Cementville (9 page)

Of course Evelyn sent a large tasteful basket of lilies to each of the families and made a substantial donation to the Holy Ghost Altar Society in the dead boys' names.

From her vantage on the platform (if you could call it that—plywood and two-by-fours and a handful of nails, from what she can
tell), Evelyn Slidell looks down into every single face that belongs to this town. She knows what they are all thinking: Why hasn't she died yet? They see a desiccated old woman hiding behind a pair of dark glasses large enough to cover half her face. She had selected these sunglasses this morning with particular care, the better to intimidate the populace. Heavy tortoise-shell frames and lenses so black she can stare without people being certain whether she is looking at them or someone just over their shoulder. It has become a prerogative of age, as far as she is concerned, to stare.

Benediction done, Father Oliver steps aside for Judge Hume. “Good people of Cementville,” the Judge starts, and the secular portion of the invocation begins. Freeman Hume's rumbling baritone shushes the crowd as the pastor's tenor could not. The speech will go on twice too long, every word predictably patriotic pap. Praise be for whatever it is out there that passes for a divinity, Evelyn thinks, that the day is not hot. Last weekend's storms, in addition to delaying the parade, broke the strange spring drought, and now her valley is lush and green. The air is cool and she is glad for her jacket. Not that she would take it off even if she were steaming—and what?—reveal the shriveled arms that refuse to do as she bids them anymore? Dresses for old women ought not be made sleeveless.

Everybody is here at the new Legion Park, the memorial patch of crabgrass created by unanimous resolution at the emergency meeting of the City Council. After news of the war dead broke, right off they stormed Evelyn asking for money to throw the whole thing together. Levon Ferguson and his scrawny little brother Tony were hired to whack down the wild privet that had taken over the vacant lot north of the distillery. Stick a few sad-looking box elders in the ground, something cheap, fast growing. But weak wooded—oh, how people have lost the long view of things! Evelyn believes with all her heart that this place, historic district designation or no, will wither into a ghost town, and sooner rather than later.

The Altar Society women at Holy Ghost joined with the Presbyterian Women's Auxiliary (will miracles never cease!) and stitched
together a bit of bunting for a grandstand, the brilliant red, white, and blue stripes highlighting the fact of this acreage being little more than a cinder dump abutting Taylortown. Evelyn still has to stop herself calling it Coloredtown. Not that she isn't glad for Civil Rights. She is, she really is.

—
I am humbled to stand before you on this consecrated day, a day to reflect on those who serve in the defense of our land. Those of us who have heeded the call can remember that first haircut, or the mystery meat served up in the chow hall. We dwell on those memories that do not fade
.

“Stop it!” It is a girl's voice that has interrupted Freeman Hume's blather, and he and everyone in attendance turn heads together toward the peals of tinkly laughter. The giggling and commotion continue, some pushing and slapping of hands, until finally Evelyn can make out where it's coming from. A girl, a child really, with that blaze of hair, and she's half-heartedly fighting off the playful advances of a couple of skinny young bucks right there at the corner of the stage for all the town to see.
Who
is
that?
Evelyn mouths to Martha, which question only elicits a roll of eyes and a shake of the head.

—
My four years at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, the football games, the times my buddies and I went for a dip on a dare in the icy Chesapeake Bay, and of the day I learned I would be going to Navy Flight School
. . .

It's that Ferguson girl. Stepped into the role of town strumpet as if it was written for her. What on earth made Arlene Ferguson hatch such a name for a baby girl? A name that calls up portents of bad things to come. Evelyn shivers again, watching Augrey Ferguson bat away the probing hands of three or four boys.

Evelyn gives the crowd another once-over to see how Freeman's speech is playing. Most of the blacks have left by now, knowing the
Judge is not talking to them—but not old Nimrod. Poor cuss thinks this Memorial Day ceremony includes him. Nimrod served in the Great War, one of the colored units. Came back a good many years later. Nobody was ever sure where he stayed in the interim. Evelyn Slidell can still remember Nimrod's mother, who stomped on her thick brown legs into Evelyn's mother's kitchen almost every dawning day of her life. Evelyn and Nimrod chased each other around the orchard when they were small, until they both got old enough that her parents made her stop. Maybe she will get Martha to drive her out there to see him one of these days. Better do it soon, she thinks, before both of us croak! And she chuckles so loud Martha looks at her with concern. Evelyn realizes she has laughed at an inappropriate time. Freeman Hume is rattling on about mourning and the call to liberty.

Evelyn had considered herself Nimrod's friend, and wonders whether he did, or does, the same. She cannot remember when they last spoke.

At the back of the crowd, Levon Ferguson and a couple of his hoodlum friends sneak off toward the distillery. Pretty soon they will have no doubt sawed the lock off Warehouse D, farthest from the road, and will have tapped a barrel and stolen as much bourbon as they can carry down to the river.

—
I remember the heartbreak of leaving my wife and my young niece, Katherine
—
you all know Katherine Juell, her husband, her pretty little daughter, and their boy Willis Junior, whom the Lord has seen fit to return to us, praise be. Ah, I remember the joy of homecoming after a long deployment. And I remember the men lost
.

And blah-de-blah-blah, Freeman, you pompous ass. Evelyn Slidell observes the proceedings from the edge of the stage. The Judge checks her immobile expression now and again to see if his words are meeting with her approval. Evelyn dabs at her face with the hanky she keeps in her pocketbook.
You remember exactly nothing!
she wishes she could
scream—how her throat burns with indignation. Hume sat out the First World War in law school, running panty raids on Radcliff girls.

Also on stage are the parents of the other boys. Rafe's seat on the other side of Martha is empty. The Kidwells and Farbers and Mitchells are there. The widow Welch. And Happy Spalding, whose wife ran off, leaving him with small children and a restaurant to run. Even the Gordons are there, though they moved away recently, him lured by one of the Tennessee distillers, Jack Daniels, she thinks it was. Evelyn's late husband Lewis had groomed Charles Gordon Senior for a good position at his own distillery here in town. Evelyn can't say why, but she is glad Charles Junior's body will rest here rather than in Tennessee, so far from home.

—
The men we buried this past week took no part in the burning of draft cards. They did not flee the borders of this great country to avoid serving. They did not hold with celebrities protesting injustices done to the enemy. They saw their duty to God and country
.

Evelyn stops listening. There's poor, obese Arlene Ferguson, mother to Levon and that bunch. Arlene and her sister Bett prop each other up like two Pisas slammed together at the top. Maria Louise Goins has followed Byard Ferguson to stand with them. Evelyn glances at Martha to see if she also notices that MaLou's hand is twined in the hand of the pony-tailed young man. Wouldn't it be nice if the girl stayed with Martha and Rafe for a while? Maybe she can fill Donnie's empty room. Find work here.

They are a handsome couple, Evelyn thinks, and there is a stirring in her, of something perhaps tired, but not moribund, as she watches the way MaLou Goins looks at Byard Ferguson.

—
As we mourn our war dead, this sadness is eclipsed by the joy of welcoming back into the fold one of our own who has suffered the loss, not of life but of limb. We stop to give
thanks to our Maker, not only for the glory and luck of being born Americans, but to stand before these mothers and fathers who have contributed to something they considered priceless
—
the defense of our country
.

The Judge gestures broadly behind him toward Lemuel and Lila O'Brien and tries to catch Harlan's eye. Weak applause peters out. Nobody is sure whether clapping over the dead, not to mention Harlan O'Brien's artificial leg, is appropriate.

Evelyn spots the Asian woman Jimmy Smith brought home with him. For three years now, Cementville has had its very own war bride. Giang Smith is staring into the Judge's face. What she is thinking is anybody's guess. She might swallow everything he's saying. She might see a fool.

—
Lieutenant O'Brien comes home to us today as a man who can be counted on to be true to his word. He has proven himself so in the two years he spent in a Communist prison. America deserves men and women of honor and character, who do not have to make excuses for their past or current actions, who have earned the name “hero.”

He sits like a starved saint at the far end of the stage. That O'Brien boy, or man, really—what—twenty-nine, thirty now. Confetti from the parade still litters the shoulders of his uniform like colored flakes of snow. Lemuel and Lila O'Brien look like they don't know whether to weep with joy or run for their lives. They are eyeing their son as if they are not convinced he isn't an imposter.

—
We must have the courage to live as a nation under God, as our founders did when they forged our country nearly two centuries ago. And so let resound the rallying cry: Long live God's great democracy, the United States of America!

T
HE CROWD PARTS DOWN THE
middle, Red Sea-style, to let pass the families of the fallen, trying but unable to keep their heads down, compelled to stare into the wretched faces as if hoping for inoculation against sorrow. Evelyn will be the last to leave the stage, and while she waits her eyes trace the horizon, the cleft where her ancestors, and the forebears of most of the people here at this scroungy park, scrambled across the Appalachians and into this valley. The history of this place, and the name into which she married, is like the weight of a great ugly bauble hung about her neck.

He was a Baltimore man, that first Slidell, and the people milling about below Evelyn now are the direct descendants of the men and women William Slidell dragged here with him, a retinue of masons, craftsmen, and servants. (Not slaves, Evelyn's late husband would have noted, but freedmen of color, decorated with new liberty on the eve of the journey, a source or a product of the pomposity against which William Slidell is said to have struggled.) Also a wife, three daughters, and a son, and two thousand in silver. The state's first governor had signed over to William Slidell the better part of this stretch of river basin, one of many deep cradles hanging in the ragged breaches of the Mississippian seabed. This entourage formed the front flank of the Catholic exodus out of Maryland, descendants of Jacobites who had fled England. The land was beautiful, if a bit hillier than the newcomers might have wished. Dense with woods and full of game. Rocky too, being a quilt of deposits from the ages, riddled with shale and limestone, petrified mussels, corals, and trilobites, the fossilized remains of sea creatures. Every square foot of alluvial bottomland they freed of stone yielded not just good farmland but the building blocks for walls to separate cows from crops, kitchen garden from a sheep or goat's unceasing appetite. Those walls still stand, most of them, lining the roads that have not changed routes in two centuries.

“Won't you let me buy you all lunch?” Evelyn says as the four of them make their slow way through the crowd to Martha Goins's car. Martha nods, wiping her nose. Maria Louise and her companion
are silent. “Say, did you see that child down front flirting with those boys? If I were her mother—” Evelyn stops short, remembering that Byard is a child of that same mother. No doubt the others in the car are now busily imagining how someone of her standing and age and wisdom would handle such carnality in her own child. None of them offers a rejoinder. Evelyn swivels around toward the two in the backseat, ready to offer an apology. She is startled to find Byard Ferguson glaring at her.

“Happy's or Hungarian Gardens?” Martha says. Evelyn has not yet heard an opinion on this new place. That Cementville would have a Hungarian restaurant of all things—this world has not ceased to surprise her. Her vote is for the devil she knows.

MaLou blurts suddenly from the backseat, “I have to say I think it's terrible how there was not a single mention of Daniel.”

“Daniel?” Martha says sweetly.

“Byard's brother Daniel died last week in Vietnam too. He was on night patrol in a whole other part of that shitty place. Where do they get off not even reading his name in the roll call? How do you think Arlene felt, came out today expecting the support of her community, and all the other parents there on the stage—sorry, Aunt Martha—and Arlene has nobody but her sister there by her side? The fucking government drafted him—didn't even give him a choice! God, how I hate this place!”

Martha keeps her eyes on the road. The girl cannot stop herself.

“They haven't even buried him yet,” she wails. “Duvall said his funeral home was all booked up.”

The boy folds the girl into his arms and she is sobbing into his clean white shirt—or Rafe's shirt, more likely, Evelyn thinks; it swallows this lanky young man.