Who Invited the Dead Man?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I held on to the arms of my chair in case it started levitating. “What happened?”

  Meriwether looked like she used to, not merely charming but radiant. “He stayed under my skin all these years, I guess. And Sunday night when I fell and he came to help me, looking so worried, I knew his feelings hadn’t changed, either.”

  “You threw salad at him,” I reminded her.

  Jed guffawed. “She was saying she loved me. We used to have food fights all the time, starting in junior high. Just little ones—we never disrupted the cafeteria. But throwing a small piece of food and saying ‘it’s all your fault’ was our secret code. As soon as she lobbed me with that lettuce, I knew things were going to be all right. That’s why I threw the pie crust back.” Their expressions would have made me sick if I weren’t a sentimental old softie.

  “I figured I’d better let the editor take her to the hospital, though,” Jed added. “I didn’t want to make a scene. So I came over after she got home, and we got things straight between us.”

  “Have you told Gusta?”

  “Not yet,” Meriwether began.

  “But we’re working up our courage.” He rubbed one cheek with his palm. “I wish I could find out who my daddy was before we tell her. Do you know anything—anything at all, Mac?”

  “I always figured Helena found you under a bush.”

  “Or floating down the river in a basket. But if she didn’t?”

  I shook my head doubtfully. “I don’t know. We all assumed he was in the Air Force, or another civilian at Warner Robbins, but she never said. His name isn’t on your birth certificate?”

  He leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “No, but Hiram kept hinting at something for the past several months. The first time was when I took him up to see my offices.” Seeing my startled look, he laughed. “Oh, I took him after work. I wouldn’t expose the firm’s partners or clients to Hiram. But anyway, he looked around and nodded like a wise old owl, and he said, ‘Boy, you done got where you was born to be.’ I thought at the time he meant I’d gotten what I went to law school for, but every time we met after that he’d say things like, ‘Your daddy and mama would be real proud of you’ or ‘If Miss High and Mighty knew what I know, she’d climb off her high horse and beg you to marry her granddaughter.’ ”

  Jed rumpled Meriwether’s hair and she swatted him playfully. “Not unless your daddy was a president she voted for.”

  “Hey, I aim that high.” He leaned over and kissed her.

  “Hiram never told you anything else?” I asked, to remind them I was there.

  He went back to his chair. “Nothing I could understand. Several times I said, ‘Hiram, tell me what you know.’ But he’d screw up his mouth and promise, ‘I’ll tell you sometime.’ He never said what he was waiting for. Probably for Martians to land.”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “And he might have been making it up.”

  “Maybe. But he told me all sorts of things I didn’t know before. Like, he said Hector threw a fit when Mama brought home another mouth to feed, and wanted her to take me back where I belonged.”

  “As if Hector ever did a lick of work to feed you,” I said sourly.

  “You got that right. But Hiram said they fought about it a lot at first, until Hector had to go do some time—his first stint in jail, I think.”

  “Yeah, that was about the time Helena came to work for us. You were around a year old, not walking yet, and Hiram volunteered to look after you.”

  “Oh, no!” Meriwether exclaimed.

  I chuckled. “That’s what Helena and I said, too. We scurried around pretty smart finding somebody else to keep Jed, then we told Hiram that Helena got free child care with her job.” She did, too, until he entered preschool, but I didn’t bother to tell them that. I just added, “Hiram was real put out with us for not leaving you with him.”

  Jed chuckled. “He told me he never minded having a little bugger around the house, and was always glad Mama got to keep me.”

  “The fact that he said Helena ‘got to keep’ you”—Meri wether took her hand from Jed’s long enough to sketch quotation marks—“makes me wonder if she was even your mother.”

  “Have you asked Hector about this since you got back?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but he said, ‘Helena never told me a thang,’ which is true. He and Mama never got along, and she never spoke to him unless she had to.”

  “Which brings us back to the bush,” I joked.

  “I hope it was a bush with decent family roots. You don’t think anybody would have killed Hiram to keep him from telling me who I am, do you?”

  “That’s pretty far-fetched. We don’t run to missing royalty in Hopemore. Now if it had been Hiram claiming to be their relative, I can see the point in somebody’s getting him out of the way. But you clean up real good. Any family would be proud to own you.”

  “Except one,” he said ruefully.

  Meriwether leaned over and punched him. “Don’t be mean. I told you I’ll marry you this time, Nana or no Nana.”

  My opportunity had come. I could be the first in Hope County to know. “Was Gusta the reason you didn’t get married before?”

  Meriwether nodded, and Jed shook his head. “You can’t both be right,” I informed them.

  “Nana was objecting, and I begged Jed to wait until she came around.”

  “But she doesn’t get to take all the blame.” Jed squeezed her hand. “I told Meriwether Miss Gusta would never agree to her marrying me, and we’d have to do it in spite of her whenever we did it. She begged me to wait one more year, and I got on my own high horse and said if she wouldn’t marry me when we planned to do it, it was off.” He groaned. “We were such fools. How could I have been so dumb?”

  “Hardheaded,” I told him. “Your daddy must be southern, at least. Southern men have heads harder than the granite beneath our soil.”

  For several minutes we sat in silence. They held hands and looked at each other like they couldn’t get enough of it. Jed was so happy his freckles glowed. I don’t know what they were thinking but I was thinking about twelve wasted years. Their children could be up in school by now. I was so busy picturing little girls with Meriwether’s green eyes and curls and little boys with Jed’s freckles—except the boys would probably get the curls and the girls the freckles—that I was startled when Jed heaved a big sigh and said softly, “I think Mama really was my mother. At least my birth certificate tells us that.”

  “You’re lucky to have a birth certificate at all,” I informed him. “Helena lost your first one, and had to get a new one when you started school. A friend of hers in the courthouse helped, I remember, and they had trouble locating the original. Finally Helena had to swear an affidavit, and—”

  “You’re leaking!” Meriwether exclaimed, pointing at me.

  “Oh, laws a mercy.” I held up my dripping plastic bag. “I brought you some stew and frozen vegetables. Now you’ll need to cook them tomorrow.”

  Jed grabbed the food and took it to the kitchen. I looked ruefully at my lap. “I need to go, so I can get out of this sopping skirt.” But before I got up, the doorbell rang.

  Meriwether peered through the lace sheers at her window. “It’s Nana and Slade. Don’t leave us, Mac. We need moral support.”

  “I can’t answer the door like this.”

  “Jed?” she called. “Can you get that?”

  As he ushered them in, it was obvious that I was the only person in the room universally welcome. Jed and Slade carried in chairs from the dining room and each took his seat like he was prepared to wait the other out. Gusta opened battle as soon as she set a basket covered with a red napkin on the floor and settled her gray skirts to her satisfaction in the blue chair. “What is he doing here?” Only good breeding kept her from pointing at Jed.

  “He brought me supper,” Meriwether replied cooly.

  “I’ve brought you supper. Florine had meat loaf and I’ve brought you some.”

/>   Slade rose to his feet. “Let me take that to the refrigerator, Augusta.”

  Point to Slade. Jed would never be able to call Gusta by her given name if he lived to be a hundred. And, as I have said, nobody but Slade called her Augusta.

  She gave him her wintry smile. “You are so kind, Slade.”

  He sauntered into the kitchen like it was his house. “Do you need a glass of tea or anything while I’m here, honey?” he called.

  Meriwether didn’t reply.

  Gusta leaned from the wing chair and said softly, “I hope you aren’t encouraging him, dear.” She gave a slight sideways nod toward Jed, as if he couldn’t hear every word.

  Jed stretched out on his chair and spread out his blue sock feet. “Oh, she’s been pretty encouraging, Miss Gusta. Pretty encouraging.” He clasped his hands behind his head and grinned.

  Meriwether started to frown at him, then changed her mind and lifted her chin. “Jed and I are getting married the week before Christmas.” Oh, I was proud of her!

  Slade, coming back from the kitchen, made a short strangled sound. Gusta sat like she’d turned to stone. Then she turned to me and asked, “How is dear Joe Riddley?”

  “Dear Joe Riddley actually took five steps on his own this afternoon. But I don’t think that’s what Meriwether wants to talk about.”

  “Meriwether is ill.”

  Slade went to the couch and knelt beside her. He spoke so softly I had to strain my ears to hear. “You don’t have to marry him. I was going to ask you at Thanksgiving, but I’ll do it right here in front of everybody if that’s what you want.”

  Meriwether shook her head and said, equally softly, “I’m sorry, Slade. But I’m going to marry Jed.”

  “You can’t throw yourself away on him. I offer you my heart and my good name.”

  I figured an interruption might be in order. “The Rutherfords from South Carolina?”

  “North Carolina.” Gusta’s tone implied that I may be southern, but my family wasn’t exactly quality. Her gnarled hands clutched the arms of the chair so tightly that her veins stood out like wisteria.

  Any family who survived the mosquitoes, malaria, heat, humidity, gnats, and boll weevils of early Georgia, as mine did, counts as quality, so I ignored her. “I believe Mr. Rutherford was raised in Orangeburg. Isn’t that right, Slade?”

  Slade slid out from that like butter between hot pancakes. He stood and gave me a friendly nod. “That’s partly right. Daddy worked in Orangeburg for a while, and I was born down there.”

  Jed waved Slade back to his seat. “Even if you were born in Buckingham Palace, Meriwether is going to marry me. And Miss Gusta knows everything there is to know about my lack of pedigree.” An impish grin creased his freckled face. Jed wasn’t anywhere near as handsome as Slade, but anybody would have to admit he was cute—with one notable exception.

  The exception gave him a chilling stare. “I think you ought to be going.”

  Jed leaned forward like he was about to tell Gusta a secret. “You’d better be nice to me, Miss Gusta. I’m fixing to endow your granddaughter with my good name, the purity of my heart, and all my worldly goods.”

  “A parrot?” Her voice would have frozen poor Joe in two seconds flat.

  “Oh, he’s got more than that.” I gave a grand wave. “He’s also got some books at my place that belonged to his grandmother.”

  Jed’s blue eyes widened in surprise. “Virgil?” He sounded like he’d found an old friend.

  “I think so. There’s also a book of poetry, a Latin grammar, and a couple of others. Your mother left them with us for you.”

  “Then let’s go get them! Honey,” he said deliberately, leaning over Meriwether and giving her a conspiratorial smile, “this room is a bit full. I’ll go with Mac now and come back tomorrow. But hold fast to your courage, you hear me?”

  She reached up and stroked his cheek. “It’s screwed to the mast.”

  Jed squeezed her hand, then slipped on his loafers. “Ready, Mac?”

  I said my good-byes and trotted after him down the walk. “I don’t know what your hurry is,” I grumbled. “Those books have been there fifteen years.”

  “I wanted out of there. Besides, they are mine, right? And they were Mama’s?”

  “They were your grandmother’s. Helena left them with us for you.” He was going to be disappointed when he saw what a pitiful legacy it was, but I was touched that he was that sentimental about his mother. “Follow me home, and don’t tailgate,” I commanded. “I can’t speed. I’m a judge.”

  Darren was in our living room watching television. “J. R.’s fast asleep and Joe’s in the barn.” As he let himself out the back, the dogs didn’t even bark.

  “Where are the books?” Jed looked around the kitchen like I kept them with the cookbooks.

  “They’re in the study, and you’ll have to reach them. I certainly can’t.”

  I pointed to the five books on the top shelf. “That red one, the two short ones in the middle, the big green one, and the poetry book at the end.”

  He glanced at all the others, then held the Virgil like it was made of gold. “If you’re thinking that book is valuable,” I warned, “it’s not. None of them are that old.”

  “I know, but Granny, Mama, and I all loved Virgil. Granny used to read him to me at bedtime. In Latin, before I was six.” His lips twisted in a sad smile. “Mama said Granny was a Latin teacher who fell for a man who looked like Paris of Troy but had no more brains than the horse. When did she give them to you?”

  I touched the four books on the desk gently. “When she first found out she was dying. She brought them to the store and asked us to give them to you for your twenty-first birthday. Then you didn’t come home after that birthday, and we plumb forgot. I am so sorry.”

  “Hey, it’s all right.” He stroked that old green book. “When Mama was dying, that very last morning, she was talking about this book. ‘Virgil,’ she’d say, turning her head back and forth on the pillow. ‘Mama’s Virgil.’ I went home at noon and turned the house upside down looking for it, but the only books I found besides my own were Hector’s girlie magazines.” Unconsciously he echoed his mother. “I figured Hector had used it to light fires. Then they called to say she was going, so I rushed back. I hadn’t thought about old Virgil for years.” He gave me a crooked, sad smile. “Like you and Gusta said, I don’t have much to offer Meriwether. But believe me, I’ll give her the moon if I can.”

  “Just give her yourself, hon. That’s all she’s ever wanted. Back when I was in college I had a car accident, and that night Joe Riddley drove three hours and sweet-talked the nurses into letting him come in after hours. He bent over my bed and whispered, ‘Don’t scare me like that, Little Bit. You’re the only thing in the world I want.’ That was one of the sweetest things he ever said.” If I wasn’t careful, I was going to get maudlin.

  Jed settled that with a grin. “Well, if I gave Meriwether the moon, Miss Gusta would just put me on it and send it back into orbit.” He hefted his books. “I’ll see you later. Sleep well.”

  I went up to bed thinking that some things, at least, turn out better than we expect.

  Others, of course, do not.

  27

  Meriwether called early the next morning. “Good morning, Mac. I need a favor.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “Could you go by Nana’s? She’s so upset she’s going to make herself sick.”

  “I’ll go by after I take Joe Riddley to therapy. Is the wedding still on?”

  For a girl with a bum leg, she was downright cheerful. “Of course!”

  As I hung up, Joe Riddley reached for the log near his plate and laboriously read the page. “Says here ‘Go to therapy.’ Doesn’t say ‘go by’ or ‘have wedding.’ ”

  “That’s your log, honey. If I kept a log, I’d need a book per day.”

  He gave me a long look, then his face crinkled into his old Joe Riddley grin. “Don’t you be getting married,
Little Bit. You’re already married.” He held out his arms, and I slid onto his lap for the first really good hug we’d had in ages. He rubbed his cheek on the top of my head like he used to. “I love you, Little Bit.”

  “I love you, too, Joe Riddley.”

  I got to Gusta’s to find Darren’s yellow Volkswagen backed up the drive, but I didn’t see him as Florine showed me to the sun porch, which was fitted with windows for winter. Gusta sat amid the floral cushions like a yard ornament in gray corduroy. Pooh sat in her wheelchair beside her. The day was cool, but the porch pleasant, warmed by the sun.