The Uninnocent (6 page)

What did we love about this place? For one, all the carved white stones, with their cherubic faces of angels and upward-soaring doves, their
bas-relief
gargoyles, not to mention their glorious names and antique dates. The trees here were especially old and seemed to us repositories of special knowledge; the Frazer of
Golden Bough
fame knew all about this. Here was a place our minds could run as wild as the spirits of the dead. This was how we thought, two pale, skinny children with no better friends than each another. I saw, quite soon, half a hundred yards away, the pile of freshly dug dirt I'd come looking for without really knowing it. I strode between grave markers to the earthen cavity into which my Julie would be lowered to begin the longest part of any human existence: eternal repose. I peered in, curious and frankly as uninhibited as anyone who'd spent his time excavating artifacts of the long dead, and the desiccated, frozen, or bog-preserved remains of men whose hands had fashioned those very tools and trinkets. One always forgot how deep a contemporary North American grave is. My guess is that in our memories we fill them in a little, make them shallower, as if we might undo a bit the terminal ruination that is mortality. Against my archaeological instincts I kicked some soil back into the hole. Some queer corner of my soul concocted the idea that I ought to climb down into her burial pit myself and spend a few speculative moments on my back, looking upward at the now fully overcast sky, try to commune with Julie in her future resting place while there was still the chance.

I didn't. Instead, I walked back to town, forgetting, in my sudden rush to climb the hill to the mortuary and view the corpse of my dear twin, to purchase the dozen lilies I'd wanted to lay at the foot of her coffin gurney, her penultimate berth. It seemed I was moving swiftly and slowly at the same time, thoughts streaming like an ironic spring melt under a harvest moon.

She and I were in a play together in high school once.
Love's Labour's Lost
. Julie was the Princess of France, and I, who coveted the role of King Ferdinand of Navarre, wasn't much of a thespian and wound up playing Costard, the clown. I can only remember one of her lines, which went,
To the death we will not move a foot
, which I naturally misinterpreted at the time to mean that, like Julie and me, the princess had no intention of giving in to mortality. Later, I realized Shakespeare's message was quite different. All Julie's princess was trying to say was, well,
never
. As for my poor Costard, I can't remember a single word I worked so hard to memorize for the production. What made me think of this? Impossible to know, since the high school was located on the southeast edge of town and my walk from the cemetery in no way converged with it. I felt that my mind, which unlike my body wasn't used to wandering, was out of sync with itself.

Reentering the house by the pantry door, I found myself alone, the hollow ticking of the kitchen clock the only sound in the place. On the table lay a note, a memo in my mother's gracefully dated round handwriting, with the words
We've gone ahead up the hill, will meet you there, dear
. What had I been thinking? Here it was already half past four, and in my daydreamy meandering I had managed to miss the beginning of Julie's funeral. No time to change clothes. Informed by many a summer's tramping up to the mortuary grounds, my feet intimately knew the path. As I made my way, I noticed the edges of my vision were blurred, causing me to believe I'd begun to weep again, just as I had back in the city when I first learned the news of my sister's death. But when I touched my eyes to brush away the tears, I found them dry. Though this was not the first intimation that something might be wrong with me, that I somehow seemed to have lost a crucial equilibrium without which consciousness makes little or no sense, it was the first of my hallucinations I could not ignore.

I climbed the hill with a quicker step, yet it was as if I approached my destination ever more unhurriedly. What was before me oddly receded. It felt as if I were walking backward. All the while, my tearless weeping—or whatever caused my sight to smear—continued unabated, worsened actually, the neighborhood elms and oaks melting into watery pools of ocher, hazel, and every sort of red. I believe I blinked hard, several times, hoping to will away this tunneling vision. The great Victorian houses on either side of the block, dressed in their cheery gingerbread, were like shimmery globules of undifferentiated mass rising up toward the now-gray ceiling of sky overhead. By dint of sheer volition I managed to reach the top of the hill, where I left the sidewalk and made my way across the lawn toward the mortuary.

In the mideighties, I was invited to participate in a dig on the southern coast of Cyprus. The Greco-Roman port city of Kourian, which had been partially excavated in the thirties, but had since been untouched by grave robbers and classical archaeologists alike, was to be our site. Early on the morning of July 21, in 365 AD, a massive earthquake had leveled every structure in this seaside town even as it snuffed out the lives of its inhabitants in a matter of minutes. What few people might have survived the falling rubble were drowned in the monster tidal waves that followed. While we dug from room to room through the hive of attached stone houses, the discoveries made by the team were nothing shy of miraculous. The skeleton of a little girl, whom we named Camelia, was found next to the remains of a mule—her workmate, we presumed—in a stable adjacent to her bedroom. Coins littered the sandy floor, as well as glass from the jar that once held them. Here was a wrought-copper volute lamp; here were amphorae. As we unearthed the physical record of this disaster, a tender intimacy developed between the members of our team and the victims of the quake. On our final day we made a discovery that was, for me, at least, the most moving of any I'd ever witnessed. A baby cradled in its mother's arms, the woman in turn being embraced by a man who was clearly trying to shelter them both with his body. Such love and natural courage were present in these spooning bones. I could hardly wait to get Julie on a transatlantic line to tell her what we had found.

For reasons that will now never be wholly clear to me, I did decide, as I approached the mortuary with its imposing, if very fake, Doric columns, to attend my sister's funeral from the vantage of our old secret hiding place. Maybe I felt, deep down, I simply couldn't face my father. Perhaps I feared sitting next to my mother, whose tears, no doubt, would be as real as they were copious. I don't know; it hardly matters. My vision, in any case, had only further disintegrated during the moments of my memory of the dig at Cyprus, and I had to wonder if I could manage to make myself presentable in front of others inside the funeral home. Pushing aside the hawthorne leaves, my hands splaying the shrubbery just as they might if I were wading into an ocean, I peeked through the window and saw, with what sight was left to me, the mourners within. A smaller group than I might have expected, since Julie had always been the more gregarious of the two of us. It was as if I could hear her voice whispering in my ear, just then, when I remembered my sister's response to that call I made telling her about the family in Kourian.

Over the years from time to time, she'd referred to me as a gardener of stones, but that day she told me she thought I was a gardener of heart. I liked that. It was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me, before or since. As the first drops of rain began to fall, and the crumbling margins of my vision grew inward toward the center of all that I could see, I felt a strong communion with the community of the many dead, and with my sister, too. My sister, Julie, who turned from where she sat in the front row nearest the casket and gazed at her shocked and vanishing brother in the window, her brother who offered her, as best he could, a smile of farewell.

WHOM NO HATE STIRS NONE DANCES

S
TILL DRESSED IN HIS SHINY BLACK SUIT
and graying white shirt he wore to church and not a full minute in Mama's house, Cutts sought, found, and pulled down on the cord that hung from the trap door to the attic. His wife, Georgia, stood behind him, barefoot, having left her black pumps downstairs by the door.

“Cutts, what are you doing?” I asked. “Georgia, what on earth's he doing?”

Ignoring me, my brother climbed the ladder that dangled from a square hole in the ceiling like a tired lattice tongue. A fine, mildewed mist of dust was shaken into the warm air of the hallway with each step he took. Georgia warned him if he wasn't careful the whole thing was going to work free of its old bolts and come crashing down. “We don't need another funeral today,” she added, half in joyless jest, half not in jest at all.

But whether he heard her or not, Cutts didn't say a word before disappearing into the darkness of the attic, a man obsessed.

“Well, anyway,” she said, turning to me with a weary shrug, maybe a bit embarrassed that he so easily dismissed her without the slightest pretense of wedded civility.

Wanting to shift the focus away from Cutts and his rudeness, I told Georgia I had something in my eye. She took me over to the window at the end of the hall and asked me to look up. Folding her handkerchief into a pointed cone, she removed it, a little black particle of who knows what fallen from the attic.

“There you go, Jen,” she said, then suggested I ought to wash my face with some nice cold water—my eyes were red from Mama's service. It was kind of her, I thought, to temporarily assume the role of big sister. After all, I was, I admit, still pretty dazed by the hard, bald, plain fact that I would no longer be my mother's caretaker. My future stretched before me like the empty plains just beyond the outskirts of town where we, now I, lived.

Meantime, there was no escaping Cutts. We heard him stomping about overhead like muffled thunder miles away in a stale afternoon, the way it plays around the perimeters of heat lightning. The thump of a chair, or maybe a lamp, its globe chipped, its wire frayed, carried from above with exaggerated weight and portent. Doing her level best to ignore him, Georgia brushed her hair in silence. When will this water ever get cold? I wondered, as my sister-in-law left the bathroom and I stared at my puffy face in the mirror.

She had been dying for years, Mama had, of a seemingly limitless variety of ailments. I nursed her through the days that led from one problem to another. During these last twelve months, however, the pain made her behave more and more peculiarly. My brother Cutts and Georgia drove out to visit her here in Lincoln in September, all the way from Maryland. But Mama couldn't recognize either one of them, and so she asked them to leave. Other than me, she never recognized anybody by then. Not the neighbors, some of whom she had known her whole life, not the kindly minister, not even Dr. Farley, whose own father had delivered her wailing into the world in the same house that stands three doors down the block. Reverend Robotham and Farley had each before witnessed this kind of gradual lapse into amnesia or whatever it was, but Cutts took it hard.

“Ephram, you get on back to your own home, or else—”

“But, Mama,” I interrupted. “This isn't Ephram. It's Cutts.”

“Ma, it's me, Cutts, your son?”

“Cutts?”

“There you go, that's right. Cutts. Me, your son.”

“Cutts,” she said again, pondering.

“Right.”

“Get me some ginger ale, would you?”

And yet when Cutts returned to her bedroom with her glass of ginger ale, she let out a sharp scream. “I thought I told Ephram to get. Still here? You go on and get out of here this minute.”

None of us knew any Ephram.

“She's lost her mind,” Cutts whispered hoarsely in the front room. “Farley's wasting our money. How long's this been going on?”

I had never noticed how the blood vessels could stand up so tall on my brother's forehead before that moment, thick and blue as rancid meat.

That was the only time Cutts and I saw each other after he and Georgia moved east when they got married, so we'd really lost touch with one another. But I remembered that tone of his like I'd heard it every day of my life. It trembled, angry and accusing, at the edge of his teeth. Georgia understood his angular, irritable voice, too.

“Cutts,” she said, quietly admonishing.

He scowled. “Old sow'll probably outlive every last one of us, and Farley? He'll retire to a big beach house in the Bahamas on any inheritance we might've hoped for.”

Out in the front yard, my gnarly crabapple trees were twirling their new leaves in a coquettish display of April's promise. The spring leaves in the cherry and cottonwood trees were shimmering in the light breezes, too.

“Well, all right then,” said Cutts, not noticing the dancing leaves or anything else as he backed away toward their Impala without so much as a handshake.

“Well, all right,” I echoed. Maybe if he had stayed a night or two, Mama might have come around and recognized her oldest child. But he made it clear that the whole trip out had been a waste of time.

Georgia stepped forward, embraced me, a forlorn smile quivering on her lips. “Listen here, Jenny. Anything you need, just write, or call, call collect, promise? Cutts?”

But Cutts was already sitting in the car. The luggage they'd brought hadn't even been taken out of the trunk.

“Thank you, Georgia,” I said.

“You take care, darling.”

She turned to go.

“Oh, Georgia?”

“Yes?” turning back.

“Mama doesn't mean to be like that to Cutts. She's that way to just about everybody.”

They left, not to be heard from until I wired them to say that our mother had died.

During her last month, the woman began calling out for Desmond during the night. She had never concealed her preference for Desmond over Cutts. Desmond had from the beginning been her favorite, her final born, her glory, and it was on him that she pinned a wide range of impossible hopes. Desmond would bring fortune and respect to their family, Desmond was her golden boy. The world, she felt, would be wise to spread itself willingly at his feet and provide for him a passive surface upon which he might make whatever mark he pleased, take whatever path he liked.