DeeDee’s head came up, like a cow swinging at a fly.
“What?” she said suspiciously.
“I want to talk a little about your dad’s will, DeeDee,” Sam said. “I know it’s probably not the time for it, and we’ll do a formal reading later if you like, but he specifically wanted this covered directly after his funeral. I know you’ll want to abide by his wishes.”
“What do you know about my daddy’s will?” DeeDee said crossly. Her swollen blue eyes were hostile.
“I’m his attorney of record,” Sam said mildly. “Have been for some time now. I thought you knew that.”
“Well, I certainly didn’t. I thought he handled his own affairs.”
“It’s customary among attorneys to get a colleague to handle your will,” Sam said. “I won’t keep you. It’s been a hard day for all of us.”
She sniffed, but rose with an effort and followed him down the little hall and into her father’s study. Duck and Bayard Sewell came behind her, Duck peering truculently at Sam, Bay looking levelly and consideringly after his square figure.
Sam stopped and turned.
“Coming, Mike?”
“I’d rather not, please,” she said, with an effort. She wanted no part of the division of her father’s spoils. “We can’t do this without you,” Sam said. So she rose and followed them into the dim, austere room that had been off-limits and thus mysterious to her throughout her childhood.
J.W. Cromie was sitting in the half-lit room, stiff and uncomfortable. He did not rise or look at them. Priss Comfort sat in another straight chair beside him. She smiled at Mike and nodded at the others as if she were accustomed to receiving visitors in this Holy of Holies every day of her life.
“Take seats, please,” Sam said politely. They did, still staring suspiciously at him. He seated himself behind John Winship’s vast, polished rolltop, where pretty, silver-framed Claudia Searcy smiled forever into the long gloom, and switched on the green-shaded brass lamp that John Winship had salvaged from the old Fulton County Courthouse, and laid his hands on the desk top.
“As I said, this is not a formal reading of the Colonel’s will. Maybe we won’t need to do that, but we surely can, if any of you still feels we need to later. I have copies for all of you, of course, and I’ll pass them around in a while. John asked me to ask Priss Comfort if she would serve as his executor”—he nodded at Priss, who nodded back, Buddha-like and unsurprised—”and she has accepted. It is Priss who will actually see to the transfer of properties. See that the torch is properly passed, so to speak.
“Well. It’s a very simple will. Skipping the legalese, I’ll tell you that the garage and garage apartment of this house, and the Cadillac, and a cash sum of fifteen thousand dollars, go to J.W. Cromie.”
Sam nodded to J.W., who ducked his head. His eyes glistened, and he shut them.
“The Colonel’s gold studs and collar pins and pocket watch, and the collection of Rose Medallion porcelain that is presently in this house, go to Priss Comfort.”
He nodded at Priss, and she smiled, an involuntary and very sweet smile.
Sam cleared his throat and said, “The rest of the estate, including this house and its contents, cash and assets amounting to fifty thousand dollars, and the proceeds of the sale of the old Winship house to the Department of Transportation, goes to DeeDee.” He smiled at DeeDee and she smiled back, a wavering, unwilling smile, her eyes filling again with tears.
“… except for the remaining eighty acres of land comprising the Winship family homeplace, which go to his younger daughter, Micah Winship Singer.”
He looked around the room affably. “Are there any questions?” he said.
For a long moment there was absolute silence. Mike, sunk in her fatigue and unwillingness to be in this room, did not, at first, comprehend Sam Canaday’s words. It was the thick totality of the silence following them that made her raise her head, not the sense of them. By the time their import had sunk in, DeeDee had begun to scream.
Mike had once seen a television program on African lions, narrated by Marlin Perkins, in which a small gazelle had been caught and dragged down and killed by a hunting pair. The gazelle’s screams had haunted her sleep for weeks afterward. They were hoarse and minor and not very loud, and went on and on, and the absolute despair in them was terrible to hear.
DeeDee sounded like that.
She did not stop screaming until Dr. Gaddis had been summoned once more and given her yet another shot, and when she did stop, it was only because she was sagging into a semitorpor and had to be supported out to the car by Sam and Duck. In a perfect, ringing shell of shock, Mike thought, Dr. Gaddis has made a fortune off the Winships this past year. We could build him a hospital. No one else spoke while DeeDee was being ministered to and taken away; Priss and J.W. sat calmly in the kitchen, simply waiting, and Bayard Sewell had, at some point, come to stand quietly beside Mike, in the living room of her father’s house.
Sam came back into the house, and Duck came raging in behind him, wet with rain, his face a congested magenta, the hooded eyes wild and ringed with white. He was inarticulate with rage; it was some moments before they could tell what he was shouting.
He put a scrabbling hand on Sam’s shoulder and spun him around.
“I ought to kill you, you lying son of a bitch,” he screamed, and Sam shrugged his hand away, green eyes narrow.
Duck turned on Mike.
“You sneaking, scheming, rotten New York bitch …”
Sam started for him, but Bayard Sewell’s voice sliced through the ringing air, and Duck Wingo stopped.
“Shut your mouth, Duck, and get on out of here,” Bay Sewell said. His voice was like a frozen whiplash. He did not move from his position beside Mike. “Get DeeDee home and don’t come around here anymore. Mike’s been through enough without this sorriness.”
Duck Wingo swung his big head from Bay Sewell to Mike and Sam and back again, like a vicious and cowardly dog whose master has suddenly turned on him. He stank of violence and stupidity. Bay stared straight into his eyes, his face still. In a moment, Duck turned and shambled heavily out the front door and through’ the diminishing rain to the car, where DeeDee slumped in her drugged peace against the door. Mike did not hear the engine start.
Bay Sewell edged himself closer to Mike across the Oriental rug. She had seen him do that once before, in this same living room, across this same rug. Only then he had been edging away from her, not toward her. Edging toward her father, and his deliverance. He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and looked down at her. His eyes were soft and clear and very, very blue.
“You need to rest, now, Mike,” he murmured. “Get some sleep, and I’ll come by in the morning. We need to talk, but we have all the time in the world.”
She looked at him.
“Get your hand off me, Bay, or I’ll cut your balls off and make cat food of them,” Mike said.
He stepped jerkily back as if she had slapped him, and the muscles around his mouth leapt out in white ridges. He looked at Sam Canaday.
“We’ll break the will, of course,” he said. His voice did not sound quite right; was higher, thicker. “It should take about fifteen minutes. I have access to some of the best lawyers in the United States.”
“Had, you mean,” Sam drawled. “You’ll be lucky if your business associates stop at cat food. But by all means, have at it.”
“I’ll have you disbarred! If you’re even a member of the bar …”
“Oh, I’m a member,” Sam said, walking to the door and opening it. “But you might as well have at that, too. Give you something to do; keep you off the streets. Meanwhile, you were just leaving.”
“Mike,” Bayard Sewell hissed, “before God, if I ever find out you knew about this and didn’t tell me …” The blue eyes were, she thought, very slightly mad.
Sam stepped in front of her and pushed Bayard Sewell lightly between his shoulder blades.
“Say good night, Bay,” he said.
Bayard Sewell whirled and strode across the porch and out into the last of the rain. He splashed unheedingly through the water that always stood at the bottom of the front steps. Sam shut the door and leaned against it. Mike sat down abruptly on the bottom step of the stairs to the second floor.
“Cat food, huh?” Sam Canaday said, beginning to laugh. “Well, it’s better than what I had in mind. Madame Tussaud’s, I thought, or maybe the Smithsonian.”
“Sam, I’m just so very tired,” Mike said, her voice dying in her throat.
He pulled her to her feet.
“Go on upstairs and go to bed. I’ll bunk down here for tonight. Don’t come down for at least twelve hours.”
“Will you be here in the morning?” Mike asked.
“I’ll be here,” Sam Canaday said. “Now go.”
Mike went.
33
WHEN SHE CAME DOWNSTAIRS THE NEXT MORNING, SAM WAS just heaving himself up off the old couch in her father’s study. The sofa afghan trailed onto the floor, and he sat up, knuckling his face. His pale hair drooped dispiritedly over his paler eyes, and the smudges underneath them were deeper than ever. Silvery bristles glistened on his jaw. He smiled at her. Mike smiled back. He’s not ever going to be able to avoid looking like a wolf who just ate a lamb, she thought.
The world outside the Pomeroy Street house was washed and crystalline. Spider webs were frosted with the faintly chill breath of September. The long heat had broken in the night, and autumn had come ghosting in behind it. It would be hot again, Mike knew; noons would burn, and long afternoons simmer, but the big heat, the monstrous great heat of summer was gone. Sounds had a new clarity. She could hear a dog barking a street away, and J.W.’s power mower seemed to purr with pleasure.
“The squire is tending his acres,” Sam said, seeing her head tilted toward the sound. “He’s been working around that garage since dawn.”
“Bless Daddy for that,” Mike said.
“Bless him indeed,” said Sam Canaday.
Sam put the coffeepot on, and Mike found leftover doughnuts in the refrigerator, and put them into the oven. They ate in silence, and then she said, as if they had just been talking of it, “What I don’t understand is why the DOT would accommodate Bay with a road, if he’s so junior in the legislature. I mean, he’s persuasive, but nobody’s that persuasive …”
“Oh, Christ, Mike, he’s obviously going to be governor one day. Or was. They could have seen to that. They were grooming him. You need to have a governor in your pocket. It’s the classic way of southern legislatures. He got wind of this developer, whoever this great cat-food mogul is, in Boston; he knew where there was a nice piece of land he could maybe get his hands on, and the rest, as they say, is history. The only problem was, the developers insisted on highway access. So he went to the Highway Committee, or whoever rattles the DOT’s cage up there, and … voilà. A little roadypoo. In exchange, of course, for untold future favors. He had to move fast, or the Boston crowd would have gone somewhere else. He couldn’t wait for the Colonel to die and leave it to DeeDee, and he didn’t know then about the cancer. And he had to form a partnership with Duck and DeeDee in order to get at the land. God knows what he promised them. I’d guess that his cut was a considerable joint venture partnership, plus a hefty finder’s fee, already in hand. It’s not really very complicated. Just neat.”
“You know,” Mike said, “nothing is really ever fair, is it? Even when you win, you don’t win. Bay and DeeDee and Duck may have lost their big shot at whatever, but Daddy lost his war.”
“No,” Sam said. “He lost his battle, but he won his war. And what a legacy he left. He showed us the power of total passion, of love. How it can work. Look at you. Christ, when you came down here, you were nothing but a child. All we saw of you for the longest kind of time was children. The ‘good’ child, the rebellious child, the little nymphet, playing with sex … oh, yeah, that was plain as the nose on your face … but you were nowhere near being a whole woman. But then somehow you managed to find him again, that father you’d been looking for all those years, and when you did, even at the very moment he died, you turned into one of the realest and wholest women I’ve ever seen. That skinny, iced-up New York child-woman lit out for good, and you were a woman who could cry, and scream, and hate, and love … you were something to see. Are something to see. That’s the power of love, Mike. That’s what it can do. It can make you whole. If he left you nothing else, he showed you how to let the unimportant go and put your passion where it counts.”
“Where did his count?” Mike asked, genuinely curious.
“Well … ‘the earth abides.’ And so does the daughter. And that woman she turned into.”
Mike smiled.
“You are a romantic,” she said. “I don’t care what you say. What about that wonderful, beautiful eulogy? What do you call that but sheer romanticism?”
“No,” Sam said. “That wasn’t romance. That was part of the package, part of the Viking funeral we promised him. It was okay; it was even fun, but I don’t want to do any more of it. It misleads people. The law is better.”
They sat silently for a time, drinking the coffee. Outside the power mower stopped and the cicadas began. They sounded like somnolence and heat, but, this time, the dry, dreaming heat of autumn.
“Poor Daddy,” Mike said. “I’m so glad he didn’t know about them.”
Sam drained his tepid coffee and looked at her.
“He knew,” he said.
Pain poured again through Mike like lava. “Ah, God!” she cried. “Oh, my God! It must have nearly killed him! Oh, Sam, how ever did he find out?”
“It did nearly kill him,” Sam Canaday said. “That’s when he had the stroke, when he first found out. I told him, Mike. J.W. came to me with it and I swore him to secrecy, and then I told your father.”
Her voice would not come out of her throat. “How could you?” she whispered, finally. “Look what it did to him!”
“I know. How do you think I’ve felt all these months, every time I looked at him in that goddamned wheelchair? I really loved your dad. And yet how could I not tell him? He was a man, Mike. He was not a child. Two people he loved were lying to him. I wasn’t going to be the third. I couldn’t just let them turn him into an old baby, an old fool, not on top of everything else they were doing to him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, then? Didn’t I deserve to know? Was it okay for me to be a fool?” Angry tears were smarting behind Mike’s eyes.
“I didn’t want to have to tell you about your sister, in the first place. I guess I kept hoping that some miracle or other would happen. That they’d call off their road. And then, we didn’t really know you at first. You might have thought it was a great idea. You made no secret of the fact that you barely tolerated him at first, you know. And as for Sewell—I’m not a fool, Mike. I’ve been in love, too. Would you have believed me?”
Mike’s face flamed. She knew that she would not have.
“After a while I did want to tell you, after you’d swung over to his side,” Sam went on. “But he made me promise not to. On that old Bible of his father’s. Really. He said you’d had enough of family treachery. But I’m awfully glad J.W. had the sense and guts to break his promise to me. I was going through hell; I couldn’t bear the thought that Sewell might get his hands on that land through you when he couldn’t get it his own way.”
And of course, he would have, Mike thought. He was headed that way. I was the queen of all the fools, not Daddy. She grimaced. Aloud, she said, “When did he change his will?”
“As soon as he could talk some, after the stroke. And then he asked for you to come home. He really did, Mike. He wanted a Winship to have the land. The right Winship.”
“So he found a way to save his land.”
“That’s not why he asked for you to come. He knew you were pretty apt to refuse it. He knew you might sell it or give it to DeeDee, whatever he did. It wasn’t for that he called you
home.”
He looked up at Mike. She poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and wrapped her hands around it. She felt, somehow, cold and diminished.
“He wanted to make things up to you,” Sam said. “He never could find the words; he never could have said, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong. I love you.’ But he tried to do it another way. He gave you what he loved best in this world, besides your mother. He spent the last three months of his life, in his own way, saying, ‘I love you.’ “
“All that time,” Mike whispered. “All that time, and I never even heard what he was saying. I thought he was just barely suffering me. I never said it to him, either … ‘I love you,’ I mean.”
“Yes, you did. You did, that day down at the homeplace when you asked if you could help him lick stamps. You couldn’t have said it any clearer. Didn’t you see his face?”
Mike began to cry again. Once again, she covered her face and wept for the father unknown, the father new-given. Under the weeping was impatience. She had thought that she was done with tears.
“I’m awfully tired of crying,” she said at last to Sam Canaday, through her wet fingers.
“Me, too,” he said. “I wish you’d stop.”
Mike splashed her face at the sink and sat blearily back down at the table.
“There’s something else,” Sam said. “I’m telling you because J.W. says he’s going to if I don’t, and he shouldn’t have to. He’s pretty sure Sewell told your dad they were wrecking the house that afternoon. He believes he woke your dad up and told him before … he went on upstairs, hoping for just what he got, or something like it.” His face was grim.
“Before he came upstairs to my room!” Mike said, incandescent with fury. “Goddamn his murdering soul, I will write that story! I’ll run him clear out of Lytton! I’ll ruin him in the legislature; the closest he’ll ever get to the governor’s office is on public tour day …”
“And all you’ll get is a libel suit,” Sam said. “The papers would never print an unsubstantiated charge, and the legislature would never rat on one of its own. This is small potatoes to the Georgia legislature, Mike. And J.W. can’t prove it, of course, and Sewell could make things pretty hot for him in Lytton, if it got out that J.W. told me that. He still needs to work, even if he is landed gentry now. Let it alone. Bayard Sewell has lost his main chance, and he ain’t got a prayer of paying back that chunk of change the big boys have already given him. All he’s accomplished is to cost the state a road to nowhere. That’s enough to cook him in the so-called political arena. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t wind up with his knee caps blown off in some dirt-road gravel pit in Coweta County. He’s had Sally Sewell on his back for twenty years, and now he’ll have Duck and DeeDee on his neck for the rest of his life. It’s enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if he packed up his toys and his poor wife and left Lytton before long, anyway. From what you say, he’s hated the place all his life, and there’s sure nothing to hold him here now.”
Homeplace Page 38
