Cementville (26 page)

Ginny Ferguson had accidentally told her all about it the other day, when Katherine made Maureen walk Ginny home from the latest crying jag in their kitchen. This tearful episode was brought on by rumors that the clodhopper Ginny was married to was a suspect in Giang Smith's death, which Maureen would not have doubted for a second. “Ain't Mizriz Ferguson already had enough heartache?” Ginny sniveled as Maureen escorted her down the Juell driveway to the tenant cabin where Ginny and Levon lived, occasionally even at the same time. “What with burying her boy Daniel and all? And
what about me, 'bout to drop this baby—I don't know how much more of this stress I can take!” Maureen reminded her that she had vowed three times since Easter alone to leave Levon for good, and Ginny came close to slapping her. “It ain't like you Juells got nothing to be ashamed of!” Ginny said with a hot vengeance that seemed to surprise Ginny herself as much as it did Maureen. And in the fluster that often was the only way Ginny could communicate, she spilled it all, some confused rigmarole that took Maureen a few minutes to unravel, about Carl and some dead hobo. “And that's what caused your granddaddy to tie a rope around his neck and string himself up in y'all's barn!”

Maureen wasn't sure whether her heart skipped a beat or sped up. She was both thrilled and appalled that such a thing had happened in her own family. She thought back to the middle of May, before the dead boys had come home, when her red diary was brand new and she had a hard time coming up with two sentences at a time that were exciting enough to put down there. She'd been resigned to the fact that nothing of an astonishing nature had ever or would ever occur to anyone in Cementville, much less to her own kin. And now she was the granddaughter of an actual suicide! Before this, Maureen had known only that Willis was off in the Korean War when his father passed away. She asked Ginny in a hushed voice if it was Carl who'd found him hanging from the rafters. “Oh, Lord! Please don't tell your mama I told you!” Ginny cried and hurried into her house and slammed the door. Maureen had stood a long time in the middle of the road. Was that what had driven her uncle off the deep end all those years ago? Coming across his father swinging at the end of a rope? It certainly sounded like the sort of thing that might end up with a person getting locked away in an insane asylum.

Here her uncle sat, staring at a curving line of ants making their way across the picnic table between them.

“I thought somebody should write a history of Cementville, you know, because of what a nice place it is,” Maureen said to Carl now, and did not add, Or
was
, until this bizarre summer. In truth
she wasn't sure if she was writing a history or a novel or a memoir or what, only that big things were happening, and it did not appear as if any of the adults around this town were capable of making sense of it all. She tried to rub out the sharply alternating mental images of the crumpled form of a woman lying on a rocky riverbank and a dark shape (someone she only knew from faded photographs) swinging from a hayloft. She wanted it both ways: the breathless excitement of strange events and the good place she knew too, like an old coat that fits right and belongs to you.

“Don't you think people ought to know about what a good place it is, Uncle Carl? The story of how our town got here and everything?” she persisted, unsure whether she was trying to convince her uncle or herself of the truth of it.

“What if nobody wants to know about what a good place it is. What if they already have their own good place and they're afraid knowing about another good place will make their place disappear?” Carl asked.

“Well then, they shouldn't read anything if they're so afraid of having their minds changed,” Maureen said. What she had started to say was,
This book will be for normal people, Uncle Carl
. Her mother had reminded her several times since Carl's arrival that it pays to think before you speak.

He wiped his eyes. Small sucking sounds came from the back of his throat. Maureen was learning it did not take much to get her uncle going. She really should not have mentioned offing herself.

“Maybe I'm writing it for us,” she said with a cheer she did not feel. “Just think. When it gets published, it'll be like a version of home you can take with you if you ever have to leave again. Say you're living in Indiana, or Paris, and you start to feel homesick. You can pull out my book and flip to a chapter and say, Oh, I remember that!”

“I'm a native of Cementville, too.”

“I know, Uncle Carl.” She pretended to study a brochure about Mammoth Cave that she had picked up the week before on a research run at the Cementville Tourism Bureau, which was basically a folding
table at the bus station where Vera Smith sat behind a rack of brochures about things to do when you were visiting the area. There was a brochure about the distillery, and the Palisades on the Kentucky River, and one about the Tourmobile. But most of the things to do were in other parts of the state. She offered a biscuit to Carl.

He took a tiny bite, wiped his fingers on his pant leg, and opened one of the travel brochures. “Since the day I got taken away I've been a visitor here forty-five times,” Carl said.

Maureen glanced up. “Forty-five?”

“Thirty years old now, minus fifteen years when I got taken away, equals fifteen years I lived at Eastern State, times three visits a year—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July—equals forty-five visits.”

Maureen remembered Uncle Carl turning up at certain times and was vaguely aware that the relatives took turns having him sit at their holiday table. He was the hot potato that had to be passed around and couldn't stay in anybody's hands too long.

“What about Easter?” she asked.

He made a face like he could not believe what she had said. “And miss the Easter egg hunt.”

She nodded. “So you were a little older than me when you moved away.”

“I didn't move away.” Carl wiped both eyes at once with his big fingers.

“When you were taken away.” Maureen tried to picture herself bundled in a white straight jacket, her parents loading her into a van full of strange men, Katherine and Willis and Billy standing at the top of the driveway, waving goodbye to her. Or taking her to spooky old Eastern State Hospital themselves and walking out the front doors without her, then driving home singing along to Pee Wee King on the radio, no different than if they had just hauled cast-off clothing to Appalachia for the annual Holy Ghost Charity Drive.

She filled one sheet of loose leaf and set it aside. Carl picked it up and looked it over and placed it exactly as he had found it.

“Did you put in about the murder?” he whispered.

“Mother said I need to stop dwelling on what happened to Giang Smith.”

“The other one,” Carl said.

“She says I have a morbid sensibility, and if I don't stop it, she's going to take me to see a doctor.” Maureen's work would get nowhere today if she indulged every crazy idea clattering around inside her addlepated uncle. That was another new term she had learned. Addlepated: being mixed-up. Confused.

The two of them sat out there at the picnic table, Maureen writing, Carl squashing ants with his big fat thumb anytime one ventured near her stacks of papers and brochures. To give him something productive to do, Maureen handed him a red pencil and let him read over the first chapter. All the while he made little throat noises she could not decipher as agreement or disapproval.

When she studied her notes later, she found not red pencil marks, but a parade of ant bodies scattered across the pages like tiny pressed flowers.

T
HE NEXT DAY, WHILE
K
ATHERINE
was lying down for a rare nap, Maureen fastened her book bag onto her handlebars. Her mother had been acting more protective than Maureen could remember, hesitating to allow her to ride her bike to town or even over to the Millers' house. Maureen knew it was because of Giang Smith's murder and the fact that the sheriff had been questioning people but no actual arrest had been made. But she had been cooped up on their ridge for six days in a row, and she had work to do, and summer was slipping away. She wasn't sure which was stronger, the twinge of guilt at sneaking off while her mother napped, or the fear of what would happen when she got home.

She was a third of the way down the driveway when Uncle Carl came barreling behind her on foot. Maureen skidded her tires to a halt in the gravel.

His face said,
Where are you going?

“Today's a research day.” She explained that she had already covered as much as she could from home and memory and her own imagination about the dead soldiers, their families, this war, and other wars that had sent dead soldiers back to Cementville. “There's some stuff I need to look up at the library. Some stuff about the Army. About how the National Guard came to be something different from what people thought it was.”

Carl squeezed the bridge of his nose hard.

Maureen remembered Billy's old five-speed in the barn. She pushed her bike back up the hill. They brought her brother's bike out into the sun and checked the chain and tires. Willis squirted it with WD-40 and spun the pedals to get the chain oiled. The tires were low, but not dry-rotted, so he thought they could make it to town all right, if Maureen and Carl promised to stop at the filling station and put air in them.

“Your mother knows you're taking off, right Mo?” Willis said. She nodded. Lying was getting easier. “Carl, you behave. Mo, keep an eye on him.”

Which seemed to Maureen a ridiculous thing for her father to say regarding a grown man. They flew down the hill, gravel pinging crazy tunes against the spokes of their bicycle wheels.

Mrs. Cahill always had things picked out for Maureen in advance, books and articles that might add something interesting to her research on Cementville or help her improve her prose. Maureen would vote Mrs. Cahill the Best Librarian in the World, even given that she is the only librarian Maureen has known, except for Miss Wanda, Mrs. Cahill's part-time assistant who was not a real librarian but basically just a haunter of the library stacks who never talked to anybody and probably would have made a good librarian if she were not so afraid of people. Maureen would not have been surprised if creepy Miss Wanda was snooping around the stacks right now, peering out at them this very minute between
Billy Budd
and
Moby Dick
.

“This is my Uncle Carl,” Maureen told Mrs. Cahill, who was already checking him over like she was trying to figure out whether he was the kind of person who could pass muster. The librarian dabbed her eyes with the wadded tissue she kept in the sleeve of her green cardigan and came round to the front of the desk. She was a small woman, and when she tried to gather Carl into her arms as if he were her own lost child, she looked like an elf attempting to tackle a large mammal.

“I heard you were home, you handsome thing, and you haven't stopped in to see me before now! How is my favorite researcher?” She glanced at Maureen. “I mean my two favorite researchers?”

Maureen picked up the stack of books Mrs. Cahill had set aside at the front desk. Carl followed her to the table by the microfilm viewer. He flipped through her notes about everything interesting she had learned so far from old
Cementville Picayunes
.

“You still don't have the murder in here.”

Before Giang Smith, people did not get murdered in Cementville, except maybe in the Civil War days, when Confederate raiders roamed the hills, shooting people at random and stealing their farm animals. When kids told ghost stories at church weenie roasts, some of the boys swore that renegade guerrillas ate whole calves raw like bloodthirsty vampires. But it looked as if Maureen was going to have to pander to her uncle's obsession with
somebody's
murder or he was not going to let it go.

“Okay, what murder?” she said.

Carl rifled through the drawer of film canisters and pulled out July-December 1954. He dragged a chair next to Maureen at the microfilm viewer and inserted the film and whirred through the frames.

“How do you know how to do that?” she asked him.

“Why do you think Mrs. Cahill likes me so much?”

Maureen leaned in and read the clipping he had centered in the viewer. “Police Probe Slaying. Man Found Dead Behind Council Street House. Coroner Rules Homicide,” Maureen read aloud. Then
silently down the narrow column.
“Roy Stubblefield bled internally from being beaten with a blunt object, possibly an ax handle found near the scene,” the coroner said
.

She pushed the chair away from the microfilm viewer. Her heart pumped furiously like it had the day Ginny blabbered out her angry story.
Hobo, rope, grandfather, barn
. The words swarmed around in her head. 1954. Fifteen years ago. Fifteen years since Carl Juell had been locked up in the nuthouse.

“Nobody's going to want to read that,” she said, afraid to look at her uncle. “Besides, I wasn't even born then. It doesn't have anything to do with me.”

Carl glowered at the microfilm viewer as if it had let him down. “I thought you wanted to write a history.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Dead people are part of history. Murderers make history.”