by R.J. Ellory
The ward nurse did ask who they were, their names, who they had come to visit.
“John Wilson,” Henry lied, “and this here is my wife, Mary.” He smiled guilelessly. “Mary is Grace Riggs’s niece’s cousin,” he added.
The nurse looked surprised. “Well, if ever there was a distant relative contest, you’d more ’an likely win a prize, my dear,” she said. “However, I am sure that Grace will appreciate your makin’ a visit. She’s been here a long time, and aside from her son, she don’t get no one comin’ down here.”
“That’d be Carson, right?” Henry asked. “The sheriff.”
“He’s a sheriff?” the nurse asked. “Who woulda known, eh? Saw him just the once. That was a long time back, though. Like I said, she don’t get no visitors.”
“How long has she been here?” Evie asked.
“Oh, Lord, I have no idea,” the nurse said. “I’ve been working on this wing for fifteen years, and Grace was here long before me.”
“She hasn’t told you?”
The nurse gave a weak smile. “You go visit her now,” she said. “Let me introduce you.”
The nurse left them standing there at the edge of a bed, within which was a frail and distant woman, a woman representing nothing more than a rough sketch of the person she’d once been.
Evie looked at Henry. Henry looked back at her. Their expressions were the same: a sense of disbelief, a sense of guilt, as well, as if they were bringing bad news to the doorstep of someone who had already received far more than any human being should have to bear.
Evie pulled up a chair and sat down. She reached out and took the pale and fragile hand of Grace Riggs.
“Grace,” she said, and Grace turned her head and looked back at her through milky eyes.
She smiled faintly, as if there were some sense of recognition, and she said, “We had angel food cake at the party. I made it myself.”
Henry stepped up behind Evie and placed his hands on her shoulders.
“We came to visit you, Mrs. Riggs,” he said. “We wanted to talk to you about Evan and Carson, you know? We wanted to ask you about Evan’s daughter … your granddaughter.”
Grace looked surprised for a moment. “She was only here for a little while,” she whispered, as if some secret was being divulged. “I saw her before she died.” She smiled then, heartfelt and sincere, yet with a shadow of poignancy. “I came to visit her, but Carson was so angry. He told me never to come again.”
“Sarah was here?” Evie asked. “And she died?” She turned and looked at Henry, and there was a visible sense of distress in her expression.
“Sarah?” Grace asked. “Who is Sarah?”
“Your granddaughter,” Henry said. “Evan’s daughter.”
“No, I didn’t see her today,” Grace said. “Is she here?”
“Who died, Mrs. Riggs? Who was here that died?” Henry asked.
“Why, Rebecca, of course. Sarah’s mother. I came to see her here. Carson told me not to come again, so I didn’t. I should have defied him.”
Grace Riggs looked away for a few moments, and then she turned back. She smiled at Henry, at Evie Chandler. “We had angel food cake at the party,” she said. “I made it myself, you know?”
Evie squeezed Grace Riggs’s hand gently. “Is that right, Mrs. Riggs? Rebecca was Sarah’s mother, and Rebecca died here at Ector?”
The look in Grace’s eyes was so very distant that Evie knew she was gone. Where she had gone, Evie had no idea, but she certainly wasn’t in the Andersen Wing of Ector County Hospital talking to her visitors.
Evie sat there a while longer. Henry didn’t say a word. When they finally got up to leave, they found the nurse again and told her they were leaving.
“She was lucid?” the nurse asked.
“A little.”
“Less and less frequently now,” she replied. “Six months, a year perhaps, and she might not even recognize me, and I see her every day.”
“Thank you for letting us visit,” Evie said. “And thank you for taking such good care of her.”
“Someone has to, eh?” the nurse said, smiling. “Most of these old ’uns have been abandoned and deserted by family, you know? Terrible shame, but that’s life, isn’t it?”
Outside, they sat in the truck. Both of them were silent for a while, but Henry broke that silence with something they had both been thinking.
“You reckon Rebecca was the mother?”
“I do,” Evie said. “She wound up here, died here. Grace winds up here, too, and Evan ends up in jail. The father is dead, as well. Is it my imagination, or does everyone around Carson Riggs get completely fucked-up?”
“Not your imagination,” Henry replied.
“That was really sad. Seeing that woman like that. Carson doesn’t come out here and visit her. However, I can’t say that’s so bad, all things considered. She can’t see Evan … probably doesn’t even remember what Evan looks like. She’s been there—what?—twenty years, maybe?”
“Fifteen at least.”
“No life, is it?”
Henry shook his head.
“So we need to find out who Rebecca is, if she ended up here, if she died. We find some record of her, we might get a little closer to Sarah.”
“Interesting, huh?”
“Which bit?”
“Looking for someone no one wants us to find.”
“Except Evan,” Evie said. “Wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Evan, right?”
“Right.”
“You ready to quit, Henry?”
“Hell, no.”
Evie smiled. “Me either. More I hear about Carson Riggs, the less I like him. The less I like him, the more I want to see him get fucked-up, too.”
“Remind me to stay friends with you.”
“Oh, I think you’d make a pretty good enemy, Henry Quinn. I think you’re a much darker horse than you let on.”
“Oh, you’re so right there, sweetheart,” Henry said, a smile in his eyes. “All hidden currents, me. Black water. Deep, too. So very deep.”
“Idiot.”
Henry started the engine and they pulled away, both of them making a point of not looking back at the dark, angular shape on the horizon.
TWENTY-NINE
The album sold, and sold well. Some of those tunes on The Whiskey Poet got more airtime than Leland Soames or Herman Russell could have hoped for. Herman had questioned the tone of the thing, said that the lion’s share of those songs were pretty downbeat and morbid.
“Sounds like a man who knows he’s lost,” he told Soames.
“We’re all lost, Herman,” Soames replied. “Believe it or not, folks like to know that they’re not alone, especially when they’re at their lowest. It’s called human nature.”
Seemed Leland Soames had his finger on the pulse, however weak that pulse might have been, and Evan Riggs’s record matched the rhythm.
Evan didn’t change his mind about going back to Calvary, but when he arrived in January of 1949, he arrived as a small star in the country music firmament.
His parents could not have been happier. Carson could not have been more jealous. Just as had been the case when Evan got back from the war, Carson was in the shade while Evan hogged the limelight. Evan didn’t see it, but then Evan never did. He was not plagued with the same insecurities as his older brother. He had his own monkeys to carry, and jealousy was not one of them. Seemed like a week of parties, and every party he was invited to, people played his record, and some of those people remembered the words better than himself. Everyone had an explanation for what such and such a song meant, and it was always to do with Calvary and something that had happened there. No one was right, save Rebecca Wyatt.
She came the first night, just to say hi, and then she returned the next day, and she found Evan on the veranda, his head a little swelled and hungover, and she sat with him quietly and waited for him to tell her something of the time he’d been away. It had been three years, pretty muc
h to the month, and though he’d forgotten the last words they’d shared, she had not. She had professed to hate him for making her life so complicated, how he knew that was not true, and then those final words—Will always love you … whatever happens—to which he had failed to reply.
“I listened to your record,” she said that morning on the veranda as he smoked his cigarette and drank his coffee and looked out across a horizon that was awkwardly familiar, “and those songs are way too sad to be about you and me.”
She waited for a response that never came.
“So I know you met someone else, Evan.”
Evan nodded slowly, but he did not look at her.
“What’s her name?”
“Was,” he replied. “She’s dead.”
Her face and tone of voice communicated genuine shock and distress. “Oh, Evan … my God … what happened?”
Evan turned and looked at her. His expression was strangely implacable, as if whatever he was feeling was buried so very deep.
“She killed herself,” he said. “I went to get cigarettes and beer, and she killed herself.”
“Oh, Evan,” Rebecca echoed. “I am so sorry … I had no idea … I don’t even know what to say.”
He smiled resignedly. “There’s nothing to say, sweetheart, and nothing needs to be said.”
“When did this happen?”
“An earlier life,” Evan said, “but that life is done with, and this here is a different one, and it’s good to see you.”
She reached out her hand, and though she expected him to be unresponsive, perhaps even to withdraw, he did not. He returned the gentle expression of affection and looked at her directly.
“It really is,” he said. “No bullshit. It’s good to see you. Of everything here, you’re the only real reason to ever come back.”
She glanced away. Had he not been looking at her, he perhaps might have missed it.
“I know about you and Carson,” he said. “I’m not stupid.”
She turned back. “Carson … he … well … you went away, Evan. You really went away. Three years. I told you I would always love you and you said nothing, and then you just disappeared. I was supposed to wait for you?”
Evan shook his head. “No, Rebecca, not for me, but for someone else.”
“Carson is a good man,” she said. “Headstrong, a little arrogant sometimes, but he’s young. He’ll settle down. Besides, there’s a lot to love about your brother, regardless of what you think.”
“And you love him?”
“Yes, Evan. I love him. I really do.”
“You gonna marry him?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but the hitch in her voice said that such a decision had already been made.
“I can’t tell you what to do, Rebecca. Hell, I’m the last person in the world who has any right to tell you what to do. I deserted you—”
“You didn’t desert me, Evan. You never made any promises to me.”
“Maybe I should have.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think. Lilly … that was her name … she died more than a year ago. December 1947. Life just vanished for a while. I drank a lot.” Evan smiled, almost to himself, and then he turned to Rebecca. “A lot,” he repeated. “Like I saw the sign DRINK CANADA DRY and thought it was an instruction.”
Rebecca laughed.
“Anyway, I drowned myself in liquor for a while, and then I met a man who made me clean bars and saloons for a while, and then I went out to Abilene and made the record, and now I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Keep on making records,” Rebecca said. “What else is there to do? You’re a country music star now, Evan Riggs. People are buying your record, and they’re gonna want to buy more.”
“I guess.”
“There’s no guess in it,” she said. “This is what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? I can’t understand why you would even think about this as anything but good.”
“Because success does not vanquish demons,” he said, and he really meant it.
“You puzzle the crap out of me sometimes, Evan Riggs,” she said.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “I sometimes puzzle the crap out of myself.”
The tension was there. It was unspoken, but it was there. That day, those final words uttered, he should have responded in kind. He should have told her he loved her. She might have waited for him. She might even have gone with him, and had she done so, there might never have been a Lilly Duvall. But Lilly Duvall starred in most of the songs on that record, and those in which she did not star, she was a walk-on, a cameo, or somewhere in the scenery directing the emotion of the thing. And had she not been there, he may never have sold so many, because whatever he was feeling when he stood in front of that microphone connected with real people who had real lives who had felt similar things themselves. Later he would understand that those emotions were already there because of Rebecca, that Lilly had merely brought them to the surface and given them words.
As Leland Soames had opined one drunken night in Abilene, “It ain’t so complicated, son. You live life, you write some songs, and people recognize their own lives in the words and music, and they feel like you’re cut from the same cloth. You explain how they feel in ways they never could.”
That had made sense to Evan while he’d recorded those tunes, but now—in hindsight—it seemed like that had been some different man, some other life he’d lived, some other story that was no longer his own. His emotions now belonged to the wider world, and he wasn’t so sure how to feel about that.
Evan stayed through January of 1949. He slept a great deal, as if exhausted from the three years he’d been away. He gave money to his ma, knowing his father would never take a cent from him, and for no other reason than pride. Fathers supported sons, not the other way around, no matter how growed-up those sons were.
Carson was here and there. He came for dinner every Sunday, stopped by now and again as he was making his way from someplace to someplace else. He had an apartment close to the Sheriff’s Office, slept there most nights, and planned to buy a home once he and Rebecca were married.
He had asked her several times. She’d never said yes, but—yet again—she’d never declined. To an outsider, someone who didn’t understand the dynamics of her relationship and history with Carson Riggs, it may have seemed cruel and unkind, but it was not. These were people who had grown up together. Evan had always been there, but Evan had gone to war, Evan had gone to San Antonio, to Austin, to Abilene. Rebecca Wyatt and Carson Riggs had stayed back in Calvary, and that fact alone gave them something that Evan would never possess. Rebecca might never have admitted it, even to herself, but there was something that drew her to the safety and predictability of whatever life was represented here. She was only part gypsy, whereas Evan merely had to stay a month or two in one place and the inner nomad started scratching on the walls of his soul. Evan knew better than to unsettle her with choices. He stayed in the wings, he watched, he listened as she went on convincing herself that marrying Carson was the right choice.
Evan knew that there was no such thing as the right choice. What was right today was wrong tomorrow, and vice versa. Given his time again, more than half of the decisions he’d made would be reversed.
Whereas Rebecca was evidently pleased to see Evan, Carson was far more unpredictable. There was something about Carson that made every conversation ambiguous and vague. Carson’s character was made of mercury. As soon as you put your finger on something, it slid from beneath you and became something else.
“You here for keeps, then?” he asked Evan one evening a couple of weeks after Evan’s return. They were out on the veranda together, the setting sun nothing more than a ghost haunting the horizon, the sky over their heads a rich midnight blue that seemed utterly without stars.
“You know I’m not here for keeps, Carson,” Evan replied. “Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer
to?”
“Just want to be sure, brother.”
“Of what? That I am not here to capsize your plans?”
“What plans would they be?”
“Your plan to marry Rebecca, to settle down, raise a family with her.”
“Are you here to do that, Evan?”
“You know the answer to that question, too, Carson.”
“Do I?”
Evan turned and looked at Carson. There was a flinty hardness in his eyes and his manner, even more so than when they’d last spent time together. “Yes, you do, big brother. Yes, you do.”
“She ain’t said yes to me.”
“She ain’t said no neither.”
“You think she’s gonna say yes?”
“I don’t doubt it, Carson. I think she’s making you work for it, is all.”
“I ain’t been nothin’ but a gentleman,” Carson said. “In every way.”
“Does that mean what I think it means?”
Carson paused, as if now he was once again explaining something very simple to a slightly backward child. “A man has his own standards and attitudes, Evan. You should know that, you bein’ all perceptive and sensitive and artistic and whatnot. I see it enough, you know? The way men treat their wives. I see them get violent, and I hear about them doing things that surely don’t seem right and proper, and I choose not to be that kind of man. I wasn’t raised that way, and neither was you, but you choose to live your life a different way from me and I don’t have any right to judge that.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Carson?”
“Well, the drinkin’ and the women you been involved with and whatever.”
“The drinking, sure. What the hell, you know? I had a problem with drinking. I got over it. You should get over it, too. Shit, Carson. It wasn’t even your problem! And as for women, there was one woman, one woman who really meant something to me, and now she’s dead, and if you’re asking me to consider what you think and feel about something that’s personal, then you can shut the hell up about that right here and now. You go on and say whatever the hell you like about me, but you keep your words in your mouth when it comes to her, if only out of respect for the dead.”
