Carried to the Grave and Other Stories

by Leslie Budewitz

  “Don’t you be telling her,” a man said, his stern voice coming through an open window framed by a clematis heavy with buds. “Gwen carried that secret to the grave, and we damn well better do the same.”

  “If she knew,” a woman answered, “it might help her understand a few things about the family. About her place in it.”

  Frank again, speaking not to Corinna, but to a different woman. His wife? I couldn’t tell. Village snoop or not, their tone made me decidedly uncomfortable.

  “I told you before, woman. She don’t need to know.”

  I lingered in the garden, and by the time I opened the back door, the big kitchen was empty. The original farm kitchen had been thoroughly remodeled, but the homestead spirit remained in the painted cabinets, pine floors, and a butcher block counter, where I set my load. I opened two bags of Jewel Bay Critter Crunch and poured the nut-and-chocolate caramel corn into a spatterware bowl.

  I carried my bowl into the dining room and set it on the long, lace-covered dining table. Chatter filtered in from the living room. I picked up a nearly-empty bowl of potato salad and a tray holding one lonely Caprese salad kabob—my mother’s creation, skewers of cherry tomatoes, seasoned balls of mozzarella, and basil leaves, grilled and dressed with a thick blackberry balsamic vinegar.

  Grief makes some people hungry.

  It wasn’t my home, but after a funeral, it felt natural to refresh the salads and the chips and dip. I ate the last kabob, then arranged tiny French tarts and palmiers, the French sugar cookies made of puff pastry, on a plate.

  I was cutting a rhubarb crisp I found on the kitchen counter, with a note from a neighbor, when footsteps sounded behind me.

  “Oh. I didn’t know anyone was in here.” The speaker’s tone made me feel like a kid caught with the cookie jar.

  I wiped my hand on my gray denim skirt and held it out. “Corinna, you probably don’t remember me. I’m Erin Murphy, Tom and Francesca’s younger daughter.”

  “Oh, yes. I’d have known you from your face. No recessive genes there.” She ignored my hand, scanning me tip to toe with that “I know all about you, and I don’t like it” look some teachers give cheeky students. She’d once been attractive, I could see, though not with the same dark-eyed intensity as the rest of the Taylor clan.

  “Your mother and sister were here earlier,” she continued. “Being the perfect family, unlike ours.”

  “I’m a friend of Wendy’s,” I said, trying to reclaim firmer ground. “I thought I’d refill the plates and trays before the kids come in. Unless you’d rather?”

  Corinna’s blue eyes flashed again, her brow darkening. She tugged her thigh-length cream cardigan across her chest. Her gaze swept from me to the bounty on the counters and back. Not bothering to reply, she stalked out of the kitchen and through the dining room. A minute later, I heard her footsteps pounding up the stairs to the second floor.

  ∞

  “He went flying through the barn like a bat out of hell.” Frank’s hand went flying through the air, punctuating his story.

  I stood in the doorway with the box of truffles. I’d never known whether Frank or Granny G was the elder of the twins, but it hardly mattered. He was presiding from the burgundy leather chair, enjoying the full house and the audience.

  He wiped a tear of laughter from the corner of his dark brown eye. “Jumped out the hayloft and kept on running. Didn’t come back till the supper bell rang.”

  The Frank I knew, the family raconteur, had replaced the harsher version of the man I’d overheard in the kitchen, chiding his wife. And earlier, lecturing Corinna outside the church.

  “How was I supposed to know the shotgun wasn’t loaded?” Uncle Al said from the matching armchair, but he was laughing, too. Two older women and Wendy’s father, George, sat on one of two matching couches.

  “Anybody comes after you with a shotgun, assume it’s loaded,” George Taylor said. “Especially if it’s Frank. Those huckleberry truffles, Erin? Bring ’em right here.”

  His rich tones swung octaves, much like Granny G’s had when she taught us girls how to roll out pie dough. His hands waved me over with the same broad, graceful gestures as his storytelling uncles. The family traits had served him well in the theater. George plucked two chocolates from the box, then I moved to the other couch, where Wendy sat with her mother, Lynn.

  “Thank you, Erin,” Lynn said. “Your family’s taken good care of us today.”

  “As you did for us. The buffet is ready for the next go-round.”

  When I’d finished the truffle circuit and followed up with the coffeepot, Lynn called to me. “Come sit. You’ll love these marvelous pictures Corinna found, from when Granny G was a girl.”

  It’s hard to imagine someone you’ve only known as an old lady having once been young. Not that she’d been old when I first knew her—just past sixty—but to a small child, everyone seems old.

  A thick, black leather-bound album lay on the coffee table, open to two pages filled with shots of smiling men in uniform. Lynn picked up the album and flipped back to the beginning. I recognized this house, and Frank’s. She paused at a photo of an unfamiliar barn, a shiny car with a long hood parked in front.

  “‘The 1937 Buick.’” I read the thick white script written across the bottom of the black-and-white snapshot.

  “Destroyed when the barn burned,” George said. “They couldn’t get another car until after the war ended, though they rebuilt the barn right away.”

  “Priorities,” Frank said, his voice booming. “That was 1941. I’d already enlisted. This loser waited to be drafted, after Pearl Harbor.”

  I glanced at Uncle Al, for once not laughing, not responding to the jibe. The great-aunts were silent, too.

  Next came a family portrait. Seven kids, all sporting minor variations of the same face, all dark-haired, with intense brown eyes that managed to dance despite the army uniforms Frank and Al wore. The girls’ classic 1940s dresses would make any vintage shop owner swoon.

  The next shot showed Frank and Al, again in uniform, with a third soldier, light-haired and pale-eyed, his arm draped not-so-casually over a woman’s shoulders. Behind them stood the new barn, framed and roofed but not yet sided.

  “Is that your father-in-law with Granny G?” I asked Lynn. “I never knew him.”

  “No, George’s parents didn’t meet until after the war,” Lynn said. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Oh, just some bloke who sniffed the scent of girls and followed us home on leave.” Frank had ambled over and stood behind the couch. “Move on, move on.”

  Next came a collage of smaller shots. The two dark-haired soldiers and their fair-haired friend, in regular pants and white undershirts, tossing bales of hay. The same three men mugging for the camera. Then the friend, milking a cow, a grin on his handsome face.

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Frank stiffen. Across the room, Al’s lips tightened and he bowed his head.

  And I knew the fair-haired man hadn’t returned, and his death had left a gap.

  Lynn flipped to a shot of seven kids, ranging from Gwen and Frank on one end to the youngest on the other. The three boys wore dark pants and white shirts, the girls in dark skirts and white blouses with Peter Pan collars, but even without the matching outfits, anyone would have known they were siblings. Each stood beside a steer or a heifer, a 4-H banner hanging above them. The white ink across the bottom read “We Are Cattle Champions—1936.”

  “That’s my favorite,” Wendy said, her voice softer than the others’, but carrying the same expressive quality. She pointed to the middle girl, bent over a sweet-faced calf while her brothers and sisters aimed forward. “I love Aunt Louise. More interested in her calf than the camera.”

  “That didn’t last,” Al said. “She sang and danced with the USO in Seattle. She probably had her picture taken with more soldiers and sailors than anyone short of Betty Grable.”

  “
What about Corinna?” I asked. “I don’t see her in any of these pictures.”

  “She came along later,” George said. “A caboose.”

  Frank dropped a half-eaten palmier on his saucer. “Enough of this fancy French food. Did you say there’s pie?” He shuffled toward the dining room, and I spotted his wife, her brow furrowed, giving him a slight shake of the head. She hadn’t spoken since I’d come in, but I was sure she’d been talking with Frank in the kitchen. What had she said?

  Something about knowing something, and how it might help “her” understand her place in the family. Who had they been referring to?

  “There’s something underneath this one.” Wendy slipped the Cattle Champions photo out of the black paper corners that held it to the page.

  Above us, feet descended the stairs. A moment later, a screen door banged shut.

  Beneath the Cattle Champions was another black-and-white, smaller, worn around the edges, not held by the framing corners. As if it had been tucked in hastily.

  Gwen and the fair-haired soldier, embracing. Across the decades, I could see the longing in their eyes.

  The three of us stared at the picture. Finally, Wendy turned it over. I squinted to read the faded penciled handwriting.

  “Gwen Gottfried and Ira Cory. Once in a lifetime.”

  ∞

  I stood in the kitchen, slicing ham. On the other side of the island, Wendy arranged miniature sweet peppers and tomatoes stuffed with herbed goat cheese on a blue-and-white platter.

  “Your Uncle Frank might give you guff about the fancy French food, but I notice he eats his share,” I said.

  She sighed. “Is every family a rat’s nest of contradictions?”

  I spooned spicy mustard into a small white bowl. “Yep.”

  The backyard soccer game had ended, with Max’s team declared the winner, the kids on the losing side grousing that they’d have won if the last goal had been counted.

  Win or lose, they were all hungry. And as if hunger were infectious, the older crowd decided it was time for a little something. Then the gang of cousins who’d gone for a drive and the crew who’d taken the kayaks out on the river slough returned.

  For the next half hour, Wendy and I fed the hordes. She mixed up lemonade and brewed iced tea. One of her brothers came in search of a beer, and I sent him to the dining room with another plate of ham and mustard and a basket of French rolls. Wendy added more buffalo meatballs to the Crock-Pot. We found bags of cut-up carrots and celery in the fridge and laid them out, with ranch dressing.

  Half the family wandered through as we refilled bowls of four bean salad and tabbouleh. We sliced up quiche and pie, and made sure there were plenty of plates, forks, and napkins.

  But there was no sign of Frank or Corinna.

  “Zis is wonderful, all zis food, all zis family.” Max sauntered in, for once not in chef’s garb. He kissed Wendy on the mouth and patted her rear end.

  “Make yourself useful,” she said, and he gave me a wink on his way back to the dining room with a plate of iced cookies.

  Then we were alone in the kitchen. Wendy’s eyes welled with emotion, and I wrapped an arm around her.

  “He’s going to be a great dad,” I said. “You’re both going to be great parents.”

  Nothing like a family gathering to trigger all one’s doubts and insecurities, along with the love and gratitude. Conversation continued in the living room and on the front porch, but muted, sandwiched between bites.

  “We should wash the dishes.” Wendy pulled away. “Pack up the leftovers.”

  “Leave them,” I said. “Your mother will want something to do later.” I darted into the dining room and grabbed two carrot cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. “Let’s take a walk.”

  We headed out the side door and through the garden. In another week, the iris would be a marvel.

  “Granny G planted these,” Wendy said. “When she moved into town, she dug up some of her favorites, but she kept on collecting new ones. There’s a nursery in Oregon that specializes in iris. Every January, she sat at her kitchen table, poring over their catalogs.”

  “I remember that garden. After school once, she punished you and Chiara by making you weed.”

  “Anne Christopherson was there, too. We’d soaped the windows on another girl’s house, and Granny G was furious. But you—” She let out a soft sound, almost a cackle.

  “Yeah, me. Stupid little sister who wanted to be part of the gang so badly, I ended up weeding most of the bed myself.”

  “We bribed you into not telling your parents by giving you a cupcake.”

  “Which Granny G would have given me anyway. I never did tell, by the way.” As a rule, I don’t like secrets. But I love cupcakes.

  We circled to the front of the house, wandering onto the path that led past the duck pond. I finished my cupcake and stuffed the paper wrapper in my skirt pocket. Wendy hadn’t touched hers.

  “Which barn is where your dad’s uncles chased each other?” I pointed at the two barns facing each other across an invisible property line.

  “The white one,” Wendy said. “The original barn. The tack room is filled with all kinds of junk. Tools, milk cans, broken chairs—you name it. That’s where I found the blue canning jars Chiara made into the chandelier for the bakery.”

  “You know, I always knew Corinna was younger than the rest of Granny G’s brothers and sisters, but I didn’t realize she isn’t much older than your dad.”

  Wendy broke off a bite of cupcake and ate it slowly.

  “No husband, no kids?” I continued.

  “She was married. They moved to Spokane ages ago,” Wendy said. “Divorced. Granny G said it was because she didn’t want kids.”

  “She always seemed different from the rest of the family,” I said. “That strawberry-blond hair, the pale skin, but more than that.”

  Wendy lowered her eyes and tightened her jaw, her throat working.

  Working on figuring out what to say, or how to tell me to hush up?

  “Granny G taught me how to bake,” Wendy said. “How to sift flour, cream butter and sugar, plump the raisins for Sunday morning scones. She knew about the baby”—Wendy’s free hand went instinctively to her belly—“and it breaks my heart that she won’t be here to get to know him. Or her.”

  A mallard emerged from the reeds at the edge of the pond and waddled toward us.

  I had to ask. I wasn’t the village snoop for nothing. “Wendy, in all those hours you spent by her bedside in those last few weeks, did she talk?”

  Wendy’s dark eyes darted toward me as she fed the duck a chunk of cupcake. “You mean, did she tell me her secrets?”

  “Did she tell you about Corinna?” The duck stood in the middle of the path, its webbed feet spread wide, head raised. Wendy gave him another morsel and he squawked for more. In moments, we were surrounded—three ducks, four, five.

  Beside me, Wendy stood still, hands raised, eyes about to pop. I felt myself stiffen as the ducks pressed in on us. The fun of feeding them turned ugly as their bills opened and shut, as they squawked and shoved. It felt like they could gobble us up if we didn’t give them what they wanted.

  “Aunt Wendy!”

  A child’s frightened cry broke the moment and we spun toward the white barn. Wendy’s ten-year-old nephew ran toward us, the ducks scattering.

  “Aunt Wendy, you have to come. It’s Uncle Frank and Aunt Corinna.” The boy skidded to a stop in front of us and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “She’s got the shotgun.”

  ∞

  “You knew,” Corinna said. Her tone was high and airy, as if not quite of this world.

  Wendy and I stood in the shadows just inside the barn. We’d sent the boy to get his father and make sure someone called the sheriff.

  “You always knew,” she continued, “that I wasn’t who I thought I was. Don’t you move.”

  Seated in an old ladder-back chair, Frank froze, the shotgun Corinna held aimed at his
chest.

  “Gwendolyn,” she said, her tone a sneer though I couldn’t see her face. “Everyone praised her family values. Her generosity. She sure welcomed your friend Ira Cory, didn’t she? But she didn’t welcome me.”

  The soldier in the photos. The one who didn’t come back.

  The one Gwendolyn named her daughter—his daughter—for, and who’d inspired her love of iris.

  “Everyone called me the caboose. The surprise.” Her words darkened and she gripped the gun with both hands. It couldn’t be the shotgun from Frank’s story—or could it? Wendy had said the tack room was crammed with junk. If she’d found ammo, too, Corinna would know how to load the gun. She was a farm girl. “They all knew, didn’t they? And I was the fool, always feeling different, not having a clue why until today. Until those photos.”

  “Corinna,” Frank said, his voice shaking. “If he’d survived the war, they would have gotten married. She did what she thought was best, letting our parents raise you as if you were their own—”

  “Shut up.” She raised the gun, her hands tight on the stock. Her stretched-out sweater had fallen off one shoulder, the loose fabric bunched above her elbow. “She told you to keep your mouth shut and you did. But I had a right to know.”

  “You didn’t see how Ira’s death devastated her. She did her best in a bad situation.”

  “I didn’t see because no one told me. Because you were all ashamed of me. Of the secret.” Her fingers inched dangerously close to the trigger. Late afternoon sun streamed in through an upper window and picked her out like a spotlight, the dust motes all that moved.

  “No, Corinna.” Frank tried for a soothing tone. “We were never ashamed of you. We all loved you, prickly as you were. Seeing you, knowing she couldn’t tell you, nearly broke Gwen’s heart.”

  I glanced at Wendy, finger to my lips, and slipped into the shadows. The smells of hay and manure clung to the air, and I prayed I wouldn’t sneeze as I crept up behind Corinna.

  “But times were different. We were protecting you from the gossip, the hurtful things people said back then.” Frank was still talking. With the sun in his eyes, he couldn’t see me, but Wendy could.