Homeplace

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “DeeDee, sugar …” Duck Wingo said. He heaved himself to his feet and put his hand on DeeDee’s arm. She whirled and slapped him, too.

  “Don’t you ever touch me again, you sorry son of a bitch.” She choked on the bubbling laughter, and he stepped back, his hand going to his cheek. DeeDee’s laughter slid swiftly over into tears.

  Mike stood still, her ears ringing with the slap. As soon as DeeDee’s words were out, she realized she had known the truth ever since J.W. had awakened her, and perhaps long before that. Like misted breath over a glass, love vanished in that instant as if it had never been. There was not, then, any pain, only the ice of rage. She turned and walked out of the terrible little house and got into the car. DeeDee’s spiraling wails followed her. Mike shut the door of the Cadillac and the wails stopped abruptly. She drove home to Pomeroy Street. Somewhere along the way the rage sank back, but the ice remained. She wanted, simply, to take a bath and go upstairs and crawl back into her bed and go to sleep.

  When she walked into the kitchen, Bayard Sewell was standing at the counter, immaculate and beautiful in a dark gray suit and white shirt and yellow tie, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “The screen door was open, so I came on in,” he said, smiling his wonderful white smile at her. “Priss made coffee and went home to feed her cat. I was worried to death when she said you weren’t upstairs in bed. Where’ve you been this early?”

  She swallowed in remembered pain at the sheer beauty and treachery of him.

  “I’ve been to DeeDee’s.”

  He set his cup down and came over and put his hand gently beneath her chin, and lifted it until she looked directly into his eyes. “Couldn’t you sleep?” he said. “Neither could I. I thought all night about you up there in that bed alone, what you must have been going through. God, I wanted so badly to come to you …”

  Mike turned away and sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and put her head down on the table on her folded arms.

  “DeeDee told me all about your little real estate venture,” she said.

  There was a long silence, in which Mike watched the blackness behind her eyelids turn to dark red and pin-wheel with parabolas of white light. Then he said, in a voice that was Bay’s familiar deep voice, and yet different, “Well, I wish she hadn’t done that. I hoped you wouldn’t have to know about that for a while, Mike, and maybe not ever. Maybe it would have been better all the way around if you could have gotten away to New York and let things down here just … be. Though I was serious when I said I wish you could have stayed, too. I think, if DeeDee had kept her mouth shut, we could have really worked something out. Now, of course, it’s all spoiled.”

  Mike’s heart, which she had thought frozen, dropped, cold and leaden, as if through fathomless black water. She had, she realized, hoped that he would deny it.

  She lifted her head and swiveled around to look at him. He looked back, his handsome face grave but very faintly amused, hands in his jacket pocket. He looked like a sketch in Gentleman’s Quarterly.

  “Why have you been fucking me all summer?” she asked. Her voice in her ears did not sound like her own. “DeeDee was going to get the land all along, not me. Has got it, now. Why not just bang her? She’d have loved that. And Duck would have sold tickets, if you’d wanted him to.”

  He chuckled. It was a merry, companionable, incredible sound.

  “Can you imagine anybody humping DeeDee? You’re light-years out of that class, Mike. No, you were my information pipeline. And I wanted you on our side. It was you he wanted to come down here when he had the stroke; you he kept asking for. Not DeeDee. We were going to get you to persuade him to deed the rest of the property over to her, once it was all over and he’d lost the appeal. We thought he might be glad just to get it off his mind. And then he was getting fond of you; we all saw that. And cold to DeeDee. I had to warn her off coming over here. That worried us. Who’s to say what you two might have cooked up, between you? You’d already gone over. And he was a crazy old man, there at the end.”

  “Yes, he was,” Mike said. “He really was a crazy old man. Well, Bay, he saved you all a lot of trouble by checking out, didn’t he? Too bad he didn’t die right off when he had the stroke. He could have spared you a lot of sack time.”

  The old smile flashed at her, crazily, in all its gay charm.

  “Oh, I didn’t mind that part,” Bay Sewell said. “You’re a fantastic piece of ass. Must be all that foreign travel. I’ve never had anything like that.”

  She screamed at him, the same words she had screamed at DeeDee and Duck Wingo: “Couldn’t you have waited?”

  “No,” he said earnestly. “The syndicate was ready to move. You almost queered it all when you started in with him on that crazy letter-writing campaign; I had to fly to Boston and try to put that fire out, and for a while there I thought we’d blown it all. Or you had. I practically signed my life away. But it’s done now. I’ve already got a big chunk of the money. They wired it last night. The rest comes when we break ground. Winship Farms Industrial Park we’re calling it, just like he was going to. You know he’d like that, Mike. Look, you have to move when the time is right. I’ve known that all my life. I’ve lived by it. It’s going to take me all the way. You have to take your chances when they come. You took yours, Mike, when you left me …”

  The rage burst. “When I left you! Goddamn you, Bay Sewell, you stood right here in this house and cast your lot with him! With him and his money! I watched you do it! And you—you just can’t keep your hands off what’s his, can you? Whether it’s his money, or his land, or his daughter …

  “You’ve hated me for a long time, haven’t you, Bay? You and DeeDee and Duck. All this time …”

  He looked down at the linoleum. “I certainly never hated you, but you shouldn’t have put me in that spot,” he said. “Everything was all set up. You had no business doing that to me.” Suddenly his dark face contorted. “You were my ticket out of here, Mike,” he said softly, but with such venom that she stepped instinctively backwards, out of his range. “My air fare. Don’t you know what a town like this does to winners? Do you think I didn’t know what I was, what I had, what I still have? I could have made the world shake … out there. You could have helped me. His money was going to kick us off. But you ran out, and I’ve been stuck all these years with a drunk and a crazy old bigot and two fools. And it’s been your name in all those magazines and all those newspapers. And all the time I was the smart one; I was always the best one …”

  “You could have left anytime,” Mike whispered.

  “No. His money had me tied here like Gulliver. His money put me through school. His fucking land started my business. Jesus Christ, he even picked out my wife!”

  “He helped you, Bay!” Mike cried.

  “No. He bought me. The real estate business and wife were how I paid him back for going to school. Those, and a life lived here in nowheresville in his shadow. But that debt’s cleared now. It’s off the books.”

  She looked up at him for a long time, at his chiseled face, his good hands, his beautiful eyes, not, perhaps, quite fully sane.

  “Did you ever love me?” she said.

  “Of course,” he said, surprised. “You were the first thing I had ever owned. And I still do love you. If you’d inherited that land … or if you’d gone along with us … I’d have been married to you in a year.”

  “I see. And how were you going to manage that? Was Sally going the way Daddy did?”

  “God, Mike, I won’t have to kill her, no more than I did your father. Can’t you see she’s doing it herself? She’ll be dead before Christmas.”

  His mouth continued to move; he was saying something more, but Mike did not hear him. She turned and went upstairs and got into the bathtub, filling it as full as possible with scalding hot water, and stayed there a long time. She closed her eyes and thought of nothing at all.

  When she came back downstairs, Bayard Sewell was gone and Sam Canaday was sitting
in his accustomed place at the kitchen table, finishing up the coffee and eating doughnuts from a greasy white sack in front of him.

  “Don’t you ever lock your door?” he said. He was dressed in the blue blazer and gray slacks, and his tie today was dark blue with a thin red stripe. His fair hair shone almost white in the overhead light, and his sallow-tanned face was not as grayed with weariness as when she had last seen him, though the yellow-green wolf’s eyes were ringed with darker saffron. He smelled of soap and some kind of piny aftershave.

  Mike sat down at the table and fished a doughnut out of the sack. She was, she realized suddenly, ravenous. She bolted the doughnut and then began to talk. She talked for nearly an hour. When she had finished, she looked at him, waiting for some reaction: anger, pity, regret … something. Nothing crossed his face except a kind of deepening of the weariness. Her own anger began to mount again.

  “Well, so you know about it,” he said. “At least you heard it straight from the horses’ mouths. Or asses, as the case may be. I can’t say I’m sorry you know. But I can say I’m glad I don’t have to tell you. I was going to, once the funeral was over. Sewell is something else, isn’t he? He would have made a great Borgia. Cat food, huh? Well. Something new in Lytton, some honest-to-God Yankee cat food. They can call it Lytton Liver and Lights, Limited. Boy’s real presidential material.”

  Mike stared at him.

  “Is that all you have to say about it?”

  “I’d say your pretty friend Bayard Everett Sewell had said it all, for the time being,” he said.

  “And you’re not going to do anything about it?”

  “What do you want me to do, Mike? They haven’t broken any law.”

  “They killed my father! There are laws against that!”

  “No, really, they didn’t. You just can’t say they did, not publicly, anyway. You’d be in the funny farm in three weeks.”

  “By God, I will say it,” Mike cried. The fury ran through her like heat lightning; stormed through her like a great wind. “I’ll tell everybody in this town what they did! Everybody in this state! Better than that, I’ll write it and send it to every paper in fucking Georgia. They know my by-line; they’ll take my stuff. And if you won’t help me do it, I’ll do it myself!”

  She had risen from her chair and was standing, supporting herself against the edge of the kitchen table. She shook all over, profoundly. He popped the last bite of doughnut into his mouth and rose himself, and pushed her gently back into the chair.

  “No,” he said. “You’re not going to do that, or anything else. You’re going to say nothing to DeeDee or Duck or Sewell, or Priss, or J.W., or anybody else. You’re going to help them give the Colonel the numero uno funeral the Lytton Methodist Church can throw, and you’re going to go to it, and thank every little old blue-haired lady and chicken-necked geezer for coming, and smile and smile, and serve coffee and cake to ten thousand people afterward if you have to, and then you’re going to thank them all again.”

  “Sam, I can’t! I can’t watch those three wail and carry on over his grave; I can’t watch people go up to them and comfort them—especially not him! Everybody thinks he loved Daddy like his own father, and they’ll be all over him, and he’ll just lap it up … they all three will. You’re telling me to just … to just … let them get away with it!”

  “That’s right. I am.”

  “Why?” It was a great, despairing howl of anguish and incomprehension.

  “Because there isn’t anything else you can do about it, Mike. Not now. They have not, repeat not, done anything illegal. DeeDee hasn’t and Duck hasn’t, and Bayard Everett Sewell hasn’t, and the Georgia Department of Transportation hasn’t.”

  “Sam, there is goddamned well something on this earth that I can do about it, and I will find out what, and I will do it.”

  “All right, Mike. Fine. I’m not going to tell you that the day will come when you won’t feel like this. But it will, and sooner than you think. Meanwhile, though, I want you to leave it alone. Just for now. Let’s give him a real Viking funeral. Can you do that? For him? For me?”

  “Just don’t, please, give me any pious shit about time the great healer,” Mike said, her voice shaking low in her throat.

  “Okay,” Sam Canaday said. “No shit. Now you’d better go up and get dressed. We need to be at the church a little early.”

  “Sam,” she said, rising again. “Will you say something at the church? For Daddy? Like a … you know, like a eulogy?”

  “I can’t do that, Mike.”

  “Why not? Aren’t you a good friend of what’s-his-name, that young preacher?”

  “I … can’t. I don’t talk in churches anymore, Mike. I haven’t done that in … a long time. And Lytton would have a fit. You know I’m not exactly everybody’s favorite son …”

  “Please, Sam. You were his. You really were like a son to him. Sam, listen.” Mike felt the hated tears start again and shook her head impatiently, but they rolled down her cheeks unchecked, warm. “I don’t have anything to … give him. To send off with him. This funeral stuff, all this to-do … this isn’t from me, it’s from DeeDee. It’s from Priss. It’s from Lytton. I want something at his funeral to be from me.”

  He walked around the table and brushed the tears from her face with his thumb, gently.

  “All right, Mike,” he said. “I’ll ask Tom Cawthorn if he minds. And I’ll try to come up with something.”

  “Don’t try, Sam,” she said, stopping in the kitchen door. “Do it. Please. For me and Daddy.”

  He put his thumb up, in the manner of fighter pilots and race car drivers.

  “You got it,” he said.

  32

  THE LYTTON UNITED METHODIST CHURCH HAD STOOD ON the corner of Trinity and Elder streets, just west of the main business district, for more than one hundred years. It had been refurbished since Mike had left, and the sanctuary was comfortable and modern now, with light, plain oak pews and deep red altar and kneeling cushions and carpet. There was a new organ with a cathedral-like tent of gleaming pipes, and a high, spacious choir loft, and a suspended pulpit that would elevate its occupant fittingly above the congregation. Not much remained of the dim, time-stained stucco sanctuary that Mike remembered, but the smell was the same: filtered sunlight and ecclesiastical dust, and somehow, minty white paste from the primary Sunday school classrooms, and the ghostly breath of the old, long-vanished coal furnace.

  The light was the same, too. Mike had hated the interminable Sunday morning services; had fidgeted restlessly through the droning messages of a succession of earnest, seemingly ancient ministers, and had been badly frightened by the frequent and apocalyptic revivals. But she had always loved the light that came in through the old church’s stained-glass windows. There were eight of them, four down each side of the sanctuary, and they depicted vignettes of Jesus with his disciples. They were as old as the church, made in Germany, and beautiful. When they were small, DeeDee had piously professed to love the window in which a Teutonic-looking Christ calmed the tossing waters of the Sea of Galilee while his faithless followers quailed in the bottom of a large flat boat. But Mike had liked the one where an abject Peter bowed his head in shame as a cock as large as he was crowed lustily, and a betrayed Jesus looked suitably long-suffering in the background.

  The light that streamed in through the windows had made of the ordinary Lytton congregation something magical to Mike, rows of enchanted, roseate people, and even on this day the lambent, deep-glowing light was the first thing she noticed when she walked into the church. The second was the enormous bronze casket standing, half-buried in flowers, at the foot of the altar. Mike’s stomach tightened. DeeDee had, she knew, gone to the funeral home and canceled the simple mahogany coffin that Priss and Sam had chosen and substituted this bronze monster, that looked for all the world like a 1956 Buick. DeeDee had ordered the casket pall, too, a great blanket of red and pink and white carnations. It looks like something they’d drape over Sea
ttle Slew, Mike thought. Her own flowers, old-fashioned red climbing roses as near to the Paul Scarlets at the homeplace as the florist could find, spilled out of a tall white wicker basket at the casket’s head. Priss had sent massed, glowing Gerbera daisies from her own garden, and Sam had sent nothing at all. “I hate funeral flowers,” he said. “Somehow they all smell like embalming fluid. I’m not going to dump any more on the Colonel.” An urn of slender, opalescent pink spider lilies, out of season and as perfect as Chinese jade, bore a card that read, “Bayard Everett Sewell and family.”

  She sat in the front row of pews where the family of the bereaved habitually sat in this and other southern churches. DeeDee was on her left with Duck beyond her, and J.W. Cromie sat, rigid and reluctant, on her right. Mike had grabbed J.W. by his alien navy blue arm on the way into the church and marched him down the aisle to the family pew where Duck and DeeDee were already seated, and plumped him down beside her. DeeDee had glared tear-scrimmed daggers at her, but Mike had only looked straight ahead. To J.W. she whispered, “If you get up and leave I’m right behind you, and I won’t come back.” He stayed put, looking impassive and grand in the unaccustomed suit, and utterly miserable. Mike could feel the eyes of Lytton on their backs and hear the soft tide of whispers that broke against them, but she did not turn. Behind her, Priss Comfort and Sam Canaday sat in the second family pew, alone. Behind them, in the rest of the pews, the church was packed to bursting. Old Lytton, that Mike had not seen since she had been home, had come at last to send off one of their own.

  The choir loft was full of men and women and teenagers in robes of a soft red that matched the seat cushions, and white surplices. Mike had never seen a full choir at a funeral before, and wondered how DeeDee … or, more likely, Priss … had managed to amass such a formidable army on such short notice, and a weekday to boot. The choir sat silent and properly solemn in the rays of colored light that slanted through the stained-glass windows … Mike had called them holy miracle rays when she was small … but they had not yet sung. Instead, the organ, manned by a small, stout, energetic woman in a robe and surplice and carved blue hair, had noodled a soft medley of solemn, old-fashioned hymns as the sanctuary filled, segueing from “Rock of Ages” into “The Old Rugged Cross” to “I Come to the Garden Alone” to “Softly and Tenderly.” As the organist reached the refrain of the latter, the choir rose as one and sang, softly: “Come home, come ho-oo-me, Ye who are weary come home,” and DeeDee gave a great sob. Mike’s mouth twitched. She would love to have smacked DeeDee’s pale, tear-wrecked face. The choir remained standing and slid into the hymn that always brought a lump to Mike’s throat, no matter where she heard it, and she heard it often, for it seemed, of late, to have become somewhat in vogue for ecumenically elegiac purposes: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound …” Mike swallowed hard, past an aching lump. She was determined not to cry. The lump dissolved as Bayard Sewell walked past her down the aisle with Sally Sewell on his arm, and seated himself in the front pew across the aisle from the Winship family.