Walking Through Shadows (22 page)

I am trying to take care of myself for the baby’s sake. I truly am, but Lloyd keeps fussing over me like a mother hen and doesn’t believe I’m eating enough, or resting enough, or, my lord, taking care of my skin. Just last night he came in with the lotion to rub on my stomach, said I was scratching in my sleep. I took the bottle, but something came over me, and it flew out of my hands and went right past his head. Lloyd says I’m furious with him and won’t admit it. I guess maybe he’s right. Yesterday Virgie Nell Jackson testified at Stoney’s trial, and now the whole town of Zebulon and half the people living in the State of Mississippi know that Lloyd left my bed for hers. I have forgiven him. At least I thought I had, but it’s like twelve and a half years of my life have been stripped away, and I feel just like I did when I first found out about the two of them. Lloyd said he could’ve lied to me, made up some excuse for his truck being parked in front of Virgie Nell’s house, and wasn’t I grateful he told me the truth. Well, no, no I was not grateful. He only admitted it because he wanted forgiveness. I remember him saying how much this had tortured him. Him!

Mama wouldn’t come over this morning when I telephoned her and asked her if she’d like to have coffee with me. She won’t talk about the trial. All she said when I told her about Virgie Nell’s testimony was “Rowena, you’d best stay home for a while. You’re getting too big to show yourself in town anyway.” Mama, and, well, a lot of people think a lady who’s p.g. shouldn’t go out in public much. She says a ripe womb is proof of a man’s knowledge of the woman, but the old ways are changing now. I read in Liberty magazine that, if we get into the war, women might have to take some of the jobs men have been doing all these years. And women could too. Leda says that she and Sylvia are already planning to form a female brigade should war come. I believe, if she could, Leda would strap on a pair of aviator goggles and fly to Europe to drop bombs on the Germans. But Leda doesn’t have a husband to worry about like I do. She can do as she pleases, but me, a married woman, I have to sit here in my house, humiliated and branded by the town as “the woman scorned by her husband for another.” I can just imagine what-all folks are saying. “Poor Rowena Cotton.” And the men! Oh, they’ll wink at Lloyd behind my back. They’ll all be thinking of Virgie Nell’s big breasts when they look at me. I might as well be wearing the big scarlet “A” like in Mr. Hawthorne’s novel. And I’m not the one who committed adultery.

Lloyd has been called to testify tomorrow, and I can tell he’s nervous by the way he keeps whistling. He’s driving me mad with it. It’s a soft little “wheet wheet wheet” that sounds like a little bird, and every time there’s a lull in the conversation, he starts up with it. Annette noticed it too and asked me what was wrong with her daddy. I told her to just quit being so hard on her parents, judging us by every little thing we say and do. Then I felt bad when her eyes got watery, and I told her we would get through this. And we will. Somehow. But I don’t know how yet.

Leland Graves tried to get a statement from me after I left the courtroom, but I told him nothing doing. That little fellow is getting pushy, sticking his nose in everybody’s face, scribbling on that pad like he’s Moses writing on the tablets. Hell, what was there to say anyhow? I’m being falsely accused and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Kevin Landry did get me the chance to say I hadn’t had any affair with Sheila Barnes and that I didn’t know who was the father of her baby. I hated to hurt Mrs. Carruth, God knows she’s been through enough, but I said how I thought maybe it was Sheila’s own father. I knew though that my words were spilled milk. Worthless. Stoney’s lawyer, that Mr. Calloway, twisted my words around to where I got so confused up there on the witness stand that it sounded like I had something to hide. Calloway suggested that Rowena had left me and gone to her mama’s because she found out I was the father of Sheila’s baby. I tried to tell him that wasn’t the reason, but he shut me up and said I could only answer the questions he asked. The law ought to be changed on that. There ought to be a way for a man to defend himself from lying lawyers. And goddamn Kevin Landry, he didn’t do his job, just sat there in his chair with his head down, looking at the mess of papers on his table. He should’ve done something. My being late getting down to the dairy that morning went against me hard. Where was I? Calloway asked me and then he told everybody in the courtroom I was lying. Said I wasn’t home in my bed oversleeping; I was up at Sheila’s, killing her, and after that dragged her like a sack of potatoes down to my own cornfield where I thought she wouldn’t be found for a long time. I couldn’t even look at Stoney Barnes’ face when I got down from that witness chair. If I had, I probably would’ve taken a swing at it. After Calloway got done with me, I don’t think anybody in that courtroom didn’t suspect that I could be the man who fucked her, and then killed her to keep from being found out.

Before I got in my truck, hoping to cool down enough to drive home without killing myself, a woman came up to me and introduced herself as Earlene Barnes. She’s a pretty lady and I’d seen her a couple of times before somewhere or other, but I wouldn’t have remembered her name. But her face was all pinched up like she had a burr up her butt, and at first I thought she was gonna lay into me, maybe accuse me of killing her sister-in-law like Calloway was saying. But she held out her gloved hand for me to shake. “I’m so sorry for what happened in there,” she said, nodding back to the courthouse.

“Not your fault,” I said.

She swallowed hard. “Well, maybe you…there are things…” She stared off to where Leland Graves was standing on the walk watching us. “I’ve got to come out to your dairy later today. There’s something I have to tell your wife.”

The last thing I needed was some woman coming out to fuss over Rowena, tell her she ought to divorce me, or pray on it maybe like her mama was doing on an hourly basis. “Rowena’s pretty upset. She don’t need any company right now.”

Her hand went up to my forearm. “Please, Mr. Cotton. It’s important.”

There wasn’t any meanness in her eyes. She didn’t look like a woman who was about to help get me thrown outta my house. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell Rowena to expect you.”

“Thank you.”

She turned to walk away, but I grabbed her arm. “You better not upset her. She’s expecting a child you know. When she hears about my testimony, it’s gonna go down hard with her. I wouldn’t want you making matters worse for her.”

I thought the woman was about to cry for a minute, but she looked hard into my face. “Believe me. That’s the last thing I want to do,” she said.

Well, just nobody in the whole entire universe is acting like they’re supposed to. As soon as I got home from school, Mama said Grandma was on her way over to pick me up and bring me to her house to spend the night. “It’s a school night,” I said.

Mama didn’t even blink at that. “Right. Well, she’ll take you to school tomorrow. Now go get packed. She’ll be here any minute.”

Grandma could see I wasn’t in the best of moods, and she believes that there is nothing better than work to take your mind off your troubles, so as soon as I put my suitcase in Mama’s old bedroom, she sent me out to pick up pecans. Grandma’s pecan orchard stretches for nearly two acres on the side of her house, and the crop of nuts this year was abundant. As I tossed the brown shells and green hulls into my bucket, I thought about Sheila and Stoney. I didn’t know how to feel about either one of them anymore. I didn’t even know how I felt about my own parents. Daddy and Sheila had both committed adultery. Stoney could be a murderer, although I still believed deep in my heart that this wasn’t true, and then there was Mama who had left us and now that she was back, she was snapping at me every time I walked into the house.

Beneath the towering pecan trees, I sat on the cold ground and considered the coming months. I had expected life to go on just as it was. Sheila and I would make pecan pies and divinity candy for Christmas; we would go into Zebulon and stroll down Main Street to admire the holiday decorations. If she were still alive, we would be buying baby clothes for two instead of one. I closed my eyes and imagined Sheila’s stomach swelling like Mama’s. She would have looked comical with a big belly jutting out between her stick arms, but I was certain that she would have been a good mother. I cried then, for her and the little baby who would never know any of us, for myself and for missing Lil’ Bit, and for Stoney locked away from the little sad house and the winter pasture and the crisp fall air.

Grandma said there is a reason for everything, and until now I had believed her. “God has a plan,” she would say. But what sense was there in His taking Lil’ Bit away, in Sheila’s death, in Stoney’s arrest? If there was a plan, it was surely the devil’s. Grandma also warned me that sometimes bad things happen to us when we need to be taught a lesson. To avoid painful instruction, I should try hard to be a good girl every day of my life. But I didn’t feel like being good; I felt like sinning my head off. I was plain mad, and I didn’t think what I did made one whit of difference to the Lord. Hadn’t I obeyed nearly all ten of the commandments? And how did He reward me? He had taken away half of all that I loved, that’s how.

I lifted my bucket and started back to Grandma’s house. Right then I couldn’t think of any sin I could accomplish given my limited opportunity, but I was sure one would come along.

Grandma frowned at my half-filled bucket, but something about me must have warned her off her fussing because she said she had tea cakes baking in the oven for me. I sat at the old scarred wooden table watching Grandma in her blue apron wiping up spilled flour and sugar with a faded rag. Her wavy gray hair was held back with black bobby pins and flour streaks ran down her fat cheeks. She was smiling and humming like there was a lot to be happy about. It was all an act; I knew that. Then Grandma looked over her shoulder at me. “Why the long puss?”

I shrugged. “I hate everybody and everything. That’s all.” I kicked the pecan bucket beside the table.

Grandma is a big woman, weighing close to two hundred pounds, and she came at me like a bulldozer about to plow down a tree. When she reached the table, she shook her rag in my face. “What are you saying? You don’t care about your mama, your daddy, the baby that’s coming?”

I leaned as far back away from her as the ladder-back chair would allow. “Yes ma’am, of course I do. It’s just all the other things. Sheila and Lil’ Bit and Stoney, and stuff at school.” Already kids were looking at me whispering about my daddy and Virgie Nell Jackson.

Grandma sat down at the head of the table. She pulled my hands into hers and squeezed them into a tent for praying. “Annette, I know. The good Lord knows I understand. Haven’t I lost my husband, one of my daughters, my sister, and two brothers to Him?”

I nodded. I was surprised to think about Grandma being mad at God too. I had forgotten He had taken so much from her. “But how can you still be happy?”

Grandma smiled. “How? I don’t know as I ever thought about how I can, I only know that life is too long not to be happy.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Oh, when your Grandpa died, I was still a young woman then even though my children were grown. After he departed this life, I thought about dying too. At night I would lie in my bed in the dark feeling the cold sheet where he used to lie. And I would pray for God to take me. I knew I was too cowardly to take my own life, but I hoped I would get gored by a bull or run down by a train or just die quietly in my sleep. But every morning the sun came up and so did I. My stomach still rumbled when I was hungry, the jasmine growing by the porch still smelled sweet, your mama’s arms around me were as soft as ever.” She glanced at the clock over the table and, grabbing a dishcloth, she slid the pan of tea cakes out of the oven. “And tea cakes still tasted like heaven,” she said, lifting them one by one with a spatula and placing them on a plate. When the dish was piled high with the cookies, she brought it to the table. “So there’s no how to it. There’s just the going on with the living. We’re not made to be sad; we’re put here to rejoice in all the things the good Lord leaves to us. He didn’t have to give us anything, you know.” Her arms swept out and waved around the kitchen. “But look at all we have to be thankful for.”

I looked at the old coal stove, the peeling paint on the cabinets, the wallpaper steamed half off the wall. “Well,” I tried to think what to say. It wasn’t a time for honesty. “Well, I guess you’re right, Grandma.” I watched her lips spread into the smile she wore whenever she thought she had helped somebody out. She pushed the plate of tea cakes toward me, and I took one from the stack. It was burned on the bottom, but I ate it anyway.

It’s funny how you can know something, and not realize you know it, but then after you find out what it is, you say to yourself, “Yes, yes. I knew it all along.” That’s the way I felt after Earlene Barnes left my house.

I was nervous about her coming after Lloyd told me. He wouldn’t talk about what had happened in the courtroom that day, said he’d tell me after supper. He needed to get down to the dairy because he’d been gone most of the day. When Annette came in from school, I sent her packing to Mama’s so that she wouldn’t be at home when Earlene came. I changed my dress, smoothed down my hair, and applied a bit of scent to my wrist. I knew she’d be looking at me with an eye as to why Lloyd would cheat on me, and I wanted to show her that it wasn’t my looks.

I felt confident, even though I was wearing a maternity smock. It was my prettiest one; the print is little purple flowers with green curved stems on a white background, and my skirt, a lighter shade of lavender, matched nicely. When I opened the front door, Earlene barely looked at me. “Come in. I’m Rowena Cotton,” I said. “I saw you at the funeral, but I didn’t have a chance to introduce myself.”

She went straight to the piano bench and sat there even though my hand was extended to the couch. “I won’t stay long, Mrs. Cotton,” she said. “I, just, I need, I have to talk to you.”

I could see then how upset she was. She kneaded her hands against her stomach like two loaves of bread dough, and I saw that there wasn’t any point in offering coffee. I sat down in the armchair across from her. “Well, I hope I can help,” I said, wondering what in the world she was going to say.

She closed her eyes, took a big breath and let it out before she sat up straight and looked up at me. “Mrs. Cotton, you know, of course, that your husband is being accused of having an affair with my sister-in-law.”

So it was about that! I decided right then and there that if she insulted me in the slightest, I would order her out of my house. “That’s not true,” I said. I stood up. “I am absolutely positive of it, and if you came here to make more accusations against my husband, I’ll have to ask you to leave.” Now my hands were shaking harder than hers.

Earlene Barnes jumped up and stretched out her hand to me. “Oh no! That’s not what I’ve come for. I didn’t think he had. No, I didn’t think that.”

The clock started bonging just then. Four o’clock. They’d begin milking soon. I backed up to my chair and eased down. I held onto the chair arms. “Then that is why you came here? To hear me say my husband didn’t have an affair with Sheila? I’m sure he said that under oath today on the witness stand. He told me that you were there in the courtroom.”

She sat back on the piano bench. “Yes. And I believed him, Mrs. Cotton.” Her voice was so soft I could barely hear her, “It was Hugh, my husband, not yours. He is the father of that poor dead baby.”

I couldn’t speak. I can’t imagine how I must have looked at that moment because all sorts of thoughts and words were crowding into my mind all at once. The pieces of that minute I remember are these: Earlene was crying; I saw the image of Hugh coming up my back-porch steps that day we were making Christmas decorations; I saw Sheila barefoot, her saying, “I’ll get my shoes.” Hugh was the father, and hadn’t I known that all along? Hadn’t I suspected that day? Sheila hadn’t come back like she said she would. And lastly, in a rush, I remembered the truck being up there when Lloyd and Stoney went on that trip, Annette’s being so upset, Sheila not letting me in.

I went to the poor woman and knelt on the floor in front of her. “I think maybe I knew. I mean I saw the way he looked at her, but I never thought she…she would. She loved Stoney so much.”

“She didn’t, Mrs. Cotton. He raped her.”

I think I said, “Oh dear Lord” or maybe “Oh no,” but I may have said nothing at all. I was so stunned I doubt there were any words in my head.

She crossed her arms and held herself tightly, rocking back and forth on the bench. “Hugh has cheated on me from the second year of our marriage. He’s weak about women, and I just put up with it, for the boys. I guess it was always easier to turn a blind eye. That’s what I did, but…” She lifted her eyes back to mine. “I never suspected Sheila. I could see how crazy she was about Stoney, and, of course, there was the hump and she was so skinny. Not Hugh’s type at all.”

I remembered his dark good looks, his thumb in his belt, my cheeks firing red and looking away from his privates. He could have easily coaxed a lot of women into his bed. “No, she wasn’t,” I said. “Are you sure he did this?”

“Oh, God, yes, yes I’m sure,” she said. After a moment, she got up and walked to the couch and stood looking over it out of the window. I followed her there and saw a small brown wren standing crookedly on a broken branch of the camellia bush. I took her hand and pulled her down to sit beside me on the couch.

She took a deep breath and said, “This is what I know. After Sheila’s funeral, Hugh came back from Jackson, and I guess Stoney found that out somehow. He came over late. Drunk. He had a gun, was yelling he was going to kill Hugh. I ran back into the house, begged Hugh not to go out, but he went anyway. I stood just inside the front door, watching them. I heard it all. Everything that was said that night. When Stoney accused Hugh of raping Sheila, he tried to say she was willing, but I knew better. They fought. I thought one of them would be killed, but then somehow Hugh got away and took off toward the woods. Stoney went after him, and I ran back to the kitchen to call the sheriff.” She bowed her head and twisted her wedding ring on her finger. “I thought better of it. I didn’t want Hugh arrested, not until I could decide what to do. So I waited, sat there at my kitchen table thinking and worrying myself sick.” Earlene’s voice changed then. Her emotions were more in check. “Mrs. Cotton, I loved my husband, but I never liked him. Really, the only one of the Barnes family I liked at all was, is, Hugh’s mother, and she has the blindest eye of them all where her sons are concerned. She spoiled them, especially Stoney. I guess she was trying to make up for some of their daddy’s meanness. But all of those boys have a mean streak, Hugh more than any of them.

“Hugh finally came home that night, tiptoed up the back steps and just appeared like a ghost in my kitchen, scared me to death. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Stoney’s passed out in the truck, hit the oak tree. I got to get gone from here before he wakes up. Help me get packed.’ I told him he wasn’t going anywhere until he told me the truth about him and Sheila. He said it was none of my business and to fix him a sandwich or biscuit to take.”

While she talked, I sat with my hands folded in my lap. I was conscious of trying to look calm for her sake, but my insides were twisting and turning with emotion. I tried to relax my facial muscles and soften my voice. “This must have been the worst night of your life, Mrs. Barnes.”

She smiled then. “Earlene. I think we should be on a first-name basis.” Her smile vanished then. “Yes, until now it was the worst. Having to tell it to strangers will be more painful. I doubt Hugh would have told me anything, except I threatened to call the sheriff. I was afraid he’d call my bluff; there were two boys sleeping in our house who would see their daddy get arrested, so I wouldn’t have called, but Hugh didn’t think of them. He started with a lie, saying he hadn’t done it, but I stood up to go to the telephone, and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you, but it was Stoney’s fault. He couldn’t shut up about her, bragged about their lovemaking, how she was like a bitch in heat.’” Earlene paused, looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry to say these ugly things, but Hugh said, ‘Stoney told me that hump of hers made it more exciting.’”

I clenched my fists to keep from crying out my disgust. I wanted to cover my ears to block out her words, but her voice grew louder as she went on with her story.

“I asked him if he had beaten her, and that was the only time Hugh looked the least bit sorry. He said, ‘She fought me the first time, and the second a little until I told her I’d tell Stoney what she and me were doing and that he wouldn’t want her no more then. I said he’d throw her out.’ I don’t remember what I said to Hugh. I know I was too shocked to even cry though. He left then, and I stayed up, walking the floors of my house, all the rest of that night. Around dawn, Stoney knocked on the door, but I didn’t answer. I was scared he was going to use the gun on me, and when he went back to his truck and drove away, I cried with relief. I waited all the rest of the day for Hugh to telephone me, but he never did. I don’t know where he is, or if he’ll ever come back. I told his mother he was in Memphis on business, but I guess she’ll have to be told the truth now.”

She started to say more, but she was sick. I saw it coming on her and I jumped up and helped her down the hall to the bathroom. When she came out, I guided her to the couch and got a cold cloth for her forehead. She was so pale, I told her to rest a while, but she shook her head and said, “No. You’ve got to hear it all.”

I sat on the floor beside her and held her hand. “Go on then. I’m listening.”

“At first I wasn’t going to tell. There’s my boys, and Hugh’s mother; she’ll hate me, but I made my decision this morning.” She closed her eyes and said, “Rowena, there’s more. There was another time before this.” Then she opened her eyes and stared at the door as if she expected it to open, and I realized there was fear behind her words, which came faster now. “I had hired a colored girl for cleaning and cooking. She was good help, dependable, a treasure really, and then one day she just didn’t show up for work. I had this feeling something was wrong, and so I drove over to her house. When she answered the door, I saw that she had been badly beaten. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened; she just said she wasn’t ever coming back to our house and slammed the door in my face.”

Earlene struggled to sit up, and I moved over to the couch beside her. “Can I get you something?”

“No, I’m okay. I can go on. I have to.” She took a breath and began again. “I think I knew right away. You see, the boys and I hadn’t been home the day before, but Hugh had been home, and I’d asked him to drive the girl to her house when she finished her work. That night I noticed some scratches on his arms, one on his face, and he told me the cat had made those marks. But after I saw the girl, I knew what had really happened. I knew, but I never said a word about it. I didn’t have the courage to accuse him. I guess I didn’t want to know.” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. “If only I had. If I’d said something, then maybe Sheila would be alive today.”

Now, understanding what torment she had been living with, my own eyes filled with tears. I searched for some words of comfort, but I knew that no matter what I said, Earlene’s guilt wasn’t going to leave her for the rest of her life.

She wiped her tears and stood up. “I talked to the girl last night, told her that I knew what Hugh had done and that I’d see to it that he paid for it. She cried and asked me not to give her name.” She fell silent then and took a few wobbly steps toward the door. “I’ve got to get home to my boys now.”

I asked her could she drive, and she nearly smiled when she said she’d been driving around in a trance ever since the night her husband had left. I helped her into her Buick, and before she turned the key she gripped the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. “I thought about her and poor Sheila all morning as I sat in the courtroom, listening to your husband’s testimony. I knew the pain that was going to come from it. For you, your husband, your daughter, too. If I had told what I knew, your family wouldn’t have had to suffer. And that’s why I came here. To ask for your forgiveness.”

I reached in the car and laid my hand on hers. “You have that. I’m so sorry for your own suffering.”

She lifted her hand and squeezed mine. “Pray for me to find the strength to do what I have to do.” She turned the key and the motor roared to life. She spoke louder over the noise of the engine. “My boys’ lives will be ruined, but I have no choice now. I’m going to call the prosecutor and tell him everything I’ve told you.”

I leaned my head in the window. I had to know, had to ask. “Earlene, did he, is Hugh the one who killed her?” I held my breath then, waiting for her answer.

Slowly, her head turned toward me. “No, he didn’t. It was Stoney. I heard him say it in our yard on the night he fought with Hugh. He said, “‘I kilt your seed, and I’m glad of it.’ ”