Fat Lightning (15 page)

Nancy treasures the few moments each day when she can write undisturbed, and she feels guilty over her annoyance when Wade's first incoherent words tell her he'll be crying for her in a few minutes, or when a knock on the door announces some neighbor who has come to visit.

She's only been writing for half an hour when she hears the front doorbell. She curses under her breath softly and hopes Wade won't wake up. Carter is standing there, holding a grocery bag full of tomatoes. He acts embarrassed to be intruding even on his son's family. Nancy likes her father-in-law and tries to make him feel welcome whenever he visits.

“Last ones we'll get this year,” he says, handing her the bag. “We've got more than we know what to do with. Thought you all might want some.”

Nancy has been secretly throwing out vegetables all summer. Carter and Marie share the bounty of their half-acre garden, and Sam and Nancy's neighbors will often leave bags of peas or okra or sometimes a watermelon on the porch. The fact that Sam and Nancy don't have a garden themselves and thus can't reciprocate only makes everyone more eager to share. Sam has suggested more than once that Nancy learn how to can vegetables so they don't spoil before they can be eaten. As with the suggestion that she work at the drugstore, Nancy puts him off with vague promises. She can't imagine spending the time she sees Sam's mother spend on preserving food as long as there are grocery stores.

Nancy invites Carter in. She doesn't tell him that Sam's out, because if she does, he'll probably mumble something about having to get back home, and, despite the loss of free time, she enjoys Carter's visits.

She goes into the kitchen to get them a couple of Cokes, spilling the sticky liquid down the sides of their glasses as she tries to fill them too quickly around the ice cubes inside.

Carter leans against the kitchen door sill, watching her.

“Don't have to use all that ice for me,” he says, as if there's a shortage.

He sits at the kitchen table, looking incongruous in the knit shirt and baggy pants that they bought for him at Christmas. In spite of his college degree and penchant for Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, Nancy always thinks of Carter as a farmer who somehow got sidetracked into pharmacy. His hands are hardened as a brick-layer's from spending much of his “free” time in the yard and garden. He has a tan that stops at the nape of his neck.

“How are Lot and Sebara doing?” she asks him. He gives her a curious look and then shakes his head.

“Lot's a sick man, has been a long time,” Carter says, sighing. “I don't know what's going to come of all this.” He's been out to Old Monacan again, a week after Sebara first appeared, and it seems to him that the chance to give money has actually increased the size of the crowds at Lot's barn. He's seen people putting multiple bills into Sebara's whiskey barrel, and he's seen the Basset boy, who Sheriff Burden says is probably messed up in drugs, standing back from the crowd like a dog waiting for scraps.

It doesn't bother Carter, or at least it doesn't bother him as much as it does the girls and Marie, that Lot appears to be living with a black woman, in their parents' old house. Carter or anyone can see that it's the big house and not the trailer that is being used for human habitation now, and Sebara Tatum's Lincoln seems to be a permanent fixture. They use Lot's truck when they go for groceries or supplies.

What does worry him is Lot himself. When Lot gets excited about something, and it doesn't work out, he has the worst of his “spells.” Carter would like to tell Sebara Tatum or even the Basset boy this, but he doesn't know how.

“Has Lot always been like he is now?” Nancy asks Carter, who isn't used to being asked such questions. In the family, Lot is like the thunderstorms that can come eight afternoons in a row, then not be seen for a month. Lot is a force of nature. With outsiders, Carter doesn't usually talk about his older brother.

“Momma said he was colicky when he was little,” he says after a long silence. “I remember that she would cook special things for him because he couldn't—or wouldn't—eat what everybody else was eating. He'd wash his hands like he was a doctor fixing to operate, and he couldn't bear to have any of his food mixed together. He'd pile up little servings of peas and corn and put a piece of ham or chicken ‘way on the other side of the plate, and better not any of the juice from the corn touch the peas or the chicken. I reckon Momma spoiled him too much.”

“That's funny,” Nancy says. “With him being the oldest and all,” but Carter tells her that Warren, the one who died in the war, was a year older.

“Holly was the baby,” he says, taking off his bifocals and wiping them on the front of his knit shirt. “She was spoiled too. Everybody took to her. Momma spoiled Lot, but everybody spoiled Holly. She had curly yellow hair and she always seemed like she was happy. Even Lot was nice around her. He didn't make her tempt the devil like he did the rest of us. Lot was full of meanness.”

He sees Nancy's puzzlement and explains about the other sawdust pile, the one that finally burned when he was a boy, and about the game they all played.

“Warren made it up,” he says, “but Warren didn't ever make any of the girls run over it like Lot did.”

He goes quiet, thinking about the first time his older brother made him scale the big orange hill of smoke. The burning cinders made his eyes water, and Lot slapped him roughly with his open hand across the back of his head, telling him not to be a baby, telling him that he'd beat him good if he didn't start running across the hill and beat him worse if he told their father.

Carter remembers but doesn't tell about the uproar and the shame when Holly had to go live with the Bondurants when she was only 10 years old, how she didn't come back home for good until she was 16 and then just for her last year of high school, how she had turned into a nail-biter, a jumper at sudden sounds, a crier.

He remembers but doesn't tell about the day the men in uniforms came to get Lot for the Army, how nobody would tell where Lot was, claiming he was working in North Carolina. How the sergeant took him off to one side, him 15 years old, and told him he'd be drafted some day soon and they'd remember who he was if he didn't tell them where his brother was hiding.

How the sergeant looked at him real close and said, You the one that sent the note, ain't you, boy? You don't have to say nothing, son, just nod your head. And how, when the sergeant, his breath close enough to smell breakfast, asked, Is he hiding back there in the woods? Carter nodded so slightly that he wasn't sure the sergeant saw him.

They brought Lot out less than an hour later, in handcuffs, and took him off. Lot seemed to look right at him, Carter remembers, on the way to the car, like they told him who it was that turned him in. But by the time Lot got out of the Army, Carter was gone from home, working in Richmond and saving for college, and nobody, not even his mother, seemed to think that Carter Chastain had turned his own brother in to the draft board.

It comes back to Carter in a rush that he had prayed for his brother not to return from the war. It comes back to him how, when Warren, the good one, was killed instead, it seemed like God was showing him what could and could not be prayed for. They caught Carter trying to enlist when he was 16, down at courthouse square where everybody knew how old everybody else's children were. All the men thought young Carter was a pistol, full of piss and vinegar, for wanting to go off and kill Huns when he wasn't even through high school. But all Carter wanted to do was be punished. After the war he was too young to fight in, after he'd gone to pharmacy school and come back to live in Monacan, he tried to look after Lot because he had wished and prayed him dead.

All of this, all that business with Holly and Lot and the day they took Lot away, but not for good, these are not for talking about, Carter knows, not even with your daughter-in-law.

“Lot's just full of meanness,” he says as he finishes his Coke and rises from the kitchen chair. “Stay away from him if you can.”

NOW

CHAPTER NINETEEN

One morning in late May, when a spring shower has chased the other ragged park regulars inside, where they must pretend to read and not fall asleep, Nancy finds Sebara hovering by the back door, pressed into a corner away from the rain. She still has on Nancy's old red dress. She looks as if she's losing weight.

Nancy coaxes her inside and leads her to an empty table at the back of the reference section. Sebara sets her bag on the middle of the table, and Nancy sits across from her, but not far enough away not to almost gag from the smell.

“Sebara,” Nancy asks the other woman when it looks as if she's about to nod off, “what happened? At Lot's, I mean. I never did know all of it.”

Sebara is silent for half a minute, and Nancy thinks that she's too far gone to even remember that far back. Then the old woman starts to chuckle to herself.

“Don't reckon it matters who knows now,” she says, not bothering to hold her hand over her mouth while she hacks and wheezes.

“You see,” she says, when she catches her breath, “I had me this plan. I always wanted to live in Florida …”

Sebara tells Nancy her story, filling in all the blanks that Nancy couldn't figure out for herself from what she'd seen that night, what the Chastains knew and what the newspaper reported. She tells Nancy about changing her name and about how she never spoke to another soul from Virginia until she came back, “broke as a convict,” three years ago.

“I had it made in the shade there,” she tells Nancy. “Had money in the bank, had a maid come in once a week and clean. Wasn't but two miles from the ocean. Went there every day.

“But I got lonesome there, lonesome for preaching, lonesome for folks clapping their hands and shouting. So I went to Belle Glade, because a man told me they was bad to have revivals in Belle Glade.

“And he was right. They just eat Jesus up in that town. One night I took in $20,000. $20,000! They had me on television, and I was scared somebody'd see me up here.

“But Belle Glade won't on no ocean; it was in the swamp. Lord, it was hot there! And then I got to doing that cocaine.” Sebara shakes her head. “Then I don't know where all that money went to. I finally got a job right on the ocean,” she goes on, with a bitter smile. “I was a maid, working for some rich folks in Palm Beach. But they said I stole. You know something? They was right.” She laughs out loud, and a man in a suit two tables away looks up, annoyed.

Sebara's laugh turns into a coughing fit. Finally, she goes on with her story.

“I had to leave Florida,” she says, “and I was damn happy to. But I been in jail in Macon, Georgia, and Bennettsville, South Carolina, and I don't know where all else.

“You know what's the blessed truth, though? When I was preachin' up here, it wasn't nothing but a way to put food on the table. Folks is always happy to give their money to a preacher, seems like.

“Now, though, I done used all that up, and it seems like maybe they is something there. Like I could of done something big, bigger than enough money to take me to Florida. Sometimes I dreams about that barn, and Jesus on it. But you know what's funny? I never for sure could see Him on there. I mean, I'd see the shadows and the scratches in the wood and how they come together, but I never did believe any of that stuff.”

Sebara scratches herself and picks at her nose.

“Now, though,” she says, “I think there was something up there, and Jesus put a curse on me. I been cursed for 20 years.”

Nancy tries to give Sebara five dollars for telling her the story, but Sebara pushes it back.

“I promised Jesus,” she says, holding her head up and looking dead on at Nancy for the first time with the red-and-yellow eyes, “that I wouldn't never take no more money from nobody, till He calls me to be with Him. I eats at the shelter, sleeps there when I can. I gets food from strangers sometimes, 'cause I don't think even Jesus would 'grudge me that. But I can't take no more money, or I'll go to hell sure as I'm sitting here. It was money that brought me down. If I hadn't had all that money, I couldn't of bought that cocaine.”

Nancy notices that Sebara never even asks about what happened to Billy Basset and Lot after she left. Maybe, she thinks, Sebara read about it in a Florida newspaper.

A month later, the day after Nancy finishes the novel that doesn't come home, she is five minutes late for work because of an accident in front of the parking deck.

When she comes in, she tells Doris Ann Potts, the fat woman who works with her in reference, why she's late.

Doris Ann doesn't look up, just says, “Oh, the ambulance must have been for the old woman, the one that stays in the park. Walked right in front of a bus, I heard. Good riddance. She was nasty.”

1971

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sebara gets up at night sometimes and walks. She thinks I'm asleep, but I don't sleep easy. Never have. I go to sleep, I start having one of them dreams, one of the bad ones, and then I wake up and just lie there. Must make a fuss when I have 'em, because when I woke up the other night, Sebara was stroking my forehead and telling me it was all right.

I seen her out the window up here. She'll walk down to her car and then go off into the woods, down towards the river. Don't have no flashlight or nothing. She'll be gone an hour sometimes, then come slip back in beside me. I started to ask her where she'd been last night, but then she got all lovey-dovey with me and it made me forget all about it. Reckon everybody's got to be by theirself once in a while.

They're after us now. Fire chief come by Wednesday, said he was going to shut us down on account of the sawdust pile. I told him won't none of his business, and he said it was because of all the people coming out here to see Jesus. Like they might catch fire or something. I told him he better keep away from here.