New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

by Amy Hempel

  It seemed scarcely a minute later but must have been an hour or so that she started straight up wide awake with the lights blazing and Boyd in the middle of room, yelling, “What the hell you think you’re doing!” And ohmigod, it was Edward saying, “Huhuhuh,” rubbing at his head and straightening up from where he was sprawled out next to her. Patricia had always maintained he was fully clothed, though why she had to maintain it was the real question.

  “You’d have to see he hadn’t even undressed,” she kept saying to Boyd, as they drove away that very morning, hardly saying good-bye.

  “Yes, all right,” said Boyd, “but what was the bastard doing in my bed in the first place?”

  “It was always his room when he came to Aunt Sadie’s.” Patricia had said it so often she was about to shriek.

  “We won’t discuss it,” said Boyd. And wouldn’t. Period.

  But slowly it dawned on her that the reason he shut her up was that he didn’t care for any of them, especially Edward. He wants to get rid of all of us! Such was the thought that kept hanging around like a bad child or a smelly stray dog, no matter how many times she told it to go away.

  Now the thought had followed them all the way into the mountains. Patricia was so annoyed she actually considered leaving them before dinner, with nothing to eat. But staying, she had to face it that the only really difficult person was Boyd. Edward was grieving over his loss. Mark was worrying about changing majors. But Boyd was sinking into a mood of long ago. Yet when she came in with a smoking casserole, everyone seemed amiable, even smiling. Talking college days.

  “What’s Pasadena like?” Boyd wanted to know.

  “I thought it was pretty nice. People out west aren’t made like us. You had to make efforts to know them. Then it might not even register. They don’t get into the politeness routines. Of course, Joclyn had friends, family too.”

  “I wish I had known her,” Patricia said.

  “It’s what I mean,” Edward said, half to himself. “Out there, nobody would say a nice thing like that.” He smiled at her. Their kinship came back.

  “We stopped by the Wolfe house,” Patricia said, leaping to a subject.

  Boyd looked blank. “The what house?”

  “Oh, you know, Boyd. The Old Kentucky Home. Thomas Wolfe’s mama kept a boarding house. It’s in Asheville.”

  “Of course, I know that. Insured with the firm. When it caught fire, we had a struggle over payments.”

  “Did somebody set it?”

  “The facts kept dodging us. It could have been some sort of family jealousy coming out that way.”

  Mark said brightly, “If you get mad in a family, it just goes on and on. There’s this boy at school can’t see his daddy because—” He stopped.

  “So what will you do next?” Patricia asked Edward.

  “When my round of visits are over you mean? I’ll have to sit down and think about it.”

  Boyd regarded him as though he might be a half-wit. For a grown man just not to know what to do next seemed hard to believe.

  Edward said, “I’d move back home if it weren’t for Aline.”

  “That’s his first wife,” Patricia told Mark. “He doesn’t like her.”

  “She wouldn’t be all over the state,” Boyd said.

  “Yes, she would,” said Edward. “She’s got a talent for it.”

  “Word gets around,” Patricia laughed. “We never knew what to make of Aline. But we tried.”

  “I tried too,” said Edward.

  “Do you remember that evening when you had gone fishing and came in to Aline’s dinner party with a string of catfish, when she had made up this important meeting you had to attend?” Starting that story made Patricia choke on laughter.

  But Boyd was getting stiff. “All that family stuff. . . .”

  Patricia retreated. “I won’t start it,” she vowed. “I promise, cross my heart, hope to die.”

  Boyd laughed. He suddenly decided to be a good host. He went to work at it, asking if they had passed a highway project on the way from the airport. “Funny thing,” he started out, and went into the funding, the business deal, the election that interrupted it, knocking out a campaign promise. He got them interested. His facts were certain to be correct. Boyd always said that to be funny you didn’t have to exaggerate, just tell the truth. He said it was one thing Mississippi people knew very well. He said that now.

  “Going to Mississippi is what I’d like to do,” said Mark.

  “It’s not like it used to be,” said Patricia. “All changed.”

  “Changed how?”

  Boyd explained: “They don’t have these big properties kept up by old ladies with lots of black help kowtowing and yesma’aming.”

  “Aunt Sadie was wonderful at it,” Edward recalled, half to himself.

  “She was getting dotty,” said Boyd. “That’s all I remember.”

  “She did her best,” said Patricia fondly. “Right to the last.”

  “Was she my aunt, too?” Mark wondered.

  “Great aunt, I guess,” Patricia allowed, then asked about football.

  Mark was their only child. In spite of efforts, she had never conceived again.

  In the dark evening on the terrace they sat listening to a faint whispering of nighttime creatures, an occasional splash from the river.

  “We could get the canoe out tomorrow,” Mark said. “Is it still down there?”

  “I haven’t checked,” said Boyd. “I’m sure they wouldn’t have taken it to Europe.”

  “Maybe I’ll go abroad,” Edward mused.

  “Ever been?” Patricia asked.

  “Once with Joclyn. It was interesting, but we moved around too much. It might be nice just to find some place and sit in it.”

  “Wondering what to do next?” Boyd asked.

  “Right,” Edward agreed.

  “Well,” said Boyd, who was commencing to feel control, “you could go some place like Sweden. I always wanted to go there, but I never found the time.”

  “What would I do?”

  “You said you would just like to sit,” Boyd pointed out.

  “The summers are too short.”

  “Try Mexico. That’s summer all year round.”

  “I did try Mexico. It’s where I met Joclyn.”

  “Oh.”

  Edward was silent. He seemed to have faded into the night shadows. He had declined dessert and coffee, wanted no more to drink. He came up out of his silence to say: “It was a pretty place.”

  Patricia knew he meant Aunt Sadie’s place and she saw, as if it was actually there, the slope of the yard in the twilight and down beyond the drive the myrtle hedge and the fireflies.

  “Lightning bugs,” said Edward, echoing her own thought exactly. “Remember the time that—”

  “I’m going to bed,” said Boyd.

  But when he left Mark wanted to know what time he meant.

  “I bet he means the time about the pig,” said Patricia, guessing. She was right.

  “She made a pet of it and wanted it in the house,” said Edward.

  On they went, laughing and remembering, until Mark left for bed. Edward, finally rising, crossed to Patricia and kissed her on the forehead. She threw her arms up to him, and he was gone.

  While still at morning coffee, Boyd and Patricia saw Mark outside with Edward, bending intently over Mark’s motorcycle. Straightened upright and started, it gave a nasty cough and snarled. Mark shut off the motor while Edward speculated. He seemed to know what was wrong. Mark came in with a grease smear down one cheek. “We need to go down to the store. Can we take the car?”

  “What do you want?” Boyd asked.

  “It’s something to clean the gas line. They’ll know at the filling station. Edward says he can tell them.”

  “I had one in Pasadena,” Edward explained.

  Boyd gave his consent. The two got in the car and went away.

  Patricia finished in the kitchen and came out to the terrace. Boyd
joined her.

  “They’re gone,” she said.

  Nobody had ever doubted that Boyd was right for Patricia. She had had a definite wild streak which she explained by saying nobody understood her. There had been escapades in the sorority at Ole Miss, sneaking out with that Osmond boy who wasn’t the right kind, and then that wild night in the cemetery. Several had got expelled. It was said she escaped because of her good family. But then her own mother had run her out of church for showing up at Easter service in a low cut silver dress with spangles. Yes, Boyd Stewart was the right one. For one thing he had a no-nonsense approach. He corrected her right before the whole family. “That won’t do, Pat,” and once he just said, “Hush up!” The remarkable thing was she minded him. And after a year or so, remarked on in stages by home visits, she “settled down.”

  As for all the running around during those years that she and Edward had done—if nobody exactly minded, it was because they were kin, or near kin, thought of that way.

  Boyd made money. He took life seriously. Insurance was a complicated business. He was still learning, he said. “But he must be fun, too,” Aunt Sadie remarked. “How come?” her daughter Gladys asked. “Patricia wouldn’t have had him if he wasn’t fun.”

  They pondered over what the fun might be. They accepted Boyd. When he visited, he unpacked and hung his clothes up carefully. Driving away with Patricia after that first visit, he had remarked, “They’re going to lose that place.” “How come?” she asked. He laughed and said in his brushing-off way, “They drink too much.” That wasn’t what he meant, and a few years later, they had to sell. By then Patricia had had her baby and then she settled down even more.

  Patricia and Boyd had lunch alone. Boyd wondered if he should call the filling station. Patricia giggled. “Maybe they went back to ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’”

  “Why do that?” Boyd asked.

  “To look for Thomas Wolfe’s ghost.”

  Boyd went out to work on the fish pond. At three o’clock he came in. The sky had thickened darkly. He was sweaty; his shirt and trousers smeared with dirt. Patricia was checking the weather station on TV. He stood in the door and announced: “I do love you, Pat.” He sounded angry. “Why, honey,” she said, “of course, you do.”

  Something was happening, but where it was happening, they didn’t know. The first thunder rumbled.

  Patricia came to Boyd. “And we both love Mark.” Impulsively, they hugged. There was a rush of rain and closer lightning. They ran around closing windows and troubling about Mark and Edward, who did not come.

  At twilight with the rain over and Boyd tired of ringing up with queries, they heard the car enter the drive and leaped up to see.

  It was Mark.

  “Gosh we were worried,” Boyd reproved.

  “It was just raining. We thought you’d know. We had a couple of beers.”

  “Where is Edward?”

  “Oh, he’s gone. He said you’d understand.”

  Patricia felt the breath go out of her, permanently, it seemed. “Why?”

  “He said just throw away the stuff in that little bag. He had a big one checked at the airport. He took a taxi into Asheville. I offered to drive him but he said no.”

  “Well,” said Boyd. “I guess that’s that.” Relief, unmistakably, was what it was.

  Patricia went inside.

  At dinner nobody talked but Mark, and he talked his head off. He had been to drink some beer with Edward! Edward was great to talk to! Mark could tell him things! He listened!

  “About what?” Boyd asked.

  “Everything. Girls and school and all. I could really talk to him. I’m sorry he went away.”

  Patricia got up to clear but Boyd said, “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll do all this. You go on out on the porch. It’s cool out there. Look for the lightning bugs.”

  She sat in the dark and heard them quarreling. “If you think like that, son, just go on back to school and don’t ever listen to me.” They could say it was about school, but it was really about Edward. There was no way possible she and Edward could have done anything at all that long ago night, both drunk as coots. No, it wasn’t possible.

  Patricia got up from the porch and walked in the dark down to the New River. She kicked off her shoes, sat on the boat pier and put her feet in the cool, silky water. It was then she heard the Mississippi voices for the first time. She knew each one for who it was, though they had died years ago or hadn’t been seen for ages. Sometimes they mentioned Edward and sometimes herself. They talked on and on about unimportant things and she knew them all, each one. She sat and listened, and let the water curl round her feet.

  Elizabeth Spencer was born in Carrollton, Mississippi. She received an MA from Vanderbilt University in 1943. Her first novel was published in 1948; eight other novels followed. Spencer has published stories in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines. She went to Italy in 1953 on a Guggenheim and met her future husband, John Rusher. In 1986 they moved to Chapel Hill, where Spencer taught writing at UNC until 1992. Her other titles include The Voice at the Back Door, The Salt Line, The Night Travellers, and The Light in the Piazza, which was made into a movie in 1962 and was premiered as a musical production on Broadway in spring 2005. It received very good reviews, and won six Tony Awards in June 2005. Spencer’s writing has received numerous awards, including the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a member of the Academy and a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2007 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Her latest award is the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Her most recent book, The Southern Woman: Selected Fiction, has recently been released as a Modern Library trade paperback. Please see her Web site, www.elizabethspencer.com, for more information.

  The story “Return Trip” is the result of a return trip of my own to Mississippi, my home state, two years ago. I have written both a play, For Lease or Sale, and two other stories centering on an enigmatic character, Edward Glenn, who seems to wander around a lot, a sort of displaced person from Mississippi, showing up either there or elsewhere—Mexico, Pasadena, and in this case North Carolina. He is a gentleman and carries with him his own disturbing qualities. I now live in North Carolina and was invited once with my husband to a house in the mountains near the New River. I will always remember that house, that weekend, and it was easy to set a story there, which convinced me that it could have happened there. But the Mississippi memories were stirred by my recent return to home base.

  Tim Gautreaux

  IDOLS

  (from The New Yorker)

  Julian was living in a sooty apartment next to an iron foundry in Memphis when he received a letter announcing that his great-grandfather’s estate had finally been cleared up. He stood in the doorway of his peeling duplex, his hands shaking as he read the terms. Most of the property had been sold off to satisfy liens and lawyers’ fees, but the old country house and six acres remained, along with twenty-eight thousand dollars. Julian was a thin man of sixty-three, balding, a typewriter repairman who worked out of his spare bedroom and kept to himself. The one time he’d seen the grand old home was when he was eight, riding past it on a gravel road with his mother, back when she could afford a car. The mansion was surrounded on three sides by rows of cracked Doric pillars, its second-floor gallery missing many balusters, its windows patched with cardboard. Back then, it had been occupied by a glowering family of squatters who’d slouched on the porches and stared after his mother’s black Ford as it crawled past the fence. For all he knew, they were still there.

  He went inside, out of the late-June heat, and sat in a duct-taped recliner to reread the terms of his good fortune. The only extra money he’d ever had was a hundred-dollar win on a scratch-off ticket. Before his mother died, he’d spent two years at a tiny local college and considered himself at least wealthy in knowledge, more so than the shopkeepers and records clerks he dealt with. Normally, he d
isparaged people who owned large houses, yet deep in his heart he’d stored the memory of the old mansion, the only grand thing in his family’s history. It had shamed him to long for the house, and now he owned it.

  The thought of inflicting pain on unlucky people bothered Julian, so instead of personally telling the impoverished family who lived in the house that they would have to leave he asked the county sheriff to evict them. He spent a month emptying his apartment of derelict Selectrics and Royal 440s, then got into his twenty-year-old Dodge and drove southeast, into the scrub-pine flats of northern Mississippi. After an hour, he left the wide state highway for a snaky blacktop road, and deep in the woods he made a left turn down a gravel lane that ran as straight as a railroad for ten miles. At one point, he came upon a five-strand run of barbed wire healed into the bodies of live oaks, and he slowed, took a breath, and stopped the car. The lawn was a weave of waist-high weeds and fallen limbs punctuated by the otherworldly pink domes of thistle blooms, and rising beyond was a mildewed temple. Patches of plaster had fallen away from the main walls, showing orange, wind-wasted brick. Julian pulled past the end of the fence, got out, and sat on the car’s hood. His now dead mother, whom he’d found hard to bear, pretentious for a poor woman and full of outdated airs, had talked about this house as though it proved something about her ancestors, the Godhighs. “They were noble and powerful people,” she’d told him the day they’d driven by the place. “And we have their blood.” He straightened his back so that he could stare over the wiry brush at the soaring columns, the brooding eaves, and felt that he deserved this inheritance, had deserved it all his life. He walked up the flag steps, through the unlocked door, and into a broad hall. It was an echoing house of frighteningly tall rooms that smelled of emptiness and mouse droppings. The place hadn’t been painted in many decades, though the last occupants had left it relatively clean. The lightless kitchen, something added a hundred years after the place was built, contained a gassy-smelling stove and a badly chipped sink. Upstairs, four vast rooms opened off a wide hall, and a door led up to an attic crossed with naked cypress beams. Above that perched a glassed-in belvedere, unbearably hot, where he could look out over long flat plots of woods that had once been cotton fields. He imagined pickers dragging their bags slowly across the steaming landscape and understood whose labor had built the house. The roof was iron, and it looked to be sound, though storm-dented and running with rust. After inspecting the outbuildings, he drove six dusty miles to the town of Poxley, where he bought, on time, a bed, some chairs, a couple of tables, and a dinette set. Mr. Chance Poxley, a soft, liver-spotted gentleman in a white shirt and a skinny tie, also sold him a small used refrigerator.