Sweet Hush

by Deborah Smith

  The girl grabbed her purse and left.

  We walked into the office beyond her desk. A lanky, prim-looked older man immediately glowered at us from his desk. His desk plaque said Aaron McGillen, County Commissioner—Honest But Tough.

  “I know what you did,” Hush said. “And there was nothing honest about selling my daughter-in-law’s privacy.”

  “Don’t you stand on your high horse and look down at me. You make money off Eddie Jacobs hand over fist.”

  “You betrayed my trust and embarrassed me.”

  “You can’t control the truth, anymore. And you can’t maneuver all the gossip to suit your own purposes. The facts are a big dark, festering cloud of smoke pouring out of your chimney and threatening to burn your home down. People are starting to smell the stink. Welcome to your own dose of that ‘open public scrutiny’ you bragged about a few years ago when you ‘exposed’ me for inviting the immigration boys to take a look at your Mexican apple pickers. I tried to enforce the law, and you made me look like a monster.”

  “Because those Mexicans work harder for their pay than any people I’ve ever seen in my life and I wasn’t about to let them be bullied on account of laws that are mainly a bunch of racist hogwash.”

  “You’re above the law. That’s what you’ve always thought.” He pounded his desk. “But don’t cry now that the world’s knocking on your door to learn all about you. You’ve always acted like you know what’s best for everybody around here. You’ve run this town and this county and you even think you run me. So I’m not about to stand by and watch you add to your power base now that you’ve got a gold-plated celebrity daughter-in-law to give you even more clout. I’m going to cut your personal tree down to size for the good of this community! And there’s only one way to do that—by showing people what you and yours are really like.”

  “You attack me all you want, Aaron, but if you—”

  “I may not be able to cut you off at the trunk, but I can sure lop off your branches.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Logan’s so-called wife, for one thing. A wife nobody ever met or spoke with on the phone or—”

  “She was German. She died in Germany when Puppy was a month old and Logan was still stationed there in the army. Everyone knows that.”

  “No, everyone says that because you told them they’d better say that. Even though there’s not one picture of Logan’s wife anywhere to be seen, and no visits from her family to see Puppy, and just no trace of her at all. I’ll tell you what people think your brother really did. They think he knocked up some gal over there and she didn’t want the baby but you made him bring his little bastard home and do the right thing.”

  Hush was electrified. She hunched over his desk. “If you ever say anything to hurt my brother or Puppy I’ll—”

  “Hush,” I said. Her name, an order, a quiet heads-up. Walk softly and keep your threats to yourself. I had been standing there just wanting to take her relative by his collar and slam him against a wall, but now I thrust an arm between her and him, pried her back from his desk, and said, “Talk is cheap.”

  She looked at me with feverish understanding, but also with a kind of Help Me look in her eyes I’d never seen before, and it shook me up. Although for once I was in territory I knew how to handle. Women who needed help were my specialty. “I’ll take care of it,” I said. I didn’t how I’d take care of the situation, but that didn’t matter. A good bluff—just like with the cameraman in the helicopter—often produced more results than real action. “No need for you to worry about your cousin Aaron,” I said to Hush. “I’ll handle him.”

  Aaron leapt to his feet. “Are you threatening me?” he yelled. He’d taken the bait.

  Hush searched my face for clues. I held her tight with an arm around her shoulders, squeezing silent signals that she interpreted rightly as a code to stay quiet. I looked at Aaron. “I don’t make threats.”

  “You are threatening me.” His face turned white. “Get out of my office.”

  “I’m going. Hush, too. Come on, Hush.”

  All I did was agree with Aaron, but he turned whiter, trembling. “You think I’m going to put up with that kind of sinister attitude? Goddammit, I’m not afraid of you.”

  “We’re going. I said I’d handle this problem for Hush, and I will. Nothing else to talk about.”

  I saw the whites of his eyes. “You just keep your distance, mister! The bet is that Eddie and Davis’s marriage won’t last a year, and the day she leaves here for good, we’ll never see you again. You’re nothing but a trained attack dog, and you can’t stifle—”

  “Enough,” Hush said. She backed from the room, pale and stiff, pulling at me to follow.

  I just looked at Aaron McGillen one more time, and pointed a finger at him. Just pointed. He sat down hard, in his chair.

  I turned and strode after Hush. She rushed to an exit and outside onto the building’s lawn. Without warning she pulled the skirt of her flour-speckled apron to her mouth, bent over the shrubs along a small parking lot, and vomited. I scanned the area in case anyone walked out of the building, then took the bundled apron from her and stuffed it in a tall trashcan nearby. “Let’s get you to a water fountain.”

  “Thank you. For everything. You’re amazing.”

  “He was an easy target. Next time I’ll recite the alphabet and really scare the shit out him.”

  “No. I can’t provoke him.” She swayed. Her eyes were whip-hard and pained. She dragged a hand over the back of her mouth.

  I stared at her. “Are you telling me that what he said about Logan and Puppy is the truth?”

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “I can’t talk about this, Jakob. That’s all. Don’t ever ask me. Ever.”

  The hackles rose on the back of my neck. Surprised, confused, and all right, wounded, I could only stand there with one hand out, asking for something and getting nothing. “Aren’t we way beyond the point where you won’t trust me with information about your life and your family?”

  “There are some things I’ll never discuss with you or anyone else.”

  I took her by the shoulders. “What kind of game are you playing? Don’t you understand that Haywood Kenney is looking for exactly the kind of trash you don’t want him to know? Do you think he won’t find it?”

  “You sound like Edwina.”

  “She warned you?”

  Hush laughed bitterly. “For my own good. ‘Tell all. To me, Edwina. Confess your sins. Your family’s sins. For your own good.’ Bullshit.”

  “She was right.”

  Hush stared at me, took a big, symbolic step back, and said softly, “She doesn’t really know anything about me and my family, and neither do you. And I intend to keep it that way.”

  “Then I see where I stand with you. Nowhere.”

  She vomited in the shrubs again, refused my help getting into the truck, and didn’t say another word as I drove her back to the Hollow.

  Nowhere.

  EDWINA WAS ON THE phone immediately.

  “Is this the best you can do—your relatives creep into the work area where my daughter is ‘slaving away’ and snap secret pictures of her? Is this how your family takes care of its own? Is this how you take care of my daughter?”

  I had no comeback for that. I had failed to protect Eddie. My family had failed to protect Eddie, too. “I apologize,” I said wearily. “You have every right to be angry.”

  Fortunately, Edwina was so shocked she simply said, “Well . . . good.”

  And I hung up.

  I HAD HURT Jakobek badly, and I hated that, but there was nothing I could do short of tell him truths I could not bring myself to speak out loud. Things that were buried inside me so deeply that I had to believe nothing and no one—not
even the Haywood Kenneys of the world—could dig them up unless I spoke, first. All I had to do was keep the faith—the faith and the silent strength and the terrible, lonely endurance I’d learned all my life from my stoic trees, my gallant soldiers, and the Hollow, itself.

  But forces had already been set in motion. My luck really had run out.

  “HUSH, IT’S ALL RIGHT,” Eddie begged, following me into the pavilion. “Really. Don’t. Please.”

  “Mother, stop,” Davis ordered.

  Jakobek stood to one side, his eyes shuttered, watching me. Smooch, as agitated as a yellow jacket in full sting mode, paced the sawdust floor. Logan clasped his Stetson in one brawny hand and traded worried frowns with Lucille.

  I faced every soul who worked for me. There had been a lot of muttering about Aaron and MerriLee, about kicking Aaron out of office and ostracizing MerriLee, but I’d said No. No. We don’t do that to each other.

  I had to give us all some breathing room. Get the reporters out of our hair, the curiosity seekers out of our windows, the cameras out of my barns.

  “This farm is closed, as of today. I won’t risk any more publicity. I don’t know who to trust right now. I will not allow my family to become laughing stocks. I don’t give a damn what Haywood Kenney said about me, but no one is going to abuse the image of this family and this farm. You’ll all get paid for the rest of the season. We’ll start again next spring. Close down the kitchens, put the apples in cold storage, and go home. This year’s apple season is over.”

  People cried. They tried to talk me out of it. It was only November.

  “This is all my fault,” Eddie said.

  I grabbed her in a hug. “No. This started long before you were born.”

  That made no sense to her, but the harvest cycle of truth and sacrifice and secrets made perfect sense, to me.

  I left everyone standing there and walked back to the house.

  BY DECEMBER THE farm was stark and quiet and a stranger to us. It felt less safe, not more, with the crowds vanished, the gates locked, the Barns quiet.

  Davis started carrying a pistol inside his shirt, like Jakobek. Lucille added security dogs to our routines. German Shepherds snuffled their way through my house and barns twice a day. All the farm’s mail was scanned, irradiated, then opened in a shed by people wearing latex gloves. I agreed to some other measures, too, and soon a number of my wavy-glassed old windows leaned against each other in the cellar so that tinted, bullet-proof windows with unbreakable frames could take their place.

  Eddie stood at those windows with me, looking out sadly. “What a naïve little girl I’ve been,” she said quietly. “This beautiful old Hollow is just like the rest of the world. Only as safe as the feeling in my heart.”

  I put an arm around her. “We have to carry our security around with us, like the shell of a turtle. Always setting up housekeeping wherever we end up for the moment, always trusting that we’ve brought what we need to keep us safe.”

  She smiled a little. “But you’ve never lived anywhere else.”

  “Apples are hard to carry on top of a turtle shell.”

  She leaned her head against mine. “What should Davis and I do, now? Rethink everything we’ve planned?”

  “No. Wait and rest, and listen for answers. Because apple trees talk to us, you know.”

  “Hush.” She chuckled.

  “They do.”

  “Then I’ll try to listen.”

  She put my hand over her abdomen. I felt my grandchild move contentedly.

  Safe inside our shell.

  I SAT IN THE LOFT door of the old barn late one cold, starry night. Just sitting.

  Of course, Jakob tracked me there, and without a word, sat down next to me.

  “I couldn’t breathe indoors,” I said. A half moon and millions of bright stars filled the soft black dome of the sky without even a hint of the world’s lights levening the mountain rims in any direction. We were alone on the planet. Him, me, and a weight of wordless dread that made me shake. “I don’t know what to do, Jakob.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Tell me what you’re hiding, I thought he was about to say, but instead he pulled me into his arms and held me. He stroked my hair and said nothing; just held me close. And we kissed. It was as simple as the night, as complicated at the night sky. A sense of dread began to creep under my skin again. All my mountain sayings and superstitions and old ways and new ones could not stop that feeling. “Something terrible is going to happen out there in the dark,” I whispered, nodding toward the world beyond my mountains. “Something’s waiting.”

  “I’ve known that all my life,” he answered.

  I had always sold apples as if they were protective talismans I sent out into the world. But I dreamed at night of terrible trees growing from seeds I didn’t willingly spread and couldn’t reclaim. Flashes of the strangling dread came and went; I knew what it was—a premonition. The world was catching up with all I held dear. The threat wasn’t necessarily the haters and the lunatics, but the past, the past. In ways no fence or weapon or guard could prevent. I watched the phones as if a single call would electrocute me with no warning.

  A few days before Christmas, it came.

  Chapter 17

  I KNOW WHEN WOMEN are hurting. It doesn’t take an extremely sensitive man to recognize the pain in another human being, but considering my background, I’m more of an expert than most men. I knew something had happened to hurt Hush more than her secrets already hurt her.

  As I lay in my bed in the room above hers, I heard the faint ring of her bedroom phone through the floorboards. I listened to her pace the floor for hours after that. I got up and moved restlessly, too, my bare feet creaking on my own floor, and she stopped moving.

  She heard me. I heard her.

  But she didn’t ask for my help. And I didn’t know how to give it. Or why she needed it.

  “Goddamn,” I whispered.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. In the kitchen the next morning I couldn’t move fast enough to corner her before Eddie and Davis came down. Davis made breakfast for Eddie. Hush made breakfast for Davis, and for me. Eddie and I did the dishes after we all finished. The four of us had a system. In just a few months, we’d become a family. I’d never even tried to tell Hush what those times meant to me.

  “I’m going to Chattanooga for the day,” Hush announced. “I may not be back until tomorrow morning.”

  “To see Abbie?” Davis asked. Nothing his mother did seemed to startle him, not even taking a day off during the middle of the week when the barns would be full of her relatives packaging last-minute orders to be shipped.

  “Yes. She’s having some problems with her husband. I have to go.” She kissed Eddie on the top of the head, ruffled Davis’s dark hair, avoided me, and left the kitchen.

  I sat there with my hands making empty gestures around a plate of pancakes she’d fixed for me. “Abbie?”

  “Old friend of my folks. Abbie’s husband and my father were racetrack buddies. Her husband has money. A lot of money. He invested in Dad’s team.” Davis dug into his own pancakes while Eddie picked at a bowl of cereal with one slender hand. The other rested protectively on her bulging stomach. She had asked me to feel her baby move, the other day. I’d started to lay the maimed hand on her, then switched and used the other one. Didn’t want to scare the baby. I felt the baby kick. “He knows kung fu already,” I said.

  “Oh, Nicky, you sweet old soldier.” She had laughed, and hugged me.

  “Old friends,” I continued prodding Davis.

  Davis set a stone keg of syrup between us like a boundary marker. The look on his face said, Stay out of my mother’s business. “Mother’s loyal to her friends. She drops everything if Abbie needs her.”

  No, I thought. She drops everything when Ab
bie calls her in the middle of the night and warns her.

  ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS, just over the Tennessee line, I bought coffee and an apple at an interstate convenience store, sat in my car holding both on my lap with my eyes shut, then bit into the apple just to remind myself that the world outside the Hollow held no protective magic. No sweet burst of magic on my tongue. I was out here all alone with everyday apples, waiting for the hammer of God to fall on me and mine.

  On better days, I loved Chattanooga. The historic old city was a monument to its Old South heritage but no fool for the past. Friends of mine had been instrumental in turning rows of decrepit warehouses along the broad Tennessee river into a neighborhood of shops and restaurants. The soaring glass roof of the Tennessee Aquarium gleamed nearby, overlooking the river. I met Abbie on the aquarium’s top floor.

  From the mountains to the sea, an educational display said. The mountain habitat smelled of laurel and moss, water and earth and rocks. Otters played in a stone grotto. Behind walls of glass, turtles and trout and large-mouthed bass swam among huge logs and rushing currents. This part of the aquarium always made me think of the Hollow, wild but protected.

  “Hush,” Abbie whispered, crying, and we hugged each other tightly. She was ten younger than me, but we looked alike. Auburn hair, green eyes, tall, but not delicate. There the sameness ended. Her voice was far more citified than my country twang could ever hope for; she had a master’s degree from Vanderbilt; she came from banking money and silver-spoon pedigrees, and her husband, Nolan, was heir to one of Tennessee’s biggest insurance brokerages and a major behind-the-scenes player in state politics. Abbie devoted her time to their riverside mansion and their two baby boys.

  We bent our heads together in a dark alcove of wood and vine, high atop that manmade planet. “They called me,” she whispered hoarsely, clutching my arm, holding on. “Haywood Kenney’s people. One of his assistants. The woman said, ‘We understand from certain sources that Eddie Jacobs’ late father-in-law led a double life. And that you were having an affair with him when he died. We have witnesses. Evidence. Is it just coincidence that your husband is a major fundraiser for President Jacobs in Tennessee?’ I told her that had nothing to do with anything, and I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Davy Thackery has been dead for over five years. His wife and I are dear friends. I’ve been married to the most wonderful man in the world since then.’ She said, ‘Comeon, now. What does the President think of this old soap opera, now that his daughter has married Thackery’s son? Mr. Kenney would like you to comment, that’s all. Tie all the loose ends together for his audience. You can’t hide. You might as well talk to Mr. Kenney. If he found out about your connection to Eddie Jacobs’ in-laws, the rest of the media won’t be far behind. And maybe there’s more to the story, hmmm?’”