Late Tuesday morning before the one o’clock closing at the lawyer’s office, Celia went out to the barn one last time to make sure the paper wasps were all gone, that there wasn’t a contingent hanging around the rafters somewhere trying to build another nest. She also wanted to check the inside of the old store again to see if she had overlooked anything there. Ashley Franco had asked to keep the coal stove that had been shoved into a corner, had said she wanted Luke to clean it up and paint it with black enamel to use as an end table in the living room.
Celia swung open the barn door and stepped inside. It looked like a totally different place than it had five days ago. It was big enough and clean enough now to hold a moderate-sized square dance in. She smiled at the thought of sending invitations to Grandmother’s sisters and her brother, Buford, and the legions of cousins. One of those preprinted ones that read, “You are cordially invited to” and then had a blank after it, in which she would write “A Square Dance!” in big bold letters. In the blank after “Where,” she would write “The Late Sadie Burnes’s Barn on Old Campground Road.” What pleasure she could derive from such a parting shot as she took her leave of Dunmore, Georgia.
She could imagine all the aunts on the telephone, gasping at the thought of holding a dance on Sadie’s property. They would never catch that it was a joke. They would assume the invitation was for real. She’d be willing to bet that every one of them would sneak by in their cars at the appointed time, hoping to catch a horrified glimpse of swirling petticoats and stomping feet in the barn. It would almost be worth the time and trouble to hang around and watch their disappointment when they found it was a hoax.
Celia walked around inside the barn, squinting up at all the rafters. No sign of more wasp nests. She was circling back toward the door when she saw a small box behind the tractor. She hadn’t noticed it before, and obviously Uncle Taylor hadn’t, either. When she opened the top, she saw that it was more than half full of broken walnut shells. No telling how long they’d been here. Years ago there had been an old walnut tree out near the railroad track, but some men from a county work crew had cut it down the summer after Celia had come to live with her grandmother. They said the branches were too close to the track.
Grandmother hadn’t been happy about losing the tree even though the railroad line had paid her a little something for it. She kept talking about how she would miss it. She had gathered the walnuts every fall and, like Milton Stewart back home, had spent hours in the evenings cracking the hard shells and picking out the nutmeats. The Thanksgiving after Celia came to live with her, Grandmother had cooked a turkey outdoors in the open pit her long-dead husband had dug for that purpose. She had placed walnut shells on top of the coals, telling Celia it would give the bird a better flavor. And it had tasted good, even though, as usual, Grandmother had overcooked it. The skin had been charred black, and the meat was dry.
Grandmother grumbled about the loss of the walnut tree for weeks and weeks. Celia, however, had gotten in on enough of the gathering and shelling of walnuts during that one fall to make her want to hug the men who had cut it down, but she stayed quiet and never let on. She tried to look sympathetic when Grandmother talked about not having walnuts for pies and cookies and not having the shells to use for roasting in the pit. To be honest, Celia knew by now that Grandmother’s pies and cookies would never win any blue ribbons at the Georgia State Fair, and she still remembered how hard it had been to chew that turkey.
She couldn’t help wondering now how long this box of walnut shells had been sitting out here. It would have been over twenty summers since the tree was cut down. No doubt Grandmother had forgotten all about them, for she never would have willingly let something go to waste. She would have built an outdoor fire and cooked over it every night if she had to until the shells were used up. So what could have happened to make her grandmother forget about them?
As Celia looked down into the box of broken shells, an idea suddenly took shape that until this minute had never entered her mind. She had thought plenty over the years about how her own life had been turned upside down by coming to live with her grandmother, but right this minute she stood very still and thought about the ways in which her coming here had changed her grandmother’s life, had interrupted her days and maybe made her forget things like a box of walnut shells stored in the barn.
Well into her sixties at the time, Grandmother would have already lived alone as a widow for over ten years, having closed down the little store after her husband’s death and having sold his pickup truck and a few personal effects in order to pay off his debts. For over ten years she would have been living off her monthly social security check, recording in a ledger how every penny was spent. Celia had run across those ledgers while cleaning out her grandmother’s drawers.
She didn’t know all the details of the financial arrangements, but she knew her grandmother had received some kind of government money for taking her in. Not that anyone had ever sat Celia down and explained it all to her. Ansell had been the one to tell her, when she was seventeen, that the government gave money to guardians of orphans. “What? You think the old bat’s doing it out of the goodness of her heart?” he had said to Celia. “Get real, Celia.”
During her last year of high school, Celia had said some pretty ugly things about the money when she had been angry at her grandmother. She had accused her more than once of hoarding her money to use for herself later. She had to use the accusation of hoarding because it was clear her grandmother wasn’t spending it on extravagances. The only things she ever bought were the weekly groceries, gas, and school clothes for Celia.
She remembered now how surprised she had been when she turned eighteen and learned how much money was available to her for her college education. She had gotten five thousand from Papa and Mums Coleman, the bulk of their estate going to an endowment fund at the college where Papa had taught. But there was much, much more than five thousand in what Grandmother called her “college fund.” This was when Celia had formed the assumption that her father’s investments must have done a lot better than he let on. And who could tell? Maybe that was the case.
Right now, though, standing in the barn staring down at the walnut shells, she allowed a thought to circle around and round in her mind. Maybe Grandmother had been hoarding money all those years, but maybe she had been hoarding it for Celia’s education, to add to whatever was already there from the sale of her parents’ assets.
Then suddenly she came to her senses. Wait a minute, she told herself. She was a stingy old woman. Don’t start making her out to be a kindhearted philanthropist. She made herself think of the leather jacket she had wanted so badly her senior year. It wasn’t the most expensive one by any means, but at least it was real leather even if it was in the Sears catalog. She had shown it to her grandmother that fall, when the days had started turning cooler, and had strongly hinted that it would be a great Christmas present. Several times after that she had seen her grandmother slowly turning the pages of the catalog as she sat in her rocking chair by the gas heater.
One large box with Celia’s name on it had appeared under the small artificial tree that Christmas, and even though they had had a rocky time at home for the preceding few months, Celia had actually let herself believe that she was getting the leather jacket for Christmas.
When she had opened the present on Christmas morning, it wasn’t the jacket, of course, but a bright blue wool parka with a hood and little oblong wooden buttons that slipped through loops. She hadn’t disguised her disappointment, hadn’t even tried to, and when Grandmother said, “This one’s more practical, Celie,” Celia had replied, “Yeah, and it’s also a lot cheaper and uglier,” then had left the parka in the box on the floor and shut herself up in her bedroom.
She wondered now why she hadn’t refused to wear it altogether or why she hadn’t marched down to Sears and gotten a refund, then bought something else she wanted with the money. She didn’t recall that such an idea had even occurred
to her. Instead, she had eventually worn the stupid parka, had worn it a lot, in fact. For being such a rebel, she surely hadn’t had much backbone. It had kept her warm through six Delaware winters at Blackrock College until she got her master’s degree and her first full-time job at a newspaper in Dover. She had even put it on and worn it in bed in the middle of the summer fourteen years ago, in the days following her trip to the clinic when she couldn’t get warm.
And the really funny thing was that when she had gone to a department store in Delaware after starting her first job, to finally buy a leather jacket, she had felt lightheaded and short of breath when she looked at the price tags. She had tried on a dozen or more and had gone away without buying one.
She had returned another day and tried again, then found herself wandering over to the other coats and jackets, finally settling on a tan wool pea coat that would be more practical. For days after, she had been so mad at herself that she finally went back and bought a leather jacket just to prove—well, she wasn’t sure what she was proving, really, maybe just that she could do whatever she wanted to. But the fact was that for the next several winters she wore the tan pea coat ten times as much as the leather jacket.
Celia gave herself a little shake and looked at her watch. She couldn’t be wasting time like this standing out here in the barn reliving the past. She picked up the box of walnut shells and headed around to the back of the barn toward the old creek bed. It had dried up many years ago and was now full of weeds, dead branches, and pinecones. She would dump the shells in there and throw the box away.
Surely, she thought later, she would have remembered the cat incident at some point, even if she hadn’t gone down by the creek bed behind the barn. Something like that would have to come back to you sometime. You couldn’t repress such a memory permanently. How odd, though, to consider the seemingly random chain of events that led up to the moment of remembering—discovering the paper-wasp nests in the first place, using the free time before the closing at the lawyer’s office to return to the barn for another check, finding the box of walnut shells, deciding to dispose of them, walking purposefully to the creek bed, and then, on the way back to the house, the sudden violent erupting of the memory from years gone by. For weeks after, it made her nervous, wondering how many other closed compartments were to burst open on her unawares.
As soon as it happened, she knew this was another of those moments that would come back to her at all hours, especially in the nighttime. Even as she sat in the lawyer’s office two hours later, she had trouble following the proceedings. She kept replaying what had just happened, saw herself tromping through the tall grass behind the barn, then reaching the creek bed and turning the box over, watching the shells fall out and disappear beneath the thick growth of weeds, then mindlessly heading back toward the barn, carrying the box by one of the top flaps.
And then . . . seeing it. There, about two feet from the back side of the barn, was a small crude-looking cross of sorts, tilted a little to one side. She had never actually seen it here in this place before, but she remembered with absolute clarity the day her grandmother had nailed it together out on the front porch. Celia had watched her from the living room window as she went into the old store and emerged a minute later with two short pieces of one-by-two. She watched her lay one piece on top of the other to form a cross, then lift her hammer there on the front porch and furiously drive two nails through the center, after which she stomped back toward the barn, holding the cross in one hand and the bucket in the other. In the bucket was a dead cat.
* * *
It was a nasty, spiteful gray cat, with an unpredictable streak running through him. He would lunge at the silliest things without warning, like a leaf skittering across the driveway, or a shadow moving across a windowpane, or a dish towel flapping on the clothesline. On the other hand, he was very predictable about other things. Every single time the train whizzed by, for example, Smoky could be found hiding behind the big tin washtub on the back porch.
Celia hated him from the moment she laid eyes on him, and the feeling was evidently mutual. The cat always watched her resentfully, as if she were trespassing on his turf, and at times she thought he had a greedy hungry look in his eye, as he might if she were a very large rodent he’d like to rip into.
He was a stray that had shown up on her grandmother’s back doorstep only weeks after Celia herself had moved in. He was half-starved and flea-bitten, and though her grandmother usually didn’t have a sympathetic bone in her body, for some reason she started feeding this mangy creature. She even used some of her grocery money to buy flea shampoo and dipped the cat within an inch of his life, over and over, suffering scratches all over her arms and face in the process. One day she gave him a name: Smoky, because his fur was smoky gray. She let the cat stay on the back porch and cut a little hole in the bottom of the screen door so he could get in and out. But he wasn’t an indoor cat. As much as she loved him, Grandmother never would have stood for an animal in the house.
And amazingly, the cat seemed to love the old woman, too. He would purr softly and rub himself against her when she took a bowl of milk and a plate of scraps out to the back porch. Whenever Grandmother swept the back steps, Smoky would meow so pitifully at her that she’d always put down her broom, sit down on the steps, and take him into her lap for a brief minute.
Celia couldn’t count the times she had seen them on the back steps, her grandmother gently stroking Smoky’s gray fur and talking to him, never in a babyish crooning voice the way a lot of pet owners did, but always very sensibly in her ordinary voice, usually reciting her day’s agenda for him. “I got to finish up the sweeping,” she might say, “and then trim the bushes in the front yard. And I got to put in a load of wash, then hang it out, then call up Molly and ask her when she’s aimin’ to bring over those cucumbers so we can put up some pickles.”
Celia had never had much contact with cats, or dogs, either. Neither one of her parents liked animals, especially not in the house, and they had always made it clear that a pet would cost money they should be using on other more important things. As a child, Celia had had only one pet briefly, a blue parakeet named Chipper, but he was a messy, loud bird who hated his cage and bolted for freedom whenever Celia opened the little door. He would fly to the top of her mother’s nicest draperies and dirty them with droppings. One day he flew right out the front door as her father came in from work, and though she was sad for a day or two, she soon realized that life at home was a lot less complicated without Chipper. She had never asked for another pet after that.
Maybe Smoky sensed in her an aversion to animals. Or maybe he liked only old women, not teenaged girls. Whatever it was, he clearly avoided her. The few times she took his food out to the back porch, he made no move to welcome her but stared at her with his evil green eyes from his favorite spot under the old wringer washing machine. She tried a few times in the beginning to stoop down and pet him, but he hissed at her and retreated behind some paint cans. “Well, I don’t like you either, dumb cat,” she finally said, but not loud enough for Grandmother to hear, and after that she quit trying to make friends with him.
Whenever Grandmother was working in the yard, Smoky would station himself near her, curled up under a bush somewhere or up against the house. On summer evenings after supper Grandmother would often sit on the front porch in the swing, snapping beans or mending something or cutting pictures out of magazines to glue onto the homemade cards she sent to missionaries. Smoky would always be lying right next to her, usually asleep. She didn’t generally talk to him in the evenings on the porch swing, only on the back steps, but as she worked, she would frequently look down at him with something very close to a smile on her lips.
To Celia’s way of thinking, there was nothing in the least bit endearing or winsome about Smoky. He was snooty and temperamental. When he caught birds or chipmunks in the backyard, he proudly paraded around with them in his mouth, their little heads hanging out one side and their
tails out the other. If he happened to see Celia, he would stop in his tracks and glare at her distrustfully. As if I want that disgusting thing, she would think. If he saw Grandmother, however, he would walk straight to her and lovingly lay his prize at her feet.
Part of Celia’s dislike of Smoky, she suspected now, was that deep down she was jealous of him, for he had appropriated Grandmother’s affection in a way she didn’t seem to be able to do. He and Grandmother seemed to have such an easy, natural relationship, each one giving and receiving gentleness as a matter of course. Theirs was a staunch silent friendship, and she felt at times like an intruder. During her senior year of high school, she had often used Smoky to excuse her wild behavior and her disrespect to her grandmother. Though she wouldn’t have stooped to say such things aloud, she had often thought, If you acted like you cared for me half as much as you do that cat, maybe things would be different.
In the lawyer’s office Celia realized that she was now being asked to sign papers. She saw Ashley Franco studying her from across the table and wondered if she had done anything to give away the fact that she hadn’t heard a word that had been said in the last few minutes. For all she knew, they could have lowered the cost of the house and gypped her out of ten thousand dollars. She ought to check the papers carefully before signing.
But even as the lawyer’s assistant slid the papers over to her, the printed words began swimming before her eyes, and once again the image of the wooden cross in the ground behind the barn rose before her. The human mind was a curious thing. How could she have possibly blotted from her memory such a horrible day? The answer suggested itself at once. Maybe it was because she had had so many other horrible days since that one.
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