Ferris Beach (5 page)

I kept a small transistor under my pillow and listened to a station in Fort Wayne, Indiana; it was as far as I could get from home without static, and I tried to imagine the invisible lines connecting me, millions of threads stretched over rooftops, crisscrossed with television antennae that rotated when the station was turned. Fort Wayne, Indiana, was far far away but Petula Clark sounded just the same.

By the time I was nine, it was getting harder and harder to recall Angela’s face. Sometimes when we sat on that faded quilt, the waves crashing as she took my hand, it was right, the real face, but other times it was Miss Kitty from “Gunsmoke,” or Anne Bancroft; sometimes it was Ann-Margret, who Misty and I had recently seen in an Elvis movie, because her hair was the right color, but more and more often it was Mo Rhodes. I loved to think of her, the way she breezed into Misty’s room when I spent the night and in one swift moment tucked the covers around us and then stretched out at our feet to tell a story, sometimes real, sometimes made up, sometimes funny and sometimes sad. “Good night, Moon,” she would whisper, and tiptoe from the room, her long purple kimono trailing behind her.

Our house was built in the 1800s by a man named Luke Wilkins who had four sons. All four died in the Civil War and were buried in their small private churchyard, which was the beginning of what was later named Whispering Pines Cemetery. I could see the gates and some of the more recent tombstones from my bedroom window,
recent
being the turn of the century. There were no vacancies in Whispering Pines, though my father had once drawn up an elaborate plan of how he could skim a measley two yards off our side yard and sell something like twenty new plots. “Of course, the folks would have to be willing to stretch out north-south,” he had said, still fiddling with a small metal ruler. “None of this facing the sunrise. Of course, if they’re some real short people ...” My mother said that she better
never
hear of this idea again, that he had had plenty of bad ones but this was the worst. It was when he
was into composing limerick obituaries for people he didn’t care for, so I never knew if his cemetery-expansion idea was serious or something crafted to irk my mother.

We had walked through the cemetery many times, my mother curious about dates and names, my father just curious, always making up stories of these long-ago dead people, how they died, whether or not they were murdered or committed suicide.
Really,
my mother was forever uttering, shaking her head in disgust, refusing to look up when he asked her to look at him and say that she did not find the possibility intriguing, refusing to discuss his ideas about what
they
should have written on
their
tombstones. The two times that we had gone to Boston to visit my mother’s brother, we had spent most of the trip in cemeteries, looking for Hawthorne and the Alcotts and Mother Goose and Ben Franklin’s parents, on and on, my mother marveling at those frightening skull and crossbones that were so popular in the 1700s. “How come you like everybody’s tombstone but mine?” my father asked. “If Paul Revere had written a limerick, you’d think it was wonderful, poetic, inspirational. Admit it,” he continued. “You have something against Southern tombstones.”

The Wilkins family plot was the farthest from our house, a thick wooded area that in the summer was completely hidden from view. There was a short iron fence surrounding the graves, which were completely overgrown with tall grass and weeds; the markers were worn smooth, the name of the wife of the oldest son illegible. Not far from there was an old caretaker’s cottage, a small closet-size building where at one time gardening tools had been kept. The yellow dirt paths were overgrown and went in crazy circular patterns, in and around the tombstones and markers. Misty and I had spent many afternoons scaring ourselves, seeing who would go the farthest, who would go closest to the caretaker’s house, closest to the Wilkins plot. Our hearts pounded as we screamed with the rustle of a squirrel or a bird
and pushed and shoved each other to get back to the clearing near the tall iron gates where we could see my house.

The opposite corner of the cemetery backed up to a dead end where teenagers met and parked on weekend nights. Sometimes when my window was open, I could hear their loud radios and gunning engines. Misty always wanted to sneak out and spy on them, and we spent a lot of time concocting elaborate plans that we never had the nerve to carry out. It was much easier in the sunlight as we sat on a limb of the large oak tree and imagined what these teenagers
did
out there.

“I’ll show you,” Misty had said one afternoon, when white winter light made everything look sharp and clear, a perfect focus. And she had jumped from a lower limb, kicked through the leaves until she found a long twig. She went over near the road where there were lots of balled-up paper bags and crunched-up beer cans, and I watched, swinging my legs, breathing in the cold air and smell of woodsmoke. She squatted down, the twig held out in front of her as if she were fishing, and in a few minutes held the stick out for me to see what looked like filmy plastic on the end. “Yep. Just as I thought,” she said and strolled toward me, waving the stick.

“What is it?” I asked, refusing to climb down from my perch as she motioned.

“What is it?” She threw back her head and laughed. “What does it look like?” She waited for me to answer, but when I shrugged she grinned and stepped closer.
“This”
she said, holding the stick up towards me,
“this
is a
rubber”
I watched as she ran back to the street, the stick in her hand, as she kicked her feet through the weeds and trash. “Here’s another one!” she yelled, and raced forward as if on some kind of wild scavenger hunt. “Man, oh man,” she laughed. “And we were wondering what they
did
over here!” I could not help but think of the souped-up red GTOI had seen race around that corner so many times, a girl
with long blond hair we had seen twirling a baton with the high school band now holding her hand out the passenger window, a cigarette between her fingers; I imagined a beer can held between those denim thighs and then the driver’s hand reaching across the seat, his fingers crabbing towards her, imagined them kissing like what we’d seen when Mo Rhodes let us watch “Peyton Place” one Friday night. “Another one. Man, oh man. Let’s see who can count the most.”

The cemetery looked like a different place those afternoons as we ran up and down the paths, spoke to graves by name.

Sometimes it scared me to look out at night and see those tall iron gates, ivy covering the brick pillars on either side, and other times it was a comfort, this resting place for the Wilkins family. Sometimes I tried to picture faces to go with the names I had read there in the cemetery: Luke, Jr., Mark, John, and the youngest, Matthew, who was only sixteen when he died. I always wondered why they didn’t name those boys in New Testament order.

I imagined the Wilkinses to look just like all the characters in
Shenandoah,
which Misty and I had watched three times in a row one Saturday at the Cape Fear theater, and sometimes as I lay in bed, I imagined where they all had slept. Mr. Wilkins, who looked just like Jimmy Stewart, slept down in my parents’ room; the youngest boy slept in my room with his brother, John, the older two boys across the hall in the guest room until they took wives and built small houses of their own within sight of the main house. I imagined that the pastel houses just past the field at the edge of our lot were where Luke junior built. I had a clear sharp view of those houses from our sleeping porch, and in the summers I liked to sneak out there and sit on the narrow cot, my knees pulled up under a cotton nightgown.

Merle Hucks and his mean brother, both of whom had pale
skin and thin light hair like their mama, lived in the light blue house with the tar-paper roof. Their daddy was as dark and hairy as the mama was pale and washed-out. A baby girl was usually holding onto the mama’s housecoat when she passed by the window of what must have been the kitchen, the room lit by a bare bulb swinging on a chain. Occasionally I’d see Merle come into the room and pass in front of the window like a flash of white. I never would have told anyone, not even Misty, that I sometimes watched the house. There was something wrong about my watching, and yet it was like I couldn’t help myself.

“That is ridiculous,” Mama said when I asked if their house had always been there. “Those old houses were thrown up right after the Depression; I’d be surprised if their walls are made of anything stronger than cardboard.” She said that the Huckses’ house and the others along that back stretch of land were an eyesore and she wished they’d move elsewhere. She complained often about Mr. Hucks, how he never cleaned his yard, how tools from when he worked at the old ice plant close by were strewn about like straw. Mr. Hucks was known to everyone in town as “Beef,” a nickname he had earned in high school when he was the star athlete. “There’s not enough kudzu to cover it,” she said, and then went on and on about the rudeness, the horrible nature of Mr. Beef Hucks, hesitating in order to give herself ample time for proper enunciation of the name. She and Mrs. Poole often talked about all the families who lived back there and how ours was the last “nice” street before the town
fell

I was told from the time I could crawl that I was
never
to play back there, never to go beyond the thick hedge which marked our property. “There are snakes near that overgrowth,” I was told, which was true, proof being the skins Merle Hucks once brought to second grade, grainy black snakeskin which he wore tied around his neck. Nobody, not even the teacher, said a word about it. When he saw me looking at him, he just grinned, one front tooth missing, and then licked dry Kool-Aid from his dirty
palm. And when he was called on to read aloud, his face went red and his voice shook and sputtered on every single word, while the teacher stood there with her own mouth open as if she could draw the words from his mouth. If it had been anyone else in the class, people would’ve laughed, but even as second graders we had all heard of the Huckses; we had all heard about Merle’s oldest brother, who was doing time in Raleigh for something so bad it was only whispered among adults, and we had all heard of his brother Dexter, who was two years ahead of us and always in the principal’s office. The little sister, Maybelline, was born that December during second grade. “Say something about it,” Merle had said as he held a little crumpled-up snapshot out to the class. “This is why I didn’t come to school last week.”

Merle was still using the old first-grade book, and when he finally got to the end of the line “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run,” he closed his book and put his head on his desk. When the teacher questioned him he looked straight ahead, his chin shaking but his words as solid and sturdy as a rock. “Who gives a goddamn? If a dog’s got legs it’ll run.” Then he pulled out his pack of cherry Kool-Aid, the same way he would in a few years pull out a pack of Marlboros, and poured the powder into his open palm.

“I once saw a dog without any legs.” He grinned at me again when he saw me watching but I turned away from him before he could make the deep, gutteral cat sound that he made whenever he saw me. “My big brother, Dexter, he made the dog that way.” Some boys in the back of the room laughed nervously, and the teacher ignored him as she usually did. She called on me to read, and I picked right back up where I had left off in an advanced reader. I could feel him watching me; I could almost hear his tongue licking the grainy bits of cherry Kool-Aid, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before he strained his thin neck out and screamed like an alley cat. I had made the foolish mistake one day of telling the teacher that I had a nickname, that at home my father sometimes called me Kitty or Kitten instead of Katie.
“Meeerrrrrrooooowwwww,” he called out and grinned. It was the one sound he could make clear as a bell without stammer or hesitation.

“That old crackerbox house of Beef,” my mother paused for pronunciation time, “of the Huckses, well, there was no such blemish on the land during the plantation days of this house. This house was a marvel, the finest in this whole coastal region.” She had stared off in the same way I imagined she must have done before I was born, when she taught school, her voice carrying up and down rows of desks. “This house was to this area what Beacon Hill is to Boston, Georgetown to Washington, Charleston to the whole state of South Carolina....” She paused, probably expecting my father to call out
Snob
from some other room in the house, but he was teaching that day.

“The house then was nothing like it is now,” she continued. “It was gutted by fire during the war. Only the structure remained, and that was just a small part of what’s here, now. Your bedroom and the kitchen below it were all added on in the 1920s by a man named McCarthy.” The McCarthys were also buried in Whispering Pines, but I never really fashioned a place for them in our house; I just clung to the Wilkins family, especially to Matthew, dead so young, too young to have lived really.

Misty’s mama once told us that there was nothing so tragic as someone struck down in his prime. Long before people had begun asking, “Where were you on November 22, 1963?,” Mo Rhodes had been doing it, keeping up with those who had died. She wasn’t talking about Kennedy that day, but Buddy Holly, his record playing in the background while she layered marshmal-lows and Hershey bars and then let us sit in front of the oven waiting for s’mores as if it were an open campfire. It was pouring down rain that day, and she kept going over and looking out the window, glancing at the clock, then back to the window.

“I want to run out and get the newspaper before it gets
sopped,” she said, and smiled at us, her face bright and clear. Her toenails shone pale pink as she stood there barefooted on the old green linoleum. She was the youngest mother I had ever known and the only one who ever would have let us eat all the s’mores we wanted. She leaned against the counter and waved, both hands over her head, to a car that passed on the street, a blue Galaxy 500 like a police car, a huge fan of water arcing into the yard, and then she watched until the car turned the corner and disappeared; it seemed she forgot about the paper and instead ate a s’more and started her record over with the song “Raining in My Heart” and then “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.”