The Evidence Against Her (17 page)

There were no more of the confrontations of strained civility between Catherine and Dwight that had always threatened to fall into full-fledged and dangerous fury—brutality—as their argument intensified into the night. Just at the precise moment that Agnes turned all her energy toward something else, Catherine had somehow struck a vein of sustained gleefulness that didn’t seem to be about to give out.

One Saturday morning, Catherine had insisted that Agnes stand still while she took all Agnes’s measurements, and even her brothers counted it against Agnes when she wasn’t a bit gracious about it. “Oh, Mama, I don’t have time for all this. What are you up to now? I don’t need any new clothes,” she said. But Catherine timidly persisted, although Howie and Richard and Edson saw that Agnes had hurt their mother’s feelings. Catherine ducked her head, and her mouth trembled as she bent to measure the distance from Agnes’s waist to the floor. The three boys were hurt on their mother’s behalf when she approached Agnes gingerly with a sheaf of pictures and drawings of some outfit or other—they weren’t paying strict attention—only to have Agnes rebuff her with a claim of schoolwork to get done or some other brisk word.

As the end of school approached, Agnes often stayed overnight at Lucille Drummond’s to finish up the business of the class book or for rehearsals of the senior pageant, but the boys were home in the afternoons and had seen their mother pore over pattern books and magazines and tear out pages, sketching in details here and there. They knew, though Agnes did not, that Catherine had some great plan for Agnes’s birthday. She had sent all sorts of instructions to her Aunt Cettie in Natchez, and one afternoon she insisted Agnes come along to the parlor to see what had arrived. Agnes was unenthusiastic in the face of her mother’s childish delight and coquettish manner. It made Agnes tired at the thought of dealing with it, though to her surprise Howie and Richard and Edson followed right along into the parlor without the slightest hesitation.

“Your birthday’s this Saturday, Agnes,” her mother said. “It’s a milestone. A milestone. Oh, I remember when I turned eighteen.” And Agnes began to feel a familiar dread at the prospect of her mother’s breathless recollections. But her brothers watched their mother with genuine interest.

“I’ll be
nineteen,
Mama.”

“Aunt Cettie gave a supper party out at Ravenna . . . . My mother had wanted to have a dance on my
sixteenth
birthday, but Cettie said that it wasn’t necessarily expected anymore, and besides I was still all bones. Aunt Cettie always made my best gowns, and she said what was the point when I still looked like a plucked chicken. ‘Let’s see if she turns into a swan or a goose,’ she said to Mama. Of course, I was right there being pinned up. But I might as well have been a dress form. My aunt Cettie wasn’t ever . . . She used to say that in this world a woman better develop a thick skin. When I was just a little girl I always thought she said that because I’d end up in tears getting pricked with pins whenever I had to go for a fitting. But you can just imagine! You can guess how I worried about that—a swan or a goose!
Oh,
my!”

And Agnes really noticed her mother for the first time in months. Agnes followed her into the parlor and saw that her mother’s hair was tidily arranged, no wisps straggling free, and she moved gracefully, with that beautiful confidence of height that Agnes had always found enviable. Her mother had about her a sort of sheen of complacency, and she was lovely to look at.

“Look here!” her mother said. “I had Aunt Cettie make this up for you. I think you ought to own one of your own. At eighteen you should have a gown and an evening coat, too. But in this place where would you wear it . . . . But I’ve given up worrying about it,” she added, cutting off her own drift into bitterness. Agnes was surprised, but she could see her brothers no longer seemed concerned. In fact, her brothers looked on eagerly. Agnes realized with a start that this was a little conspiracy. The three of them already knew what was in the package.

Agnes unfolded the paper in the large box lying open on the table and found a beautifully made riding habit, with a gray jacket and vest and a bias-cut, six-gored skirt for riding sidesaddle. The skirt flared so extravagantly that it had been packed with the hem carefully folded in upon itself twice over in ever-lengthening triangles, each fold cushioned with crumpled tissue to guard against creasing. The whole outfit had been carefully arranged to lie in its wrappings the same way it would appear once it was put on. Beneath the vest was a high-necked white linen blouse, also stuffed with tissue to protect the fullness of the unstitched pleats of the bodice, which was tucked into the skirt band. A gray ribbon was artfully pinned and tied around the collar stay.

Catherine Claytor and her daughter leaned over the box with a similar reverence, and Catherine drew her fingertips over the sleeve of the jacket. “This is very fine, you see. This is very fine wool. Not heavy. No one can drape a jacket like Cettie. You’ll see how the sleeves . . .”

“Oh, yes!” Agnes said, feeling the fabric herself and for the first time in a while not at all irritated or put off by her mother’s dreamy consideration. “It
is
beautiful. It is beautifully made. I can see that.”

Catherine straightened and looked at Agnes with a rapturous smile of exaltation, and Agnes smiled back. When Catherine was happy in the excited way she was that afternoon she was irresistible. “But, oh, Agnes, just wait and see what else . . . Wait here!” She left the room briefly and returned with two more boxes, in one of which Agnes found a pair of tall black boots with a tapered toe, an articulated arch, and a sloped heel, unlike her broad-footed laced Wellingtons. The second box Catherine clasped in front of her with an expression of delighted satisfaction.

“Now, you
know
how I feel about those hats, Agnes. You and Lucille look to me exactly like you’ve put buckets on your heads. But of course no one wears . . . Well,” and she put the box down and carefully lifted its lid, “I thought this would do and not seem too . . . It’s just that the brim only
dips
a little in the front and back instead of that awful helmetlike allover curve.” She lifted out a handsome black hat with a very plain satin band and perched it on her own head to show Agnes. Catherine only turned briefly to the mirror to set it at a proper angle and then she turned back to her daughter with a satisfied and rather hopeful expression.

“You look beautiful, Mama!” Catherine turned back to the mirror for a moment to see. She nodded at her reflection. She did look beautiful. “It’s as beautiful as a
costume,
” Agnes said. “It’s a wonderful birthday present. Oh, but Mama, I want to wear it this Sunday? I could ride to church, couldn’t I?”

Agnes was imagining the figure she would make and how surprised Lucille and Edith would be. She knew it was possible that it would look as if she were showing off. But since the Scofields and Lily Butler were all away she didn’t care, and she couldn’t resist the temptation. She could ride to the Drummonds’ house and walk over to church with them, in case she might look vain—in case she might look silly—riding past the groups of people congregating on the steps of the Methodist church and Saint James Episcopal across the way. “I’ll give Bandit a bath Saturday if it’s warm enough!”

Howie and Richard and Edson Claytor were soothed by all this happy girlishness, although they took themselves off feeling a little envious of Agnes’s good luck in being the only daughter of their mother. Agnes did get so much more of their mother’s attention than any one of the three of them.

O
N SATURDAY, April 6, 1918, the morning of her nineteenth birthday, Agnes woke under the lingering influence of what must have been a pleasant dream. She tried to regain it for some long, drowsy minutes, but she couldn’t fall back into it. Her mother always said, though, that you would have good luck during any day you woke up from a happy dream. And Agnes
felt
lucky. The idea of her day shaped itself into an orderly staircase of tasks she meant to get done, and she unbunched her pillow and stretched out flat under her quilt, looking forward to a length of time in which the hours had already taken on a safe, thick, busy quality.

She would need to check over the sidesaddle in case it needed cleaning, and she wanted to give Bandit a bath if it got warm enough, and that would take up the greater part of the late morning and early afternoon. But the job she most looked forward to, and which she ran through in her mind in great detail, was the business of pressing her new riding habit, being especially careful not to iron in a crease along the elegant roll of the lapel and not to use an iron on the skirt at all but to hang it over steam, as her mother’s aunt Cettie had directed. For the first time in months, Agnes lay in bed considering her day without even a single thought of Warren Scofield entering her head.

The weather was not breezy, but the sky was bright blue with high, rushing clouds, so that when Agnes was in the barn checking over the saddle she happened to glance up long enough to get the rather pleasing but disconcerting impression that the very spot where she stood was spinning away from the sky. It was partly the effect of the distant, streaky, racing clouds and partly just the elation that follows a period of brooding. By midmorning the temperature had risen enough that she took off her old barn jacket and rolled up her sleeves. She set out buckets of water to warm in the sun, and after lunch she went about giving Bandit a bath.

Her mother joined her in the barn, bringing along a bar of her fine-milled French soap with its wonderful smell of fading roses—roses with their petals blown but that give off a heavy last perfume that’s so profuse the scent lingers with sweet, round bitterness on the back of the tongue. “Can I help, Agnes? I’ve brought some of my scented soap out.” Her mother was timid about asking, and Agnes was surprised and delighted.

“That would be wonderful, Mama.” She felt shy in the face of her mother’s goodwill and amiability.

“When we get done he’ll smell like a garden,” her mother said. And Catherine rolled up her sleeves as well, put on the cobbler’s apron that always hung on the tack room door, and went to work with Agnes.

They sponged and lathered Agnes’s horse, whom she’d named Bandit because he had been an outlaw’s horse her father had bought especially for her at a court sale in Coshocton. Bandit wasn’t a particularly placid horse, but he was almost always accommodating, and he stood calmly enough, turning his head a little when he caught the first scent of Catherine Claytor’s French soap. The surprise to Agnes, those four years ago when her father had thought of her exclusively, and the whole attendant circumstance of the horse he had bought her had been wonderfully exciting. “Why, Mrs. Longacre,” she had said unwisely, “I’ll be riding an
outlaw’s
horse!”

“I wouldn’t think that would be any story I’d
tell,
” Mrs. Longacre had said. “A man poor enough to take to robbing banks, or no telling what, isn’t likely to have been able to keep a very good horse.” And, of course, Agnes hadn’t thought of that, but it proved not to be true. It was generally Bandit that Agnes rode at show, although sometimes she rode Buckeye, who was smaller and on the whole had a better disposition. But she loved Bandit more, and in that early afternoon she curried him and carefully worked soapy water through his mane, stopping to address any tangles that met her comb.

Agnes was a fairly accomplished rider; she and Lucille often rode in local shows and at the Marshal County Fair. When Agnes had fallen during last year’s competition, the
Washburn Observer
had mixed up the girls’ names and reported that Lucille Drummond had fallen from her horse, Cash, when taking the second jump of the course. Lucille was so offended that she would scarcely speak to Agnes for several weeks.

“You aren’t even being sensible, Lucille!” Agnes had finally said. “For goodness sake! It isn’t
my
fault that the
Observer
got the names wrong.”

That had been one Saturday when Agnes and Sally Trenholm were at Lucille’s house, and Lucille’s sister Celia was showing them a new way to do their hair, although she’d given up on Agnes’s. “That’s true,” Celia said to her sister, whose hair she was pinning carefully, so that the eyes of everyone in the room were on Lucille’s reflection in the mirror—their attention caught by the transformation of Lucille’s sweet, long girl’s face into that of an attractive but surprisingly stern-looking grown woman. “You’re just being silly, Lucille,” Celia said.

“Oh,
well!
How can you say that? I’ve
never
fallen on a jump in a show! To see my name in the paper like that was the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened in my life! But it isn’t even that. Agnes, it just makes me so
mad!
Because I
know
you’re glad . . . not that they got my name wrong! But you’re awfully glad that your name
wasn’t
in that paper! That it didn’t say that
you’d
taken a fall.” Agnes hadn’t replied, because that was true enough.

Agnes could hardly wait to show Lucille her riding habit. On Sundays there were always so many of Lucille’s sisters and brothers-in-law and nephews and nieces coming and going at the big house on the square, and Agnes knew that for a few minutes she would be the center of all that hectic commotion as one after another Mrs. Drummond and Celia and Lucille called to the others to come see Agnes’s new outfit.

And it still thrilled Agnes that her mother had gone to such trouble to contrive the surprise of it. Agnes lingered over the thought of explaining to the assorted Drummonds how her mother had been dissatisfied with any pattern she had found and so had designed the skirt of Agnes’s habit herself. She knew that Mrs. Drummond would exclaim over the remarkable workmanship, the beautifully bound buttonholes, the impeccably turned, notched collar. She knew Celia would admire her hat.

As Agnes worked carefully through the tangles of Bandit’s mane she was caught up in the idea of herself riding regally through the square—riding through the square not seeming a bit foolish. She would sit erect and graceful, a sight to behold, a person other people would surreptitiously turn to see and whose image would haunt them later. Who was that
girl?
They would wonder about that, not recognizing the Agnes of every day, the Agnes of the navy-and-white middy blouse, of the dreary school uniform and flyaway hair. Sunday morning she would be another person altogether.

Agnes was standing on a stool to work her fingers through the crest of Bandit’s mane. Catherine stood on the ground with one hand on the bridge of Bandit’s nose to remind him to keep his head down, and she was using a damp cloth to clean the horse’s ear. She began singing very softly, as if she meant to soothe Bandit. It was a song she had sung to her children when they were young, but she was making up new words as she went along, to tease Agnes.

When once I was living on Newcastle Street,

I knew a young girl, oh so pure and so sweet.

Though she was a young lady who could not resist

When handsome young William did beg for a kiss.

Agnes felt a smile take over her face; her expression went rubbery with pleasure, and she ducked her head to the side so she wouldn’t be caught out. “Mama, that’s just silly,” Agnes tried to object, but Catherine continued:

Oh Agnes, I pledge you I cannot abide

To live my life through without you at my side

If you’ll come to Washburn to make a new life,

It shall do me great honor to make you my wife.

Oh hey, away awa-ay . . .

Agnes couldn’t control her tone of voice either, which had the loose, chuckling quality of a repressed giggle. “Oh, Mama! For goodness sake! William might just as well be my
brother—
”

They cro-ossed the wi-ide blue ocean,

They sa-ailed the mi-ighty sea,

And never more did I happen to meet

That young girl of Newcastle Street.

When once I was living down Devonshire way,

I knew a young lady as fair as the day.

Sweet Agnes Claytor with hair bright as gold,

Who never was brazen, who never was bold.

Then a young soldier came seeking the lass.

Right by her window brave William did pass . . .

“Mama, stop it!” Agnes pleaded, but she was beaming with absurd pleasure, like a little girl. “I’ve only had one
letter
from William. All about learning to fly. And, Mama, those words hardly work, anyway. Hair bright as
gold
 . . . ?” She looked over to see that her mother’s face had an eager expression. Her mother looked pleased and light-hearted in a way Agnes had not seen her for such a long time, and Agnes couldn’t help but continue to grin at her.

“I know,” Catherine said, “I know . . . but what about . . .”

Sweet Agnes Claytor with hair black as night,

Who never did argue, who never did fight . . .

“Uhmm, that’s not very good . . .”

Sweet Agnes Claytor with hair black as slate

Was never unhappy, was never irate . . . .

Sweet Agnes Claytor with hair black as coal

La da da, la da da, la da la da stole . . . ?

“Umm . . . something better to work with that . . .”

Always was happy and always was droll . . .

Agnes’s spirits soared. Who in the world was ever more fun than her own mother? Who among any of her friends had such a sense of nonsense, knew the pleasure of falling into plain silliness? Agnes hadn’t mentioned her interest in Warren Scofield to anyone, but she looked at her mother, who radiated delight just now. “Well, Mama, it might not be William Dameron at all that I have any interest in,” she said, and Catherine turned sideways to Bandit so that she and Agnes were less than a foot apart, their eyes level since Agnes was on a step stool.

Catherine’s expression widened, and she smiled with excitement. “Oh, Agnes! You can tell me! I’ve seen the two of you . . . since you were children. And it’s just right, I think. A handsome hero! Gone off to war. Well, he’ll be a nice-looking man when he fills out. A pilot!” Her voice was infused with the anticipated pleasure of learning a secret. “You can’t keep
everything
from me! But I won’t say anything, you know. I wouldn’t do that.
Unmerciful
teasing. I know how your brothers . . . You’re safe telling me. I always thought it must be William.”

But they were interrupted just then by the sight of Mr. Evans coming across the field from the direction of the Damerons’, carrying an assortment of long-handled tools— a rake and spade and two shovels—and glaring their way in obvious disapproval. Catherine waved happily at him. He had worked for Agnes’s grandfather and did a little bit of everything around the property, keeping a special eye on the horses. He had known Agnes since she was a little girl, but he was a wiry, tall, dour-seeming man who suffered from terrible shyness. He never could speak for any length of time while looking a person straight in the eye; his gaze inevitably slipped sideways, giving the impression of a sort of evasive displeasure.

“Agnes, what’re you putting on that horse?” he said when he got nearer. “Bandit’s patient, but he’s not liking that a bit.”

“Oh, no. It’s all right, Mr. Evans. It’s Mama’s soap. It smells exactly like roses. Bandit won’t smell so much like a stable.”

“That’s where he lives, isn’t it? I don’t expect he minds the smell at all.”

“Oh, you’re probably right, Mack,” Catherine answered in Agnes’s stead. “But he needs some feminine attention, poor old boy,” she added disarmingly. Mack Evans thought highly of all the horses in his charge, but he liked Mrs. Claytor best of the various people he had to deal with. The two of them were surprisingly at ease around each other. In the company of horses Catherine lost her self-absorption and became genuinely inquisitive, involved, and never even thought of the impression she made one way or another.

“It’s Agnes’s birthday, Mr. Evans.” Catherine addressed him formally, which seemed almost coquettish after her initial breezy familiarity. “She’s eighteen today—”

“Nineteen, Mama,” Agnes said.

“—and my aunt sent her a beautiful habit. You wait till you see, Mack! And a hat. She’s going to ride in to church tomorrow.”

Mr. Evans didn’t say anything, but his whole attitude became less recalcitrant, and he began to move off around the side of the barn.

“This horse is just going to be gorgeous!” Catherine called in his direction, and he gave a brief nod and went on his way, leaving them to what he clearly thought was a frivolous bit of work. When they’d rinsed Bandit, and while Agnes was using the side of her hand to sluice water from his coat, Catherine stood back a moment, looking him over. “My, you’re handsome, Bandit,” she said softly to the horse, and he looked exactly like he agreed, and Agnes and Catherine laughed at him.

“Don’t think we’re not onto you,” Catherine said to him conversationally. “You just like to stroll around the barn because it makes old Dilly and especially poor Buckeye so unhappy.” Bandit was always managing to unlatch his stall, and they would find him investigating the barn with his back to the other two, and Buckeye would be whuffling and complaining at the injustice.

“How could you have gotten so dirty? I don’t like the look of the white on him, Agnes,” she said. “It’s yellowish still. And I never like the look of white feet when a horse doesn’t have stockings on all four legs.” Catherine moved around to look at Bandit assessingly. “Ummm. I know what. I have an idea. Now wait here! This horse has got to do you proud. He’s got to make a fine appearance. And his white stockings . . . Wait here! I’ll be right back! And I want you to tell me all about this mysterious beau, Agnes. It’s not fair—you can’t leave me not knowing. Leave me in suspense like this. And it’ll be fair. I’ll tell you a secret, too. Then we’ll be even. Don’t you think that’s fair? I’ll come up with something! Oh, I’ll come up with something you’ve never even guessed! It’s the only way to have secrets.”