Three Story House: A Novel (44 page)

“You shouldn’t do that,” Roger said, startling her.

Mellie turned and ran full speed into his arms, as she did with her father and all of her uncles. “Who cares? It’ll just go into the river and disintegrate.”

He set her down and rubbed the small of his back. “Aren’t you a little old for jump hugs?”

“Never,” she said, adjusting the waistband of her skirt. She looked up to see Roger looking at her as if he wasn’t sure how to treat her. The older she got, the more often men looked at her that way.

“Some people wouldn’t find it proper,” he said, tucking in his own shirttail, which had come loose on his walk from the brewery.

“Did you make enough money to finish any of those rooms?” Mellie did a little tap dance on the roof.

“A little,” he said. “I’m getting close. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy this summer when it’s too hot to sleep.”

“You could get the air,” she said. “Got enough saved up for that at least. Daddy put it in his and Mama’s room and we all go in there and sleep shoulder to shoulder on especially muggy nights.”

Roger looked away from her. “I don’t think you should come here anymore,” he said. “At least not unless you tell your parents where you are.”

Mellie threw her book and it skidded across the roof. “That’s ridiculous. You know Daddy would never allow me to be here. Where else am I supposed to go?”

“Wherever it is fifteen-year-old girls should be going.” He straightened his back. It was the first time Mellie had ever seen him look like her daddy, who adopted the same stiff posture after his rages, which quite often left messes for everyone to clean up. The resoluteness worried Mellie. She and Roger had been having a version of this same argument for several months. It was one of the many ways the adults around her were beginning to treat her like a grown-up.

A commotion of people and voices moved from her daddy’s property onto Roger’s. Instinctively, Mellie moved into the cupola where she would be out of sight. In a moment, loud pounding reverberated from Roger’s back door. Without a word, he moved to the edge of the roof. “What in the hell do you want?” he asked.

From the ground, Mellie heard her father’s voice, indistinct but several octaves higher than normal.

“I can’t hear you,” Roger said.

“Have you seen my daughter?”

Mellie watched Roger’s shoulders collapse. “Which one? You got so damn many, it’s like you’re running a nunnery.”

“Now’s not the time for jokes. We’re afraid she’s been caught up in that bomber crash—”

Another voice, Mellie thought it was her Uncle Nathan, interrupted. “They say it took out a whole city block and a trolley car—”

Her daddy took back control of the conversation. “—I’m not saying she’s dead. But her mother’s hysterical, thinks that she was on that trolley that’s a ball of fire now, because she was supposed to be here hours ago with my lunch and nobody’s seen her. I’m asking you. Seems like you got a lot of time on your hands and just sit up there on that roof of yours and watch other people work. So, tell me, have you seen my daughter?”

“Later,” the driver said, “when wild rumors had stopped circulating and the paper gave a full account of the accident, it would become clear that the bomber had taken out only one house, not an entire city block and there weren’t, in fact, any trolley tracks even near the wreck. A B-25 flying on a training mission from the Millington base, just north of Memphis inexplicably nosedived into a house—killing the three officers on the plane and the four people in the house. It took the fire department nearly two days to put out the fire.”

The woman wanted to tell him that she understood Mellie more than he could know, but instead she closed her eyes.

Mellie had left the cupola without realizing it. As the conversation unfolded, she stepped closer to the edge of the roof. She got caught up in the drama of the situation and the romantic notion that anyone at all would care if she lived or died.

“Who you got up there with you, Roger?” one of her uncles asked.

“I left your lunch on the table,” Mellie said. “If you go in the office, you’ll see it sitting at the head of the table, where you always sit.”

“Mellie,” her daddy said.

There were other words exchanged, but none of them sunk into Mellie’s mind. Very quickly everyone was on the roof yelling and her uncles had surrounded Roger, punching him and kicking at him, calling him a “son-of-a-bitch” and then her daddy had him by the neck of his shirt and was hauling him toward the edge of the roof as if he were a sack of potatoes.

“No!” Mellie’s scream echoed around the open space of the rooftop, but not one of her uncles or her father looked at her.

“Pull down your skirt,” her uncle Noah said. “I have to take you home to your mother.”

Her father dropped Roger off the roof, pulling his shoulders back as he let go. In a flash, Mellie had run across the roof and into her father, shoving him hard enough that he stumbled and then followed his half-brother off the roof. Mellie would have jumped, but two of her uncles grabbed her and carried her downstairs, heaving her next to Roger on the muddy clay ground of the bluff. Neither her father nor Roger died. The doctor said they were lucky that April had been such a wet month—making the ground soft. The papers said that’s what kept the fire from the bomber crash from spreading, too. The wet ground. Roger broke his left ankle and cracked several ribs. Her father had been less lucky. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair—having lost the use of his legs.

“Like the story of the bomber, the details got lost with time.” The driver paused and looked at the woman.

“The child put her father in a wheelchair.” She thought then of her own parents, who were puzzled by the ways their daughter had changed since coming home from California.

“The next part, I don’t know all that much about. I think only old Mellie knew the whole story and she died more than five years ago, but what people say, well, I can tell you that.”

The woman imagined who Mellie had grown up to be as the driver spoke.

Roger and Mellie married in 1948. There’d been pretenses the first few years, of them maintaining their previous relationship of uncle and niece, but her family continued not to speak to her—as did everyone she’d ever known and there wasn’t enough money for her to go away. She became lonely and without realizing it, she’d come to view Roger as something very different than an uncle.

The clerk at the courthouse was an old man with even older glasses. He looked at their paperwork and then back at them. She stepped behind Roger. Neither of them liked going out in public together. “A lot of people thought you were already married,” the clerk said. “Of course, I know better. I make it my business to know who is and who isn’t. You’d be surprised at who isn’t married. Some of the old timers who were here from way before the plague aren’t married. Wasn’t a requirement for some folks. You moved in together, paid the father a bit of money, and that was as good as one of these.” He slid the marriage license across the counter, pointing out where they’d need to sign and where the judge would sign.

Roger cleared his throat. “Is he going to give us any trouble?”

“Not unless you’re black and neither of you as far as I know got mixed up in any of that. I think the way he sees it is there ain’t no proof you are related. Just hearsay and a bit of land the boys gave you.” The clerk laughed, clearly excluding them from the joke and picked up as if in the middle of a story. “That one woman thought a head scarf could fool us.”

They made their way down the hallway, listening to the clerk laugh at private stories. “Probably be laughing about us tomorrow,” Mellie said.

“You’ve got to think better of people,” Roger said, taking her hand. “That’s how I came to love you—seeing how much you thought of me. Not even my mother ever looked at me the way you do sometimes.”

They looked away from each other. Roger’s story of his family had been different than the version Mellie had heard growing up. Frederick Linwood had married Roger’s mother first, when he arrived in Arkansas and then came across the river and started up with Mellie’s grandmother. She wondered if the clerk knew that her grandparents hadn’t had a legal marriage. The judge’s secretary called them in. Her eyes shined with real tears. “I love marriages,” she whispered, bringing Mellie in for a breathy hug. “The judge might grab at you,” she said. “He don’t mean nothing by it.”

“Mr. and Miss Linwood,” the judge said, opening his hands wide. The judge was one of those skinny men with a strangely large stomach. “Making your little arrangement legal, I see.”

“I’d appreciate just getting this over with,” Roger said, squeezing Mellie’s hand.

“You’re not the first man to say that.” The judge slapped Roger’s back and then lightly patted Mellie on the rear end. The secretary nodded and then blushed. “I’ll marry you, but there’s a few things that need to be said.”

“I do,” Mellie said, hoping to speed the proceedings along.

The judge shook his head. “I tend to disagree with your father, which is why I’m going to do this. There are some people who think that I shouldn’t. Been talking about it ever since you filed the paperwork a few weeks back. But I say, let ’em get married.”

They made their way down the hallway to the judge’s office, where they would sit for an interview and then for the actual ceremony. Mellie reached over and took Roger’s hand in hers, squeezing lightly. He squeezed back. She missed her sisters most of all. There’d always been a distance between her and her mother and she couldn’t even consider her father. He’d become dead to her the moment she ran into him and he stumbled off the roof. Running her gloved fingers along the edge of the chair, she picked up the dirt from hundreds of other couples who’d had to endure the judge’s proclamations. If God had forgiven her, he’d send her daughters. Small, curly haired angels who could replace her sisters.

“You understand he’ll have the final say, right?”

The judge appeared to be speaking to Mellie. She looked up.

“Little lady is dumbstruck. I guess that’s the good part about marrying them young; they don’t know enough not to treat you like you’re in charge. My wife was only fourteen when we got married. My son married him a girl from back East, who’d gotten some college under her belt.” The judge paused and pulled at the waistband of his pants. “Might’ve been a mistake. Turns out college doesn’t just get under the belt but in the backbone as well. Of course, there’s no undoing those sorts of things, unless you get out before you have children.”

Roger cleared his throat. “I have to be at work by noon.”

“We got time,” the judge said. “It don’t but take a minute to say the words.”

Mellie thought a bit of praise might move the proceedings along. She cleared her throat and then complimented the judge on his collection of hats posted on pegs along the side wall of his office. He paid her no attention.

“I watched you building that house,” the judge said to Roger. “Worked the rail yard a few summers trying to get enough money to do something else.”

“Took me a good while,” Roger said. Mellie had often heard him talk with people about the house. It stoked curiosity in others. “Built a lot of it off of what fell off those trains you were working on.”

“I made a lot of money from stuff that fell off those cars, too,” the judge said. He and Roger raised their eyebrows at each other. Mellie supposed it was recognition.

Roger tapped her knee. His hand was slick with sweat. She considered what would happen if the judge refused to marry them.

“I grew up in one of them,” the judge said, swallowing the last part of his words. “I mean a spite house. They’re all over the South, you know?”

Roger nodded, but Mellie didn’t understand. “There’s only the one,” she said. “I mean they only call it that because Roger built it on land they thought he couldn’t build on. That’s why Daddy and the uncles gave him that bit of land.”

“Nah. Spite houses go back further than that,” the judge pushed back his chair as if preparing to stand. “My momma wasn’t married when she had me, or any of my brothers. The house sat way back on the corner of my grandfather’s plantation—almost hid by lollylobs around it.”

“I put mine where everyone could see,” Roger said. His palms had dried and he sat in the chair as if it were his own. Mellie understood that the men were not speaking of houses, but of other, larger issues.

“And now, I have a plate of cold chicken with my name on it,” the judge said, standing and calling his secretary in as a witness. Prescribed and formal words were spoken, and then the judge with a nod prompted Mellie when the time came to agree to marry Roger. They kissed, because they’d been told to, and they walked out of the office.

“Happily ever after,” the woman said. The way the driver spoke of the couple made her see them as if they were alive.

“Of course, they only ever had the one kid—a girl, I believe. And that Roger died awful early. Had a heart attack at the brewery.”

The woman stood, thinking about what her own happily-ever-after might look like.

“I haven’t told you the best part,” the driver said as the woman pulled the cord to indicate she’d be getting off at the next stop. “Given your experiences, I think you’ll find it a fitting end.”

“How could there be more?” She didn’t have anywhere she needed to be, but the trolley had become unbearably hot.

“Besides, after all that, don’t you want to see the house again?”

The woman returned to her seat.

The driver slowed the trolley as it turned around the last corner and the river came back into view. “This is a story that my father was there for, so I know it more than the others.”

Mellie called the fire department to tell them that someone had gotten stuck. She thought it would keep quiet, but that afternoon, the
Press Scimitar
carried a large photo of the unfortunate lady wedged in the front door. The caption read, “Not skinny enough.”

The woman looked at the floor, grateful at least that the world had stopped making fun of the obese. She knew that the driver was picturing her as she’d been when she first set foot on the weight-loss show.