Tomorrow River

Chapter Thirty-seven

We’ve been settled in our new house for almost three weeks.

The gray Victorian is sort of run-down and does not show a lot of promise of picking itself up. It reminds me a lot of something you’d find over at What Goes Around Comes Around. There are no glorious woods of birch and ash and no creek with stepping stones. No wide veranda with a welcoming porch swing that invites you to while away an afternoon. No barn. In the backyard, there’s a dilapidated doghouse. Ivory uses it to store his bones, but is happier snoring on the other side of Woody at bedtime.

It didn’t take us anytime at all to get set up. We had nothing to unpack. Everything we owned was destroyed in the fire. Even my binoculars. We have done some shopping. Mama bought us books and clothes and a new hi-fi. She really missed her show tunes in the hospital, but she no longer sings along. She told Woody and me, “As soon as I rebuild my strength, we’ll fix up the house. And I’m going to get that job at the library that I was thinking about getting before…”

She trails off like that a lot. I can hear her muffled crying through the thin walls some nights, but when I crawl in bed with her, she pretends to be asleep. So I just hold her hand and tell her, “Hushacat.” Sometimes I see Mama floating about in the garden from our bedroom window or perched stiffly on the new reading bench, staring off into the distance to the twin peaks of House Mountain. I’m thinking that once she gets her library job she’ll perk up some. We don’t need the money she’ll make because she has her inheritance, but she tells me she wants to work, which is proof that she’s not bouncing back as fast as I hoped she would.

Woody, Granny Beezy, and I went over to Slidell’s this afternoon to pick up a few odds and ends for the get-together we’re having tonight. That was kind of sad because farewells always are. Vera Ledbetter and her parrot, Sunny Boy, are preparing to fly the coop. Vera wants to go back to her old job entertaining the sailors in Norfolk. She told Woody and me over a couple of brown cows, “Thank you for wantin’ me to stay and be part of your lives, but ya know, I got my own people that I’ve been missin’. Me and Sunny’ll come back for visits. You girls take care good care of your mama, ya hear?” And then she gave us a french fry-smelling hug and some free licorice. As Woody and I were walking out the drugstore door, I heard her tell Beezy, “I tried to walk the straight and narrow, but there’s a lot less nastiness in my previous line of work. More customer appreciation and less wear on my feet, too.”

Since their cottage also burned down in “The Lilyfield Blaze,” Mr. Cole and Louise are staying with Vera until she leaves, and then they’ll take over the lease on the house. They are still our help even if they don’t live with us anymore. As a way of thanking Lou for taking such good care of her girls while she was gone, Mama told me last week when she was braiding my hair, “I’m going to help Louise start up her own business. The women in Mudtown don’t have a beauty salon of their own. I think it’s about time they do.”

I am for that whole hog because Lou really does do good braids and, of course, I will never forget how she saved us by running to the sheriff that night and telling him to go rescue me and Woody. She was mighty brave to risk that. Sometimes just one courageous act is enough for you to change your opinion about somebody, don’t you think? Out of the goodness of my heart, I did not tell Mama how Lou was carrying on with Blackie in the meadow after midnight or how hellaciously mean she was to Woody and me once she’d taken up with him. You know why? Because now I got something to hold over her if she gets it into her mind to quit acting like her former Louisiana self and reverts back to her unrelenting personality self. (Like I mentioned earlier, it is always nice to have an ace up your sleeve.)

Mr. Cole offered to build Woody and me a new fort in the backyard of the new house. I thought about that long and hard, and so did Woody. We ended up telling him, “No, thank you, but we reserve the right to change our mind.” The fort came to mean so many things to us and I think we need time to sort out the good from the bad and see which one wins.

I went up to Lilyfield and the fort tree a few days ago all by myself and kicked around the rubble to see if there was anything left I could save. I found a piece of the family picnic picture that had been taken in more carefree days in the field of lilies. All that love. Gone. And just for a second, looking down at the bit of photo, I hated Papa for making that the truth. I also found the rusty coffee can altar and Saint Jude, too. I’m going to clean that statue off and give him to Woody on our birthday next month, which is very unselfish of me because she will get so above herself on that lost-causes topic.

“Evenin’, Shen. Woody,” Sam says, coming through the garden gate. My sister is sitting on the nearby glider, working on a drawing, Ivory’s snout in her lap. I have seen Mama and Sam holding hands, stealing glances at each other when they don’t think anybody’s watching, but I’m still not sure if that’s in a friendly family way or not. I do know that she never takes off the Speranza watch he gave her. We still go to the library every Tuesday afternoon, and they still talk about Shakespeare, but I think they’re working their way alphabetical through the stacks because now they love to discuss Mark Twain a little bit more.

Woody smiles and nods at him. I look up and say, “Hey.” He looks fancier than usual and is not smelling like gas.

Sam sits down next to me and asks, “What are you writing?”

“Just putting the finishin’ touches on my diary.”

Mama takes Woody and me to Charlottesville every week to a special kind of doctor who does not stick you with needles or take your temperature. He’s got a comfortable office with beanbag chairs and he helps you talk about what’s ailing you. Not your body, but your heart and head. Dr. Ellis Wilson, Ph.D., was the one who suggested I start writing about my feelings and just about whatever else comes up in my life. I thought that was a good idea. I mean, if Woody and me are going to move to New York City someday so she can be the next Toulouse-Lautrec and I can be the next Harper Lee, I better start practicing.

I ask Sam, “You wanna hear some of what I wrote?”

“Can’t imagine anything I’d enjoy more,” he says, because that’s the kind of encouraging man he is.

I read, “‘Dear Diary, Big day today for so many different reasons. Remmy Hawkins got put in the detention center just like I thought he would. And his grandfather, Mayor Jeb Hawkins, got kicked out of office. I don’t know why, but I’ll ask Granny Beezy tomorrow, she will have heard the gossip by then. She told me this morning when Woody and I were over at her house watching E. J. mow the lawn, that she heard Muffy Mitchell tell June Harding that Miss Abigail Hawkins is dating a man who sells saddles and bridles in Farmville.’”

Sam chuckles at that, and so does Woody, the same way I did when I heard that news about horsey Miss Abigail.

“‘And…,’” I continue after I turn the page, “‘Papa, Grampa, and Uncle Blackie all left for Red Onion State Prison today.’” There never was a trial. Bobby Rudd advised them to make a deal for a lesser sentence. “‘A picture in the newspaper showed the three of them getting on the bus. His Honor looked handsome.’”

Songs of evening blackbirds and a couple of ambitious crickets, a dog barking the next street over, are the only sounds hanging in the air until Sam says thoughtfully, “This is hard on you, isn’t it, Shenny.”

I look into his familiar eyes. “Only when it comes to Papa,” I say, hoping that doesn’t hurt his feelings. Because after all, when you look at how everything unfolded, I might’ve got the ball rolling when it came to finding Mama, but Sam was the one who rescued her. With able assistance from Curry Weaver and Sheriff Nash.

Sam asks, “How about you, Woody?”

My sister has started talking more, thanks to some help from another doctor who is a friend of Dr. Wilson’s who is particularly good with willful children. His name is Dr. Ben Abernathy. He told Mama and me that Woody quit speaking in the first place because of the horrible thing she saw-someone she loved, her own grandmother, trying to murder someone else she loved, her mother. Not because, like I thought, she was grieving Mama’s disappearance. The doctor told me that was a part of it, too, though. My sister’s delicate artistic brain was not able to make sense of all the despicable goings-on, so to protect her, it made her stop talking. (That sounds weak to me, but this man has a lot of diplomas on his wall.)

Woody lifts her head up from her drawing. “What?”

Sam asks, “Do you miss your father?”

She looks down at her scarred, root-cellar knees and doesn’t miss a beat. “No.”

And it’s not only her. Nobody seems to miss His Honor as much as I do and that can make me feel like the odd man out. After Woody falls asleep some nights, Mama and I have a cup of tea out on the back porch steps. I identify the constellations for her and we talk about him. On one of those evenings, she cried into her hands and couldn’t stop for the longest time after she told me, “Yes, honey. It would be all right if you went to Slidell’s and bought a bottle of English Leather to remember him by.” I keep it under our mattress because the smell of it makes my sister sick to her stomach.

The back door opens and Mama, who is wearing the prettiest red polka-dot dress, calls, “Sam? Could you get the serving plate off the top shelf, please?” Then to us she says, “The rest of the guests are arriving. Please finish up what you’re doing and come wash up,” and goes back in.

Sam stands, brushes his hands down his pants, and says, “It’s fine for each of you to feel the way you do. The heart does not answer to the brain. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that feelings are complicated.”

When Sam heads towards the house, I go sit next to Woody and Ivory on the glider. She is drawing a picture of E. J. A hundred tiny hearts are buzzing around his face like flies attracted to a plate of leftovers. He was by her side ’til just a little while ago. He probably went into the kitchen to get closer to the food.

“So you still love him, huh,” I say, impressed as all get out that she has not taken the liberty that every artist can to make their subject look better than they really do. “When you were… I mean…” We don’t talk much about when she didn’t talk. “Did you miss those berry lips of Ed James, yum-yum?”

Woody says, “Shut up, Shenbone,” just the way she would’ve once upon a time, but it’s not as funny anymore. I can’t barely admit it to myself, but I have been told by Dr. Wilson that no matter how tragic it is, facing the truth is better than pretending even though it sure doesn’t feel like it. “You can’t mend a wound if you won’t admit that you’ve got one” is what the doctor told me the last time I saw him. So the fact… the truth is… Woody and I are not the same as we were. We aren’t as connected. I miss that feeling of oneness with her more than anything and can only pray our apartness is temporary. “Don’t you dare tease me about E. J.” Her voice is sort of slow and wobbly like your leg is when you get a cast off it. “I saw you lockin’ lips at the cemetery yesterday, don’t think I didn’t.”

Ivory and I went over there to say a final farewell to Clive Minnow. I pushed that Confederate button that I took from What Goes Around Comes Around deep into the soil of his grave. I was going to apologize on behalf of my grandmother for poisoning him, but I got distracted by bare-chested Bootie Young, who let me stick my finger in his cleft chin. All the way to the knuckle.

“C’mon,” I tell Woody. “The skeeters are comin’ out.”

Wedding veil clouds are drifting past the moon. It’s supposed to storm tonight, but not until late. When I was young, I used to think that the stars disappeared when there were showers. Like the rain extinguished them. When I told Papa that, he smiled and said, “They’re always there twinkling, honey. You just can’t see them for the clouds.”

I think of him often during the day when I try to write him a letter that never seems to go any further than Dear Papa… I miss you. But he is most on my mind when the constellations pop up early and are kissing close. Like tonight. I know it’s not a popular way to feel around here because of all the bad things that he’s done, but between you and me, this half of his little Gemini wishes with my whole heart and soul that my father was by my side on this historical evening the way we planned.

It’s July 20, 1969. The astronauts made it to the moon.

They fared much, much better than I thought they would.

Now all they got to do is get back home.