She had been so veiled and covered that I barely had a glimpse of her face, but her very stillness had seemed more peaceful than I ever remembered seeing her in life. Zona always had a restless air about her, as if she didn’t know where she wanted to go but wanted to get there as quick as she could, never satisfied, never still. It seemed to me that she had spent her life like an orphaned calf, pushing against the fence and trying to get someplace else just because it was someplace else. And now she had reached her destination, the last place she would ever go, and I didn’t think she had ever known a moment’s peace until she got there. I hoped the end for her had come fast and unexpected, so that she wouldn’t have had time to reflect that it had all been for nothing.
I wish Edward Shue had taken the sheet I’d tried to return to him, for I wanted no trace of him in the house. He wasn’t family anymore, if indeed he ever had been. Some in-laws keep on being part of the family, even after the death of the relative they were married to—Abigail Heaster, Johnson’s wife, was a friend as well as a relation, and she would go right on being kinfolk to us even if he passed before she did—but with Edward Shue, things were different. None of us could bear to look at him.
There was also something else I had to do.
Even though Zona was already consigned to the earth at Soule Chapel, I needed to honor her memory in the old ways, for my sake as much as hers. I didn’t want the rest of the family to see me doing it, because they might think me backward and foolish. Certainly Jacob would say that what I was doing was only a worthless superstition, and perhaps that was so, but these things were also a custom in the community, going back further than anyone can remember, and we did them as a sign of mourning. Tradition can be a comfort in difficult times. It gives you something to hold on to when everything else is falling apart.
I went into the kitchen and took down the box of salt that we kept next to the stove. I poured a handful into a small glass plate. Salt of the earth. Salt is cheap and we seldom take much notice of it, but nevertheless it is salt that binds us to life. Even our blood tastes salty. We use salt to preserve the hog meat so that it will keep through the winter. We throw it into the frying pan in case of a grease fire on the stove, and keep it close to the sink to scour the pans with, to clean them after cooking. We gargle with salt when we’re sick, and sprinkle it outside in the winter to keep the snow from sticking to the steps and walkways. It purifies and protects us in a hundred ways—and maybe that’s the reason for this last, solemn use for salt. The one that nobody talks about.
I carried an oil lamp in one hand and the dish of salt in the other into the parlor, where Zona had lain hours earlier, muffled and shrouded in her oak coffin. She was gone now, so perhaps the ritual was useless, but I knew I would feel better for doing it. Perhaps rituals are for the living, anyhow. I went to the front window, set the dish on the windowsill, and pulled up the window, but only an inch or so, because the cold night air was fierce. My hand shook a little as the wind rushed in under the crack, but I stepped back without spilling any of the salt.
Then I thought about what I was doing. When there is a death in the house, you stop the clock, cover the mirrors, and tie a bit of crepe to the beehive. And then you put a dish of table salt on the sill of an open window. For what purpose? To free the soul of the departed one.
Nobody ever explained the whys of it, but I thought that stopping the clock might mean that for the dead, time had ceased to matter. The covered mirror would keep the deceased from seeing their own reflection and trying to hold on to who they were on earth. And the table salt kept evil spirits from getting into the house, so that they could not take hold of the soul of the dead, but yet the departed one could pass through that open window, over the salt and into the hereafter, leaving all their earthly cares behind. It was all meant to ease their passing, and to help them find peace.
I rushed back to the window, dumped the salt outside, where the wind took it, and slammed down the sash.
I didn’t want Zona to slip from this world in peace. She had died in violence, in fear and pain, well before her time, and her killer stood a good chance of getting away with it. I wished that the Lord would grant her a way to let me know what had happened to her. It was too late to save her, but at least I could get justice for her.
“Come back, Zona,” I whispered. “Don’t leave this world until you tell us what happened.”
ten
JOHN ALFRED PRESTON always read the local newspaper, the Greenbrier Independent, to keep abreast of happenings within the county, but today he was also checking to make sure that his announcement had appeared on the front page, as he had requested. Sure enough, there it was in a little box on the left side of the front page, ahead of the ads of three other local lawyers: “John A Preston Attorney at Law Lewisburg WVa will practice in the Circuit of Greenbrier and Adjoining Counties.”
He wasn’t new in town—far from it: born and bred here—but it never hurt to remind people that he was available, should they need legal representation. There were a good many attorneys to choose from these days, and he couldn’t say that he approved of all of them. He scanned the rest of the front page. There had been a time not all that long ago when he hadn’t needed spectacles to read the unbroken columns of fine print. Now he couldn’t even read the headlines without them. Well, he would be turning fifty in May; perhaps it was time to stop fighting the inevitable. One of these days he might even have to use a magnifying glass when he perused the paper. Not that there was much worth reading on page one—no news at all to speak of. Some aphorisms on the right side of the page (“Take care of your plough, and your plough will take care of you”); a poem at the top of the page, beginning “On life’s rugged road . . .” The author of that bit of doggerel was not named; he wouldn’t have claimed it, either. Most of the rest of the front page was taken up with a number of stories and anecdotes having nothing whatever to do with Greenbrier County, West Virginia. He supposed they didn’t generate enough news locally to fill up a weekly newspaper, or else they couldn’t afford the reporters to go out and find it. Actually, quite a lot went on in little Greenbrier, as it did everywhere else, but he suspected that the local citizenry generally knew more about it than the Independent did. He often thought that the locals merely read the newspaper to see who had been caught. In the matter of personal tragedies, when misfortunes occurred in area families, they didn’t care to see them plastered all over the local newspaper for all the neighbors to see.
As for the civic news, much of the business—both commercial and political—was conducted behind closed doors, and the results were only presented to the citizenry as a fait accompli. Maybe the average man didn’t even want to know all the minutiae of local government and business. Certainly the witty stories and bits of trivia on the front page were more entertaining than the long hours of small talk, punctuated by wrangling, that constituted local politics. Preston didn’t mind the Independent’s deficiencies. He got the real civic news from those directly involved, and Lillie kept him informed about all the other particulars of Lewisburg so that he was always aware of the births, deaths, and marriages in their social circle, often in greater detail than he considered strictly necessary. It was useful to know such things; so much of business consisted of not talking about business at all.
His late first wife, Sallie, had also been wonderfully adept at managing the social currents of their lives, but of course she came by it naturally, being the daughter of the lieutenant governor of Virginia. Ambition and being socially adroit ran in the Price family, but he came from a line of clergymen, and so he had relied on Sallie—and now her successor, Lillie—to manage that side of his career. He wondered if Sallie had ever been disappointed by the fact that he had not shared her family’s ambition and skill at dealing with people. Perhaps, when he was her father’s assistant and her suitor, she might have thought that she would become the wife of a governor or a senator. But John Alfred Preston, though wellborn and well educated, could find i
n himself no attraction to the rough-and-tumble life of a career politician. At the age of seventeen he had gone to war, and that experience had provided him with enough uncertainty and excitement to last him for the rest of his days. Somehow in military life he had come to associate manipulating people with sending them to their deaths, and to this day he shrank from it. By his own standards he had led a good life: pillar of the local community, elder of the church, respected member of the legal fraternity, devoted husband and father. That was enough.
He had thought all that as if he were trying to convince Sallie of the rightness of his choice, but she had been laid to rest in the churchyard these past fifteen years. What had made him think of her now? Perhaps it was because he would soon resume the post of county prosecutor, which she might have mistaken for a stepping-stone to greater things—wishful thinking, of course. In truth, though, the local attorneys passed the office around amongst themselves like a hot potato. Already he had been prosecutor three times running, then Henry Gilmer had succeeded him, and now Gilmer was leaving office and Preston would come in again. There was no more rhyme or reason to the appointment of county prosecutor than there was in the games of tag that James and Samuel, the two older Preston boys, once played on the lawn. They were Sallie’s boys. John and Walter, his sons with Lillie, would be playing there soon, but Walter was barely two and not up to it yet. Preston hoped all his sons would grow up to be successful men that their mothers could be proud of. His chief regret was that Sallie had missed seeing her boys grow up.
Preston had spent his youth in that war. He lived through the final months of it with the 14th Virginia Cavalry under General McCausland in a haze of danger and privation, although he had been only seventeen years old at the time. He had dropped out of Washington College over in Lexington in order to join the army. Just as well that the war ended three months later, before his widowed mother could lose yet another son in battle. Six months before he had enlisted, his older brother Walter had lost an arm in the battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse, and a few months after that—in July of ’64—his eldest brother, Thomas, had been killed at Monocacy. Nine months later the war was lost, the region was in shambles, and young John Alfred Preston was the hope of the family.
To finish his education, he returned to Washington College, where Robert E. Lee spent the last three years of his life serving as president. He was proud of having known the general, both at the college and in Greenbrier County. Lee had often sojourned there at the Old White Hotel, startling fellow guests, who would encounter him unexpectedly on the hiking trails around the hotel grounds. Lee was a gracious, somber gentleman, patient and courteous to his well-wishers but preferring to avoid the limelight. Preston could think of no one he would rather emulate.
In due course, Preston got his law degree and went home to Lewisburg, now and forever located in the state of West Virginia, for the region’s separation from the Old Dominion had been sanctioned by the Union, and they had won the war. Virginia had been the only state in the union to lose territory on account of the war, but all the state’s lawyers and all of Lee’s men could not put the two states together again. In time he had grown used to the division, but sometimes even now he felt a pang of nostalgia for Virginia.
As a newly fledged attorney he had entered into practice under tutelage of the Honorable Samuel Price, whose daughter Sallie he would marry four years later.
Marrying the boss’s daughter after four years’ acquaintance was hardly the storybook idyll most women would consider romantic, but John Alfred Preston favored practicality over passion. People had thought the War was romantic, too. He had thought so himself, at seventeen, seduced by stirring anthems, banners, gold braid, and the thought of military honors, but the mud and carnage of Petersburg had cured him of his delusions. He emerged from the war impervious to myth and sentiment.
Sallie Price, who was his own age and nearly thirty when they wed, had been a sensible and appropriate choice for a wife. Mawkish love-at-first-sight romances were all very well in Tin Pan Alley melodies, but, lawyerlike, he thought of marriage as more of a contract wherein two people entered into an agreement for their mutual benefit; each was expected to keep his or her part of the bargain, working together for the good of the community and the benefit of the family. As the daughter of a lawyer, Sallie knew what to expect when she married one, and he thought that they had suited each other well. The alliance had been successful—two well-bred, self-disciplined people had joined their lives together, and each had profited by the union. It was unfortunate that poor Sallie would die so soon. She was only thirty-five, and her sons were still toddling boys who would barely remember her, but Preston believed that one had to trust in the ways of Providence and not question God’s will.
Strange to think that she had been dead these fifteen years—three times longer than they were married. Perhaps if Sallie had lived, she might have persuaded him to aspire to greater achievements than those of a simple country lawyer. When she died in 1882 and left him with two sons who were little more than babies, he had given up all thought of higher office beyond the bounds of Greenbrier County, with unspoken relief that he should now have a perfect excuse to rise no higher. Better to raise his motherless boys in his hometown, and to devote his surplus energy beyond his ordinary law practice to their care and education. His own parents were long dead, of course—he had barely known his father—but here in Greenbrier County he had a lifelong store of friends and colleagues and a church full of kindred spirits to sustain him as he carried on with his career and tended to his motherless boys for another decade.
He supposed he might have sought another wife sooner to help him raise the children, but John Alfred Preston did nothing impulsively or in haste. He had waited ten years to marry again. Miss Lillie Davis, the daughter of a Clarksburg attorney, was sixteen years his junior. At twenty-nine—nearly the same age that Sallie had been as a bride—she was certainly old enough to be the stepmother of two adolescent youths, but perhaps too young and inexperienced to question her husband’s career decisions. She didn’t seem to mind that he had no aspirations to be a congressman or even a judge. Well, he was past forty by the time they married—not old, perhaps, but the war had seemed to last forever, and then in its aftermath the world had changed so much over the decades that he sometimes felt that he had lived a hundred years.
Lillie was too young to remember the war, and much of the time he succeeded in keeping the memories of it at bay. She was also a lawyer’s daughter, and their union was as calm and cordial as the first one had been. The careful, unsentimental practice of marrying the daughter of an attorney had served him well. He thought he had proved a good husband, honoring his part of the contract to the best of his ability, and he had chosen well in both of his matrimonial endeavors: prudent, sensible wives who were an asset to his position in the community.
He glanced down at the list of marriages on an inside page of the Independent, wondering how frivolous, empty-headed women managed to snare a husband. Youthful prettiness, he supposed, but if they outlived that girlish charm, their husbands would repent their choices, perhaps for decades. He sighed and turned a page. Love was a form of madness. It was too bad they couldn’t be committed for it, but he supposed there was no cure, anyhow.
He looked at the little box on the page with the newspaper’s advertisements: “Greenbrier Official Directory.” Every week the Independent listed all of the county’s personnel from the judges and officers of the court all the way down to the notaries public and the overseers of the poor. There was Henry Gilmer, listed as the county prosecutor, right after Judge McWhorter and ahead of the county commissioners, but in another issue or two Preston’s name would replace Gilmer’s in the box. The appointment was no less an honor for the fact that he had held the post several times before. Perhaps he had never been called to any higher office than that, nor frequented the seats of the mighty, but he had occupied a place of importance in the affairs of Greenbrier County. He had led
a quiet, ordinary life perhaps, but a placid existence could be considered an achievement in this uncertain world, and after the chaos of war in his youth, a quiet, ordinary life was not to be scorned. It was a gift that had been denied to many of his contemporaries. He was mindful of his good fortune to have survived to enjoy a placid old age.
Now that he had reached his fiftieth year of living, he had no need to wish for any sensational murder cases or headline-making scandals. A peaceful, well-ordered county would suit him just fine, and if no one committed a crime or needed prosecuting, he would consider that a blessing, but of course it was past praying for. No matter how peaceful and bucolic a place was, there would always be transgressors—thieves, drunken brawlers, even killers. He didn’t know that he felt particularly sorry for the lawbreakers themselves, for in his experience it was their families who suffered and who paid even more dearly for the crime than the felons did. He might pray for them on a Sunday morning in the Old Stone Church, where he was an elder, but there was little else he could do to ease their pain.
He had to squint to read the fine print of the newspaper. You’d think, with so little news to report, that they could take out some of the silly poems and irrelevant items of trivia, and print what was worth reading in a larger typeface. He sighed. He was getting old, not just his eyes but also his aching joints and his dyspeptic stomach. That was all right, though. He had fought the good fight, stayed the course, acted well his part, and he was still in his prime professionally, still striving, still achieving, at least locally.
There was nothing in the newspaper about the county’s change of personnel, but everyone who mattered knew. The announcement would be made public within the next few weeks: John Alfred Preston would succeed Henry Gilmer as the prosecuting attorney for the county. The only notice the newspaper was likely to take of that would be to change the wording in the Greenbrier directory in the middle of page two. To most of the law-abiding citizens of Greenbrier County, the change would make no difference. Nor would it affect the feloniously inclined, because the law was the law, set down in books from time immemorial, and it hardly mattered which well-dressed gentleman carried out its directives. Thieves and killers would still go to prison, and their victims would still have their day in court, hoping to receive justice.
The Unquiet Grave: A Novel Page 13
