The Major's Wife (Jubilant Falls series Book 2) (20 page)

"You ain't hiding’ behind no more pill bottles with me no more." Novella folded her arms resolutely and stepped to the foot of my bed. She pulled the Valium from her apron pocket and held it tantalizingly in front of me. "You ain't getting these in your mouth, ‘til I'm done with you."

"What?"

"I'm tired of the way you treat Miss Kay. She's standing by you, Miz James, and you and I both know you're guilty as sin."

"You can be dismissed, Novella."

"Then do it, but you're going to hear every word I got to say, whether you like it or not." Novella's black eyes flamed. "I knew you when you was just a new bride, Miz James, when you didn't know the difference between a fork and a finger bowl. For all your airs and all your stories, I know you ain't come from no money. I know you're just poor white trash—I seen too many white people like you. You made your place in this town on Doc Montgomery's coattails, and you know it. You done spent your life making sure nobody tarnishes your precious image, even if it means driving the best daughter anybody ever had half out of her mind."

"I am certainly not responsible for—"

"You hush! I ain't don't with you yet. You set up Mr. Grant to do in Mr. Henning. I know you did. You're a mean old woman, Miz James. You're sick, and you're twisted inside. I’ve seen too much of the way you operate to not know any different. I don't doubt for a minute that you done set up this whole thing. I don't know nothing ‘bout your past, and I don't think I care to. Whatever it was has made you into a monster, and you deserve anything that comes your way."

There it was again, Ma, that awful, screaming noise. Who is it that does that? Why don't she stop? Can't somebody make her stop?

Chapter 10 Marcus

Some stories swallow you whole, like Jonah and the whale. Others turn upside down, so that you are Jonah who swallows the whale. When that happens—and it does to every reporter at one time or another—you’re so deep inside the details of the story that you can’t see the truth. Then you’ve got to let it go.

I lost my truth. Everything I held dear, Kay, my career, and a chance at making something right were dead: and, in the name of ambition and what I called justice, I was the one who killed it.

The first three months after I came home to my parents’ house in Chillicothe, Ohio, I spent staring out the window of my childhood bedroom, or staring at their small color television from my perch across the room on the living room couch.

My parents knew very little of what happened. They knew I had a big story by the tail, a story so big it reached back to bite me, and damn near swallowed me whole. They also knew it cost me the woman I loved. I could not tell them more.

I came down for meals, dressed in sweatpants and a torn Packers tee shirt for weeks on end, until my father told me I smelled like old man Dorningham’s hog farm, and if I wanted to continue to live under his Goddamn roof, I take a Goddamn shower and find myself a Goddamn job.

“Yes, sir.” I said, staring at my plate of Mom’s chicken and dumplings.

“Frank,” Mom laid a hand on my father’s hairy arm. “The boy’s had a shock. He just needs a little time and then I’m sure—“

“He’s had Goddamn ninety days to sit around here and eat my food and watch my television and whine.” Dad threw his napkin down on the table. I could still see the blue USMC tattoo through the black hairs on his forearm. “Life’s hard. It kicks you in the teeth more than once. There’s a helluva lot more people out there who’ve had to deal with worser things than whatever’s eating him. He’s got both arms and legs and at least half a brain. There’s no Goddamn reason why I should be supporting him.”

My father was right. I stood in the shower the next morning and felt the water and the soap course over me like a baptism. Once again, I found myself looking for a new beginning.

Kay was lost to me forever; I had to accept that.

My sister Calpurnia and her husband lived south of Chillicothe, outside a little town called Docetville. Cal had my mother’s love of reading and the tall, angular, good looks of our mother’s youth, but she improved on the genetics she inherited.

She had her teeth straightened, gotten her hair frosted, and looked like every other soccer mom driving her minivan into the Wal-Mart parking lot. She wore denim jumpers with kittens embroidered on them, white canvas Keds, and cotton anklets to work at her job as a fourth grade teacher in the Docetville Local Schools.

Her husband, Dave, was one of those affable, bland, blonde guys whose wardrobe mainly consists of golf shirts and khaki pants and who managed to bounce from industrial sales job to sales job without ever affecting the family’s standard of living.

That afternoon, she was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Mom as I came back from the printers with a stack of resumes.

“How’s my favorite sister?” I asked, as I kissed her cheek.

“Looks like you’re getting yourself back on your feet.” Cal smiled, as she eyed me critically. Her southern Ohio accent seemed to get stronger, the older she got. “That’s a good thing.”

I loosened my tie and poured myself a cup of coffee. “Yeah. I’m getting there, slowly,” I said, dropping into a vinyl-padded kitchen chair between Mom and Cal.

“Calpurnia says Docetville schools are looking for substitute teachers,” Mom offered.

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think anybody would want me in a classroom teaching their children.”

“You know, the
Docetville Truth
is looking for an editor.” Cal fished through the canvas tote at her feet and pulled out a copy of the newspaper. She scanned the page for the ad and when she found it, pushed it across the table to me. “It’s not a big paper. It comes out on Thursdays and it’s mostly got what the kids at school are doing and what the village council says.”

“I don’t know.” Fact was, I didn’t think I wanted to go back to journalism. I didn’t have what Jess had, that hard-eyed ability to boil down everything to a six-word headline, to set my feelings aside and make a cold, hard decision on a story, regardless of how it affected someone. But I didn’t want to teach and couldn’t do anything else, really, when it came down to it.

“Let me think about it.”

I patted Calpurnia on the shoulder and, taking the newspaper with me, went back to my room.

I dropped my sport coat across a chair in the corner and, deep in thought, flopped on the twin bed.

Jess.

I hadn’t thought about him for a while. Just before I left Jubilant Falls, I stood in the doorway of his hospital room, staring at the tubes that seemed to come from every orifice and at the white turban of bandages around his head. His left arm was in traction, held at a right angle above his body, his fingers purple and curled around the plaster-of-Paris cast. His neurosurgeon put him into a drug-induced coma, hoping to give his synapses a chance to recover and minimize the damage done by Grant Matthews’ Louisville Slugger.

There were no guarantees on recovery, Carol told me, and I held her as she cried.

“Will anything ever be the same?” she asked tearfully.

I didn’t think so then and, lying on the woven plaid Sears bedspread, didn’t think so now.

I heard the kitchen door slam and looked out the window to see Mom, head down and with hands on her hips, stroll slowly down the sidewalk to Cal’s minivan. She and my sister were deep in conversation. I slid open the window sash to listen.

“He’ll come out of it, Mom. You’ve just got to give it time,” Cal was saying.

“I don’t know, honey. Whatever it was, he won’t talk about it. Your Daddy was a little hard on him last night at dinner.”

“That’s Daddy.” Cal jingled her keys in her hand and shrugged.

“Maybe this job at your little newspaper will be something he’s interested in.”

I closed the window and stepped into the hallway where an old push-button phone sat on a small table at the head of the stairs. Automatically, I punched in the number of the
Jubilant Falls Journal-Gazette
newsroom.

“Newsroom, Porter,” the cops’ reporter intoned.

“Hey, John, it’s me. Marcus Henning.”

“Marcus! Hey, guy, how’s it going? Where are you? We never heard where you ended up and everybody’s been asking.”

“I’m living at my folks in Chillicothe. I’m not working yet, just trying to get my life back together, slowly.”

“Don’t blame you. That was a nasty time there. Still is kind of, I guess, for some folks.”

“Yeah, that’s why I called. I wanted to know how Jess was doing.”

“He’s been moved. He’s out of the coma now, and he’s at a rehabilitation institute in Cleveland. Carol has taken their daughter and they’ve moved up there for the short term.”

“Who they get to replace Jess?”

Porter made a disgusted sound. “Watt promoted Addison. She’s managing editor now.”

“You applied and didn’t get the job, I take it?”

“Basically. I’m looking around for something else. If I can’t move up here, there’s no sense in staying, I guess.”

“What’s Kay James doing?”

“The literacy center director? I don’t know. After the trial was over, I never heard anything.”

“Did she leave town? Take another job?”

“I dunno.”

I listened to him complain for a few more minutes, then hung up. Porter’s dreams always exceeded his abilities, and it was no surprise that the publisher promoted Addison. She was good, and she deserved the position.

For a moment, I stared at the phone. I punched in Kay’s phone number.

“I’m sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected.”
A disembodied voice filled my ear.
“If you think you have received this message in error, please hang up and try the number again.”

So she was gone, too. I gently replaced to phone in its cradle and leaned my head against the wall, my eyes closed.

“Marcus.“

I turned to see my mother standing in the stairwell.

“You’ve got to let her go, son. You’ve got to let her go.”

* * *

“We don’t get many with your kind of experience for this kind of a job.” Group Publisher Stephen Hamlin looked through his trendy, wire-framed glasses at my résumé. Sitting behind an expensive cherry desk, Hamlin wore an Italian suit, an Ohio State University tie, and reeked of expensive cologne and political correctness.

He poured himself a glass of Perrier and, tipping the bottle my direction, wordlessly offered some to me.

“No thanks. I’m back in the area, and thought I’d like to try my hand at being an editor,” I responded. I rehearsed my answers in the car on the way to Columbus where the regional offices of the
Docetville Truth’s
parent company, Choice Publications, were located.

“What brings you to the Chillicothe area?”
I focused on a framed picture behind Hamlin’s desk of Choice’s flagship newspaper, the national daily,
America This Morning
, and gave him my canned answer.

“It’s my home town. My parents live there. I had a relationship go sour and decided to come back.”

“Well, happens to the best of us. I think you’re very qualified for the job at the
Docetville Truth
, but it’s probably a much slower pace than you’re used to. However, we’re used to our smaller papers being training grounds for some of our larger products, and I think you’ll find there’s a great deal of opportunity with Choice Publications.” Hamlin began to tick off the benefits, but I was only half-listening.

Product?
When did a newspaper become a product? Or had I been so spoiled at the family-owned
Journal-Gazette
that I was unaware of the corporate culture that was beginning to overtake the news business?

I didn’t realize it then, but Hamlin was one of many business types who were invading newspapers across the country. Men and women like Hamlin had never written a word on deadline in their lives, but worked in everything from banking to manufacturing and figured they could apply that knowledge to newspapering. Everything came down to the balance sheet, not the quality of information being provided to the community, not the free expression of opinions, or serving as a record of local government actions.

I wondered how Addison McIntyre was adjusting to her new role and shifted in my seat. Where had Kay gone? Why had she left Jubilant Falls? Was the shame of knowing that her mother was behind Aurora Development too much to handle?

Let her go, son. Let her go.
My mother’s words echoed in my ears.

“And, if those figures are satisfactory for you, Mr. Henning, I’m prepared to offer you the job as the Docetville editor,” Hamlin finished.

“Sure. Sounds great.” He probably offered me two dollars a week and all the peanuts I could eat, but I didn’t care. It was a job.

And not much of one. The next day, Hamlin and I met with the staff. I had one part-time staff writer, a local woman, Carlene Johnston, who often brought two small children to work with her, who were well-behaved enough to sit in the corner of the office and play with a box of Legos, and Doris Overton, my full-time office manager who also handled the circulation and classified advertising. My part-time sports writer, Larry Westerbrock, worked full time at the local Peterbuilt plant. On my first day, he informed me that, if overtime ever became mandatory on Friday nights, he wouldn’t be able to cover football games.

Yes, it certainly was different from the hard-driving newsroom Jess Hoffman ran.

The building was old and decrepit, with the name of the paper painted in an old-style font in a circle on the front plate glass window, and old Linotype machines sat beneath a mantle of dust in the back room. Mice had nested in the nooks and crannies of the old equipment, and the two resident cats, Clark Kent and Lois Lane, were charged with keeping their populations down, although they often found it less stressful to sleep atop the computer monitor on my desk.

The pace was certainly slower. I covered the Docetville village council, the township trustees, and took my own photos, getting them developed at the one-hour photo at the back of the Heidman’s grocery store.

In my first week, I took a picture of two kids selling lemonade at the edge of town, of a potato from Harvey Schneemeister’s backyard garden that he claimed resembled Mickey Mouse, and a grip-and-grin ribbon-cutting photo of the new addition on the Baptist church, hardly the gritty subjects of a daily newspaper’s front page.

The outside world rarely intruded on our front page. Later in the summer, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I interviewed Betty Van Britton whose son was in one of the early Air Force units shipped over to Saudi Arabia. But for the most part, Docetville was its own small, self-contained world.

I put my pages together on my outdated computer each Wednesday night, printing them out and waxing them down on grid sheets to be shipped by truck to the press in Columbus. It was a primitive way to do things, but I figured I was getting back to basics not only personally, but professionally as well.

Nights, I slept on Cal and Dave’s couch. It wasn’t a bad way to live, and they didn’t ask me how long I was staying. By this time it was summer, so Cal was home with the twins, Dodd and Deena, who were just finishing the second grade. We spent Saturday afternoons drinking Kool-Aid in the back yard watching the kids splash around in the blue plastic wading pool, and each Sunday I waved good-bye from the front door as they all bundled into the mini-van to head to the Docetville First Methodist Church.

“Don’t know why they call it First Methodist,” Dave said, elbowing me one morning and grinning. “Should call it Only Methodist Church.”

I think he sort of envied that I stayed at home, pleading heathenism and clicking through the morning news shows in my robe and boxers, while he and Calpurnia greeted visiting worshippers, led Sunday school, and counted the offering after services.