Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (16 page)

A justice of the peace married them and then they drove over the mountains to Gatlinburg for the weekend. Carl moved in what little he had and they began a life together. She thought that the more comfortable they became around each other the more they would talk, but that didn’t happen. Evenings Carl sat by himself on the porch or found some small chore to do, something best done alone. He didn’t like to watch TV or rent movies. At supper he’d always say it was a good meal, and thank her for making it. She might tell him something about her day, and he’d listen politely, make a brief remark to show that though he said little at least he was listening. But at night as she readied herself for bed, he’d always come in. They’d lie down together and he’d turn to kiss her good night, always on the mouth. Three, four nights a week that kiss would linger and then quilts and sheets would be pulled back. Afterward, Marcie would not put her nightgown back on. Instead, she’d press her back into his chest and stomach, bend her knees and fold herself inside him, his arms holding her close, his body’s heat enclosing her.

Once back home, Marcie put up the groceries and placed a chuck roast on the stove to simmer. She did a load of laundry and swept off the front porch, her eyes glancing down the road for Carl’s pickup. At six o’clock she turned on the news. Another fire had been set, no more than thirty minutes earlier. Fortunately, a hiker was close by and saw the smoke, even glimpsed a pickup through the trees. No tag number or make. All the hiker knew for sure was that the pickup was black.

Carl did not get home until almost seven. Marcie heard the truck coming up the road and began setting the table. Carl took off his boots on the porch and came inside, his face grimy with sweat, bits of sawdust in his hair and on his clothes. He nodded at her and went into the bathroom. As he showered, Marcie went out to the pickup. In the truck bed was the chain saw, beside it plastic bottles of twenty-weight engine oil and the red five-gallon gasoline can. When she lifted the can, it was empty.

They ate in silence except for Carl’s usual compliment on the meal. Marcie watched him, waiting for a sign of something different in his demeanor, some glimpse of anxiety or satisfaction.

“There was another fire today,” she finally said.

“I know,” Carl answered, not looking up from his plate.

She didn’t ask how he knew, since the radio in his truck didn’t work. But he could have heard it at Burrell’s as well.

“They say whoever set it drove a black pickup.”

Carl looked at her then, his blue eyes clear and depthless.

“I know that too,” he said.

After supper Carl went out to the porch while Marcie switched on the TV. She kept turning away from the movie she watched to look through the window. Carl sat in the wooden deck chair, only the back of his head and shoulders visible, less so as the minutes passed and his body merged with the gathering dusk. He stared toward the high mountains of the Smokies, and Marcie had no idea what, if anything, he was thinking about. He’d already smoked his cigarette, but she waited to see if he would take the lighter from his pocket, flick it, and stare at the flame a few moments. But he didn’t. Not this night. When she cut off the TV and went to the back room, the deck chair scraped as Carl pushed himself out of it. Then the click of metal as he locked the door.

When he settled into bed beside her, Marcie continued to lie with her back to him. He moved closer, placed his hand between her head and pillow, and slowly, gently, turned her head so he could kiss her. As soon as his lips brushed hers, she turned away, moved so his body didn’t touch hers. Marcie fell asleep but woke a few hours later. Sometime in the night she had resettled in the bed’s center, and Carl’s arm now lay around her, his knees tucked behind her knees, his chest pressed against her back.

As she lay awake, Marcie remembered the day her younger daughter left for Cincinnati, joining her sister there. I guess it’s just us now, Arthur had said glumly. She’d resented those words, as if Marcie were some grudgingly accepted consolation prize. She’d also resented how the words acknowledged that their daughters had always been closer to Arthur, even as children. In their teens, the girls had unleashed their rancor, the shouting and tears and grievances, on Marcie. The inevitable conflicts between mothers and daughters and Arthur being the only male in the house—that was surely part of it, but Marcie also believed there’d been some difference in temperament as innate as different blood types.

Arthur had hoped that one day the novelty of city life would pale and the girls would come back to North Carolina. But the girls stayed up north and married and began their own families. Their visits and phone calls became less and less frequent. Arthur was hurt by that, hurt deep, though never saying so. He aged more quickly, especially after he’d had a stent placed in an artery. After that Arthur did less around the farm, until finally he no longer grew tobacco or cabbage, just raised a few cattle. Then one day he didn’t come back for lunch. She found him in the barn, slumped beside a stall, a hay hook in his hand.

The girls came home for the funeral and stayed three days. After they left, there was a month-long flurry of phone calls and visits and casseroles from people in the community and then days when the only vehicle that came was the mail truck. Marcie learned then what true loneliness was. Five miles from town on a dead-end dirt road, with not even the Floridians’ houses in sight. She bought extra locks for the doors because at night she sometimes grew afraid, though what she feared was as much inside the house as outside it. Because she knew what was expected of her—to stay in this place, alone, waiting for the years, perhaps decades, to pass until she herself died.

It was mid-morning the following day when Sheriff Beasley came. Marcie met him on the porch. The sheriff had been a close friend of Arthur’s, and as he got out of the patrol car he looked not at her but at the sagging barn and empty pasture, seeming to ignore the house’s new garage and freshly shingled roof. He didn’t take off his hat as he crossed the yard, or when he stepped onto the porch.

“I knew you’d sold some of Arthur’s cows, but I didn’t know it was all of them.” The sheriff spoke as if it were intended only as an observation.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have if there’d been some men to help me with them after Arthur died,” Marcie said. “I couldn’t do it by myself.”

“I guess not,” Sheriff Beasley replied, letting a few moments pass before he spoke again, his eyes on her now. “I need to speak to Carl. You know where he’s working today?”

“Talk to him about what?” Marcie asked.

“Whoever’s setting these fires drives a black pickup.”

“There’s lots of black pickups in this county.”

“Yes there are,” Sheriff Beasley said, “and I’m checking out everybody who drives one, checking out where they were yesterday around six o’clock as well. I figure that to narrow it some.”

“You don’t need to ask Carl,” Marcie said. “He was here eating supper.”

“At six o’clock?”

“Around six, but he was here by five thirty.”

“How are you so sure of that?”

“The five-thirty news had just come on when he pulled up.”

The sheriff said nothing.

“You need me to sign something I will,” Marcie said.

“No, Marcie. That’s not needed. I’m just checking off folks with black pickups. It’s a long list.”

“I bet you came here first, though, didn’t you,” Marcie said. “Because Carl’s not from around here.”

“I came here first, but I had cause,” Sheriff Beasley said. “When you and Carl started getting involved, Preacher Carter asked me to check up on him, just to make sure he was on the up and up. I called the sheriff down there. Turns out that when Carl was fifteen he and another boy got arrested for burning some woods behind a ball field. They claimed it an accident, but the judge didn’t buy that. They almost got sent to juvenile detention.”

“There’ve been boys do that kind of thing around here.”

“Yes, there have,” the sheriff said. “And that was the only thing in Carl’s file, not even a speeding ticket. Still, his being here last evening when it happened, that’s a good thing for him.”

Marcie waited for the sheriff to leave, but he lingered. He took out a soiled handkerchief and wiped his brow. Probably wanting a glass of iced tea, she suspected, but she wasn’t going to offer him one. The sheriff put up his handkerchief and glanced at the sky.

“You’d think we’d at least get an afternoon thunderstorm.”

“I’ve got things to do,” she said, and reached for the screen door handle.

“Marcie,” the sheriff said, his voice so soft that she turned. He lifted his right hand, palm open as if to offer her something, then let it fall. “You’re right. We should have done more for you after Arthur died. I regret that.”

Marcie opened the screen door and went inside.

When Carl got home she said nothing about the sheriff’s visit, and that night in bed when Carl turned and kissed her, Marcie met his lips and raised her hand to his cheek. She pressed her free hand against the small of his back, guiding his body as it shifted, settled over her. Afterward, she lay awake, feeling Carl’s breath on the back of her neck, his arm cinched around her ribs and stomach. She listened for a first far-off rumble, but there was only the dry raspy sound of insects striking the window screen. Marcie had not been to church in months, had not prayed for even longer than that. But she did now. She shut her eyes tighter, trying to open a space inside herself that might offer up all of what she feared and hoped for, brought forth with such fervor it could not help but be heard. She prayed for rain.

O
n the drive home from her mother’s funeral, Ruth Welborn thinks of jaguars. She saw one once in the Atlanta Zoo and admired the creature’s movements—like muscled water—as it paced back and forth, turning inches from the iron bars but never acknowledging the cage’s existence. She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface, a memory from the third grade. Mrs. Carter tells them to get out their
History of South Carolina
textbooks. Paper and books shuffle and shift. Some of the boys snicker, for on the book’s first page is a drawing of an Indian woman suckling her child. Ruth opens the book and sees a black-and-white sketch of a jaguar, but for only a moment, because this is not a page they will study today or any other day this school year. She turns to the correct page and forgets what she’s seen for fifty years.

But now as she drives west toward Columbia, Ruth again sees the jaguar and the palmetto trees it walks through. She wonders why in the intervening decades she has never read or heard anyone else mention that jaguars once roamed South Carolina. Windows up, radio off, Ruth travels in silence. The last few days were made more wearying because she’s had to converse with so many people. She is an only child, her early lifelong silences filled with books and games that needed no other players. That had been the hardest adjustment in her marriage—the constant presence of Richard, though she’d come to love the cluttered intimacy of their shared life, the reassurance and promise of “I’m here” and “I’ll be back.” Now a whole day can pass without her speaking a word to another person.

In her apartment for the first time in three days, Ruth drops her mail on the bed, then hangs up the black dress, nudges the shoes back into the closet’s far corner. She glances through the bills and advertisements, but stops, as she always does, when she sees the flyer of a missing child. She studies the boy’s face, ignoring the gapped smile. If she were to see him, he would not be smiling. Her lips move slightly as she reads of a child four-feet tall and eighty pounds, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes last seen in Charlotte. Not so far away, she thinks, and places it in a pocketbook already holding a dozen similar flyers.

No pastel sympathy cards brighten her mail. A personal matter, Ruth had told her supervisor, and out of deference or indifference the supervisor hadn’t asked her to explain further. Though Ruth’s worked in the office sixteen years, her coworkers know nothing about her. They do not know she was once married, once had a child. At Christmas the people she works with draw names, and every year she receives a sampler of cheeses and meats. She imagines the giver buying one for her and one for some maiden aunt. There are days at the office when Ruth feels invisible. Coworkers look right through her as they pass her desk. She believes that if she actually did disappear and the police needed an artist’s sketch, none of them could provide a distinguishing detail.

Ruth walks into the living room, kneels in front of the set of encyclopedias on the bottom bookshelf. When she was pregnant, her mother insisted on making a trip to Columbia to bring a shiny new stroller, huge discount bags of diapers, and the encyclopedias bought years ago for Ruth.

They’re for your child now, her mother had said. That’s why I saved them.

But Ruth’s child lived only four hours. She was still hazy from the anesthesia when Richard had sat on the hospital bed, his face pale and haggard, and told her they had lost the baby. In her drugged mind she envisioned a child in the new stroller, wheeled into some rarely used hospital hallway and then forgotten.

Tell them they have to find him, she’d said, and tried to get up, propping herself on her elbows for a moment before they gave way and darkness closed around her.

Richard had wanted to try again. We’ve got to move on with our lives, he’d said. But she’d taken the stroller and bags of diapers to Goodwill. In the end only Richard moved on, taking a job in Atlanta. Soon they were seeing each other on fewer and fewer weekends, solitude returning to her life like a geographical place, a landscape neither hostile nor welcoming, just familiar.

That their marriage had come apart was not unusual. All the books and advice columnists said so. Their marriage had become a tangled exchange of sorrow. Ruth knew now that it had been she, not Richard, who too easily had acquiesced to the idea that it always would be so, that solitude was better because it allowed no mirror for one’s grief. They could have had another child, could have tried to heal themselves. She’d been the unwilling one.