Where We Are Now (4 page)

Alone after supper, he stared out his upstairs bedroom window. Night fell over the widespread lawn so dark with trees he could glimpse only part of the drive, part of the newly painted fence.

Kate just laughed at the color.

Where would he go? Maybe back to New York, or he might take off toward Savannah. He could try to find Jeanie and his son. How many years had it been? Four? What was the boy's name? How tall was he now? He might even persuade Jeanie to marry him at last. He might. He might not. She could have married someone else. If not she, too, could have made up her mind to despise him. Still he might win her. Why was he filled with such foolish hope? Having more choices was daunting but he could remember waiting for the spring rains to stop the year he was fifteen then hiking out of the mountains while gazing up at a clear blue sky.

T
he ground mist
eddied around the mule's legs. He walked slowly toward a farmhouse as if aware that the man on his back was asleep. Behind the hills the moon set, casting long shadows on rows of cotton already stripped. Leftover bits dotted the dark earth, fluttered from the bolls' dry hulls, caught the eye of the mule's rider as he woke. Rising slightly, he touched the fiddle tied to the back of his saddle. As he reached the front porch steps, he shook his head then shouted.

“Hal-loo! Hal-loo!”

The front door opened quickly, but he could not make out the figure holding the lamp.

“Can you tell me where Edgar Moore lives?”

“Edgar Moore?” a woman's voice answered.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Moore, this is your own house, you fool. Get off that mule and come inside.”

He slid off the mule, untied his fiddle, pulled the girth free, and with the same hand wrestled the saddle and blanket to the porch. Tucking the fiddle under one arm, he moved to the mule's head, already lowered, slid the bridle off, tossed it, reins dragging, on top of the saddle. For a moment he considered the steps. Five, or were there six? He took every other one in defiant leaps. As he fell over the doorsill, he held the fiddle up in his right hand, then gently both arm and fiddle sank to the carpet.

Kate Moore looked down at him. She had on a new nightdress, which she saw he would not notice. Her long, dark hair was covered with a paisley scarf to keep it unmussed till church time tomorrow. She turned away and put the
lamp down on a table by the door. Gathering the white dress around her legs, she sat down on the third step of the stairs. For ten minutes she waited. The figure at her feet did not stir. She stood up, carefully curved his legs out of the way and pushed the door to. Moving deliberately, she picked up the lamp, then carrying it before her, she walked to their bedroom. A mule loose on the front lawn, her husband so drunk he couldn't move out of the entry hall. Such depravity stopped at her threshold. She locked the door.

It was 1906. My grandmother Moore told me this incident—part of it—long after Grandpa was dead, long after I'd left Tennessee, had married and gone. Part of it she may have imagined. Mine is a family of taletellers, anecdote swappers, believers in the word, for we have used the word to know each other's lives. But the word often fails. There are lapses, year-long pauses, lies perhaps. And who's to set matters straight? Whoever is left. There are not many of us.

Leaning back in her chair fifty-four years later, grandmother drifted away for a moment as old people do when telling a story they know well, yet she seemed to be musing over some fragment she did not choose to reveal.

“And the fiddle wasn't broken?” I asked.

“No. Would have served him right if it had been. Would have served him right if I'd never opened the front door. He'd been at a country dance right after harvest. Big, noisy gatherings. I seldom went. Mr. Moore always wanted to go, so he rode off to play the fiddle for them. In those days they paid the fiddler with liquor, moonshine most likely. That's
why Mr. Moore came home, rather the mule brought him home, in that disgraceful condition.”

“Miss Kate,” Grandpa called her, twenty-two in l906, seventy-six when she decided to tell me the tale, remained a formidably respectable woman. A churchgoer, organizer of Sunday schools, a house cleaner and a collector of cut-glass and porcelains which stood on what-not shelves, a piece of furniture all children were forbidden to approach, she was described by everyone in the family with one word—particular. Reputedly the best cake baker in the county, she detested cooking. Her ideas about what ladies did and did not do led her away from the farm to her house in town as often as possible. She knew how to make lye soap and wring a chicken's neck but she preferred, as she grew older, to forget such skills. She continued, however, to call Grandpa, dead thirty years before her, “Mr. Moore” all her long life.

Did the formality mark the distance between them? He was ten years older. Or was it merely the custom at that time for women to refer to their husbands as “Mr.” in public while reserving first names for private conversations? Both of these I suspect. And there was yet another reason—inverse snobbery. By continual use of this title and by other means—she insisted he should wear a suit rather than overalls to town—Grandmother tried to reconstruct Grandpa. He would, she was determined, become a gentleman, an act of will bound to fail. Grandpa's friends called him “Sog,” a name given to him as a child after he fell into a half-empty barrel of sorghum molasses. When told that his station in life demanded a suit he said, “Miss Kate, I will cover myself with a suit for weddings, funerals, going to the bank for a loan and other great occasions but I will not ruin my business by wearing one. Mule traders wear overall like mule buyers do.”

It was a spurious argument since he had many other occupations; however, it served his purpose. She gave up on
the suit but not the “Mr.” Though she never said so, it was apparent Grandmother felt she had married beneath her. She was an Allen from Virginia, a designation involving, as far as we could tell, contriving to act as if one's breeding and social position were more important than money, especially when the family fortune had fallen to the poverty level.

Some of “the other Moores,” alas, included an older brother who had served time in a distant penitentiary. Grandmother never uttered his name, nor did anyone else in her presence. In fact I did not know of his existence till I was thirty-two, and Uncle Phillip, an in-law, told me Miss Kate had pruned the family tree, lopsidedly as it turned out. She continued to visit her own brother who, besides working as a circus roustabout and running the Silver Slipper Saloon somewhere in Oklahoma, later opened a liquor store in the Texas Panhandle. He was excused because it was a legitimate business located a safe distance from Allen territory. Texas, to her mind, was the Wild West, a suitable place for a wild brother.

Grandpa also still went to see his brother, privately we supposed. Except for lineages of mules, horses, and bird-dogs, Mr. Moore did not care about breeding. Somewhere during their marriage, early I'd venture, Grandpa gave up discussing asses, mares, stallions, and bitches when Grandmother dropped the Allens of Virginia. By the time I was old enough to notice such omissions, she seemed to have lost interest in ancestry altogether.

Grandpa Moore died in 1938 when he was sixty-three and I was three, too young to ask him the truth of those surmises or any others that were passed on to me. Only a few of the immediate family are left. Age, accident and illness carried off Grandmother, my mother, the only son George.
Aunt Lucy, her husband Phillip, and their son Fergus remain in Tennessee. I married and moved first to Texas, then to New Mexico, but I fly back to visit my relatives, compelled, I imagine, by the almost atavistic instinct of kinship that knits some families together. Air hours are short; movement through time is long. The moment I leave New Mexico I know I'm flying into a sepia-toned world peopled with beloved though elusive ghosts. Certain characteristics remain distinct while others are exaggerated, softened, forgotten or changed entirely depending on who's telling the story. What is it we are after? No one seems to desire the whole truth, whatever that may be.

We have never ceased speculating about Grandpa's death, which was admittedly strange. He was run over by the Interurban, an electric trolley that ran from Nashville to Franklin, a nearby county seat. Part of the tracks bordered his farm, so he often rode home from the fields. What was he doing on those well-known tracks? Could he possibly have gotten stuck? He was diabetic. Did he fall into a coma right there? Did he get drunk and fall asleep on the tracks? Uncle Phillip brought this up, but nobody else agreed with his theory. Was Grandpa suicidal? Why would he have been? None of these questions have ever been answered to anyone's satisfaction. In 1938 autopsies were seldom performed to settle family curiosity. The suggestion of one would have, no doubt, shocked my grandmother. The Interurban had run over Grandpa. That was enough.

He is so much alive in everyone else's imagination that I cannot imagine his death. During childhood summers at the farm I'd seen the trolley swerving along making clicking noises on the tracks. Since then I've seen those abandoned
tracks. I've seen the place Grandpa Moore laid across them. Where was the mustachioed villain? The peril was evident. Oh, it was absurd! Like drowning in two feet of water, or choking to death on a fish bone, or dying from a concussion after slipping in a bathtub. Nevertheless, the Interurban ran over Grandpa Moore.

His farmhouse was two-story, faded red brick. The sloping roof of the long front porch divided the front of the house in half. Inside, underneath the stairs, was a closet with a fake floor and space enough between it and the cellar ceiling for a man to hide, a secret place never revealed to children of the family for fear something might happen to one of us if we used it. When Grandmother finally told me, I was twenty-eight and had children of my own to protect, yet I felt cheated.

“What a grand place for hide-and-seek it would have been.”

“You might have gotten stuck. The hinges were rusty. Anyway you most certainly would have been afraid in that small dark space. You would have been hysterical. Screaming and crying.”