The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  My God! He lowered his eyes, he felt so embarrassed for her. He hadn’t been close to grief like that in years, the way it can breed self-doubt, all that self-inflicted blame and loneliness. It will forever astonish me, he thought, how deeply and without qualification people can love, especially women. It’s without rhyme or reason, for it has nothing to do with whether the people being loved are good or bad. It just happens. If they are good, then it’s beyond measure in its grace.

  She didn’t wait for an answer. Still speechless, he watched her hurry down the walk to her car. Before she got in, she looked back and with a shake of her head gave him a friendly wave. Fully herself again, letting him know it was okay. Then it hit him. He found himself thinking back on Harlan Monroe’s call, how he’d been sorely tempted to spill his insides, so sick was he of the grief and the burden of worry he’d been carrying since that damn Carver shooting. Now he knew if he’d done it, he would have felt more than awful, and probably out of guilt, and because misery loves company, he’d have encouraged her to let loose, too, like he supposed she was half hoping to when she came. And he would have thereby betrayed her, all that lovely pride of hers and near-absolute mortification, as well as himself once again. It had been a close one. Some things just had to get worked out by themselves: he and Charlie, she and Charlie, Charlie and Charlie. Still, he felt all the worse about what happened, having seen her.

  Then he wondered about the way people feel who you deliberately break down so they confess the carryings-on of their loved ones or friends. When you take away their privacy like that, it’s trust you destroy in them, the trust in themselves, faith even, and he knew life would have to be awful without that.

  XXX

  Drusilla

  She’d never felt so mortified in her life. She didn’t even know why she went to see Eddie.

  Drusilla had been trying to not think about going to see him from that dawn Charlie walked out, the sun creeping over the kitchen table, her hand lifeless around a cup of cold coffee. It was like Charlie had taken his spirit away, too, and she hadn’t known why or, worse, what it was she might have done wrong. She’d wanted to throw every dish in the kitchen after him, break everything that ever was between them. He’d been spoiling for it. She guessed they’d both been. Too many years without taking risks with each other.

  But coming home and brushing by her like she hadn’t asked him a normal question, like she didn’t exist! Everything in the way he looked and carried himself that dawn had told her the fuse was real short. She had stared across the yard emerging from the night, stared at a world that had become theirs and could cease to be, then, taking a deep breath, had followed him in. He was standing at the far end of the living room, indistinct in the early-morning light. “How bad was it, Charlie?”

  “Well, what on earth makes you think it was bad?” Sarcastic, too. My. Sarcasm was something he usually disdained as cheap, a coward’s way of expressing dissatisfaction while trying to duck responsibility for what you were saying.

  “What has happened to you?”

  “You want to tell me?” Worse than sarcasm—contempt. She shook her head like she’d been struck. Fiercely as she loved him, she was ready to claw his eyes out. She wasn’t about to tiptoe around Charles Pompeii Dugan or any other man. So they stared at each other in a simmering silence. Finally he said, “Eddie resigned.” That brought her up short; she couldn’t find her voice. “Well?” he demanded after another long silence.

  “Well what?” Her tone must have been a little gentler. She was still trying to cope with Eddie’s resigning. Maybe he saw that as weakness.

  “You going to tell me I had it coming, all the things I been doing wrong?”

  “Did he?” That had stopped him, and for a moment she thought the little talk they were beginning to have was about to lead somewhere.

  He never touched her or anything in the house, but when he got in his pickup a little while later and drove off God only knew where, she’d known they could never live together again, not like that.

  Then, the day after, just when she’d made up her mind to go see Eddie, the phone had rung. It was Rachel, wanting to talk to Charlie.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “Elmore was in some kind of hellacious fight night before last. I mean, he looks awful! I swear someone almost killed him.”

  “Elmore know you’re doing this?” Things were beginning to clarify.

  Silence. “No.” Then another silence, and finally, “He’s not saying a damn thing about it, and that’s not like him. We always talk.”

  “Well, for the time being, I think you’d better leave it just the way it is.”

  “Dru, I don’t know what’s going on, but he’s bothered, I can tell.”

  “You never knew what was going on with Martin Pemberton, did you?”

  “With Martin, I couldn’t have cared less.”

  “Is Elmore hurt so bad he can’t make it around on his own steam? Should he see a doctor, is that what’s troubling you?” She felt an impatience taking over, no desire at all for handholding.

  “He’s at work. I expect he thinks he doesn’t need a doctor.”

  “Has he been getting ugly with you?”

  “Lord, no! Anything but.”

  “So what is it, really?”

  Rachel grew silent again. The longer the silence went on, the more impatient Dru became, until she couldn’t bear to be on that phone another second. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time,” Rachel said at last.

  Dru closed her eyes. “And you’re afraid. You don’t want to be hurt again.” Once more, the phone fell silent. Please hurry, Rachel! I can’t handle anyone’s silence except my own right now, and even it’s driving me crazy. When she couldn’t wait any longer, she said, “Take my word. If you had to, you could take the loss again. Because if someone really matters, you have no damn choice. None of us does.”

  “Dru, I want to know what Uncle Charlie had to do with this.”

  “Charlie’s out of town, and I gotta run.”

  So of course Eddie had turned out to be real good with her—far better than she’d been with Rachel.

  She still didn’t know how she’d made it off Eddie’s porch to the car, and even managed a little wave like it was all okay. She’d just betrayed herself, shown him everything she’d learned never to show. She scarcely made a block before she had to pull over. She couldn’t see anymore, on account of the tears. Worse than mortified, she was sick thinking of what she had wanted Eddie to tell her. She’d never talked much about herself to men except Charlie. She had her pride and too often damn little else, and she wasn’t about to give that away, men thinking what they did and people forever judging. But Charlie held stuff in, too, in spades. She’d sensed that in him from the first and trusted him, because there was no judgment in it. She would have despised him if there had been.

  But now, after ten years, he’d walked out, let all the self-doubt and everything else they’d lifted from each other come raining down again. She hadn’t felt so ugly about herself in years. Maybe he did what he had to, but that didn’t excuse it.

  Thank God, Eddie was a good man. She started the car again and headed downtown, anywhere but back up that little valley to the farm, where she’d have only herself to sit with. She supposed she might not have fallen all the way back to where she’d been before she met Charlie, but she didn’t believe it.

  Then she noticed the evening sun was gone. With a crash, the sky opened. People started running. Nobody was in sight on the courthouse square. Traffic lights turned red, then green over empty streets. She could scarcely breathe.

  Driving across South Charlotte Street, past Damascus Hardware with its lights on, people inside moving around in a cozy world where she couldn’t go, she remembered that the cattle, his cattle, would have to be fed. Damn him! By what right?

  Once upon a time, she could have driven north to New Apex, gone home. And that was fine when she left her ex-husband, Lonnie, but that was
a thousand years ago. In her heart, she hadn’t left home when she became Mrs. Lonnie Parcel, because she always knew she could go back. But her parents had long ago split up, her father moving off the mountain to the farm. Now they were both gone. But Charlie had already changed that. Together they’d changed that. Her only home now was on that farm she’d inherited, where the cattle had to be fed, and she would have to do it because no one in the world knew where Charlie was, or at least they weren’t telling her. And cattle were innocent and helpless.

  If he’d just said, It’s not about you. I just gotta go away, she could have lived with that. But all she’d felt was his fury. It was all over the place, and he’d refused to say why. Charlie had betrayed her; he’d betrayed them. No one could ever have betrayed her before, because she was too busy worrying about herself. But Charlie had staked his pride on her when they met, and so she’d staked everything in return.

  He hadn’t even let her near him the morning he walked out. That was the absolute worst, like she was dirty.

  The highway opened up where she could ordinarily see the mountains, but now there was only mist rising in the fields, and the rain. All she wanted to do was drive and drive, to bury herself in that mist until she was so tired she wouldn’t be able to drive anymore, and then she’d stop someplace and sleep until she woke, and it would all be over, one way or another. She reached up and wiped her eyes and then her nose with her hand. And then, because she was going to have to do it again, she reached into her purse to find a Kleenex, her eyes still on the road, the headlights shining on the pavement. Damn his Angus! Like he can shake free and I can’t?

  No, she would go someplace right now, anyplace, and rest and not have to talk to anybody. She thought of towns up the road, lots of towns, and she knew most of them, a pink neon sign in the rain somewhere saying “Vacancy.”

  God help me, she thought, and pulled off onto the shoulder and stopped. She heard cars pass by, and trucks, and lost track of how long she had been there. The thunder and lightning were gone and the rain had settled in when she heard another car swish past, then seem to slow down, but she forgot about it. After a bit, someone tapped on her window. Startled, she looked up. It was almost dark outside and pouring again, the rain pounding on the roof and running in sheets down the window, where she saw the outline of a big man. No, not this, please, she thought, suddenly remembering she wasn’t home anywhere at the moment, that the world she had known years ago hadn’t changed, only she had. And here it was back.

  The man tapped again, more insistently. Without looking directly at him, she waved him off. Tap, tap, tap! “Drusilla?” She stared this time, saw he was wearing a slicker, then made herself look up where his face would be and saw the rain streaming off his campaign hat. “Dru!” he shouted. She put a hand to her eyes, grabbed the handle with the other and lowered the window. The world rushed in, full of noise and wet smells. “You okay?”

  She looked away then, out over the hood, where she should have looked in the first place, down the shoulder to where a highway patrol car idled, a curl of steam rising from the tailpipe, the taillights bright red in the rain, the blue light pulsating. Mort Riddell leaned in the open window. She could smell his wet rubber slicker, his stale cigars, his aftershave faint and sweet. Charlie always said Mort was solid. “Hell, no!”

  “I did hear Charlie went away,” he said.

  She nodded. Then the feeling of loss became unbearable.

  He looked away for a moment, giving her a little room. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Take my word for it. He’s a good man. The best.”

  She nodded again, then felt his hand on her shoulder, light and respectful.

  “Get yourself on home, hear? This is no night to be out. You need me to follow?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then I’ll phone in about an hour to make sure everything’s okay.”

  She watched him walk back along the highway to his car, watched his taillights go brilliant when he stepped on the brake and put the car in gear. Then he wheeled up onto the highway and disappeared.

  XXXI

  Winthrop

  Highway 60 bisected Blackstone County from east to west, climbing out of the flat farmland through Damascus toward Little Zion. Eventually, some fifty-odd miles and three counties later, it reached Tennessee. A two-lane highway, it had seen much of its through traffic siphoned off when the nearby interstate opened. It was a legendary run for the moonshiners who had once roared through Damascus but were rarely seen anymore.

  Winthrop Reedy eased the International tractor and the Simplicity mobile home he was hauling up to Sentry—to that construction worker with the Harley-Davidson—off the four-lane bypass onto Highway 60, then started working his way up through the gears. Ahead of him was a car, a Ford Pinto with a Wide Load sign on its roof. Another Pinto was behind him. The tractor and cars belonged to Forrest Brothers Garage, which did most of his hauling for him. Just sometimes he wanted to do the driving himself, like this morning, when he’d gone down to the yard, picked up a rig, then headed for his own place to get the trailer.

  He and Cub Forrest had gone to high school together. Cub was Bedford’s son, and they were all like family to Winthrop, who had gone to work for them while he was still in school. He had once thought about making trucking a career, except that Lizzie wouldn’t have been much for that.

  Forrest Brothers wasn’t a big business. In addition to two tow trucks, one big enough to haul a semi, it had five tractor-trailer rigs and did some regular interstate hauling as well as local work. Cub was the company’s mechanic, a skinny man with freckles, impossible hair and increasingly terrible teeth who also raced mini-stockers outside Hickory, his pride being a ’64 VW Beetle with a ’62 Porsche engine in it that no one had figured out.

  Winthrop had parked his and Lizzie’s Firebird under an oak tree for the shade and walked across the gravel yard red with clay and already smelling of warming oil, rusty steel and water. Cub was standing in the huge, open doors of the metal building that was the Forrest Brothers office, garage and warehouse all in one. He held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger to minimize its contact with grease. “Leave me the keys to that Firebird and I’ll get her running right while you’re up in Sentry,” Cub said, deadpan, squinting into the sunshine toward the car.

  “I’ll do her, Cub, just as soon as I can afford dispensing with my car and wife.”

  “That was something about Doc Pemberton being bound over on account of that Carver vehicle I hauled off the mountain in April, now, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s a fact, you did tow it. Just goes to show you. I still find it hard to believe old Doc did something like that, or at least that bad.”

  Still not looking at Winthrop, Cub dropped the cigarette onto the concrete floor and stepped on it. "Take number 3, Winn. I already entered the mileage. Four’s gotta go to South Carolina. I didn’t think Lizzie ever let go of that car.”

  “She and her mama went on down to Charlotte, shopping,” Winthrop said, slipping a key off a board.

  “I thought she was teaching.”

  “She’s only part-time at the church nursery school,” Winthrop replied, turning to a logbook on a workbench nearby. “I gotta go if I’m ever going to get this trailer up to Sentry, Cub.” Flipping the pages of the book, Winthrop happened to look up. Right in front of him, almost as big as life, was a calendar with a photo of a good-looking gal in high heels, the skimpiest shorts and a blouse unbuttoned so far you could see almost an entire, wonderful breast. She was holding a huge socket wrench like she didn’t know what the hell to do with that. Truck tools. It took a moment for Winthrop to refocus on the log. Crazy. He’d always wanted a calendar like that, but it would never do in his business, and besides, Lizzie would never understand. She was fine looking and not stingy with her favors. She would wonder why any man would want to look at anyone else. And, he asked himself, why would he?

  “Nice tit, huh?” Cub said, suddenly
beside him.

  Startled, Winthrop felt ashamed his thoughts had been read. “You bet,” he said, recovering as Cub slid the log around and wrote in the time beside Winthrop’s signature. Cub sure ought to know. His wife, Curly, wore blouses that hung way out in front of her jeans, her breasts were so damn big.

  It was a beautiful morning, and he was planning to take a back way up to Sentry off Highway 60 about five miles west of Little Zion, instead of going straight north up the Bristol highway toward New Hope. The road was pretty good and carried a lot less traffic. It would also bring him right by the construction site for the new generating plant, which he hadn’t seen in several months.

  The intersection of the Damascus bypass and Highway 60 he’d just passed through was a famous one, a favorite location for roadblocks when at one time bootleggers, but more likely these days just some old boy from the eastern part of the county with a wild hair up his ass, howled up Damascus way under a full moon, thinking he had to break the boredom for the city cops, the deputies and the highway patrol. Not to mention everyone in the county listening to their scanners. It was like a game, trying to get from one end of the county to the other without getting caught or wrecking your car or both. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why bootleggers, who by definition were in trouble before they even started, didn’t avoid the county seat and all its officialdom and sneak around on the back roads, if they were really serious about their business. Business was business, after all, and Winthrop understood business. It seemed they always came in on the state highways, the two-lanes—the Bristol highway running north-south or Highway 60, the two intersecting at the traffic light at the top of the courthouse square. You could hear them coming like the Huey helicopters in Vietnam he saw on the TV news—not just an announcement, but by the sheer magnitude of their thunder a challenge. The twin pricks of light would suddenly burst white under the trees and over the waiting, expressionless, sun-crinkled faces of the country people drawn from their porches or TVs, pronouncing “Must be young Riddell” or “The Gershaw boy” like a benediction on that passage toward the orange mercury-vapor glow on the skyline that was Damascus, or Babylon, or simply hell, depending on your politics or religion. The outcome was foregone in the minds of everyone. Whether this time or the next, or the one after that, a gaunt figure in a T-shirt and blue jeans would sit with a court-appointed lawyer in front of the bar before Judge This-or-That of the district court, to be handed over to superior court if he were caught actually transporting. Deep down, Winthrop understood the moonshine was irrelevant except as a symbol. It didn’t make him feel easy.