Cementville (8 page)

“When I think of Canada, I always think of expanses of timber and log cabins buried to the windowsills in snow,” she says.
There's a long bus ride ahead, and she might as well make the most of it. When she asked for time off, her boss suggested she write a story about the town's tragedy. If it was good enough, he'd consider front page.

“There is that. Toronto is where most resisters go. I started out there. But look at me. I've got ‘country' written all over me.”

MaLou laughs and lets down muscles she hadn't realized were clenched.

“Wasn't long before the city got to me, and that first spring thaw, I hitched a ride west to the Canadian Rockies.” He pulls a wax paper bundle from his pocket and offers her what appears to be a homemade cinnamon roll. MaLou's eyebrows shoot up in question. Byard shrugs. “My landlady is partial to me.” They eat in silence, licking sugar and cinnamon off their fingers. “I'd gotten there a few years before the big wave of resisters started, so when the government let us apply for immigrant status, I had a front-row seat.”

“So you have legal status? But that still doesn't stop authorities here from arresting you, does it?”

Byard's mouth is full. When he finally swallows, it's he who changes the subject. “What about your cousin?”

“Donnie? Meanest bastard you would ever want to see.”

“Oh, I doubt that. You don't know what all I've seen.”

“Well, mean enough for me.” MaLou stops herself. “He wasn't always that way. Once—we were probably ten, eleven—I fell out of a tree and had the breath knocked out of me. All I could think was, I am going to die. Donnie sat there and held my hand and told me to just give it a few minutes.” She laughs. “The second I was all better and we knew nothing was broken, he stuffed a fistful of crabapples in my mouth. You have other brothers and sisters?”

“Yep.” There's a sudden set of the jaw, so subtle that if she hadn't been studying the lines of his mouth, MaLou would have missed it. She waits.

“I have a little sister. Augrey. She's—let's see—she's fifteen, I reckon. Doesn't seem possible,” he says after a long silence. “Tony's
thirteen. Little Nate would be seven now, but he passed on. Long time ago. House fire.” Byard stops again, but MaLou senses that he isn't finished. And again, her training as a reporter tells her to wait it out. Her traveling companion takes in a deep breath and with a long exhale says, “And then there's Levon.”

“Ferguson? You're Levon Ferguson's brother?”

“You've heard of my brother. You don't sound like somebody raised in Cementville.”

She shakes her head. “Cincinnati. My dad was from Cementville. He told me once that he drove like the proverbial bat out of hell away from Cementville the very day he graduated high school.”

“A sentiment shared,” he says. There is something of the old mountain eloquence in his speech, the inheritance of generations of Bible-reading ancestors.

“I was the city mouse visiting her country mouse cousins. Every July my parents shipped me off to Aunt Martha and Uncle Rafe.”

“Not of Rafe Goins Auto Body?”

“You know them?”

Byard's face breaks open. “They're good people.” He shakes his head. “I'll be damn. Old Donnie Ray, dead,” he says, more softly. “Mama said a bunch of them were killed over there, but she didn't give names.” He stares at his hands as if he is searching out something written there. “Wait a minute, I remember you . . . what was your name? . . . Don't tell me. . . .”

She does. “Donnie's the one who started calling me MaLou. It's really Maria Louise.” She shakes her head and stares at him. “I can't believe you are the infamous Levon Ferguson's brother.”

“I can't believe his reputation has spread as far as Cincinnati.”

“Are you kidding? We were terrified of him when we were kids. I have seen him torture small animals with my own eyes. That must have been a trip, growing up in that shadow.”

“That's one way to put it.” Then, “Who else?”

She looks at him blankly.

“Who else got shoveled into a garbage bag over there?”

MaLou's eyes are blinking fast. “I . . .” She buries her face in her hands. The words come out muffled and strangled and thick. “There were seven. All National Guard. They'd only been there a few months.” She is gulping air, but control escapes her. “Ricky Welch. Bran Miller. Mac Spalding. Chuckie Gordon. Mitch Kid-well. And Donnie.” She saves one, the one that cannot be real, for last. “Boyd Farber.”

“Sorry.” Byard takes her hands away from her face. “I'm an asshole. You knew all of them?”

MaLou nods. “I had a letter from Boyd two days ago.” She should have known better than to put mascara on this morning. It must be all over her face by now. “He said they were assigned to a flrebase on the side of a hill. He said they were sitting ducks.” She turns her face to the window. She could sleep for a long, long time.

“I've been up way too many hours,” Byard says. “I bet you have too.”

“A nap sounds good.”

“Shall I awaken you when we arrive?”

She had not wished to be charmed. Not by this handsome and filthy wanderer who is holding her hand now, not by anyone. When she closes her eyes, her cousin's lopsided grin occupies the whole of her mind until she manages to shake his image and conjure Boyd Farber. Her first heat, who let her bury her nose in his wavy brown hair that always smelled like rain. Boyd's mother had held on to some of the country ways and made the whole family rinse their hair in rainwater every Saturday night. MaLou wasn't a real girlfriend—they were just kids together. She and Boyd. Donnie. All of them.

In the old days, women married their childhood sweethearts. And when the tragedy of war struck, they were meant to compose lyrical elegies and place tiny braided wreaths of their own hair on the graves of departed lovers. She wonders what she might do to make sure it will not ever be as if Boyd Farber never lived. Any ideas that come are no less morbid than those of the Victorians. At
twenty-three, Maria Louise Goins has gone to too many funerals, the result of belonging to a family whose web of begats rivals that of Jesus. She gives another cynical shake that becomes a shudder, and the strange young man seated next to her squeezes her hand.

“Miss? You feeling sick?” The smell of Uncle Rafe's greasy black garage, oddly comforting, mingles with the tart green apple of his breath.

Homesick, MaLou starts to say, maybe.

FOUR

M
artha Goins has come over early to help Evelyn Slidell with her bath, lifting her in and out of the tub as if she is nothing more than a dried husk of skin, which she isn't really. At the vanity table Martha does what she can with the hanks of wispy gray hair, a dab of rouge, a new shade of lipstick she picked up for Evelyn at the drugstore. She slips the beige dress over Evelyn's old bones and fastens the matching jacket at her neck. Chanel. Not that any of the hayseeds at the service are going to notice.

“Don't you look pretty, Mrs. Slidell.”

“I look like Bette Davis in that dreadful movie where she tries to kill Joan Crawford,” Evelyn growls when she finally works up the gumption to glance at the mirror. “I hope you told Judge Hume I don't intend to say a goddamn word at this thing.”

They are skipping the parade (“I just don't think I'm up to it,” Martha had said yesterday when she and Evelyn talked about the schedule), and will arrive at Legion Park in time for the speechifying. Evelyn Slidell hates Memorial Day. It reminds her every year of the burden that accompanies being what she refers to as a
goddamn pillar of society
.

“The Judge has his marching orders,” Martha assures her. “Listen, we need to swing by the house and collect Rafe and Maria Louise. Remember, I mentioned our niece came down from Cincinnati last Saturday? I can't believe she's already been with me a whole week. Got here when . . .” She stops talking for a beat.

Evelyn knows: Martha's niece arrived by bus from the north the same day the funeral cortege drove into town from the south.

“I am so glad to have her. She's been a godsend.” Martha's chatter will not save her. Her voice trails off again, and this time the tears, though silent, will not be refused.

Bless the woman's big, broken heart. Evelyn had found the thing that connected her to her nurse: They each had birthed a near-worthless son. Now the tie might be even stronger, given that the lives of both young men were cut short under circumstances of abominable waste. Evelyn had never liked Martha's Donald Ray; a snotty, mean boy who gave Martha and Rafe no end of torment. Still she hopes the grenade, or whatever it was that flew into his bunker as he slept that night, hit before he woke up. She cannot let herself think what pieces of him—twenty-three years old at the most, poor lout!—lay in the box they put in the ground this past week. Her Stanley hadn't even been that old. But that was a long time ago, and her grief is a tiny dead coal compared to Martha's bright, burning fury.

“Let's get on with it then,” Evelyn says, not unkindly, handing Martha a linen hankie from the top drawer of the vanity. She leans on Martha all the way down the staircase and across the broad hall, and can almost feel the big woman's anxiety pulsing off her. On the front porch Martha goes ahead without asking and picks Evelyn up in her strong, fat arms and carries her out to the car.

Honestly, this life. Sometimes Evelyn really does wish she had the courage, not to mention the physical wherewithal, to just get it all over with.

Martha's husband Rafe is waiting out front when they pull up to the Goinses' house.

“Shouldn't you be dressed, honey?” Martha calls to him from the car.

Rafe struggles from the porch swing and calls something into the house through the screen door. The girl steps out. Pretty thing. Evelyn remembers her now. She was a handful, couldn't stay out of trouble at home in Cincinnati, so her mother had to send her to her Aunt Martha's every summer for some old-fashioned discipline. Everybody knows everybody's business, one of the few available means of staving off boredom in a town this size. Maria Louise was around Donald Ray's age, if Evelyn recalls correctly. Today the girl looks ready to murder anyone who tries to get friendly. Right behind her comes a red-haired young man Evelyn thinks she ought to recognize. Wait—Martha wouldn't allow Levon Ferguson onto her property, much less in her house, would she? No, this boy is handsomer than Levon. But a Ferguson, Evelyn feels sure. The two young people climb into the backseat and Rafe slams the car door on them.

“Aren't you coming?” Martha's voice threatens to go shrill.

“You all go on. I got things need doing in the shop.” Judging from the blur in his eyes, Rafe has already spent time in the shop this morning. Nipping, Evelyn thinks. Rafe had once been something of a hellion; got mixed up in some kind of infraction, a ring of automobile thieves or some such, and did time at the state penitentiary. Came home a different man. Evelyn took him for a teetotaler all these years. Nobody was going to begrudge him for tippling a bit, what with his loss. But he really ought to be there at the service today. For Martha.

Nobody speaks as they make the short drive through town. Finally Evelyn turns around and stares at the young man and notices for the first time that his hair has been drawn into a small curly ponytail.

The girl gathers her wits from wherever they have scattered and says, “I'm sorry. Mrs. Slidell, this is Byard Ferguson.”

He nods, his startling eyes almost hurting her, they are such a crystalline blue. Thank heavens Evelyn has worn her large sunglasses.
So he is that other Ferguson brother. Where in the world did he tumble in from? People said he ran off to Canada a few years ago. Draft dodger, some called him. Evelyn called him smart.

“Charmed,” Evelyn says, and over the seat she offers him a white-gloved hand. When he does not take it, she lets it fall to her lap.

At the Legion Park, MaLou tells Martha they will meet her at the car after this thing is over, then MaLou and Byard disappear into the crowd. They have arrived in time for Father Oliver's Benediction. Martha guides Evelyn up the rickety steps to a scaffold construction that makes Evelyn think not of Memorial Day festivities but of public lynchings. People trickle in from the parade, and as Evelyn settles into her seat behind the podium, Lemuel O'Brien and his wife Lila clamber onto the stage. Behind them comes their son Harlan, newly freed from a Vietcong hellhole where they did a messy job of sawing off his gangrenous leg. He is awkward with a fancy new cane. Evelyn would lay down money that Harlan O'Brien wasn't a bit sorry when the parade in his honor was postponed last weekend. The storms saw to that, power out, trees down everywhere. Poor fellow only got a reprieve. Made to ride through town on Freeman's black nag today like some kind of clown. She hopes his parents didn't insist he attend those funeral Masses. Seven of them, spread over this whole agonizing week. Evelyn couldn't bring herself to go to all of them, not after the exhibition of grief on display at the first one. Honestly, when did it become acceptable to shriek and carry on that way? In her day, a person grieved in private and with dignity and it was understood that one was not to be disturbed in her mourning. No, after that first Mass for the Farber boy she stayed home. It strikes her now that a lot of the racket at Boyd Farber's funeral was coming out of Maria Louise Goins.