Chaneysville Incident (20 page)

I sat there for a minute or two, not doing anything, just sitting and looking out the kitchen window at the plot of dead earth that had been Bill’s garden. Originally, it had been Moses Washington’s private truck farm. At unspecified hours he would descend from the attic and go out there and tend the vegetables, and a lot of the time Bill and I would be pressed into service to stand around holding his hoe or his rake, or to pick rocks out of the soil, or to weed around the plants. Whatever it was, we had never done it quite right, and he had not been averse to telling us about it in no uncertain terms. The worst part of it had been that there was never any end in sight; the ordeal ended when Moses Washington grew tired, and he was tireless. So we had hated the garden, hated the vegetables that came from it. And the year after his death, as spring approached, I had found myself looking forward to a summer free of it. But Bill had not.

As soon as the snow had melted he began to prepare the ground, hauling manure in Moses Washington’s old wheelbarrow, hoeing with his hoes, raking with his rakes. He begged or borrowed or stole his seed from God knows where. He planted and tended with a devotion that verged on obsession; he was nine years old and driven. Daniel and Francis laughed at him and called him “the farmer.” The WH&FMS ladies had clucked their heads sadly and prayed for him, sharing the opinion, voiced by Aunt Lydia Pettigrew—who, despite being childless, understood children—that what he was doing was showing how much he missed his daddy. Even Old Jack, who had paid a call on the plot one afternoon when my mother was not around, and who had inspected the plants closely (which was something nobody else had bothered to do), had a reaction; he grinned. And wouldn’t say why. And he was probably the only person who was not surprised when the plants matured into chrysanthemums and marigolds and violets; Bill had converted Moses Washington’s truck farm into a flower garden. It was his kind of revenge, and he had exacted it in full every Saturday, by taking a bouquet of whatever happened to be blooming across the Hill to the cemetery and laying it on Moses Washington’s grave.

I looked at the garden and wondered what he had thought when he did that, week after week, year after year, and, not for the first time, wondered if perhaps I was not wrong about his motives; if perhaps he really meant it as a tribute. But I couldn’t afford to believe that he had been that good—I hated them enough already.

After a while I got up and went to the stove and poured the rest of the coffee into my cup. I had meant to sip it, but I found myself gulping it down, hot, black; felt it scalding down my gullet and slamming into my belly and turning my stomach sour. I turned the stove off then, and put the cup in the sink. I realized I was tired. But I was not ready to risk sleeping, or even to go upstairs in that house. Not yet. And so I went into the dining room.

Nobody knows where Moses Washington got the design for his house, although according to one apocryphal tale, Miss Winifred Brainard, the old-maid librarian, had looked up one day from the book she was checking for obscene language to find him standing over her waving a library card and demanding to see back numbers of
House Beautiful
, whereupon she had fainted dead away. The story might have been true, but it was also true that Moses Washington got his design from no such magazine. Most likely he got it out of his head. The lower floor was a claustrophobe’s dream: there were no less than seven exits. There was rampant duplication: two entrances to every room, making it possible to make a complete tour of either floor without backtracking; two fully equipped bathrooms, the first and second built on the Hill (also the last and next to last); two staircases, front and back—a schizophrenic could have lived in the place without ever having to face his alter ego. A paranoid would have found it equally comfortable, for although there were no hallways, and each room opened directly into the next, none of the doorways was in line with any of the others, and since none of the rooms was a simple rectangle, but rather a combination of rectangular shapes, there were nooks and crannies all over the place which you had to actually enter to see into.

Those who saw it interpreted it—if they got beyond simply thinking it was all very weird—as an egomaniacal expression by a sick personality. It was far from that. Moses Washington, for some reason known only to himself, after nearly forty years of telling society to go to hell, had decided to come down from the mountains and live in society; something had to contain him, to make it possible for other people to live with him, and for him to live with them. So he had built a house with lots of exits and plenty of places to hide, and he had reserved, for his own use, a place that had to be entered by a folding staircase that he could pull up after him. That he had surely needed. Because in the lower portion of the house he made the ultimate concession to society and to his wife: he had built a parlor and a dining room so that people from outside could be entertained.

They rarely had been. For while Moses Washington had made concessions for the comfort of guests, he had never gone out of his way to invite any, or to make those who were invited by his wife particularly welcome. And so during his lifetime the parlor knew no abundance of visitors, most potential callers having been discouraged by the story of how he, neatly dressed in pinstripe and tie, had joined his bride’s first—and only—tea party, taking a seat in the fragile-looking Queen Anne chair that had been the pride of his wife’s mother, his bulk threatening to turn it into kindling at any second, and sipping tea from one of his wife’s frail china cups, the delicate arch of his pinkie seeming obscene. He had joined in the conversation—had taken it over, rather, since everybody else had ceased speaking as soon as he had come through the door—asking, in a polite, gentle, and totally inoffensive voice, the preacher’s opinion of certain Christian assumptions concerning the afterlife. It had been obvious to all present—except the preacher—that the questions were stupid, offensive, and obscene, all the more so for coming out of the mouth of such a well-known heretic; as usual, Moses Washington was making fun, and those present had taken rapid and outraged leave, as angry over the fact that Moses Washington had not actually done anything as over what he
had
done. Finally, the only persons left in the parlor had been Moses Washington and the preacher—who had seemed curiously insensitive to his personal and professional humiliation—who now had their jackets off and their ties loosened and were engaged in spirited debate, the hostess having retired to an upstairs bedroom to cry her eyes out in frustration. The experience had totally befuddled the preacher, everybody agreed; nobody blamed him when, afterwards, he was heard to say that Moses Washington was, in terms of theological understanding, far more advanced than most of his parishioners. But at the next annual conference, they had had him moved.

Nobody much came visiting after that. In fact, the only times I could recall the parlor being used was during the infrequent visits of whatever minister the Central Jurisdiction of the Methodist Episcopal Church had seen fit to punish with an assignment to the Hill, and on the first Wednesday of every August, when the annual rotation made it my mother’s turn to host the monthly meeting of the Women’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society—obviously, nobody felt comfortable visiting in Moses Washington’s house unless he was under the auspices of God Almighty. The preachers, at that, had always been a little frightened. The WH&FMS ladies, on the other hand, had been fearless, the courage no doubt born of their personal bulk and relatively formidable numbers. Moses Washington probably could have taken them, but it would have been a costly victory, and on the occasions of the meetings he had stayed not only away from the parlor but away from the house—from that side of the Hill, in fact.

But even the WH&FMS ladies did not go into the dining room, not even after Moses Washington was dead; when my mother served food to them, or to other guests, she served it in the parlor, buffet style. Nobody, not even family members, had ever eaten a meal in Moses Washington’s dining room.

Which is not to say it went unused. No space that fell inside my mother’s orbit ever went unused, or, at least, unfilled. She regarded such space as territory ripe for conquest, and she proceeded to take it in the same way she conquered the minds of those who opposed her; she piled things in it. Anything. It didn’t matter what, just so long as it wasn’t anything big, anything anybody could reasonably object to. She would pile and pile, a little bit at a time, until one day there wasn’t any space anymore, and the original shape of anything that had been there was lost under the piles. It was an effective technique, and over the years she had managed to pretty much conquer every clear space in the house. She had failed on only one occasion; then she had been piling things on the front stairs which led from Bill’s and my bedroom down into the parlor. The assault had got pretty far advanced; Bill and I were small and able to slip through the space she left for a long time, and were motivated to do so as long as possible, to avoid Moses Washington. But eventually we had been forced to use the back stairs, and he had noticed the shift in the traffic pattern. I don’t recall him asking a single question; probably he knew her well enough to figure out what was going on. Or perhaps he had just gone to look. At any rate, we had heard the sound and had come running just in time to see an avalanche of odds and ends of cloth and sewing patterns and three years’ worth of David C. Cook Sunday School literature sliding down to drift on the parlor floor. We had peeked cautiously around the corner and seen him there, his face impassive, not a sound escaping his lips, his heavy shoes mopping up what was left of her occupying forces. And later we had seen her, just as silently, clearing the mess off the floor.

But perhaps that was not a real defeat. For while she had never again blocked a passageway in Moses Washington’s house, he had pretty much tolerated her other occupations. He had said nothing at all that I could recall about the use to which she had put the dining room, which was to turn it into a family photo gallery.

My mother had an inordinate love of photographs. For years she put them everywhere, sticking them in the edges of windows and mirrors, pasting them to walls and taping them to doors the way some people hang up flypaper. Eventually she had tired of such a haphazard arrangement, and established the dining room as the Washington Gallery, collecting in it the pictures she believed were most representative of us all. I think that was her rationale. At any rate, she had selected the pictures, after lengthy and silent deliberation, and the representation seemed significant because, in the presence of such a wealth of material, it was so Spartan.

Moses Washington himself was there only three times. The first photograph was a formal portrait, perhaps the first picture ever taken of him, which dated from the time he had returned from the war. He wore his uniform, the decorations weighing down the material. The photographer had tried to make him seem humble and benign by having him pose with his hands resting on his thighs, but the strategy had failed: the left hand was beginning to curl into a fist, and despite the sepia tint and the fading print, the eyes shone out hard and dangerous. The second photograph was a wedding picture. In it he was dressed formally, white tie and tails, and a top hat. He stood rigidly beside my mother, his arm arched uncomfortably around her. She was smiling. He was not. The same arrogant eyes stared out from beneath the brim of the top hat, which he had somehow managed to sport at an angle like a Stetson.

The third photograph was the one that had always fascinated me. In it he was standing on a hillside, his feet and lower legs concealed in wild grass, his back to a low stone wall, behind which was a stand of leafless elms. He was dressed oddly for him, in a wide-lapeled coat and white shirt and sober tie, and pants that might have been the match of the coat—it was hard to tell and still harder for me to believe that he had ever voluntarily worn a black suit. And it certainly must have been voluntary, because in the picture there was nothing of the stiff, formal discomfort that showed in the others; he looked relaxed, calm, his eyes deceptively sane. And so I had wondered where the hillside was, and when the picture had been taken, and by whom. I had never found out; it was one of my earliest researches, and like the ones that followed, it had ended in dead-end confusion. I could tell from the way the shadows fell that the hillside was facing south, but that was all I could tell; I believed the hill was local, but it could have been any place that had a similar climate and geology—certainly it was not familiar to me. The photograph had appeared shortly before his death, and the paper was of a type that was in common use in the mid-fifties, but the negative could have been made at any time before then, and Moses Washington did not appear any older or younger in that photograph than he did in any of the others. I had at first believed that the key, not only to dating the picture but to finding out more about its background, was to discover who had taken it, but nobody knew anything about that. My mother claimed not that she had not taken the picture, but that, in fact, she had not even selected it; it had been something pressed upon her by Moses Washington. Old Jack also claimed ignorance, and even Uncle Josh, who grunted his answer in monosyllables, denied any knowledge. I had concluded that Moses Washington had, for some reason, decided he wanted a picture taken of himself, and had gone out and figured a way to take it himself. Further research revealed that the idea of a black thread device, which would have made such self-portraiture possible, dated back to at least 1878. And so my research had ended, as it always did, at a stone wall.

From looking at the gallery one would have suspected that my mother was a modest woman; she had placed only two depictions of herself on display. She smiled out from a small oval portrait that showed her sitting on an angle, shoulder dipped slightly forward in the old-fashioned style. Her face was unlined, youthful, beautiful. It was a graduation picture. She smiled out from the wedding picture, teeth flashing, face framed by the white veil. She looked a bit older there, a bit harder, but still young, still beautiful. But that was the end of it; it was as if she had given up having her picture taken on the day of her wedding. Or perhaps she had just stopped smiling. But I did not need a portrait; I knew what she had looked like. In the first few years after Moses Washington had died her body had thickened and softened, her breasts and thighs seeming to swell to form a warm safe nest for Bill and me. It was hard to imagine where the plumpness had come from: she never ate breakfast, although she prepared it for us, and she always skipped lunch so that she could get off work early and be there when we got home from school. She walked everywhere then, sometimes pulling us in a big stake wagon, to the river to wade on summer Saturday afternoons, or to the green on summer evenings when the local softball teams had fought it out for the greater glory of Calhoun’s Atlantic or Deist Cleaners. But despite the skipped meals and the exercise, she got plump. I wondered about it even then, and I watched carefully to see what it was she ate, and once, only once, I saw her slipping down the back stairs in the dead of night, and I slipped down the front stairs and crept into the dining room and saw her take a quart of vanilla ice cream from the back of the freezer and sit at the table with a spoon poised, and sigh, and consume it all. Perhaps it had been the ice cream that had fattened her, although she would have had to eat it every night. Perhaps she did; perhaps it was a ritual born of sublimated sexuality, or just a simple indulgence. But whether it was the ice cream or not,
something
had plumped her, and although she had never really come to look fat, she did begin to look more like a member of the WH&FMS. But one day she had changed.