DeeDee stopped for breath, and Mike took a deep breath. Where ice had packed her heart before, now molten lava flowed.
“You forgot the photo opportunities,” she said. “Or, how about a funeral pyre? Fireworks, maybe?”
DeeDee whirled on her.
“If you don’t like it, go back to New York with your sophisticated bohemian gang of … trash,” she hissed furiously. “Where do you get off prissing down here and telling me how to bury my daddy? You couldn’t even look after him; you couldn’t even keep him from getting killed; you haven’t lifted a finger for him since you broke his heart wallowing around with the niggers twenty-five years ago! Go on back up there and squirm around in some more beds …”
“Shut up, DeeDee,” Bayard Sewell said in a soft, dangerous voice. DeeDee looked sidewise at him, red-faced with rage, but she dropped her eyes and snapped her mouth shut.
“Don’t you talk to my wife like that!” Duck Wingo said truculently.
“Shut up, all of you, for God’s sake,” Priss Comfort growled in her beautiful bronze voice. “DeeDee, hold your flapping tongue. You ought to thank your lucky stars your sister came down here; you’d have been in a fine fix if she hadn’t. Mike, I know how you feel, but DeeDee is right about the funeral. God knows it’s not your way or mine or even Scamp’s, but it’s Lytton’s way, and that’s what we ought to give him. He’s earned a little pomp and circumstance. Duck, sit down and shut up. “
Duck sat.
“All right,” Mike said reluctantly. She was very tired. The night ahead of her, and the day after that, loomed enormously; she could not see beyond them. “But I want you to okay every step and every detail, Priss.”
“That’s fine with me.” DeeDee shrugged. She gazed sullenly at the kitchen floor for a moment longer, and then she looked up at Mike and smiled, a wavering, propitiatory smile.
“But now Mikie, really,” she said. “I know you’ve got to get on with your life. You’ve given up a whole summer already; your work must be just piling up. And Rachel will be coming home to start school. You’ve been just wonderful help; we truly couldn’t have managed without you, but it would be selfish to keep you any longer, even though we’d all love it if you’d stay forever, of course … but you really must feel free to go on back as soon as the funeral’s over. J.W. and Priss will help us out, and Bay will …”
She looked earnestly around the room at one and then another of them. Bayard Sewell nodded, but his eyes were on Mike. Later, they promised. We’ll talk later.
J.W. did not look at DeeDee. He stared steadily at Mike.
“Maybe Mike would like to stay on just a little while in her home,” Priss said dryly. “Until she can get herself together. Or were you planning on moving right in, DeeDee?”
“Why … no. Of course not. Not right yet,” DeeDee said.
Mike was surprised at the feeling of loss that flooded her. Of course DeeDee had inherited their father’s house; she had known that from the start of the summer. Of course she would want to live in it, rather than that flimsy shotgun horror she had lived in with Duck for so many years. And she herself had never planned to stay on in Lytton. Had she? Mike shut out the image of Duck Wingo in her father’s chair at the dining table, in the big double bed that had once been John and Claudia Winship’s.
“I guess I do need to get on with it, Dee,” she said. “And you’re right. There’s really no reason to stay now, is there?”
She did not look at Bayard Sewell as she left the room to go out to her father’s Cadillac in the driveway and drive to the funeral home. He did not speak. Well, of course, she thought, shutting the door behind her. He can’t. Not in front of everybody.
Much later that night, when she came wearily into her bedroom after saying good night to Priss Comfort, she turned back her freshly made bed and found a note on the pillow beneath the bedspread.
“Roses are red and violets are blue,” it said.
“All naked ladies should look like you.”
It was not signed, but the nauseatingly ubiquitous little smiling circle had been penciled in at the bottom, with a salacious leer on its face, and she recognized Sam Canaday’s spiky, sprawling handwriting.
Mike crawled into her bed and turned out the light and clutched the note to her breast, and once again, she cried.
31
AT FIVE FIFTEEN THE NEXT MORNING, ON THE DAY OF JOHN Winship’s funeral, J.W. Cromie knocked once more at Mike’s bedroom door.
Mike came instantly awake out of skeins and webs of sweating dreams, her heart knocking with fatigue and alarm, her hair in wet strings at the back of her neck. She was at the door in a moment, clutching her robe around her.
“Priss?” she called out softly.
“J.W., Mike. Can I come in?”
She opened the door and he came silently into the bedroom and walked over to the window and raised the Venetian blinds as if he had been in the room many times before. Soft gray light filtered in. Somehow, even in the chill of the air conditioner, the budding morning looked hot.
J.W. stood with his back to Mike and looked for long moments over the emerging front lawn of John Winship’s house. It was neat and trimmed and raked and mowed; he had done all that the day before, in preparation for the people who would stream through the house this afternoon, after her father’s funeral. Mike wondered if he had ever before been able to see his own handiwork from the vantage point that those who lived in the house did.
“I need to tell you something, Mike,” he said. He did not go on, and she sat down on the edge of the bed, dread beginning in the pit of her stomach. She sensed that this was going to be bad. But what could there be left? The worst had already happened; was over.
“You’d better go ahead and tell me, then,” she said.
“I didn’t want to tell you this,” he said. “But I think you got to know. And there ain’t no more time. DeeDee and Duck been planning to get that house tore down an’ a road put in there for more than a year. Maybe even longer. I do yard work for DeeDee some, and that’s when I first heard ’em talkin’ about it, when they didn’t know I was there. After that I listened whenever I could. They ain’t been too careful about talkin’. Don’t reckon they think I got sense enough to know what they’re sayin’. They stopped askin’ me to do work for ’em about the time you come home, so I ain’t heard any more than that, but I’m sure of what I did hear.”
Mike could not think of anything to say. Nothing seemed to track. She stared at this black man whom she had known all her life, totally strange to her now, in silhouette against the lightening sky.
“How could they do that?” she said numbly, conversationally. “They don’t have any … power, any clout. Who would listen to them? And why? Why? What earthly good could it do them, a road to nowhere?”
“I ain’t sure,” J.W. said, not turning from the window. “Soun’ like there’s gon’ be some kind of big sale of that land when DeeDee gets it … now, I guess, with Mr. John gone. They standin’ to make a lot of money. Heard ’em talkin’ about what they gon’ do with it. It gon’ be one big chunk of change if they sell off yo’ daddy’s land to some big developer wantin’ to put up houses or a factory or somethin’. I don’t know who in it with ’em. I listened all I could, but they never did say. Got to be somebody big, though, could get that road in and the house tore down.”
“But … how could they? They didn’t own that land. DeeDee didn’t own it. Not till Daddy … but he did die, didn’t he? How could they possibly know all that long ago that the land would … be theirs?”
“It don’t take magic to figure a sick old man ain’t gon’ live long. Specially if he frettin’ and grievin’ over somethin’ like he done that house.”
“Did … did you tell Daddy? Who else did you tell? Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
Her voice in her ears sounded querulous and whining. He turned to face her, and she saw that his face was drawn to bone and his black eyes swollen.
“I didn�
�t tell your daddy. No. I knew it would kill him to find out DeeDee would do that. I only told one other person, Sam Canaday. I didn’t tell nobody else because he made me promise I wouldn’t. Especially not you, Mike, when we knowed you was coming. He didn’t know you back then, he didn’t know whose side you’d be on. And later, I think he didn’t want to hurt you. He knew DeeDee raised you, practically. I think he wanted you to have some family left.”
“I never would have known,” she said in simple wonder. “I never would have, if you hadn’t told me. Why did you break your promise to Sam, J.W.?”
“You never did see us plain, Mike,” J.W. Cromie said. “Not any of us. I didn’t want you to leave here again without seein’ them two plain, like they really are. Even though they got what they were after, and we can’t do nothin’ about that, I just wanted you to know ’em. Your daddy deserved better than that. You do, too. I thought for a while that maybe you’d stay on here; he’d have loved that. To have his girl at home after he was gone … the girl he never did stop mournin’. I saw him every day of his life after you left. I know how he felt. I wouldn’t have told you about this if you’d have been goin’ to stay, but then you said you were goin’ back … and so I did.”
He leaned against the thrumming air conditioner as though he were so tired that his two legs could not support him any longer, and put his hands into the pockets of his work pants.
“Might be I should have waited until after this afternoon,” he said. “But I didn’t want you feelin’ sorry for them when they get to cryin’ an’ carryin’ on over him in that church. I figure you ain’t gon’ break down now.”
“No,” Mike whispered. “Not now.”
Neither moved for a long time, and then Mike went to him across the soured, thin old carpet and simply laid her head on his chest. He was still, and then he put his arms around her and held her lightly.
“Thank you, J.W.,” Mike said.
“You’re welcome, Mike.”
Presently he went across to the door as softly as he had come, and slipped out and closed it. Mike dressed in the hot dawn silence and went quietly down the stairs so as not to waken Priss Comfort, asleep in John Winship’s back bedroom, and out to the car and drove to the mean little house on the edge of the mobile home park to confront her older sister.
Mike knew that soon she was going to be very angry, worse than angry: furious, red and murderous with rage, maddened with it. But for the moment, rage was frozen under the ice of disbelief. As she drove, she hoped simply and fervently, as a child will hope for something, that the rage would not break through until she had seen her sister and the dreadful, trivial, blustering man she had married and was home again. She did not know what she was going to say to DeeDee and Duck, but it was the most important thing in the world at this moment that she say it, that it be said, and then be over. Then, Mike thought, I can leave; I can go away from here. When she had been very small and had had to be taken to old Dr. Gaddis for one of the childhood shots, of which she was terrified, Mike had comforted herself by sobbing to herself, over and over, “And then and then and then, it will all be over. And then and then and then.” She was doing that now, as she drove the silent old Cadillac: “And then and then and then.”
DeeDee and Duck were sitting at the round, varnished yellow pine table in what DeeDee called the breakfast nook. DeeDee wore a vast, knee-length, no-color duster and rubber flipflops. Her hair had not been combed, and her great face was swollen almost unrecognizably from hours and hours of crying; her lovely blue eyes had vanished almost completely, and the skin of her face was streaked and mottled with angry red. She was drinking coffee from a mug with Kermit the Frog on it, and breathing wetly through her mouth. Her small, inflamed nose seemed to be completely blocked with the dregs of grief. Duck wore nothing but his undershorts. If Mike had been able to focus her eyes clearly, she would have been repelled by his sagging fatness, the gross ruin of him. But she could see nothing but her sister’s face. She walked stiffly into the breakfast nook, her hands clenched at her sides, the car keys biting deeply and unheeded into her bandaged palm.
They looked up at her, dully surprised, as if she were a spectral materialization. She had not been back in the little house since the night she had met Bayard Sewell here. She supposed she might look like a madwoman; she had not combed her own flyaway hair, and the clothes she had put on were the same ones she had thrown down beside the bed the night before. She realized dimly that she was barefoot.
“Mikie?” DeeDee said tentatively.
“It killed him, you know,” Mike said. Her voice surprised her; she might have been talking of the weather. “I don’t know if that’s what you planned or not, but it killed him as surely as if you’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Congratulations, DeeDee. It couldn’t have worked out any neater for you. The timing was perfect. You got the house down and the old man out of the way in the same afternoon. When does the road come through?”
They did not protest or pretend that they did not know what she was talking about. Duck said nothing, but put his coffee cup down on the varnished tabletop, to which a dismal collection of breakfast effluvia was stuck in the morning heat. He clasped his hands together on the table and watched her, his hooded eyes drooping almost closed. DeeDee’s mouth sagged into a great rictus, like a child’s heartbroken wailing, and fresh tears spurted down her vast cheeks, and the breath came and went in her throat in great sobs, but for a moment she made no sound. Her enormous shelf of bosom, unbound at this hour, heaved up and down atop her stomach as she struggled to get her breath. Finally she did, and her words poured out on her strangling sobs, a lava of woe: “I didn’t mean for him to be down there! We didn’t know he knew what day it was! I didn’t think he could move … I thought it would just be over, and then he wouldn’t care anymore about the rest of the land! Oh, Mikie, I loved my daddy, and I didn’t think he would care …”
“Well, he cared himself to death, DeeDee,” Mike was implacable; her sister’s grotesque anguish did not touch her. “God, I can’t believe you! I’m not surprised at Duck; I should have known about Duck. But you … DeeDee, you were his baby; you were his pet! Didn’t you ever know him at all? Even a little bit? How could you think he wouldn’t care?”
“He’d had the stupid house all his life,” DeeDee sobbed through laced fingers. “The famous, wonderful homeplace. He wasn’t ever going to use it again; it had just stood there all those years. Just stood there. He hadn’t even been down there for months. And he’d had his life, and you’d been gone all that time, and you had such a fine, great life, and you weren’t ever coming back again, and I … I haven’t ever had anything! Not ever anything! And it was my land anyway …”
Mike saw, as if for the first time, though Priss had hinted of it, that DeeDee must have hated her for every by-line, for the imagined life of luxury, privilege, and excitement, for the ersatz glamour of the great cities of the world, for the prosperous husband and the exemplary daughter and the fancied warm, secure marriage.
She’s never once known the truth of me, either, any more than I knew hers, Mike thought. Far down, the rage quivered.
“It wasn’t your land yet,” she said to her sister. “And it might not have been for a good while.” Her voice began to tremble. “Couldn’t you have waited? You must have know he couldn’t last forever. Couldn’t you have waited? Did you have to make him watch it?”
DeeDee said nothing, but cried harder.
“What’s the harm, Mike?” Duck said, smiling winningly at Mike. It was the old smile: slow, insinuating. It crawled over Mike. “The land was just sitting there. The old house was falling in. It wasn’t like he was ever going to even see it again, and all along it was going to be ours … DeeDee’s … anyway. We never meant for him to know when the old heap was going down. I don’t know how in the hell he found out … but the chance came, Mike. It wouldn’t have come again. The investors were there, they had the money ready, and they wanted to move. You have
to move when you see the chance. We’d have lost it if we’d waited. Hell, John would want the people he loved to be provided for, his daughter, his grandchildren. He’d have given them anything in the world …”
“Maybe there was something else he wanted to give them,” Mike said. The rage was beginning to eat through the ice. It frightened her.
“What?” Duck Wingo said. “He didn’t have anything else. Christ, it was just an old house …”
Mike screamed suddenly. The world around her reddened. “Well, by God, it was his house! It’s not right! What you two did is monstrous! It’s evil, it’s wrong! It was his house! Nothing justifies it!”
DeeDee was on her feet in front of Mike, rocking on the tiny, grubbing thongs, her teeth clenched and bared, her furious breath bubbling in her clogged little nostrils.
“Don’t you dare call us evil, Mike Winship!” she shrieked. “Miz Micah Gotrocks Winship Singer! It wasn’t our fault; it wasn’t our idea! You want to call names, you call the right one! You talk to your dear, sweet lover baby, Bayard Sewell! Oh, yeah, we know about that; everybody in town knows about that! Who do you think came to us with the proposition; who do you think found the backers all the way up there in Boston, and put the package together, and offered us enough money to fix us up for the rest of our lives? Who’s going to put the world’s biggest cat food plant and a whole industrial mall right in the middle of that land, once the road goes through? And who’s going to be a partner in the whole thing? Who do you think got that road through the legislature in the first place? Bay Sewell has been screwing you more than one way this summer, baby sister!”
“You are a goddamned liar,” Mike said. DeeDee sucked in a breath so quick and deep that her chins quivered, and slapped Mike across the face. Then she began to laugh.
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