Songs in Ordinary Time (98 page)

I
t was two in the morning and Howard was wide awake. He crept from bed dressed except for his shoes, which he carried as he tiptoed to the door. He had already taken a walk earlier tonight, which was why he no longer bothered putting on pajamas. Now when he couldn’t sleep he had to go out for long walks because Lucille complained about the creaking floorboards under his pacing feet. Yesterday she had told him he had to find another place to live. She didn’t think it looked right to have a single man and a single lady living in the same house, especially in her kind of business.

The apartment was dark but for the weak flicker of the votive candle at the feet of the Infant of Prague, its yellow satin gown dim with dust. He had stopped going down to the Holy Articles Shoppe because of the way Lucille treated him there. “Don’t touch that!” she’d snap, watching him from her tall stool behind the register. Father Gannon had been right. Taking her to see Perda had been a mistake. Hoping to set things straight, he had asked her to the Kong Chow, where he and Jozia used to share a pupu platter and pork chop suey with white rice, and then afterward a fizzy pineapple drink with an umbrella stirrer in it that always made them giggly by the time they were breaking open their fortune cookies. But Lucille hated Chinese food. That’s easy, Father Gannon had said, just take her someplace else. But it wasn’t easy. Nothing ever was. The Kong Chow was the only restaurant he had ever been in.

He missed Father Gannon terribly. In the days after his trouble over Alice Fermoyle, Father Gannon had spent a lot of time with him. Father Gannon had talked so much that Howard was having a hard time getting used to SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 479

all this silence again. Father Gannon told him about his mother and his father. He told him about a boy named Radlette and some priests who said he stole the birthday money and all about the blankets he collected and the beautiful young woman asleep in bed with her dead baby and the Bishop with his pale-blue eyes and silver hair who said Father Gannon had to return to the hospital in the desert, only this time for a longer stay. But what Howard most liked hearing about was God and how kind He was. Father Gannon said God was not an angry old man in the heavens, who punished people for doing bad things. He said God was love, and so when we feel love inside us, what we were really feeling was God. Howard liked that idea and he thought about it all the time now. He had all this love for his sister and even for Lucille if she would only be nice. He loved God, and going to church, and praying with all the people. But no one ever loved him back. So what did that mean? Where was God? Why was He letting Jozia love the pigman more than her own brother? Soon all the old confusions between his head and his heart got so stirred up he had turned to Father Gannon and demanded to know why God let bad things happen. Father Gannon didn’t say anything right away. Then he admitted he didn’t know the answer to that. He said of all life’s mysteries that was the biggest mystery of all. Maybe bad things happened so God could test not just our strength and bravery, but how much love we could keep on giving.

“That don’t seem fair,” he had blurted. “Not to the one that’s always having the bad things happen to him.”

“No, it doesn’t, does it?” Father Gannon had said, and after that Howard felt bad that he’d made Father Gannon so sad and quiet for all the rest of the day.

The night before Father Gannon left, he had taken Howard to dinner at the Kong Chow. He had ordered two pupu platters and three other dishes with names Howard couldn’t pronounce. Father Gannon had worn his collar, and all night long, people kept staring at them, and this pleased Howard. They were nibbling pineapple chunks off wooden toothpicks and sipping their fruity drinks when the waiter brought tea and fortune cookies.

Howard broke open his and read his fortune:
A vision brings great wisdom
.

He was disappointed. Jozia usually figured out the complicated ones. He felt bad remembering the times he’d accused her of acting like a know-it-all. He wished he could always just get simple ones, like Father Gannon’s:
Good luck comes tonight
.

“How intriguing,” Father Gannon said, reading Howard’s fortune. He asked Howard if he’d ever had a vision, a strange experience, seen something he could not explain or understand. Only one time, Howard said, and he began to tell the secret, the terrible thing he had seen that night at the pig farm. It was a dead man, he whispered. Or like a dead man, but swelling with rot and overgrown with vines. He explained how when he finally told Jozia she said he was going off the deep end because he was so scared of finally having to live his own life.

480 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Well, that can happen,” Father Gannon had said, pouring them both more bitter black tea. “You see Grondine Carson as this badness, this foul thing that’s up there in the woods, waiting to consume you the way he’s consuming your sister.”

The tiny cup trembled and tea dribbled down Howard’s chin. Consume, he kept thinking. Consume, such a scary word.
Consume
.

“But it’s only your imagination, Howard. Don’t you see? It’s not real. It’s all your own fears. We all do it. Our brains play tricks on us, and if we’re not careful we see only what we want to see. And then we’re in a terrible mess.”

He was walking along Main Street now, through the moonlight-spattered shadows, down the hill past the empty fairgrounds. Every Labor Day he and Jozia spent ten dollars each at the fair. It was the one day in the year when he felt rich. This year Jozia would probably go with Carson.

As he walked he grew more lonely. The black sky was so awash with stars that they seemed to sway, sagging lower and lower overhead. He had not seen Jozia in days. Now that she had quit the Fermoyles’ there was nothing to come to town for anymore, not even to bring him the pigman’s leftovers. She loved the pigman more than him. Father Gannon had said Radlette’s father tried to scare him away. Radlette’s father told everyone the priest had kissed his son. A lie, said Father Gannon. But now Howard wasn’t so sure. The morning they took Father Gannon away, he had thrown his arms around Howard.

“God loves us, Howard. No matter what happens, we have to remember that,” he had whispered, then kissed him on the lips. That memory and the stars and Father Gannon’s stories converged in his brain now like fireworks, the dazzling images bursting and receding one into the other, the dead baby’s glowing face, Perda grinning up at him from her leafy tomb, the bloated dead body in Perda’s hospital bed, and then Lucille asleep in his bed with the nude Infant of Prague suckling at her breast.

The air seemed thinner here, the road more narrow, steep and rutted. In the distance a dog howled. There were crickets and frogs, and now the splash of an unseen waterfall on rocks. Ahead lay the pig farm, its windows dark, all but one up on the second floor. Carson’s two trucks were parked across the road in front of the barn. Here, the earth smelled of sweet warm rot. There was no dead body, but a vision, he assured himself, moving closer to the house. It was like Father Gannon said, our brains play tricks on us, and all at once now, he knew how to get Jozia back. Maybe if she thought there were ghosts around she’d be too afraid to live here. Maybe this was God’s test to see how brave and strong he was, to see how much love he had. He picked up a stick and crept close, keeping his head below the windowsills. He reached up and tapped three times on the front windows. Then he went along the side, tapping on all those windows. He was at the back of the house now, but it was too dark out here. He scurried next to a narrow shed, its furrowed tin roof sparkling with starlight. He squatted down and raked his fingers back and forth in the dirt until he had a handful of stones.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 481

He darted into the yard and threw the stones against the side of the house.

He ducked down next to the shed again and felt around for more stones.

A light came on downstairs. A dog barked loudly from inside the house.

The back door squeaked open with a glare of light that flooded the yard.

Howard crept to the back of the shed.

“Who’s out there?” Grondine Carson demanded. “I said who’s out there?”

Now Howard was trembling. This was real. The stories had ended. The dream was over. This would end with Jozia even madder at him. He sprang blindly into the woods, branches batting his face and twigs cracking underfoot as he ran.

“Son of a bitch. You no-good son of a bitch.” Carson panted in pursuit, and then a bullet whizzed past his head in a streak of heat.

He turned and scrambled up a brambly rise. Thorns gashed his neck and arms. He could hear a siren coming up the road. All that mattered now was that Jozia not find out. A dog growled nearby. The running footsteps were almost on top of him. He stumbled down the other side of the rise, his feet skidding along thick slippery pine needles.

“Hold it!” Carson cried as he started to run again. Carson fired.

And the night and all the stars and stories exploded, pinwheeling around him. As he fell the panting dog pounced on his chest, its thick paws pinning him there. His right leg was burning hot. He touched the sticky wet hole.

The dog growled and snapped at his face.

“Oh Jesus!” Carson groaned above the beam of light in his eyes. “Howard!

Why didn’t you say it was you?”

His eyes closed and he thought sure he was dead, and then men were hollering, and lights spilled down the rise.

“It’s Howard,” Carson cried. “I shot him. Oh God, I shot Jozia’s brother.”

“Howard! Howard!” Jozia screamed, and his eyes opened as his sister ran past the policemen in her white bathrobe. She pushed Carson aside and dropped to her knees. “Oh poor baby Howard,” she wept, cradling his head in her hands.

Two men carried him from the woods and slid him into the back seat of the cruiser. They sped him to the hospital, where Dr. Deitler cut the bullet from his thigh. The doctor held it up between tweezers to show him, then dropped it into a metal cup. As it clinked, Howard fainted.

I
t was the two remaining policemen who found the corpse, so decomposed they could not tell at first if it was a man or a woman. Man, they guessed looking down at the rank straw hat that had been underneath the body. The stained papers in the shredded pocket bore the name Earl Lapham Jones.

Twenty years old, read Sonny Stoner. Probably been there all summer, Dr.

Deitler guessed.

Probably had been, Sonny agreed just inside the mortuary door. Day after day, through rain and wind and heat. So that was it. There it lay, sealed in canvas. The corruption. The vile manifestation of his failure. He turned away, disgusted and weak with the realization that it was finally over. This 482 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

morning he’d found out that there had never been a life insurance policy on Carol, and he’d been relieved. There would be no comfort from his loss, no profit from his sins. Some of his men wanted to pin this murder on Haddad, who had been transferred from the hospital to jail, but Grondine Carson was the only suspect. It didn’t take any brilliant detective work to know what had happened to Earl Lapham Jones. The pigman had caught the young man trespassing on his property and had shot him. Carson continued to deny everything, even Sonny’s carefully worded suggestion that Jones had threatened him, and Carson, after all the intrusions on his property, had been forced to shoot in self-defense.

“No sir,” Carson repeated. “That never did happen.”

Like a visitor in his own front parlor, Carson sat red-eyed and rigidly erect on the austere loveseat. He kept turning his cap in his big stained hands. Jozia was back in town tending her brother, and the taciturn pigman was alone again.

“Well, maybe it was the same thing as Howard, then,” Stoner offered, noting the ruffled curtains in the bright rainy windows, the newly blacked woodstove, the waxed floors. He thought of his own neglected house.

“Maybe you just heard a sound one night and you ran out and you fired off a few shots thinking to scare whoever it was away. And you hit him, but you never even knew it, and he ran in the grove to hide, and that’s where he died. How about that?”

Carson shook his head. “No sir.” He rubbed his eyes. “I told you, all those times, all the trouble I had here, I only once ever fired my gun and that was last night.” His weary gaze sought Stoner’s. “I thought they were trying to get in here. And Jozia was so scared again.”

“Again? You mean it happened before?”

“No. Like I already said. Howard was always telling her bad things, trying to scare her home. He told her there was a dead man in the woods.” Carson shook his head. “Only I didn’t pay no attention. Should have, but I didn’t.”

Sonny got up to go. He had already questioned Howard, who thought it had been six weeks ago, anyway, when he stumbled on the moonlit body.

The only incongruity was Howard’s insistence there had been a knife in the chest. But then again, even Jozia had said of her brother, “Half what he thinks he sees is all mixed up because he always puts the wrong parts of things in all the wrong places.”

Howard Menka had definitely seen a body and was obviously confused about having seen a knife. Grondine Carson had shot and killed an intruder on his property. The only real mystery now was Earl Lapham Jones himself, a man no one knew and no one missed.

Sonny turned on the wipers and headed back to town. He would give Carson as much time as he could.

N
orm honked the horn in front of Weeb’s house. His eyes scanned all the windows, hoping for a glimpse of Janice. He wanted her to see him driving a Cadillac. This was the second night in a row Omar had let SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 483

him drive it. Last night he had taken Benjy to the drive-in to see
A Summer
Place
. It had rained and Benjy fell asleep and then the windows fogged up, so he had gone home early. “What’s that?” Benjy had asked the minute they stepped inside. It had seemed in the dark with the creaking and banging that the whole house was shaking. It had been his mother’s headboard hitting the wall as Omar moaned.