by Lamb, Wally
Still, I figured it was over at that point. For the next several weeks, I thought that, and after a while, I stopped thinking about it at all. Except it wasn’t over. The worst was coming. Claude had just been biding his time.
It come on the radio first. The noontime news said how a local man, employed as a mason by building contractor Angus Skloot, was found dead on the Skloots’ property. Found stuck headfirst down a well. All afternoon, every hour on the hour, the radio kept saying that same thing, just those couple sentences in the middle of the rest of the day’s news. I was so scared that I couldn’t even get my housework done. I just walked around from room to room, letting everything go. Claude had been sullen the night before, but that was nothing new. Then he’d had trouble sleeping. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard him walking around downstairs. When I put the light on and looked at the clock, it said it was two something. I woke up later and lit the light again. It was quiet downstairs now, but his bed was still empty. But that didn’t prove anything. Claude had trouble sleeping lots of nights. One minute I’d tell myself no, he wasn’t capable of murder. The next minute, I’d start worrying that he might be.
In the morning, before I went downstairs to make Claude’s breakfast, I prayed on it—asked Jesus Christ Almighty not to let my husband have done what I was afraid he might have, and if he hadn’t done it, to please forgive me for even thinking along those lines. Claude didn’t say more than two or three words to me while he was eating his eggs and toast. Well, that doesn’t prove a thing, I told myself; he never was the talkative type in the morning. But after Claude went off to work, I decided to go out to his garage and look around. The work I did down at the Loew’s Poli made me a detective of sorts, didn’t it? I’d just go out there and poke around a little, like a detective would do. But when I went out there, I saw that he’d padlocked the garage door. Usually that lock just hung open unless we were going away someplace for the day. And when I went back in the house to take the spare key off the hook, it was gone. All our other extra keys were there except that one. By the time Belinda Jean come downstairs for her breakfast, I was good and worked up. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Not a thing. Why do you ask?” She shrugged and shook a little more shredded wheat into her cereal bowl.
She was working that day. It was her long day because the library doesn’t close until 8:00 P.M. on Thursdays. From the normal way she’d been acting before she left, I could tell she still didn’t know about Jones’s death. But halfway through the afternoon, the front door banged open and I could tell from the look on her face that she knew. “I’m sick,” she said and ran right upstairs. Two or three times, I heard her in the bathroom, upchucking from the sounds of it. I made her a cup of tea, put some milk crackers on a plate to go with it, and went up there. She was back in bed, her face against the pillow. “Here,” I said. “This’ll settle your stomach.”
She turned and looked up at me, her face bright pink from crying. My heart was breaking for her, she looked so pitiful. “I had two friends in this whole wide world,” she said. “And now one of them’s dead.”
I hated to ask it, but I did. “Is that all you and him were, Belinda Jean? Just friends? Because I heard you vomiting. You’re not baby sick, are you?”
“No!” she shouted. “He was nice to me was all. He was easy to talk to and he said he thought I was pretty. That’s all there was to it.” She put her face to her pillow again and wailed.
After she’d quieted down, I said, “Drink your tea and eat a little. It’ll make you feel better.” Then I left the room. That was all we’ve ever said to each other about Joe Jones, from that day to now, four years later.
That night, the Evening Record run a picture. It showed Jones’s shoes sticking up out of that shallow well. And the headline above it—FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN LOCAL MAN’S DEATH—nearly stopped my heart. I held my breath as I read through the article. It said that it might have been an accident, that Joe could have tripped and fallen into that well headfirst, but that the victim’s brother was wanted by the police for questioning. They’d questioned Angus Skloot, too, it said, and he’d told them the brothers had had a violent quarrel after Rufus’s wife had took off and left him. The paper didn’t come out and say there’d been hanky-panky between Joe and Rufus’s wife, but I thought that was what it was saying between the lines. Well, good, I thought. If it was murder, it wasn’t Claude who done it. It was one brother killing the other brother, same as Cain had killed Abel in a jealous rage and been made “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.” The coroner, Mr. McKee, would be conducting an inquest over the next several days to figure things out, the paper said. There was nothing in that article about Josephus Jones being a picture painter. I was relieved about that. I didn’t want anyone who might have seen the scuffle between him and Claude putting two and two together and getting seven. As far as I recalled, when the police stopped their fight at the art show and walked Claude to the exit gate that day, they hadn’t even asked him for his name. That was a relief, too.
Usually, Claude finished work at five o’clock and was home by five fifteen wanting his dinner. But the day that story about Jones’s death broke, he didn’t show. I held his supper until eight or so, then wrapped it up and put it in the Frigidaire. By the time I heard his truck come up the driveway, it was after ten and I was upstairs in bed, staring into the pitch-dark and praying as hard as I could. It had been quiet down the hall for an hour or more, so I figured Belinda had finally gotten to sleep. I got up and went downstairs. Everything was still dark, but when I looked out the back window, I saw the light on in the garage. I went out there in bare feet with just my nightgown on.
“Where you been?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer me. Didn’t even look at me.
“What are you doing out here, Claude?”
He told me it was none of my business what he was doing, but I just stood there, looking at him. “If you must know, Miss Nosey, I’m cleaning some of my tools,” he said then. But his toolbox was shut, still up on the shelf. He had his crowbar in one hand, a kerosene-smelling rag in the other. A pair of his coveralls was in a heap on the workbench. I walked over to them. “These dirty?” I said. “I’ll take them in. I’m doing wash tomorrow.” But when I went for them, he batted my hand away.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “They’re no good anymore. My boots neither.”
It made no sense. I’d bought him those boots for his birthday the month before and they were hardly broken in. “No? Why not?”
He turned and faced me. Gave me a long, hard look. “Because they got nigger blood on them. The overalls, too.” When he said that, my heart sunk.
I said nothing. Just stood there, staring back at him for the longest time until a shiver run through me. Then I turned away and walked back toward the house. A little while later, I stood at the window and watched as he burned those coveralls and boots in the barrel, the flames leaping up and lighting his face like he was Lucifer himself. Like I was married to the devil.
And maybe I had some devil in me, too, because every morning and night for the next several days, and sometimes even in the middle of the day, I’d get down on my knees and pray that Rufus Jones, not Claude, would be arrested—that an innocent man would pay for the crime instead of a guilty one. It was a shameful thing for a Christian woman to do: asking the Good Lord to cover up a lie for selfish reasons, and a terrible lie at that. He didn’t grant my request, either. I found that out the day the radio said that Rufus had been found, questioned, and cleared. That he’d gone off on a three-day toot was all, and witnesses at the places where he’d been had said so.
But at the end of that same long week, the paper and the radio said that Coroner McKee’s report concluded that Joe Jones’s death was accidental—that he’d probably tripped in the dark, stumbled and fallen into the well headfirst, and drowned. The well was made of stone, it said, and was most likely responsible fo
r Jones’s banged-up skull and forehead.
There was some guff about Jones’s death from the colored folks. That big colored woman, Bertha Jinks—the one who’s mixed up in that group, the N Double A CP, and is always stirring up race trouble? She wrote a letter to the editor of the Record saying that everyone in town, black or white, knew how unlikely it was that a six-foot man would fall into a five-foot-deep well and manage to get himself drowned. And that if Josephus Jones had been a Caucasian instead of a Negro, the coroner would have concluded otherwise, and the police would have worked overtime until they’d solved his murder and gotten the victim some justice. My heart was near to stopping when I read that letter, and I got so scared that I didn’t even finish it. I just ripped it out of the newspaper and tore it into a million little pieces and burned them in the sink. Other letters to the editor went back and forth for a week or so after that, most of them in support of the official findings, and one or two saying how the coloreds were always finding something to complain about. After a while, the whole thing died down.
But not in our house. In our house, it kept festering in silence, like an untended-to wound that never quite heals and eventually kills you. Belinda Jean quit her job at the library, stopped speaking to her father, and started staying home all the time. Whenever her friend Peggy called, she’d have me tell her she was out, and after a while Peggy got the message and stopped calling. Claude’s suffering and breathing got worse and worse. And then, nine days ago, he turned purple, gasped for his last breath, and died—unrepentant and undetected in the matter of Josephus Jones’s murder. May God grant him mercy for what he done, I pray each night, and may He grant me mercy, too, for having kept my silence these four years. In the Bible, it says that Jesus told the Jews, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” It’s in John 8:32. But knowing the truth and telling it are two different things, and knowing the truth about how Josephus Jones met His Maker and not saying how hasn’t set me free. It’s put me in a kind of prison. Me and poor Belinda both. . . .
At Claude’s wake last night, it broke my heart the way Belinda Jean kept jerking her head up every time someone appeared at the doorway of the room where we were sitting. I suspect she was waiting for Peggy Konicki to show. Peggy, the only friend she ever had that didn’t get murdered. . . . Her mother come into Benny’s the other day, where I work now, running the cash register. Mrs. Konicki opened her wallet and showed me Peggy’s wedding picture, and a picture of her cute little grandbaby. I hate my Benny’s job, because it keeps me on my feet all day long, and because the manager’s always hanging around, making sure that I ask whoever I’m ringing up if they want the stuff that’s on the counter. “Can I interest you in a can of these deluxe mixed nuts?” Or, “Need any flashlight batteries today?” Or, “How about some bubble stuff for the kiddies? You know how children love to blow bubbles.” . . . I looked at that picture of Peggy’s baby quick. Then I had to look away and pinch my leg hard so that I wouldn’t cry in front of Mrs. Konicki, who was already a grandmother and I was never going to be one.
I still count heads for that movie distributor, Axion Entertainment, and between that and Claude’s Social Security and my Benny’s paycheck, we get by, Belinda and me. Of course, she doesn’t work. Doesn’t leave the house hardly ever, either. Just hangs around all day from morning till nighttime, watching TV in her housecoat. She’s big as a house now, poor thing. Has those two or three double chins and breathes like she’s out of breath, even when she’s just sitting on the couch, knitting and watching her TV shows. I remember when I first come on the scene and laid eyes on her. She was eleven. Half of her eyebrows were missing and she had a wad of paper towel plugging up the bloody nose she’d given herself. Then I took charge and she got better. And now she’s bad again. Real bad. She don’t turn off that television at night until after Johnny Carson’s over. I get down on my knees and pray for her every single night.
Tonight, after I’ve gotten myself ready for bed, I’m going to pray for that other little girl, too—the one I saw across the hall last night at McPadden’s Funeral Home wearing her blue dress and Mary Jane shoes. Chick and Sunny O’Day’s little daughter, Annie. She could use some prayer, I think. It’s like that song Daddy used to sing back in Alabama. I heard it on the radio just the other day. Johnny Cash was the one singing it, I’m pretty sure. Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. . . . There’s more truth than poetry in that line. When I heard that song again, I sat down and cried a river.
Another thought just come to me: how, even though the circumstances of their dying were different, both Sunny O’Day and Claude died because they suffocated. Because they couldn’t draw enough air into their lungs—her from drowning and him from his emphysema, and maybe because of the terrible thing he done, too. And then they both ended up together in the basement of McPadden’s that night, floating in floodwater.
I’m down on my knees now, asking God why, if He’s merciful, He had to put so much meanness in the world He made. Weasels pounce, snakes bite, dams break, men kill other men. And why would a merciful God let a little child’s mother die? I’m crying now and praying both, for Belinda Jean and that little O’Day girl. And for the souls of Sunny and Claude. And for Joe Jones’s soul, too, and the soul of his brother who died in the flood. Dear Lord, have mercy on all of them, and on me, too, if it is Thy will.
Part III
Family
Chapter Eleven
Andrew Oh
I tidied up my point of view
I got a new attitude . . .
I’m Dr. Laura Schlessinger and I do welcome you to this hour of the program. Our number here is 1-800-Dr. Laura. That’s 1-800-D-R-L-A-U-R-A. I’m here with Kimberly Neill who screens your calls, Benjamin Pratt who orchestrates our music, and me. I am my kid’s mom, ready to preach, teach, and nag you into doing the right thing. . . . Casey-Lee, welcome to the program.”
“Hi, Dr. Laura. Thank you for taking my call.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve been listening to you since my mom used to pick me up from grade school, and I just wanted to say what an honor it is to speak with you.”
“Thank you. How can I help?”
“I’m . . . well, the thing is . . . Sorry. I’m a little nervous.”
“That’s okay.”
“Do you want me to give you some background, or should I get right to my question?”
“Well, why don’t you just start and we’ll see where it goes?”
“Okay. Actually, I’m calling for my fiancé. He’s got a family situation that he’s struggling with, so I suggested we call Dr. Laura and see what she has to say about it.”
“And your fiancé’s name is?”
“Andrew. His problem—well, his parents are divorced, okay? And his mother’s getting remarried. To a woman.”
“Uh-huh. And your question for me is?”
“Whether or not we should go to their wedding. See, he grew up in a family that wasn’t very religious, but since we’ve been going out, he’s found His Lord and Savior. We already said we couldn’t go, but now he’s getting pressure from one of his sisters about how we should, because it’ll hurt their mother if we don’t. And yesterday his mom’s partner sent us plane tickets so that we can surprise her. And, well, the thing is . . . Don’t you think gay marriage is sinful?”
“What I think is beside the point. What do you think?”
“Me? I think it is.”
“Okay. Now a minute ago, you said this was your fiancé’s problem. So why is it that you’re calling me instead of him?”
“Oh. Well, because I said I would. He’s right here, though.”
“Ah. Then why don’t you put him on?”
“Oh, okay. [sotto voce] She wants to talk to you.”
Muffled voices.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Andrew.”
“Hey. How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. Now, first of all, I have a n
ote here from Kimberly that says you’re a member of the military.”
“Yes, ma’am. United States Army, Specialist E-Four.”
“And what’s your specialty, soldier?”
“My . . . I’m in a nurses’ training program.”
“Ahh. Well, thank you for your service to your country. And hoo-ya!”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”
“Casey-Lynn says you’re conflicted about going to your mother’s wedding. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Okay, well . . . Like Casey said, she’s getting married to a woman, okay? She’s . . . my mother’s an artist. Kind of a free spirit, you know?”
“And?”
“And her and this woman have been living together for a while, and now they’re going to get married. Which, you know, they can do. Legally. Because the wedding’s going to be in Connecticut. And so, part of me thinks I should go because, you know, she’s my mom.”
“And what’s the other part telling you?”
“Uh . . . what?”
“You just told me that part of you is telling you to go, so I’m assuming there’s another part that’s telling you not to. Right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because?”
“Because I don’t, me and Casey don’t . . . we feel that marriage should just be between a man and a woman. Whether, you know, it’s legal or not.”
“So this wedding flies in the face of your values.”
“Yes, ma’am. Plus, I don’t know. I just think that going would be disloyal to my dad. I mean, him and my mom are divorced, but—”
“Divorced for how long?”
“Over a year now. But they’ve been separated for, like, three years.”
