Backwater

by Joan Bauer

  Dad sniffed. “We loved the law. My father taught us legal precedent every night at the dinner table.”

  This had to affect the digestion. “What kinds of things did you talk about?”

  Dad squirmed. “Cases, politics, law journal articles.”

  “So you and Uncle Archie had law school every night at dinner?”

  Dad leaned forward. “I had law school,” he said quietly. “Archie had dinner.”

  “Now just a minute!” Archie stormed into the room. “You needed the help.”

  “I was always interested in learning more no matter how long it took,” Dad addressed me, “whereas Archie didn’t seem to think he needed it.”

  “I was first in my class at Yale Law,” Archie spat. “You were seventeenth. From the first day, I felt in complete resonance with the law and its powers. I never wavered in my quest. I’ll let my record speak for itself.”

  He was very rich and basically undefeated.

  “Veni, vedi, vici.” Archie said smugly. That’s Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Julius Caesar said it first. Uncle Archie did not relate to regular guys.

  I smiled at Uncle Archie, even though it hurt to. “Your father must have been so proud of you.”

  Archie’s bushy eyebrows tightened. “He was.”

  “How did he let you know?”

  “By expecting me to excel at everything.”

  “Excuse me, but didn’t that put a lot of pressure on you? It’s pretty hard to be excellent at everything.”

  “Some of us manage.”

  “What other things did Grandpa expect?” I asked cautiously.

  Dad interjected, “Our father said given the chance to be a rich lawyer or a poor one, any son of his better choose the former.”

  “I guess there was a reason Grandpa was called ‘Iron Will.’”

  “He lived up to the name.” Dad and Archie said this in unison.

  “Uncle Archie,” I pleaded. “Could I get my dad’s comments now? I’m going to interview you next. I promise.”

  Archie’s chin stuck out in immovable Breedlove fashion.

  “Please?” I added.

  He retreated to the hall, but like all powerful lawyers, his presence remained.

  I broached the next part gently. “Uh, Dad … how did Josephine feel about having law school at dinner?”

  “Josephine,” Dad began coarsely, “had her own ways of not being present.”

  “She certainly did,” Archie added from the doorway.

  “I’ve seen pictures of her hiding under the dinner table …”

  “That,” Archie asserted, “was one of many places.”

  Dad got up angrily. “She deliberately walked away from this family, never turning back. She has lost her family privileges and I, for one, won’t waste any breath talking about her.”

  He stormed out.

  “Dad …”

  I followed him, holding out the tape recorder. “We don’t have to talk about Josephine, Dad. We can talk about anything else. What you want from life … what your father wanted.”

  He looked at me with irritation.

  I went for a global perspective, held the tape recorder out, smiled caringly. “What do you want to say to future generations, Dad?”

  “Ivy,” Dad intoned, “I want to be very clear about this. For future generations, including you. Breedloves have been born and bred to love the law. I have nothing more to say.” He marched up the stairs.

  Uncle Archie checked my tape recorder to make sure it was on. “Personally, Ivy, I feel that my life didn’t begin until I went to law school.”

  I leaned wearily against the wall holding the recorder. “Can you tell me about that, Uncle Archie?”

  * * *

  I had ninety taped minutes of Uncle Archie droning on about law school.

  I had a headache, too.

  It was nine A.M. I was back in the family cemetery trying to become centered. Most people don’t realize that gravemarkers are the oldest surviving form of American folk art. Walking through an old cemetery is like walking through history—you can learn something about the people buried there, their families, and the time in which they died. Take the Puritans—they were big on life being hard in the 1600s and their gravemarkers shouted it. If you’re into despair, you’ll feel right at home with the hollow-eyed skulls, crossed bones, and grim reapers. Personally, I’m more of an eighteenth century person. Give me a gravestone with winged cherubs and rosettes any day.

  I studied the holly wreaths at my grandparents’ graves—the sharp green leaves, the small red berries. It was the perfect touch, a simple statement. I liked simple things.

  Nobody sees a flower, really—it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

  That’s what the artist Georgia O’Keeffe said. I tilted my head to look at the holly, boring in deep as I imagined Georgia O’Keeffe would. My concentration was broken as usual.

  “Good morning!” Fiona shouted it like a caffeinated tour guide, did a quick sweep of a few headstones with her videocam, said, “That should do it,” and started walking around the house, missing just about everything of historical significance, like the porch Great-Grandpa brought all the way from the first family home in New Hampshire, the garden stones Great-Great-Aunt Lucrecia carried here from England that were in her mother’s prize garden, the bird feeder that Josephine sculpted out of granite before she disappeared. Fiona couldn’t tell an artifact if it got shoved up her surgically reduced nose.

  Out of all the relatives I’ve learned about, I’m most intrigued by Josephine, the Breedlove mystery woman. Tib said Josephine didn’t know how to be with people.

  “Her best friends were her birds,” Tib recalled. “Jo just loved being around anything with wings.”

  I have some photographs of her—it’s eerie how much we look alike. I have her high school yearbook, although instead of where her picture should have been, there’s a photograph of a soaring white dove. The caption says, “Remember me this way.” She went to a special arts school that let you do things like that.

  I’ve tried to imagine what it was like for her growing up in this legal family. Tib said Jo just went deeper and deeper into herself. The last time anyone saw her was at my mother’s funeral, but she didn’t stay long. Tib and Josephine would write occasionally, but after years of no responses, Tib threw in the towel.

  Tib is Josephine’s godmother. “I promised before God and the Episcopal church to protect that child from evil and stupidity,” Tib said. “I didn’t do much of a job.” I mentioned that if a person doesn’t want to be with people, how can you help them? But on this issue, Tib wouldn’t be comforted. She said that Josephine seemed so alone at my mother’s funeral, sitting in the back of the church, not talking to anyone.

  I don’t remember anything about Mom’s funeral, which bothers me. I remember a dream I had right after it, though—I was on a huge mountain feeling peaceful, surrounded by flying birds.

  I don’t know why I remember that.

  People in the family said that Josephine was stuck in the backwater. “Backwater” means an isolated or backward place or condition; it had become a favorite Breedlove expression, dating back to Oral Breedlove, a circuit-riding preacher in the 1700s whose loudest sermon began, “Brothers and sisters, are you stuck in the backwater of sin?”

  Now it was just a convenient way to describe a person the family didn’t understand.

  I wondered what they’d say about me when I was older.

  I wondered what they said about me now.

  I heard a rasping cough. An old, wrinkled face appeared from behind the holly bush. It was Mrs. Englebert. She’d lived next to our family home for as long as anyone could remember. She was ninety-three and as crazy as they come.

  “She’s alive, you know.” Mrs. Englebert pointed her liver-spotted hand at the birdbath. “The Commies got her up in the woods.”

  “Who’s that?”


  “The bird girl.”

  “I see …”

  Mrs. Englebert looked around, said she wanted to make sure there weren’t any Commies listening.

  “Communism has been in a major downturn for years now, Mrs. Englebert. You don’t have to worry.”

  Mrs. Englebert motioned me close. “She came here recently. Sat in the graveyard. I seen her.”

  I nodded. Last year she told me she’d seen Teddy Roosevelt sitting on his horse in our driveway.

  “How are you, Mrs. Englebert? Are you taking your medicine?”

  Her eyes clouded over. I started moving toward the house slowly.

  “That bird girl was always burying things around here.”

  “Uh-huh …” I’d almost reached the porch.

  “Over there mostly.” Mrs. Englebert pointed to a group of large rocks that almost formed a cave.

  That’s where Josephine used to spend time as a child. Tib told me. She’d sit there all alone with a candle. Mrs. Englebert started back toward her house.

  “You look just like her,” the old woman rasped, and headed off behind the holly bush.

  * * *

  I couldn’t shake the feeling.

  It was strange and disjointed, it made me shiver when I wasn’t cold. It crawled through my mind like a python slithering through grass.

  Maybe, just maybe, Mrs. Englebert knew something.

  As a historian, I had first-hand experience with questionable sources. You can’t always believe what people say—you’ve got to check the facts. Primary sources (the people who personally lived through an experience) are always your best road to truth. Last fall when I won the school essay contest (Why I Want To Write The Hundred-Year History of Long Wharf Academy) and began researching the school’s history, I interviewed the founder’s seventy-five-year-old granddaughter. I put my tape recorder on the table between us and she leaned forward, eyes gleaming, and said, “Do you know about the school scandal?”

  “Nooooooo.”

  She told me how in 1957 the school’s star running back, Clark Thickman, took a bribe to throw the regional football championship game in the fourth quarter. He went on to play college ball at UCLA, had a big career with the Chicago Bears, and became a beloved spokesman and model for Brute Strength men’s underwear. But on his deathbed, wracked with guilt over what he had done, he endowed a great deal of money to the school and wrote a letter to the administration asking them to forgive him. Money oils the road to forgiveness, so the administration built Thickman Memorial Stadium, and buried Carl’s letter and the truth by the end zone.

  I had to check this out. I wrote to Thickman’s widow, who said it was all true—the secret had weighed on Carl all his life. When I approached the headmaster, G. Preston Roblick, with what I’d found, the weight of history hung heavily in the room.

  “This story stays and ends here,” he announced brusquely. “Is that clear?”

  This was one of those moments like I had studied in ethics class—one that stirs rightness and honor. As the appointed historian and chronicler of my school, I had to take a stand. I hated taking stands.

  “Sir, I know this isn’t what schools normally have in their histories, but I think it’s important for the whole story of the school to be reported because that’s what history is supposed to do, show us what really happened so we can learn from it and—”

  G. Preston Roblick put his pale, learned face in front of mine. “Nothing will be served by this piece of history except grave misunderstanding.”

  I gulped. “But couldn’t it be a lesson to people about honorable conduct, or about how people can do wrong things, but come around at the end and do something good or—”

  “Thickman Memorial Stadium was built by the gracious and generous donation of an upstanding sports legend and beloved alumnus!”

  “But—”

  “That is all, Ivy.”

  I didn’t know what to do. You can’t rewrite history, even if people get mad at you for what you found. So I wrote up all I had researched with heavy emphasis on redemption and the historical glory of coming clean and handed it in. I’m still waiting to hear. G. Preston Roblick looks away when he sees me these days, which does not bode well for anything.

  I looked out the window by the reading nook, stared across the snowy hill of the Breedlove property to the Adirondack Mountains in the distance.

  Where was Josephine?

  Fiona walked up to me, beaming. “When you follow a schedule, when you have laid out a master plan, things fall right into place. I’m ahead of schedule. I amaze myself sometimes.”

  “Aunt Fiona, are you going to mention anything about Josephine in the video?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Josephine is not a good memory for this family.”

  Baby Face Breedlove wouldn’t get mentioned either, probably. He was a gangster who hung with Al Capone in the Roaring Twenties, but saw the error of his ways and went to Oklahoma to become a farmer just in time for the Dust Bowl Disaster in the 1930’s that wiped out farming for a decade in the Midwest.

  Cousin James said God will make you pay one way or the other.

  “Ivy, Ivy,” Fiona crooned, “always so serious. I don’t want you to think for a minute that your efforts aren’t appreciated by one and all.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Fiona’s eyes turned to gray-blue slits. “History will prove that my approach will reach and inspire the most amount of people. That is the unfathomable power of video.”

  I heard the voices of my irritated ancestors deep within my soul.

  I ran outside, down the steps, and across the cemetery to Mrs. Englebert’s house.

  4

  I raced up the rickety steps. Mrs. Englebert was watching me from behind a curtain.

  “Mrs. Englebert, could we talk about the bird girl some more?”

  No answer. I knocked on the door gently.

  “Mrs. Englebert?”

  A rustle inside.

  I waited.

  Finally the old scratched door creaked open slowly. If bats flew out, I wasn’t staying around.

  Mrs. Englebert peeked at me from behind the door.

  It was a true reach to think of this woman as a reliable source.

  She stuck out her pointed jaw. “She’s hiding like she always did.”

  “What do you mean, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Englebert’s old eyes glazed over. She looked off to the mountains. I didn’t know where the old lady was in her head, but she wasn’t with me.

  “Where did she hide, Mrs. Englebert?”

  She started to shut the door, said she couldn’t talk anymore. She was having Clark Gable to tea. Clark Gable was an actor who’d been dead for years.

  Then she pointed at the big holly bush on the boundaries of our property. “She put it on the graves this year.”

  I thought of the holly wreaths placed at the graves in the family cemetery this Christmas.

  “You mean Josephine?”

  Mrs. Englebert looked at me blankly.

  “Are you saying that the bird girl came and decorated the graves?”

  “She came at night.”

  My heart was racing, my breath came in quick spurts. “Mrs. Englebert, this is so important. Are you sure about this?”

  She shut the door fast and hollered from behind it. “As sure as I am that Clark Gable’s coming to tea!”

  * * *

  Do not reject information until you have proved it to be false.

  That’s what Tib taught me, and despite the fact that I was dealing with an all-out loon, I decided to test Mrs. Englebert’s capacity for insight.

  I ran back to the old family house, past the whitewashed fence, up the wide, wooden steps, hurled myself through the door, determined to accost the first person I saw.

  It was Egan. He was breathing heavily, chugging bottled water, just back from a run.

  I tore the bottle from his lips, grabbed his shoulders. “I want the truth, Egan! If you lie to me, I swe
ar, I’ll find out!”

  “What?”

  I pointed a long, probing finger. “I want to know if it’s you that’s put holly wreaths on the graves in the family cemetery!”

  Egan stepped back like I’d lost my mind.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Someone’s doing it.”

  “I’m innocent.”

  I went to the kitchen and found James, Victoria, and Whit.

  They didn’t do it.

  I talked to Fiona, Archie, Brad, and Sarah.

  I could tell by their faces, they were clean.

  Tib said of course she didn’t do it, she couldn’t see. Dad said no, and what was this all about anyway?

  I felt like a great detective who had just uncovered a significant clue and I didn’t have any idea what it meant.

  Of course, crazy Mrs. Englebert could have put the wreaths on the graves. It was doubtful, though. She had trouble bending down.

  The bird girl was always burying things around here.

  My heart was beating fast. I dragged Egan out to the shed, found two shovels.

  “What are we doing?” he demanded.

  I led him to the rocks out back. “We’re going to dig.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to need more than that, Ivy.”

  I bit my lip. Could I trust him?

  I had no choice. I told him about Mrs. Englebert.

  Egan fell on the ground laughing, which I felt was extreme. The archaeologist who found the first Egyptian mummies probably got laughed at, too, right before his spade hit pay dirt. If you’ve got low self-esteem, forget about a career in history. After ten minutes, Egan was able to speak.

  “She’s certifiable, Ivy!”

  “She has lucid moments. She got two things right. She remembered that Josephine spent time by the rocks and she also knew that we look alike. She knew the graves were decorated at Christmas.”

  “So what?”

  “Who decorated them, Egan? None of us did!”

  “The Grave Beautification Committee of Upstate New York!”

  “Dig.”