Uncertain Ground (3 page)

All these things seemed to have particular places as if permanence might bring order to the whole assortment. I looked down at three tightly draped buxom ladies who supported a marble table top on their heads and laughed. The ladies were, at least, useful. Like my Tennessee grandmother, the Mcleans accumulated things and apparently never rid themselves of any object they ever owned no matter whether they had bought or inherited it.

I jumped when Aunt Bertha stuck her head in the doorway, the rest of her almost disembodied in the dark hall.

“What are you doing in there?”

It wasn’t an unfriendly question; she was simply curious.

“Just looking. You’ve got a lot of antiques.”

“Mostly Mother Mclean’s passed down to Mowrey with the house. You like antiques?”

I didn’t. I longed for the spare lines of modern Scandinavian design, for light, not for rooms darkened to save Victorian furniture’s patina and the oriental rugs’ colors. I wanted open, uncurtained windows I could see the world through.

“Mother does.” I said.

“But you?”

“Some. I’m used to them.”

She didn’t press further. “I’m going upstairs for a nap. Summer afternoons make me drowsy.”

I’d been surprised by her cheerful reference to Mother Mclean. Mother thought of her otherwise. “Mean … penny pinching. She wouldn’t pay for a maid when she could have well afforded to, and she kept Bertha working in that house like she was a slave.” Once free of her mother-in-law, Bertha didn’t seem to mind keeping her furniture. Perhaps she’d looked after the household so long everything seemed like her own by the time the old lady died.

I eyed the copper colored chandelier with its daffodil shaped shades reflected in a long gilt-framed mirror that faintly
distorted images. Wary of seeing myself pulled out of shape in the darkened room, I kept away from the mirror. It wasn’t like a fun house mirror, although I didn’t like the way they turned people into freaks either. Aunt Bertha’s mirror pushed eyes further up into foreheads, elongated noses. Remembering my first visit’s reflection, I knew it would nudge familiar features vaguely askew and this was more threatening than a fun house mirror; it merely hinted at the grotesque and provoked fear of what else might be lurking. Dreading that possibility, I began to search for something more reassuring.

Since we’d lived in Nashville near relatives, their things had become so familiar I’d almost stopped seeing them, but the houses of my Texas kin held sets of clues, suggestions about unknown people with unknown characteristics. Aunt Earlene, I’d noticed seemed to revere Jensen silver, or anything else she might buy at Neiman-Marcus. Like Mother and Aunt Bertha, she prized antiques. Uncle Estes who had little interest in objects other than guns and saddles, did like old straight chairs with cowhide seats. He was permitted to keep one in the kitchen.

Keeping my back to Bertha’s mirror, I picked up a book of pictures of French cathedrals. There was the angel I liked, the smiling angel of Rheims, holding stone robes so lightly that they seemed made of silk, making a joyful proclamation: Catholicism is the true religion. I’d given the book to Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey for Christmas. Had they ever done anything more than idly turn pages as I was doing? For most of Mother’s family, newspapers were enough. She and Earlene read house magazines, the big glossy ones with pictures of totally clean, totally unobtainable rooms where everything matched beautifully or clashed stylishly, a perfection neither one of them really hoped to achieve. Perhaps they just liked knowing such rooms existed somewhere. Estes thumbed through
Time
occasionally. None of them read like my father, Kenyon, and I. All of us lived with our noses in books. My father swore he couldn’t go to sleep without reading something first. Next to us, Bertha hardly read at all. That was one reason I’d chosen a picture book—that and the
Catholicism. The Chandlers were Methodists except for Bertha who’d become a Catholic when she married.

“Scotch Catholics, all the Mcleans were,” Mother said. “Mama nearly died when they married.”

I knew about religious conflicts in the South. I hadn’t thought they had moved to Texas. According to Mother when she was a girl, Granny Chandler hadn’t approved of drinking, dancing, card playing, and Catholicism. I felt she had a weak sense of sin. What about killing and rape and dropping atom bombs?

Granny must have given up on Mother since she and my father drank at home, in other people’s houses, at the Ft. Hood’s Officer’s Club where they also danced. Card playing was definitely acceptable. Women met with others at bridge clubs all over town. As for Catholicism, in Leon it was generally left to a few Anglos and the Mexican population. A small group of them clustered around an equally small church on the east highway near the outskirts of town.

I had never gone inside that church. I doubted anybody else I knew had either.

Granny Chandler, a pleasant, round-faced lady in her seventies, stayed in Mullin safely removed from the wickedness of Galveston or Leon. She’d been a frontier sort of woman, one who lived in a place not really ready for settlement till after the Civil War. The Comanches had roamed freely around there, a fact Emmett told me with great pleasure. He was so dark-skinned he might have been part Indian himself.

Though Granny had forbidden Aunt Bertha to join the church, the rest of the family, both her brothers and her sister, seemed to ignore the Mcleans’ religion. Amazed at the strength of old prejudices, I remained curious. I could, I suppose, ask her how she felt about becoming a Catholic; however, I was too unsure about how she’d react, and I would never have waked up anybody to ask such a question. She was napping by now beneath a dried palm cross tacked on the wall above her headboard. Even if she were given to abrupt questions herself, she’d
be too upset over losing her nap to give a clear answer. I could imagine her rising up hollering, sitting straight up in bed, a plump middle-aged woman multiplied nine times by triple mirrors on each of the three dressers stationed around the room. Across from her bedstead was Uncle Mowrey’s.

She slept happily surrounded by her nest of dressers, a chair, and a small daybed. Too small for me or for Emmett—unused except as a catchall for Bertha’s treasures—the daybed was covered with bits of frayed tapestry that might become pillow covers if she ever got around to making them, boxes of last year’s Christmas decorations, a clutter of costume jewelry, and an amber rosary that had been blessed by the pope.

“It got broken anyway,” Bertha sighed, then laughed.

The day we arrived, she led us to our part of the bedroom, a double-sized space since the sliding doors which would have ordinarily made two bedrooms had been pushed wide open.

I saw then that she meant for Emmett and me to sleep on the twin beds straight across from hers and Uncle Mowrey’s.

“We all need the draft.” Bertha pointed to the tall front and back windows, the only one without curtains in the house.

“You want us both here?” I was so surprised I asked out loud. I’d expected a room of my own. Why couldn’t Emmett have slept on the couch downstairs? That was the way Kenyon and I had slept when we first visited. Now Emmett had to have the only other bed in the house, one next to mine separated by a narrow strip of rug and Bertha’s supposed supervision. Uncle Mowrey, slightly deaf already, wouldn’t have heard an approaching bomb, and he was, I thought, generally so unnoticing he wouldn’t see somebody tap dancing naked in front of him.

“Well, Celia, after all, you are cousins.” She smiled as if she had said the most ordinary thing.

Emmett grinned, hung a few things in the closet, and dumped this suitcase under the bed. He’d been living out of it mostly ever since. I’d emptied mine into one of the dressers and the closet. I wanted to slam the door when I finished, but Aunt Bertha was waiting on her side of the room so I didn’t. I was still
unhappy in that bedroom with Emmett. I had to make sure he wasn’t around or go to the bathroom to dress and undress. And when I walked out, I had to make sure I had enough clothes on. At home I could wander around in a slip or pajamas. Not here. At the first sight of my blue-flower-sprigged shortie pajamas Emmett had given me a mock leer, just enough of one to let me know he was watching. When I added a robe, he stood by his bed wearing only a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms and laughed. Despising being made to feel too prim, I pulled the robe off and got the leer once more. When I got into bed, I turned my back on him. A flush broke over my neck and down my shoulders as if I were standing under a warm shower. I rolled over and threw my pillow at him. He wouldn’t give it back.

“I’ll have to ask Aunt Bertha for another one,” I whispered.

He laughed and tossed it toward me as if he’d planned to all along, and for that moment, I wasn’t an equal. I was only about ten-years-old and at the mercy of a slightly indulgent, much older boy.

I needed a place to be by myself, a room with a door I could shut. Kenyon and I had shared a bedroom until I was six. Since then, except for the semesters away, I’d had a room of my own. Emmett and Uncle Mowrey both snored. So did Aunt Bertha sometimes. So did I maybe. I didn’t know. My roommates at the university hadn’t complained so far.

We’d only been in Galveston two days. The first I spent mainly at the beach only four or five blocks away. I hadn’t minded being there alone with the low waves, the gray-brown sand, the huge light blue sky that turned almost white at noon. So much of my life I’d spent visiting old people’s houses—especially Grandmother Henderson’s in Tennessee during the war—waiting for time to pass, waiting for my father to come home, waiting to grow up. Granny Chandler’s in Mullin was the one we often visited on Sundays now. It smelled different, not of soot, old wood, lemon oil, and medicine I remembered. Granny Chandler’s smelled of gas fires and a whiff of decay I associated with talcum powder and earth. I wanted to escape all
those smells, the darkness of those old houses, to be outside, to be alone.

It had been hot on Galveston beach yesterday, hotter than many summer days I’d known, but the sea was fresh and clear, the tides so slight when I was there that, despite the long slow slope of the continental shelf, the water had hardly roiled the sand. Other days near the shore the little waves would be light brown. I’d seen it that way before. Yesterday the Gulf had been perfect, and lying on a big towel on the blistering sand, wearing over my bathing suit a soft old cotton shirt that Mother had insisted I bring, I’d slept for a few moments in silent animal comfort, undistracted by anyone, hearing only distant voices of children playing and the quiet shush-shush of waves drowning traffic noise on the seawall above. Once I heard gulls cry, but that was all. My legs, unprotected by the shirt, were slightly burned. I’d keep off the beach today. Late in the afternoon I might walk back over to the boulevard to see if I could hear the man playing. He wasn’t exactly black but deep brown, the color of strong tea. Yesterday he’d stationed himself on the steps of one of the piers, the one where all the giant conch shells were sold. Next to him was a barrel painted in wild zigzags, yellow, red, black, and white.

“A drum, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I play most times in the night. You never hear me before?”

I shook my head.

“You come here this night or the next. I be here then.” He was speaking with an accent I’d never heard.

“Where are you from?”

“Another island, child, in another sea.”

“Which one?”

“Jamaica. Far out in the ocean.” He exaggerated o-ce-an making it sound as wavy as water.

I tried to imagine it then, another island far out in the ocean, but I couldn’t remember where oceans stopped and seas began on any map. Who decided that kind of thing anyway?
Who drew those invisible lines? Aunt Bertha had an old atlas somewhere. I could at least look up Jamaica. After all I was a journalism student, uncertain as to whether I’d stick with it, but already trained to make sure of locations.

Remembering I hadn’t looked for Jamaica yet, I stared toward the little alcove dividing the dining room from the kitchen, a place where things and people seemed to collect. I thought I’d seen that atlas bulging out of a shelf back there.

On my way through the room, the phone rang. I hoped it wasn’t Emmett in trouble already. He hadn’t wanted to go to the beach yesterday, and I didn’t know where he’d gone that morning.

“Celia, get in the car and come on down here and get me.”

“I can’t get you unless I know where you are.”

The receiver on the other end fell with a clunk against a wall or the floor somewhere. I could barely hear a country-western wail over the murmur of people talking. A motor started and sighed dead then started again. I sat down on the floor wondering if somebody had to go and get him all the time when he was exiled to Laredo. Probably not since he was with Alex, Uncle Blanton’s son. Blanton lived in town with his wife Ellen, Alex who was Emmett’s age, and a daughter, Marie. Evidently Emmett was kept busy all week at the ranch then turned loose with Alex to roam on the weekends. There were no rodeos nearby, but there were plenty of bars and boys’ town in Nuevo Laredo, with its shanties full of prostitutes, was more interesting—he’d let me know—than any particular girl.

“I’m at West Beach.”

“How far down?”

“Damned if I know.” He laughed.

I was sure he was drunk then. When he drank he had a half crazy kind of laugh, a low chuckle that reached higher and higher. I’d heard it before in a honky-tonk cafe near McGregor, the first wet town across the line from Leon where everybody came from all the dry counties around to drink beer. I cringed inwardly when I heard Emmett’s whoop across the room.
Getting drunk was all right; showing it wasn’t. He didn’t seem to know it that night in McGregor and he hadn’t learned it yet. Still waiting on him, I watched the slits of sunlight poke through the dark shutters on the west side and fall across the carpet’s mass of faded blue flowers to my feet.

He coughed into the phone.

“Don’t do that.”

“Always saying ‘don’t’.”