Run River (29 page)

Lily looked first at Everett, then at Knight; neither looked at her.

“Get out,” Everett said. “You want to say every trashy thing you hear, you get off this place to say it.”

“You think I want to stay on this place? You think I want one lousy acre of it?”

“Get off now.”

“It’s not what I hear, it’s what I know. Nobody says it out loud, not around here. But you know what they call her? You know how they think of her still? They call her Lily Knight, not McClellan,
Knight
. Like she was never married at all.
So I guess you didn’t count for much.”

When Julie asked that night where her brother was, Lily said that he had gone out. “He’s not coming back,” Everett said. “He’s disloyal.” Julie looked at her father and then at her mother and her large eyes filled with tears: “I don’t believe that,” she said in her steady voice. “I wouldn’t believe Knight could be disloyal.” “I wouldn’t believe you could go swimming without any clothes on, either,” Everett said flatly.

After Julie had gone to sleep Lily sat down in the dark by her bed. She wanted to hold Julie’s hand, flung out from the striped lavender and white sheets, but was afraid that she would wake her. Instead she sat with her hands in her lap listening to Julie’s even breathing, and when Julie woke and looked at her with the tears beginning in her eyes again, Lily only smoothed her hair. “Go to sleep, baby,” she said, unable to explain to Julie, any more than she could explain to herself, just where the trouble had begun. “It’s all right.”

When Knight came home two days later (“That was absurd,” Lily heard Julie telling him, “running away in your mother’s car. That’s childish”), Lily prevailed upon Everett to accept, as she had done, his inarticulate, embarrassed apology. He brought Lily a dozen white roses, but was ashamed to tell her that he had bought them (“This guy gave them to me,” he explained. “This guy I know in a florist’s shop had them left over”); he asked Everett, carefully casual, if Everett minded if he stuck around and listened when the hop broker came at four o’clock. That was the day they began to be very polite to one another, dimly aware that they had been, more than they had ever been before, vis-à-vis the complexities, the downright complicity, of family love.
(It had nothing to do with you
, she tried to explain to Ryder, talking to him about it night after night. He did not understand what she was talking about, but it was better than talking to herself.)

August 1959

25

Everett loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. Exhausted, he remembered for the first time that the gun still lay on the dock.

“Sit down,” Lily said. “Sit down, baby.”

He let her lead him to a chair. The house looked no different than it had earlier in the evening; he could not think why he had expected it to.

“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink.”

“What time is it?”

Lily looked at her wrist. She was wearing the watch he had given her the September of 1957, when she and the children came home from abroad. He had bought it the week she left and saved it until she came home in September, telling her then, embarrassed, that she could count it an anniversary present. Once he had seen it on her thin wrist, he had seen how wrong the heavy diamonds were for Lily, but in the jeweler’s that afternoon he had so wanted something which would make irrevocable his love and determination that if the jeweler could have worked the Cullinan Diamond into a wrist watch (the point of a wrist watch being that she could wear it every day) he would have borrowed on the ranches and bought it. Although he was quite sure that Lily did not like the watch, she wore it not only every day but so frequently in the shower and in the swimming pool that the parts were rusted and it seldom ran.

“One-thirty,” she said. “One-twenty-five.”

He looked at her. “The children,” he said finally.

“They’ll be a while. We have time.”

She poured some bourbon into two glasses and handed him one.

“I meant to,” he said. “I came here and got the gun. If I hadn’t meant to I wouldn’t have come here and gotten the gun. Would I.”

“I don’t know. That’s not the point.”

He said nothing.

“Listen,” she said. “We’re going to make it all right. I’m going to tell McGrath what happened.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“It could have happened.”

“It didn’t.”

“Don’t you want it to be all right?”

He did not say anything.

She swallowed half the bourbon in her glass. “Everett. Listen to me. If you don’t listen to me you’re going to go to prison. You’re going to go to Alcatraz and maybe
die
if you don’t start listening to me.”

“San Quentin. Not Alcatraz. San Quentin.”

“Everett.”

He looked at her. He had been wrong about her down on the dock: she was no older, she was still the thin little girl with the safety pin in her sunglasses, and whatever had happened in the years between did not signify much. Channing did not signify much: he thought of Channing sitting there on the log smoking a cigarette, switching his flashlight toward the levee and calling
Lily?
then springing up and flipping his cigarette into the water when he saw that it was not Lily.
(You better get off, Channing, you better get off this property
, he had said, and Channing had laughed:
O.K., Coop, O.K
. He had imagined Channing maybe telling Lily, later, what had happened, imagined Lily laughing with him.
O.K., Coop
, Channing had said,
you’re going to hurt somebody with that, and she’s no good to you dead.)
None of it signified: whether Channing had tried to grab the gun to protect himself or because he thought Everett intended to shoot Lily; whether he had shot Channing because he had intended to all along or because he was angered by Channing’s thinking he could hurt Lily; none of it mattered. Channing pitching forward over the log, his flashlight rolling into the water: they were events of equal importance. After a while it had all been quiet again and he had wondered how the shot could have been so accurate when he could not remember aiming.

He smoothed the hair back from Lily’s face.

“Anyway,” he said, trying to make her smile. “We call it Quentin. Or just plain ‘Q.’ ”

“Everett.”
She buried her face in his sleeve.

“Never mind. Don’t worry.”

“Listen.” She looked up at him. “You wouldn’t do it now.”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does.” He got up and walked over to the window.

“The swimming-pool lights are on again,” he said. It suddenly irritated him: the pool lights left on when they were all at a party, the dock light burned out and not replaced, the waste everywhere, waste and erosion. “There’s no reason to have the lights on when nobody’s home.”

“Julie thinks they’re beautiful,” Lily said faintly. “I left them on for Julie.”

“Julie’s not home,” he said reasonably. “We can burn them all day and all night if Julie thinks they’re beautiful, but Julie has not been home all evening.”

“Everett.
Please.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just a minute.”

“Sit down and listen to me.”

He opened and closed the screen door, examined the hinges absently, picked up his drink and finished it.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m going to call McGrath now.”

She sat forward on the edge of the couch. “You’re going to tell him what we planned? Everett?”

“Sure. Sure, baby.”

“Let me call.”

He closed the telephone book and dialed.

“Ed? Everett McClellan.”

Lily crossed the room and sat down by the telephone looking up at him.

“That’s right,” he said.
“Once
before. I called you in the middle of the night once before. Ten years ago.”

“You know Ryder Channing? That’s right. No, they’re divorced.” He paused. “Listen. I shot him.”

“Tell him why,”
Lily whispered.

“I just shot him. We had a fight over a gun and I shot him. My gun. You get on over here and I’ll tell you about it.”

Everett hung up.

“You didn’t tell him why.”

“No,” Everett said. “It doesn’t matter.”

He took Lily’s hand.

“Lily. Lily baby.”

She did not take her eyes from him.

“I’m going down to get the gun,” he said.

“Leave the gun. Wait until McGrath comes.”

He shook his head.

“Leave me be,” he said gently. “You sit here.”

Holding her, her head pressed against his chest, he felt the sobs beginning in her frame and knew that she realized it was not going to be the way she had wanted it.

“Wait for the children,” she said. “Julie will be here.”

“I don’t want to see her.”

“Everett—”

“It was all right,” he whispered. “It’s been all right.”

“I love you.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that.”

“Nobody would have known it,” she said. “Nobody. The way it’s been.”

“Known what.”

“That I loved you.”

“I knew it. You knew it.”

She clung to him. He could feel her ribs beneath her dress.

“Listen,” he said. “You have to put on some weight. You have to start eating more and getting some rest. You promise.”

“I promise.”

“All right then.” He kissed her closed eyes.

26

Sitting on the needlepoint chair where Everett had told her to sit she felt her hands wet, her head hurting (hurting, not aching; it had stopped aching upstairs, an hour ago, when she had first heard the shot), nothing very real. The only real thing had been the shot and she could hear it still, cracking reflexively through all the years before, spinning through the darkness between the games they had all played as children and the games they played now, between the child she had been and whoever she was now, sitting on the needlepoint chair and knowing that he was not going to let her make it all right.

Leave me be
. What had it all been about: all the manqué promises, the failures of love and faith and honor; Martha buried out there by the levee in a $250 dress from Magnin’s with river silt in the seams; Sarah in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; her father, who had not much cared, the easy loser
(He never could have been
, her mother had said and still loved him); her mother sitting alone this afternoon in the big house upriver writing out invitations for the Admission Day Fiesta and watching
Dick Clark’s American Bandstand
because the Dodgers were rained out; Everett down there on the dock with his father’s .38. She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States Senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only cloudily by one or two in each generation, by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mother’s dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: of moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.

Leave him be. It was all she could do now, the only present she could make him.
Drive far away our ghostly foe and thine abiding peace bestow
. Christ on the cross couldn’t drive away that ghostly foe. And maybe once you realized you had to do it alone, you were on your way home. Maybe the most difficult, most important thing anyone could do for anyone else was to leave him alone; it was perhaps the only gratuitous act, the act of love.

She sat on the needlepoint chair until she heard it, the second shot. When she found him, face down with his arm flung out and his head hanging over the edge of the dock, she lay down beside him on the wet boards and talked to him, telling him things for which there had never been any other words:
Remember, Everett baby once at the Fair, you lifted me onto the golden bear in front of the Counties Building and kissed me and we laughed. And remember we used to lie in bed mornings, sometimes with Knight in bed between us and I would say don’t go to sleep, he’ll smother, remember how it was and remember the day we took the children to the Cosumnes and it rained and we all sat drinking Cokes under the cottonwood and the rain coming through remember Everett baby remember
. She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her,
we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much
.

As she lay holding him against the dark she heard the sirens on the highway, but did not move until the two cars, one McGrath’s and one the Highway Patrol, swung off the levee and down the drive to the house. She stood up then, left Everett and climbed the wooden stairs to the road. In the light down on the verandah McGrath, his pants pulled on with a pajama top, stood with two other men; another man, in a Highway Patrol uniform, waited on the lawn, looking not at the house but at the lighted pool. Watching them as she brushed the leaves from her skirt and licked the blood from the arm she had held around Everett, she began to wonder what she would say, not to them but to Knight and to Julie. She did not know what she could tell anyone except that he had been a good man. She was not certain that he had been but it was what she would have wished for him, if they gave her one wish.