The Unquiet Grave: A Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “It was you who spoke to me upstairs late the other night, Dr. Boozer. I do indeed remember. You’ll find that my memory is excellent. I could recite you case law by the hour, until they’d have to put you in a cold bath to calm your fits.”

  Now, in the light of afternoon, he could see the young physician’s features more clearly, and they were not as he had expected them to be: he had assumed that Dr. Boozer would have skin like yellow pine, rather than the rich brown mahogany he did possess. That observation inspired a stray thought, a wry mental observation that, while the world prized darkest mahogany in wood and scorned yellow pine as an unsuitable material for fine furniture, their judgment of the worth of human coloring was quite the reverse. Even he had not been immune; he pictured the lovely face of Alice and pushed the thought away again, before he gave way to emotion, which in here was not termed grief but melancholia.

  The doctor’s hair was close-cropped above a high forehead, and he sported a little Charlie Chaplin mustache, which Gardner thought rather silly, but with his cleft chin and those well-proportioned features, he would be considered handsome by both races. He looked young—everybody looked young to Gardner these days—and yet he had qualified as a doctor. Perhaps it had not been easy for him, but at least it had been possible. When it came to succeeding in this world, even shades of skin color mattered. He’d had such an advantage himself, thanks to his light-skinned mother. Lighter skin often meant greater respect and privilege accorded to its possessor—by both races, oddly enough. He had—not altogether unconsciously—chosen wives as light as himself so that this advantage might be conferred upon their children, but no children ever came. He was alone now, and at age sixty-three he seemed likely to remain so for the rest of his life. Melancholia? Or simply a clear evaluation of the facts?

  He wondered if the doctor had married yet. Surely not, since he lived in a room on the same hall as his patients. He had no place to bring a bride and set up housekeeping, but perhaps he had left a wife at home somewhere, with his parents or hers, until he could arrange for lodging. He supposed it would be considered impertinent for him to ask. At any other place they might have been equals, he and this slick Yankee doctor, or else his own greater age would have given him the social advantage between them, but here, by reason of his mental instability, he was merely a patient in a green cotton uniform, while the fine-featured young physician was a panjandrum.

  He eyed the doctor with the disfavor of one who will not tolerate condescension, no matter how tactfully disguised. “I suppose I should be honored by your presence. And what brings you here this afternoon, sir? Was it your turn to attend this little boiree, or did you lose the coin toss up in the staff sitting room?” Sarcasm was as close as he ever came to wit, but the physician smiled politely at the attempt and ventured a sip of tepid tea.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you, Mr. Gardner. One of the attendants told me you generally turn up at these afternoon affairs, and I confess that I find you most interesting.”

  Gardner raised an eyebrow. “You find me interesting? In this place? You astonish me, Doctor. Why, among this lot, I think myself a snowy dove trooping with crows. You could pass the time here with a modern-day Prophet Isaiah, hear tales of visiting demons from a terrified old harridan, or perhaps you might even persuade the stony woman in that corner yonder to tell you what made her slit her baby’s throat and dump him in the hog pen. I fear that as far as diversions go, I am meager fare compared to such a feast of strangeness.”

  Dr. Boozer smiled again. “It isn’t madness that intrigues me. That’s common enough around here, and you do get used to it, you know. There’s even a certain sameness to it after a while. But your intellect is a rarity here. You quoted Shakespeare—once just now and twice the other night when we spoke. And in general you talk like a gilt-edged, calf-bound book of sermons. That interests me. You are such a singular fellow here that I was afraid I had hallucinated you myself.”

  Gardner ignored the doctor’s self-deprecating chuckle and pounced on the literal statement. “Hallucinated me? Do I worry you? Am I proof to you that intelligence and education are no protection against madness? Are you afraid you might be next?”

  James Boozer shook his head. “Just a figure of speech, Mr. Gardner. And don’t tell me to mend my speech, lest it mar my fortune, because I’m the fellow in the white coat here. I think I am safe from a charge of madness.”

  “I expect you are. Sanity seems to be mostly a consensus of opinion, anyhow, and since your opinion counts for much around here, you could probably get away with anything short of setting fire to the curtains.”

  “I would have said the same about a prominent attorney, Mr. Gardner. So tell me: What are you in for?”

  five

  Zona and Trout

  GREENBRIER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA

  1896

  I DIDN’T LIKE ANYTHING about it. Not one thing.

  After Zona met that slick young stranger—when he came to shoe the society lady’s lame horse—and then walked him back across the road without a by-your-leave to them that she was staying with, she and that blacksmith fellow—Edward or Trout or whatever Mr. Shue was pleased to call himself on a given day—had taken to one another like moths to a candle, and everybody said what a handsome pair they made: him tall, dark-haired, and square-jawed and her a porcelain doll with hair like sparks from a flint, dainty and daring all at once.

  But it was only September when she met this new beau, and—although she seemed to have forgotten it entirely—on the twenty-ninth of November last, Zona had been busy birthing the bastard of that no-account farmhand named George Woldridge. At least he was no longer a shadow in our lives. He went off logging in the summer before the child came into the world, and he must have drifted on somewhere else from there, because he never turned up again around here. He was probably afraid he’d be made to pay maintenance on his by-blow if he stayed around. Nobody missed him, either, least of all Zona. I think we were all relieved that he didn’t have a change of heart and suddenly declare an interest in his son, but he did not. He went off and left it as if it had been no more than an old shirt that he couldn’t be bothered to come back for. Much as I deplored his tomcat attitude toward his child, I was glad to see him go.

  That baby was better off without either of his parents troubling themselves about him, and after I delivered him to the older couple who wanted him, I never said a word to remind anyone that he even existed. Some things are best forgotten.

  But forgetting a mistake once you’ve made it is one thing, and rushing headlong to make that same mistake again is quite another. To my mind, that’s just what Zona was fixing to do. She made no bones about the fact that she was besotted with Crookshanks’s new blacksmith, and he was happy to let her fawn over him as much as she liked. In a few hastily written letters, Zona told me all about the budding courtship, which her hostess, my cousin Sarah, approved of no more than I did. Sarah wrote that they made eyes at each other on her porch, and grinned and giggled between themselves until you’d have thought they were drunk. Zona was forever slipping across the road, when she ought to have been somewhere about the place getting on with her chores in payment for her kinfolk’s hospitality. Everybody knew that James Crookshanks would not allow a workman to go off lollygagging with a sweetheart during working hours, but he couldn’t very well stop Zona from bringing a packed lunch to Mr. Shue, or forbid her from standing just outside the forge and watching them at work. Many a young boy and a few old men used to congregate there at the smithy when they had nothing better to do. Watching a red-hot horseshoe come out of the furnace and take shape under hammer and tongs was a marvel to behold on a sleepy country afternoon. Crookshanks couldn’t very well forbid Zona from watching without making the rest of the crowd scatter as well, and since the old men, at least, might be customers from time to time, chasing them away would have been bad for business.

  I expect the smith wished that Jacob and I would come to Livesay’s Mill and ca
rt our headstrong daughter off home so’s his hired man could work in peace, but Zona had never listened to me, and I think Jacob lost interest in trying to control her when she broke his heart carrying on with George Woldridge. Or perhaps he hoped that the experience had taught her a lesson, and that she might have developed enough sense to mend her ways on her own. She hadn’t, though. Perhaps she thought the worst of her misfortunes had come and gone. Anyhow, if the Brown cousins (my mother’s people) had turned her out of the house, she’d have found someplace else to stay soon enough. One good thing about her staying with kin was that they kept me apprised of what Zona was up to.

  When evening came and Mr. Shue finished work for the day, most times he would hightail it straight across the road to their place, where Zona would be waiting on the porch, big-eyed and breathless as if it had been five months since they parted instead of five hours. Being hospitable people, John and Sarah would let him sit supper with the family when the food would stretch that far and if they couldn’t get out of it, for Zona would promise to do all her chores and half of everybody else’s if only they would allow him to stay. She always managed to make her plea with him in earshot so that her cousins couldn’t very well refuse without giving offense. She never made good on her promises of extra work, though. That didn’t surprise me.

  It might have gladdened folks’ eyes to see such a handsome couple, devoted and inseparable, if they had been two dewy young people finding love for the first time, but that wasn’t the way of it. Zona’s past was hardly past at all, and when I came to hear of their carrying-on, I thought it more than likely that a downy fellow on the make like Mr. Shue had sown a few crops of wild oats back wherever he had come from.

  Finally on Sunday, the first of November, after many stern letters from me and a couple of scribbled postscripts from her father, Zona did consent to bring her new beau out to Meadow Bluff in a buggy borrowed from Crookshanks. They had fixed it up to get married by then, and now that there was nothing to be done about it, she came swanning up to Meadow Bluff to show him off. They were certainly a well-matched pair, as far as looks went, but there was an uneasiness about them that made me wonder what we weren’t being told, and maybe even what they weren’t telling each other. They had only been acquainted for all of a month by then, and if ever a thing looked too good to be true, it was that sleek and smirking groom-to-be, over thirty if he was a day, and trying to act like love’s young dream. He was a sight too old for calf-love, if you was to ask me, which nobody did.

  Zona was smug about her new beau, as pleased with herself as if she’d discovered gold coins in the chamber pot, but I was afraid that instead she had just come upon exactly what you’d expect to find in a chamber pot. Time would tell.

  I brought the matter up with them that evening at the dinner table, thinking I might learn enough about the handsome Mr. Shue to make some inquiries about his past. I’d had enough of no-account men with less than honorable intentions taking advantage of my daughter. If Zona would not look out for herself, then it fell to me to do it for her.

  “Where do you come from, Mr. Shue?” I asked him, holding the plate of biscuits just out of his reach.

  He gulped down a mouthful of mashed potatoes and glanced warily at Zona, but I just sat there staring him down and holding out the biscuit plate until he answered.

  Finally he muttered, “Droop Mountain, ma’am, over in the next county.”

  Pocahontas County, then. Droop Mountain had been the site of that battle back in ’63, but the place hadn’t amounted to much before or since, and it was more than twenty miles north of Lewisburg, mostly woods and fields and a few scattered farms. “Hillsboro lies over that way,” I said. “Are your people from here?”

  He had managed to snare a biscuit, and was trying to focus all his attention on smothering it with butter and honey. “They hailed from Augusta County, over in Virginia, and before that from somewhere back in Pennsylvania, but they settled in Hillsboro when I was still a young’un. Just lately, though, I moved on from about six miles this side of Hillsboro. Like I said: Droop Mountain.”

  “Y’all farm there then?”

  I would have appreciated some help in the conversation from Jacob or Zona so that my table talk wouldn’t have sounded so much like the interrogation it was, but they were both staring down at their plates, embarrassed at me being so forthright with a guest, and the young’uns were too busy stuffing down their food to hear a word anybody said. They had taken Mr. Shue’s measure as a glutton, and decided that they had best eat quickly before he cleared every dish on the table.

  Finally Zona spoke up. “His daddy is a blacksmith, too. That’s how come he’s so good at what he does. Been learning the trade all his life, near ’bouts.”

  It seemed strange to hear a man over thirty being praised for taking after his daddy. That might account for half of his life, being born with his father’s knack with tools and then learning the trade while he was growing up, but what had he been doing with himself since then?

  “You only just got to the Richlands this past month, I hear, when Mr. Crookshanks took you on at the smithy. So you were still living with your folks up until then?”

  Mr. Shue and Zona glanced at each other, and I’ll bet they were both wishing that the other one had the wit to change the subject or the presence of mind to think up a plausible lie, but Zona knew me well enough to be sure that sooner or later I’d have an answer to my question, or else we would all stay sitting there until I did. She shrugged at him as if to say, Best to get it over with.

  “I had been out on my own a good while, ma’am,” he said, through a mouthful of biscuit, “what with one thing and another, but then a year or two ago I did move back in with the folks. This is a mighty good dinner, Miz Heaster. I surely do admire a woman who’s an excellent cook.”

  “I can’t think what you’d want with Zona then,” I said, “for it’s about all she can do to boil water.”

  He laughed politely at this, as if I had been making a joke, but it was true enough, and he might as well know it. “I reckon she can learn,” he said. “A smart young lady like her. Especially since the talent runs in the family. Maybe you could teach her a few things.”

  Zona never could stand to be criticized. Her frown showed how nettled she was by my remarks, and by Mr. Shue’s lack of trust in her ability. In her anger she forgot herself. “I’m good enough at canning vegetables and I’m able to put up preserves as well as anybody, Mama, and you know it.” Then she cast a cold eye on her intended. “Besides, I’ll bet I can cook as well as Mr. Shue’s other wives!”

  The silence that followed that remark was like the one that comes in a thunderstorm after the shattering sound of a lightning strike close by. For a couple of seconds it seemed like nobody even breathed, much less chewed. Even the youngest one sat still, his little cheeks bulging, not really understanding the conversation, which the boys mostly hadn’t been listening to, but knowing from the posture of the grown-ups that something was amiss. We were all staring at Shue and Zona, waiting to hear the rest.

  After a little more silence, Mr. Shue looked up with a sorrowful expression, his dark eyes glistening. “Zona was referring to the fact that I lost my precious wife a year ago in an accident, ma’am, though I seldom speak of it.”

  “You have my sympathy, sir,” I said, which wasn’t strictly true, because if he was that recently bereft, he had no call to contemplate getting himself hitched again. “How did she pass?”

  He paused a good long while, thinking out what to say. “An accident, like I told you. She was out walking one afternoon, and we reckon she tripped over something and hit her head on a rock when she fell. By the time we found her, she was gone.”

  “Well, that accounts for one. But I believe my daughter here said wives. So what about the rest of them? Are they dead, too?”

  He gave Zona a look that could’ve melted an iron bar, and I’ll bet he was regretting confiding in her about so much of his personal business,
but after a moment, he reined in his temper again and the anger passed. After he took another swig of coffee, he had recovered himself enough to answer me in civil tones. “There was just the one other, ma’am, and Lord knows she’s still alive and kicking, but we parted ways nearly ten years ago, and I ain’t hardly seen her since. Just a youthful mistake, that was.”

  Youthful? I didn’t say anything out loud, but I was ciphering in my head fast enough. If he was around thirty-three or thirty-four years of age now, then ten years ago he’d have been at least twenty-three. When I was that age, I’d been married a few years and birthed our oldest boy, Alfred, already. I don’t remember feeling particularly youthful back then, either, toiling on the farm from sunup until dark and taking care of a fractious young’un besides. It seemed to me that this slick fellow had precious little to show for a life that was nearly half over, for the Scripture says that the life of a man is threescore years and ten.

  So Mr. Edward Trout Shue had been in possession of another wife before the one who had recently died. I reckoned that if she was still alive, but they had parted ways, it meant they had been through a divorce, and I wondered which of them had transgressed to the point of making that happen. Him, likely as not. If Zona had a lick of sense, she’d try to find out the circumstances behind that—from someone other than him. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but there was bound to be another side to the story. However, Zona had a mulish look that told me she wouldn’t hear a word against him, and the more I tried to get her to use cold common sense in the matter, the more she was going to dig her heels in and refuse to consider anything concerning his past except what she heard from him directly.