“I wish Dick was interested in Melba instead of Sally,” Rusty said. “Then they could have my farm and me and Ned could keep this one. Plus it would solve what to do about Melba.”
“Melba don’t want Dick and little Sally don’t either, so stop dreaming,” Neddie said.
“Neddie, Pat’s in jail,” Harmony said.
“Uh-oh,” Neddie said. “So the bank finally figured it out.”
“Nope,” Harmony said. More and more she was getting to like the short responses.
Rusty and Neddie just looked at her.
“Pills,” Harmony said. “She had seventeen thousand pills in the trunk of her car and some patrolman stopped her because her taillight was broken.”
“Wow,” Rusty said. “Seventeen thousand pills.”
“She was planning to sell them,” Harmony said. “We have to go down and get her out of jail.”
“Why can’t she just stay in?” Neddie asked. “She’d be good company for Billy.”
“Neddie, we can’t leave her in jail, even if she has committed a few crimes.”
“Pat’s got the temperament of a fugitive,” Neddie remarked. “If we bail her out she’ll just run off.”
“That’s what I think,” Rusty said. “Me and you need to save our money for the divorce lawyers. Speaking of which, I need to get over to my place and try to catch Melba before she leaves for work.”
“Okay, I’ll go get Pat out,” Harmony said. She felt sure she had probably been heartless too, during periods when she was in love. Neddie and Rusty should get to enjoy their feelings for a while, without having to worry about Pat’s problems.
She left Neddie’s with every intention of going straight to the jail and getting Pat out; but when she came to the Tarwater turnoff she didn’t take it. Somehow her arms just wouldn’t make the wheel turn. She didn’t want to go into Tarwater again—so her arms informed her. Despite a desire to be helpful she couldn’t make the pickup take her to the jail.
When she drove up the lane toward her parents’ house she saw Eddie sitting on the stump by the pond, with her father. There was a fishing pole stuck in the ground nearby. Harmony crawled through the fence again, and picked her way through the grass burrs to where they sat. Eddie was listening raptly, so entranced by what his grandfather was telling him that he scarcely gave his mother a glance. Her father noticed her picking grass burrs out of her socks and smiled a sympathetic smile.
“Some years we get grass and other years we just get grass burrs,” he said. “This year it’s mostly grass burrs.”
“Momma, Grandpa was telling me about an Indian chief who painted himself red when he wanted to fight,” Eddie said. “His name was Santana. He was very large and he killed six buffalo right over there on that hill. Grandpa showed me the place and while I was walking around I found an arrowhead.”
He dug in his pocket and produced the arrowhead, which was made of dark flint.
“I’m going to keep it forever and forever, to remember the farm by,” Eddie said. “I’ll show it to my friends though. I think it belonged to Santana and I think it was what he killed the buffalo with.
“It’s my greatest treasure,” he added, “and my stuffed animals are my other treasures. And Iggy and Eli are treasures, but they’re alive.”
“Dad, do you still want to go?” Harmony asked—she was nervous on that subject.
“You bet—I could leave now, if I had my shirts packed,” Sty said. “Me and Eddie had a pretty good look around the old place. We’re going to come back once in a while, just the two of us, so I can fill him in on some stories I might have forgotten this morning.”
“Would you keep my arrowhead, Grandpa?” Eddie said, handing it to him. “I don’t want to lose it. It’s very important because it belonged to an Indian long ago.”
When they went in the house her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, painting her fingernails and watching a soap.
“People just let me sit here all day, alone, never give me a thought—I could have drunk lye and be dying and no one would come to check on me,” Ethel said.
“Mother, why would you drink lye?” Harmony asked.
“Anybody can make a mistake and drink lye,” Ethel said. “I sit here from morning till night and don’t see a soul. I might drink lye just to have something to do.”
“Momma, can’t you be glad about anything, ever?” Harmony asked, curious.
“Sure, my hair and my figure,” Ethel said. “I still get compliments on my hair and my figure.
“I called Pat and I called Neddie and I never got either of them,” Ethel went on. “I don’t see why those girls can’t stay home in their own houses. They both have real nice homes—better than this old mess of a place.”
Harmony decided not to comment—why tell her mother the truth about Pat and Neddie? But, the very next second, some demon prompted her to do just that.
“Mother, Pat’s in jail for selling drugs and Neddie’s going to divorce Dick and marry his brother,” she said, just as her mother was applying a little more polish to the nails of her left hand. Ethel lifted an eyebrow but didn’t stop painting her nails.
“Well, Rusty’s a loser, Neddie will soon regret that move,” Ethel said. “Dick ought to take a gun and shoot Rusty, the lazy skunk.”
“Momma, did you hear me say Pat’s in jail for selling dope?” Harmony asked.
“I guess she was set up,” Ethel said. “She works in a bank and steals all the money she needs, why would she sell dope?”
“Mom, I’m taking Dad to Las Vegas—he wants to live with Eddie and me, for a while,” Harmony said.
“Good riddance,” her mother said. “I knew he’d run off, one of these days. He ain’t been doing much under the quilts for the last few years. I expect he’ll find himself some floozy, as soon as he hits the ground. At least he won’t be where he can steal my social security checks out of the mailbox. I might just move Billy into that spare bedroom, once Sty’s gone. Billy had no business leaving home in the first place.”
“Mom, the family’s gone to pieces, don’t you care?” Harmony asked. But Ethel thought she meant the family on the soap she was watching. The soap interested her more than the fact that her husband was leaving, or that her daughter was in jail.
“I know, but that’s because they’re all atheists,” Ethel said. “When you slight the Lord you pay for it.”
Harmony left the kitchen and went upstairs. With the house almost empty the stairs didn’t seem so claustrophobic. Her old room was claustrophobic, though. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet. On the little dresser there were pictures of Pepper, sitting with pictures of all the other grandchildren. On the wall there was a picture of herself, the year she had been made homecoming queen, with Huggie Rawlins, the captain of the football team that year. He had escorted her to the fifty-yard line and kissed her—it was about then, Harmony remembered, that things began to go wrong for her at home. Neither of her sisters ever forgave her for being made homecoming queen. It was an honor they both dreamed of. About six months after the homecoming game she left Tarwater, more or less for good. Nobody liked it that she had been made homecoming queen but didn’t even feel obliged to stick around and live her whole life in the town, as a result.
Harmony wandered into her parents’ room, briefly—there was another picture of Pepper, again with all the grandkids. Pepper had had braces at the time.
It was in the dentist’s office, about a year later, while they were having an appointment to get the braces removed, that Harmony learned that Pepper wasn’t a virgin anymore. Pepper was so happy to be getting the braces off—in her view they marred her perfect appearance—that she blurted out the fact that she had been having sex for nearly six months with a lifeguard at the Trop.
But there was Pepper’s picture, on her parents’ old brown dresser—there at least she was a grandchild among grandchildren, perfect in the eyes of her grandparents.
“Oh, Pepper,” Harmony said, aloud. The bu
rn of grief came again—she rushed right out of the room. She couldn’t bear memories of her daughter—couldn’t bear them.
To her mother’s astonishment she rushed into the kitchen and grabbed the telephone—by good luck she even remembered Laurie’s number. Fortunately Laurie answered right away.
“Laurie, when you were upstairs at my parents’ did you see the picture of Pepper in braces?” she asked.
“Yes, didn’t it break your heart?” Laurie said.
“What will we do, Laurie? I can’t bear any more memories,” Harmony said.
“I don’t know, sweetie,” Laurie said.
“Isn’t there a part of your brain they can cut away, so you have no memory?” Harmony asked. “I want mine cut away. I don’t want to remember anymore—it’s too hard. Why did I have all those boyfriends? Why couldn’t I have just been a mom?”
“Harmony, you need to ease up on yourself,” Laurie said. “We all have plenty we can blame ourselves for. But you need to ease up on yourself, for Eddie’s sake.”
Harmony couldn’t remember the rest of the conversation, all she knew was that Laurie said she wished she hadn’t left. Her father came in and went upstairs to pack. Eddie ran up the stairs behind him. He was sticking close to his grandfather, now that he’d found him.
Her mother still sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the polish on her fingernails to dry.
“Yankees have more diseases than we do, I expect that was the cause of the tragedy,” Ethel said, when Harmony hung up.
17.
“Well, it’s so long to the prairie—I expect I’ll miss it,” Sty said, when the plane took off.
“But it’s not so long to me, Grandpa,” Eddie reminded him. He had Iggy in a little carrying case, under the seat. Eddie was holding his grandfather’s hand, and his mother’s hand as well, even though he was a little put out with his mother for her lack of regard for proper goodbyes—they had spent the whole day at her parents’ house and hadn’t really said goodbye to anyone.
“It will make my cousins very sad, I know it,” Eddie told her.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t—we’ll make phone calls once we get to Las Vegas,” Harmony said. Even though Eddie was quite annoyed, she really couldn’t face seeing anybody. She didn’t get Pat out of jail, or call Neddie, or anything. The only family member they saw on the way to the airport was Dick. They passed him as the sun was setting. He was still in his field plowing, on his tractor, with a big cloud of dust hanging in the rear. He looked so lonely, on his tractor, that Harmony felt a pang. What if Sally, twenty-two years old, just wasn’t interested? What would that leave Dick, except the girly magazines?
“I wonder if Dick will remarry?” she asked her father.
“Not unless some woman’s enterprising enough to go drag him off that tractor,” Sty said.
“I hope some woman does,” Harmony said—she was remembering his look of gratitude when she made him come.
“At least we said goodbye to Grandma,” Eddie said—he was a little bit obsessed with the need for proper goodbyes. “At least she didn’t get to turn Eli loose.”
Actually, Ethel had thought they were going frog hunting when they left. She was watching Jeopardy, and hardly gave them a glance.
“Don’t bring none of them old smelly frogs in this house,” she said. “People catch TB from handling frogs.”
“Ethel, we’re not going frog hunting, we’re going to Las Vegas,” Sty said. “I may be back someday, but, on the other hand, I may not.”
“It’s not just TB you get, it’s polio too, and you get it from handling old smelly frogs or fish heads or anything that lives underwater,” Ethel insisted. It was her last comment, as they went out the door.
“She’s cracked, always was,” Sty said. He meant to leave the pickup at the airport, for one of the grandkids to pick up.
“I spent my life with a crazy woman, that’s what it boils down to,” Sty said, as they were driving down the lane, past the ponds and the stump and the fields he had tended all his life.
“But I’m not cracked, and my mother isn’t and Iggy isn’t and Gary isn’t,” Eddie insisted, as they turned onto the highway.
“The northern part of Texas ain’t a lot different from Oklahoma,” Sty said, as the plane flew westward, over the grasslands. He looked out the window, keenly interested in the dark land below—here and there, on the plains, were sprinkles of lights. Sty mused about what towns the lights might be.
“I like being up in the sky, Grandpa,” Eddie said. “We might fly by a goose.”
“Or a flying badger,” Sty said.
“No, we will not fly by a flying badger,” Eddie said, with the conviction of one who had spent many hours glued to the Discovery Channel.
Harmony had mixed feelings—really mixed. She was wishing the plane could just fly on forever—just fly on and never land, so she could always be somewhere in the sky, with her father and her son. She didn’t want to come down, into the world of memory, not to mention the world of apartment hunting, job interviews, bank accounts with eight dollars in them, men with their greed and their needs. Once she had had the energy to meet all those demands; now she didn’t know where she would find the energy to meet any of them.
But she knew she had to find it somehow; an old man and a boy had put their trust in her. She had to let the memories go, and the regrets as well; she had to fold them away, as she had folded away her hopes for a man who would love her and care for her. Such a man wasn’t going to come; but the old man and the young boy were there, she had to quit being selfish, she had to be good; even if she didn’t think she could be good, she had to try.
Then she dozed a little. When she woke the plane was banking over Las Vegas. Eddie and her father were looking out the window at the million lights. They were looking with almost identical expressions—keen expressions. She realized at that moment that they had the same eyes.
“Grandpa, look!” Eddie said, as the plane banked over the Strip. Harmony could make out Caesars, and also the Stardust.
“It’s Las Vegas, Grandpa—that’s the Strip!” Eddie said. “It’s where I’m growing up. It’s my home!”
“Oh, golly, that’s a bunch of lights, this town must run up a big electricity bill,” Sty said, smiling. He could tell that Eddie was very excited, and he seemed excited too.
“It’s a bunch of lights because it’s the Strip,” Eddie informed him. “It’s a very important place—it’s where millions come.”
Harmony couldn’t get over how much Eddie looked like her father—she had been too sad to notice it sooner. It made something lift a little, in her, seeing how excited they both were to be coming down over the lights of the Strip. Seeing how alike they looked gave her a little sense of promise.
“You okay, hon?” her father asked. “You had a pretty good nap.”
“I’m okay, Dad,” Harmony said—she didn’t want him to worry. Going away hadn’t worked. Maybe coming back would work a little better. She would just have to soldier on, if that was the phrase—she had never been a soldier, and if there was a war she had lost it. But seeing the lights affected her too—she had always loved them. Eddie was right—those lights lit up a place where millions came. She and her son and her father would be part of the millions soon.
“I just hope Gary’s there—otherwise we don’t have a ride,” she said. “He’s got a purple Cadillac, you’re going to love it, Eddie.”
“A purple Cadillac,” Eddie said.
“You have to be a little tolerant of his driving, Dad,” Harmony said—she didn’t want her father to get too much of a shock on his first night in town.
“Tell Grandpa how Gary drives, Eddie,” she said—let him hear it from his grandson.
“Pedal to the metal,” Eddie said, grinning his irresistible grin.
“Pedal to the metal—oh boy, here we go,” her father said.
>
(Series: The Desert Rose # 2)
The Late Child Page 47
