a man's needs. It was so simple, so foolish. Richard insisting he had to have Edgar visit, Edgar obeying—he always did whatever Richard wanted. Then Edgar turned around and insisted, and Howie obeyed, came to stay with Kate while his brother went off leaving them together out in the country five or six miles away from town, away from people. Kate had an aunt in Franklin. Why didn't she stay with her? Was she away? I don't know. Too much I don't know. Oh, I guess it could have happened in town next door to the preacher. Who knows what goes on inside of houses?

I see Kate's face now half-turned away from me, her long curly hair a curtain between us while we sat on the back
porch steps whispering. Innocents! We were two innocents! And me waiting to hear the rest of it because she had to tell someone, some other woman, and I loved Howie. Or maybe I was the one to come along just then. Pa wouldn't come, not for a funeral even. Spring showed up. Planting time. The ground, his ground, commanded him. That was the way he was, born in the mountains. They held him and others like him. Boys left from mountain farms leading a cow behind them when they went to sign up for the war. Their people lived so far removed they didn't know milk came in bottles. Pa didn't send me. I had already left, married Daniel and left when I was fifteen. Except to go to school, Pa wouldn't let me out of the kitchen. Ma wasn't alive to help me. There was no other way to go save on the arm of a man, or on the back of some man's horse, told Pa I was going to the spring, met Dan there, left home riding behind him barefoot as a Indian. He bought me a pair of shoes. We married when I was a child myself, fifteen, five years before Edgar did. Dan and I were traveling to California, coming out to make our way in the west when we got word of Howie. I had to go by way of Tennessee. I had to, Dan agreed. Mama died when I was thirteen and left me with a household full of bossy men. I found an agreeable one to marry.

Richard, Edgar, Ambrose, Howie and me. Five of us. Ambrose ran off to Charleston, left a note, said they had better pianos there. Howie and I were raised together. He was the only one who wanted to stay at home to help Pa. Edgar was musical like Ambrose except he knew the fiddle, learned it from Pa, but he was more interested in making money, so he left for better farming country in Tennessee. Richard made moonshine, made foolishness walking, made himself a jail sentence.

Listen, Kate said. Oh, Eula. Tell me, did I kill him? I loved him. I couldn't help loving him. I couldn't stop, then
Mr. Moore came home, and I had to stop. I hadn't wanted him to leave, begged him not to go away, but he said he had to, had to go see Richard. He's been in trouble all his life, hasn't he? She cocked her head, pushed her hair back a little, so I could tell someone else's trouble, Richard's even, was a relief to her. Yes, I told her, trouble seemed to come natural to Richard. Pa said he went bad early. He wouldn't learn a dandelion from a tobacco plant, said he'd never have to hoe that way.

I knew it was wrong, Eula. We both knew. We couldn't help ourselves.

Did Edgar?

I told you. We had to stop when he came home. I am not a wanton.

But did he know?

Maybe. I don't know. I didn't tell him. Neither did Howie. When he was around me and Mr. Moore, I acted as if I didn't much care for him.

Why, I had to ask her. Why didn't Howie leave?

He did. The day after Mr. Moore came home. He left early the next morning. He was going to Franklin to catch the train there. Mr. Moore was out in the fields somewhere. Howie borrowed one of the horses, I watched him saddle. He was white in the face and his hands were shaking. We were both shaking trying not to touch each other. Made the horse skittish. Howie planned to stable it in town. I was supposed to pass that on. We looked each other in the eye, then he rode off. The horse brought him home. He fell off back here. I didn't know. She pointed out in the yard. Near the faucet. Mr. Moore found him when he came. I was inside all the time, in the bedroom crying because Howie was gone, and he was out here I don't know how long. I must have killed him. I let him lay out there on the ground.

She put her head down on her lap.

Kate, don't. I told her. He was probably sick way before he left.

He should of stayed. I could have looked after him. He wouldn't stay in the house with me and his brother. Incestuous. That's what he said.

Well, it wasn't. That's what Cain and Abel were doing with their sisters. And King David's son Amon did with his sister Tamar. Don't you remember all that trouble that began with David and Bathsheba? Don't you know your Bible? I started to say and didn't because I remembered the laws set down in Leviticus. Anyway it was Howie that had been talking about incest, not Kate. She knew the word was adultery. Howie did too. They didn't want to say it.

There was a tree blooming there by the back steps, a fruit tree, a pear, I think, the way its branches stood up, not bent like a peach, but a pear holding all its white blossoms up and bees already around. Was that what made me think? Was that what gave me the idea? “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Was that God speaking to Cain and Abel, or to their wives? I've forgotten my own Bible.
Ben-Hur
sent everyone scampering after theirs because they wanted to check on General Lew Wallace. I put both the novel and the Bible in the lobby of our theater when we showed it. Somebody stole the Bible. Dan laughed, said maybe it would do them some good.

The March wind blew white pear blossoms over our heads, Kate's and mine. A petal landed in her dark hair. She shook it out. You know the rest, she said.

No, well maybe I do. But tell me. Mourners need to talk, to repeat until the very thing they don't want to know becomes real to them.

Edgar and the hired man brought him in.

That's the only time I ever heard her say Edgar's name. She was too proper generally. Had to call him Mr. Moore no matter if she was talking to his own sister. But this one time, when he was carrying Howie in his house, when his arms were around his younger brother, she said Edgar. He laid him in the guest room bed, and he died of a fever two weeks later. Kate thought he died of love. I used to think she was too proud, too eager to prove her own family belonged to the gentry. That was all she had, her pride, her own idea of respectability. She gave it up to speak of my brother Howie to me.

Mr. Moore said it must have been typhoid. The doctor wasn't sure. No one else came down with it. But Mr. Moore determined our well was too near an old outhouse he used to have out back He closed it. Hauled stones in and filled the well, then opened a new one deeper and further away. I wanted to put a monument for Howie at the old well. Mr. Moore wouldn't do it, said it wasn't fitting. He sent money home to Kentucky, told his pa to raise a stone there. It was that or send Howie's body home on the train. The doctor said not to. Oh, Eula, he'd hardly ever been anywhere, just down here to visit.

She'd already shown me Howie's unmarked resting place near the Moore stone in the Franklin graveyard, so all I could do was nod my head and wonder at Edgar's stubbornness. To bury his brother here and arrange for a monument to be raised in his memory in Kentucky was a strange choice, and then again, maybe it wasn't so strange. He gave his brother burial, and, as I see it, meant to forget him, meant for Kate to forget him. I didn't know. I couldn't ask Edgar. He and Kate had gotten to some kind of peace, some kind of necessary agreement anyway. Because, even if she wasn't showing yet, I knew she was going to have a baby. Was it Howie's or Edgar's? I wonder if she knew herself.
She wrote me just after George was born in l906, said since I was the only one who cared about family history, I could put the date of their son's birth in my records.

How often does that sort of thing happen? More than I ever knew, I guess. I wanted to know where I came from, who my people were. I tracked the Moores back five generations, made a tree of other people's memories, our tombstones and our church records of births, baptisms, deaths, whole lives traced in spidery wavering hands or sometimes written so hard the pen nearly tore the paper. That's the way I put Howie's dates in my own Bible. My pen scratched black drops. The Moores found their way down the coast to the mountains of east Tennessee from Scotland. They didn't come of their own will. They were pushed off by others, by the Enclosures. Landless, poor, but they got here, and survived. That's about all I know, the only true thing I know, and the years, the dates, a kind of multiplication table. “Be fruitful.” Well, I can see they were. Nothing else is certain. So I'm sitting here at one in the morning, unable to sleep, writing a reminder to myself of something I had to learn, like it or not. I'll keep this with the tree I've drawn in that little wall safe at the theater. Nobody but me remembers the combination.

S
he wrote on blue paper,
her favorite color and his. She'd do that to send the melancholy news of love lost. Would drink help? There was no help for this.

Ambrose picked up the crumpled page, smoothed it out on the round dining table, his gaze flickering toward the doors until he reminded himself that the others were gone to town—his brother Edgar, his sister-in-law, Kate, and their youngest daughter. No one would interrupt; no one would search him out and see his face. No, he wouldn't read Josephine's note again. Why subject himself?

And all the time he was smoothing out the wrinkles on the table, pressing them vehemently with his fingers as he might press the lid of his piano just before opening it. Not that he'd open a piano now. People were always imagining pianists pounding out their anguish. Nothing here anyway but Kate's absurd player piano with its punched paper roll and tinkling mechanical cylinder. She'd apologized when he first arrived, for she knew the thing must be a mockery to a real musician, and she was sorry, but Edgar had insisted they buy it. She'd never much liked it herself. He was not to tell Edgar. She couldn't play, and none of the children were musically inclined. Why didn't it get passed down, that inclination? Behind them they had their father who was a well-known country fiddler and their uncle Ambrose, a pianist who made his living teaching. Why hadn't at least one of three children a spark? Kate lamented at first. After he was there a few days, she teased him gently.

“Until you have your own children, Ambrose, we can't truly know, now can we?”

She wouldn't have mentioned children if she hadn't known about Josephine. And who told her? He did. He'd arrived in Tennessee so full of hope he couldn't help glorying in the days to come.

He glowered at the wrinkled blue paper.

“Oh, damn my tongue!”

He leaned back away from the table in his chair. He'd had to tell someone, so he'd confided in his sister-in-law, that he planned to marry Josephine when he returned to Charleston. Knowing he couldn't help but opportune her if he were there, he'd left for two weeks to allow her time for consideration. It had been her idea to part just as it was certain they were about to join forever. He'd accused her of testing him.

“What will you have me do next, slay dragons, climb towers?”

“Take a dangerous journey!” She played along

The Depression had kept him poor but it seemed to be lifting a little, and it wouldn't cost too much to take the train. Why not go to visit his brother Edgar?

They both laughed, and Josephine went with him to see him off.

He pushed himself away from the table and went to the sideboard to rummage through the bottles of patent medicine stored there. Hiding among them was the bottle of bourbon Edgar told Kate he kept for purely medicinal purposes. Others were stashed around at the barn, in a corner of the hall closet. Kate would never have approved. She sometimes grew merry on a dose of one mixture of another never suspecting they were mostly alcohol.

“Don't tell her, Brother,” Edgar whispered. “She needs it to ease her nerves now and then. She's a high-strung mare.”

Edgar had little schooling, a lot of farming. That didn't make him a gallus-snapping oaf. Much of Edgar was mask.
He wore overalls and chewed, yes. Be he also had a tender side. Closest to her, he'd mourned their mother's passing longer than any of her four children. Edgar was also a trader, and just under the trader was a gambler. He'd tamed himself, stayed away from cards and cockfights, refused to take up moonshining, turned to livestock and land, renting first, buying later. Marrying Kate had helped him, kept him looking beyond the pleasure of the moment.