Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  I buttoned my coat. “Aren’t you supposed to be joining Mrs. Cadmean and Rebecca in there for lunch?”

  “The girls’ll be fine. That woman’s so scared of me—now, isn’t that amazing?—she can’t even eat when I’m around. Just diddles with her fork.”

  So I crossed back over the street with him, slowing my steps to his as we trudged into the snow-splotched wet field of the jumping arena bordering the stables. There we wandered about among the scattered red and white gates, and the hogback rails, and the plasterboard walls painted to look like either bricks or stone. We could hear the snow melting, and the earth sucking it in.

  “Sun’s working,” Cadmean grumbled. “I told you it would. Now. Let’s play some poker.” He put his gnarled hand through my arm as we stepped around a gully of icy mud. “You see my Baby, am I right?” I nodded. “You interested in her?”

  “She’s interesting, yes.”

  “She’s damn pretty.”

  “Indeed she is.”

  “Smart.”

  He bobbed his head, and then slid his hands into the deep pockets of the old hunt coat. After a few more yards, he growled, “Well, I want her to come over and see me.” I nodded again. “I want her to do something else.” He looked at me. “I want her settled down before they dig my hole. I want her with a man that can make her happy. Right sort of man.”

  “What kind is that, Mr. Cadmean? Surely not the sort with a history of mental trouble. I believe I’m quoting correctly your remark to Mr. Stanhope about me.” Leaning against the fake brick wall, I thought with some pleasure about the inevitable clash between the old man and Cuddy Mangum, whose name the industrialist had doubtless never heard, unless he’d heard it from Cuddy’s father, who’d worked on the line at C&W all his adult life.

  Cadmean navigated the puddles, came up to me wheezing, and stood to scrape the bottom of his old black-laced boot against the wall edge. “Oh, shit,” he grinned. “Forget what I said to Walter. I’m the one all for burying the past. You’re the gravedigger won’t let it be.” His small eyes smiled with a sleepy malevolence. “All right, son. Let me hear your answer. Can you bring my Baby over to her own home, to sit down and talk with her own daddy for one evening’s time—and doesn’t it crush your soul to hear me have to ask it? Can you bring her?” The only sign of his feelings was a rapid twitch that began at the side of his mouth.

  I looked at the bearish eyes; in the sun they were yellow as sulfur. I asked, “And if I do?”

  “Well, then,” he started to walk again, Duchess tilting toward his heel, dottering along beside him, as fat and old as he. “Well, then, I guess in trade I’d lend you a shovel to help close up that grave of yours. I guess I’d tell you a story. Now, understand me, this would be just a story, and it’s not one I’ll ever tell again, and it’s not one if you wanted to tell it to somebody else and give me the credit for it, I’d ever say that I’d told you. Hunh? If you were to go blabbering, I’d be obliged…” (And he grinned, his discolored teeth oddly old behind the baby-pink lips.) “…I’d certainly be obliged to tell whoever you’d talk to, that, well, you had a history of mental trouble. This here is a private story for your own satisfaction. Not for Ken Moize. I’d like your word on that.”

  I looked across the road to the stubbled farm fields where a chicken hawk swooped tirelessly on the watch for a snake or a careless mouse. I said, “All right. You have my word. Tell me the story.”

  He grinned. “Why don’t I tell it after you bring over my little girl?”

  But I shook my head and kept walking, too quickly for him to keep up.

  He called, “Hell, hold up, son.” So I waited for him to slush stiffly through the sinking snow. “Hell, I hate being old,” he was muttering. “Truly, truly hate it. But I like your gumption. You’re stubborn as me.” He took my arm again, and we ambled on around the maze of jumps. His other hand scraped its monotonous song against his cheek as he began to tell me his story: “A while back, one summer, there was this man who designed my machinery—and this is a man I treated so well, giving him so much stock, he came to hold the chits for a goddamn 10 percent of my business—this particular man decided on the sly to peddle his fanny to the highest bidder. And, same time, to peddle those designs he’d been doodling behind my back, besides.”

  I interrupted, “As I understand it, Ames opposed you for trying to keep the union out of C&W.”

  Cadmean stopped short. “Now, wait. Wait. Don’t ‘understand,’ just listen. This is a made-up story, wasn’t that clear? And I’m the one making it up. There’s no names to this story. Huh? You just listen, all right?”

  I said all right, and he clumped forward again through the mud. “Well, now, I happen to hear that some business acquaintances who’d come up to see me were sneaking around on this visit and setting up a private-type meeting with this particular two-timer. I happen to hear because I make it my business to hear. Everything.” He gave me a sideways glance. “Now, pretend the place they were meeting was mighty close to where I have a summer home, and say I also keep a nice boat. Still have it. I enjoyed a spin in that boat. Pretend that night I spun it over to the marina next to Pine Hills Inn, just to keep a personal eye out, see if my sad information of this two-timing was accurate.”

  I whispered, “Go on.”

  He nodded, “Good story, am I right?”

  At the end of the field, out of the stable trotted two young matrons, one on a gray, the other on a dun mare. They’d been in the Fox and Hound earlier, and I knew them both from those social and civic affairs that, like medieval feast days, ordered the calendar of Hillston’s inner circle. In their black and red riding outfits, the two waved merrily and Cadmean swept off his fur cap with a bow as they whisked by us. “Ah, women, lovely women!” he groaned. “I truly could have married another half a dozen if the Lord hadn’t shut off my tap.” He guffawed loudly and the women turned their heads and waved gaily again. Watching them trot away off among the trees, Cadmean squeezed my arm. “Why in hell don’t you get married? You and Baby, now. You two are certainly good looking, both of you. Good blood. Good families. I believe I could get a fine litter of grandchildren out of the two of you. ’Course, they’d be goddamn stubborn.”

  I stepped away, folding my arms, but I said nothing to disabuse him of his suddenly evident plans to breed me to his daughter. Instead, I told him that yes, his story was fascinating.

  “I figured you’d think so,” he chuckled. “Well, I’ll finish it. Say I took a glance into that inn window that night, and I see all my old pals are sure enough having a little gab with the two-timer. I also see, looking miserable over by himself at the bar, a certain good looking fellow, maybe about what your age is now, who I happen to know is cross-eyed in love with a foolish woman that’s already married to this betraying man I’ve been talking about. You follow me?”

  I said I did, and he smiled.

  “So, I go back to my boat, diddle around there—pretty damn put out and trying to ease my soul.” Cadmean stopped again and hoisted himself up on a hay bale we’d come upon; he gazed complacently around him, as if that too were a way to ease his soul. He looked on one side at the dark feathery trees fronting the blank sky, then turned around and looked across the street to where small white swamps of snow seeped into the brown and yellow grass of the meadow. The hawk still circled.

  Cadmean beamed. “Isn’t that the prettiest thing in the world? Winter fields. I got no use for people putting down the Piedmont like it was some scruffy patch between the mountains and the beach.”

  “The mountains and the coast are beautiful,” I said.

  “It’s all beautiful. God on the land never went wrong. People now, I think He gave up and turned people over to Lucifer.” Cadmean pulled out another cigar while I found a last cigarette and we each lit our own, and I waited.

  Finally he mumbled, “So,” his lips a circle of smoke. “Here’s the part of my story for your special satisfaction. Say, when I’m sitting down there in my boat,
I see my false friends out on the inn’s porch arguing with that design man, and he looks a mite weavy on his feet from not being the kind to hold his liquor. After the others walk on back inside, he stands there looking down at something he’s pulled out of his pocket.”

  The coin. So far, each thing Cadmean had said fit precisely with what Cary Bogue had long ago reported: the arguing would have been their trying to convince Ames not to take his boat across the lake after having so much to drink. It was what happened next that I wanted to know. I asked, “And?”

  “And? Well, and this in-love fellow pops out of the inn and catches up with the other one, right about where his boat’s moored. And they talk a bit. And they yell a bit. And maybe it’s talk about this also two-timing woman they both want to hold on to. The way I said before, men are rutting hogs, and, son, that’s a fact of nature no sense denying. And this in-love fellow gets carried away with his feelings and slugs my design man right in the face a good one, and down he goes, clunk, on that hard concrete walkway by the dock. And off the other one goes not even looking back.”

  My heart had quickened fast enough to sweat my hands inside their gloves. Had Rowell simply left Ames lying there on the marina walk?

  “He went off to his car in the lot?” I asked.

  Cadmean shrugged, puffing up smoke at the cloudless sky, watching it rise. “So, there I sit and there the other one lies flat out. I’ll tell you this. I didn’t feel like going helping that man up after he’d stabbed me in the back. But he didn’t move and didn’t move, and I’m starting to think, maybe he’s accidentally dead from that fall under the influence.

  But pretend, here comes the in-love fellow back and he about jumps out of his skin when he sees the other one still laying where he’d socked him. So he picks him up. Now, son, let me rest my old voice. You use your imagination.” Cadmean’s sleepy yellow eyes moved back toward me.

  I stared at him. “He put the body in the boat and took off.”

  “All right. That sounds like a good ending to this story.”

  I said, “And he motors out into the middle of Pine Hills Lake, throws the body overboard, jumps off himself, and swims ashore.”

  Cadmean’s cigar slid around in his pink puffy lips. He shook his head. “My story ends at the dock. My eyes are good, they truly are, but not good enough to see across a big old lake in the middle of a summer night.”

  “You heard the explosion when the boat hit the pump?”

  “My ears are good as my eyes.”

  I tried to keep my voice even. “And you never said anything? Why didn’t you tell Stanhope?”

  Cadmean’s little, eyes widened innocently. “Tell him what?”

  “Christ! That Rowell murdered Bainton Ames!”

  “Now, son, now.” He leaned over and squeezed at my shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I walked off, wheeled and stared back at him. At the stable end of the muddy arena I could see the teenage boy leading out Manassas, now unsaddled and looking like some Tartar chieftain’s steed, the winter hair of his pasterns like high shaggy black fur boots. I said to Cadmean, “Fifteen years! And you know what! You told Rowell what you saw, didn’t you? Christ, you’ve had him by the balls for fifteen years?”

  Pulling off his fur cap, Cadmean scratched his bald skull. “Well, that’s a mighty uncomfortable figure of speech… I’ll tell you two things about Rowell. He was a good husband to Cloris. He’s been a good state senator to this area. He’s a Piedmont man. He does what he can for us.”

  “He’s your man.”

  Cadmean squished the cap back on. “I’m a Piedmont man. So are you. I love where I live. Don’t you, son?”

  I told him, “Ken Moize can subpoena you. You’ve withheld evidence in a felony.”

  “Have I?” He pulled out the cigar and studied it curiously. “Have I? I thought I was just telling you a story. In exchange for you arranging a visit. And seems like you gave me your word you’d get Baby to come see me. So why don’t you go do it, son?”

  “You’re amazing! You stand there and tell me you’d commit perjury, and then you expect me to ‘keep my word’!”

  He looked at me with an astonishing benign affection. “Justin. I don’t believe you think a gentleman’s word has anything to do with what other people do or don’t do, or say or don’t say. Keeping his word just has to do with his having given his word. Am I right? That’s the kind of gentleman I want to see my girl bed down with.”

  By now I was pacing back and forth about twenty feet off from him. I yelled, “Just what are you going to do if Hudson and Willis won’t keep their mouths shut! If you sent them over to Cloris’s, and we can tie you to it, you better believe that’s a subpoena you’ll have to answer. Christ!”

  Cadmean spit out his cigar and ground it into the mud. “Oh, now we’re back to your story. Well, I don’t believe I’ll worry about that. I’m an old man, and worrying’s bad for the little bit left of my health. Like I said, son, this philosophizing of yours about brute violence and all getting on the loose, and how it can’t be controlled…It all depends.” And then with a jerky quickness I wouldn’t have thought possible, he jumped down from the hay bale, threw up both arms, clapped his hands sharply, and in a booming shout called, “Manassas! Huh! Huh! Huh!”

  Off at the field’s end, the black stallion broke loose from the startled stableboy, reared with a shivering whinny, then bolted toward us. Duchess bounded to her feet and started barking.

  Mud flew up with a smacking pop as Manassas’ hooves slapped at the ground, flying closer. He was galloping straight toward me, his neck stretched, mane shaking, nostrils huffing out white smoky air. His eyes wild on mine, he kept coming almost as if old Cadmean, like a wizard, had communicated to him some silent command that he come trample me to death. At the last instant, when I could feel his breath in the air, I leapt sideways to the barrier of the hay bale.

  Cadmean stood right where he was, as serenely as if he watched a child skip toward him bringing flowers. Only inches away from crashing into the fat old man, the horse sheered off at an angle, legs prancing mud up on Cadmean’s pant legs, then whirled around and stopped himself in front of his master, who reached calmly in the deep pocket, pulled out the jelly beans, and held them up. Manassas mouthed them out of the big, twisted fingers while Cadmean, cooing, rubbed the sweated neck. “Good boy,” said the old man with a chuckle, and peered over at me. “Controlling brutes, now, son. It all depends,” he said quietly, “on who’s in control. Huh?” He thrust his fingers through the bridle strap and tugged the nuzzling animal into a walk beside him back across the thawing field.

  • • •

  Two hours later, when I came quietly into the crematorium of Pauley and Keene Funeral Home, Mr. Cadmean, in a dark suit, his bald head bowed, stood alone among the empty chairs as the Reverend Thomas Campbell, who had baptized generations of the inner circle, including mine, prayed that in heaven Joanna Cadmean’s soul would find the peace that life should not promise and cannot give; while Mr. Pauley with a discreet forefinger pushed the button that slid her rich, black coffin smoothly and slowly into the fiery furnace.

  Afterward, I walked Mr. Cadmean out to his limousine and said I’d like to ask him one question. “Did you ever tell Joanna the story you told me?”

  “What story was that, son?”

  “The one about the designing man and the in-love fellow.”

  His driver opened the back door to the C&W company limousine. Cadmean carefully lowered himself into the plush seat, then shook his head. “I don’t recall that particular story,” he said. “But I never told Joanna any love stories. I truly never had the feeling she was the kind of woman would want to hear them. Would you excuse me now? I need to get back to my mills. I’ve got a young snot been giving me a hard time. He’s in for a surprise. I’m an old man. But I’m not as old as they think. Huh? I appreciate you paying Joanna your respects. I like a man with good manners. Principles, I’ve got no use fo
r. Ever notice how most of the slime of the world gets flung there by men with principles? Take care, now.” The big car turned slowly toward home. Home was Hillston. All of it.

  Chapter 27

  “General, I had made plans to fling my skinny body over what you might call the chasm between Junior Briggs and her old man Fatso the Bald because I hate to see a family frost each other when it’s a family I want to put my name to, and I’m the one liable to end up catching the icy breeze. But I don’t know about talking Briggs into going over there. All this terrible stuff you tell me that old rascal’s said, not to mention done, lordy! I don’t know. Why did you say we can’t go to Moize? My future pa-in-law ought to be in jail!”

  I said, “Cadmean does love her, Cuddy. It’s been five years since Briggs’s even gone to his house.”

  “Well, now, love. Nero loved Rome. To hear him tell it, he only burnt it down so he could redo it prettier. I saw that on TV.”

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t think you’d been sneaking around reading Suetonius.”

  “Who?”

  Cuddy Mangum roamed my kitchen drinking my beer and complaining to Mrs. Mitchell about the contents of my refrigerator and shelves. “Honey, just eat it. I know it looks all crumbly and rotted, but he doesn’t have any American cheese. What kind of soups are these tall skinny cans supposed to be? Bisque? Vissysuave? Don’t you have any meatball vegetable?”

  We were there waiting for a visitor. Mr. Ratcher Phelps had telephoned shortly after my return from the funeral services to say he was ready to pay his call. I confessed I wasn’t going to be able to hand him a check for $5,000 today. In his sonorous dirge of a voice, he replied, “Patience is a woman I’ve kept company with all my life, and I’ve got the trusting heart that gives a man tranquillity of mind.”