Cancel the Wedding

by Carolyn T. Dingman

  It had been assumed by the first responders that Nate had gone rushing in to try to pull my mother out of the house, but Janie Jones was nowhere to be found.

  A search for the missing Janie commenced using tracking dogs, volunteers on foot, and boaters. After twelve long hours, Janie Rutledge Jones was found alive. She was pulled out of a small rowboat, adrift in the lake, unconscious. The article stated that she was uninjured, but offered no explanation about the strange fact that she was floating out on the lake in the middle of the night while her home burned to the ground.

  The investigation concluded that the fire started in the kitchen and was most likely due to the ancient wiring. Perhaps a spark had gone off inside the wall igniting the cotton batting insulation allowing the fire to take off from there.

  I closed my eyes, the images of shifting map lines morphing with hydrangeas and wide summer porches bursting into flames in front of a black night sky. Why was she in the lake while her house burned? Was she trying to escape the fire?

  How many things had burned for her that night that she lost her house? I needed to find someone who knew her back then, someone who may be able to answer some of these questions. So far the only person I had met in this town who may have known my mother was that crazy old man wielding a double-barreled shotgun. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but I was going to see if I could talk to him again.

  EIGHTEEN

  I retraced my drive up the switchback roads and climbed the gravel lanes that led to the top of the ridge. Before I left the safety of my get-away vehicle I checked around for a weapon of some kind. I was regretting not buying mace years ago when Georgia had told me to. My only weapon was my cell phone so I kept it in my hand as I hiked up to the abandoned house.

  The path looked different this early in the day. It was steamy under the trees in the heat and the sunlight was sharp as it broke through the leaves. The house came into view and I approached it slowly, fully expecting Nathan Forrest to materialize at any minute.

  I stood at the edge of the eroded path leading to the front door and called out. “Hello? Mr. Forrest?”

  The house looked different in this light too. Instead of menacing it just looked sad. Lonely almost. Thud! I wheeled around at the direction of the bang I had just heard expecting—what? For someone to swing down from a tree with a knife in his mouth and an axe in his hand probably. “Mr. Forrest? Are you here?” Thud! This time the bang had come from the other side of the house. I was surrounded. I held my cell phone out in front of me, putting it between myself and the monster sound coming out of the trees.

  “Hello! Who’s there?”

  Thud! Thud! I was hit and I screamed. It got me on the shoulder. I ducked down instinctively, thinking that someone must be throwing rocks at me. I threw my hands over my head wondering if I should make a run for it when another one hit the ground right in front of me.

  It was a huge green seedpod of some kind. The size of a racquetball and just as hard. They were falling from the trees. I was so relieved that no one had been here to witness my ducking for cover from a falling tree nut.

  Thud, tink! One of them hit the tin roof of the old house. I picked up the nearest green ball and threw it back at the tree mumbling to myself. “You are an idiot, Olivia. Get it together.” I tried to shake off the feeling of imminent danger and walked over to the front porch.

  I climbed up the broken steps gingerly and went into the shell of the house. It was hot and sticky inside and there was a damp smell of mildew. I called out again, for good measure, but no one answered me. I wandered around the house again, trying to get some sense of the people who had lived here. The only thing it told me was that they had abandoned it a long time ago.

  Going up the disintegrating stairs to the second floor was tricky, but I managed it by clinging to the wall and testing each step before I put my weight on it. The house creaked with my intrusion and the trees outside continued their assault. There wasn’t anything up there so I carefully went back down.

  One last walk through the first floor brought me to the sideboard filled with old letters. I looked over my shoulder before taking a handful and stepping out into the sunlight to read through them.

  I fanned my face with one of the larger envelopes as I sat on the splintered front steps reading through letters. Occasionally I would call out to Mr. Forrest, “Hello?” No one ever answered.

  The letters dated from the forties and fifties and they were personal correspondence, but not so personal that I felt like I was intruding. They were so old and had been so obviously abandoned that it felt like they were a part of the public trust, open to anyone who cared to read them.

  They were updates to the Forrests from out-of-town friends and family. Each one seemed to give a weather, health, and crop update with the occasional announcement of a birth or a wedding.

  The letters didn’t say much, but the way they were written told me a great deal. Calling the language in the letters racist would be a gross understatement. It felt inappropriate just reading some of the words in my head.

  After I read each letter I tucked the pages back into their yellowed envelopes and stacked them next to me where I sat. My mother had been a history professor whose main focus was the American civil rights movement. As a young woman Janie had ridden buses to Birmingham, marched in Selma, and protested in Atlanta. I knew about her experiences from listening to her lectures at school and the first-person accounts she would recount to her classes. She used to end one lecture series by saying, “It’s the opportunities that divide people, not the color of their skin. But some people have opportunities given to them, handed to them, and some have to go out and find them for themselves. Go out in the world and find your opportunities.”

  She never talked about any of it at home of course. Those events had taken place before the demarcation in her timeline. They had occurred here, in her time growing up; therefore it was all part and parcel of the same code of silence.

  But comparing what I knew about my mother’s views on civil rights and what these letters told me about the Forrest family, well, I could understand why they didn’t get along.

  “Why are you back on my porch?”

  I jumped. Nathan Forrest materialized out of thin air and was suddenly standing behind me, catching me in the act.

  He walked around to face me. I was relieved when I didn’t see a shotgun, although I was unfamiliar with the state of Georgia’s concealed weapons laws. He shook his head slowly. “Trespassing wasn’t enough. You had to come back and steal my family’s letters?”

  I put all the letters down. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Forrest. I have no good excuse for intruding like that.” I tried to make light of the moment. “Although it would be tough to say I had to break into the house.” I motioned to the door, barely hanging on to one hinge. “You don’t live in there do you?”

  He rolled his eyes at me clearly annoyed and grabbed the letters, shoving them into his pocket. “No one lives there.” He didn’t end that sentence with “idiot,” but it was implied. He was wearing the same pair of old blue jeans and a tan windbreaker. It was already pushing ninety degrees. Why were old people always so cold? He grumbled at me. “Why do you keep turning up?”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions about my mother. And her parents. You’re the only person I’ve met in town who knew my mother.”

  Nathan Forrest started walking away from me, into the underbrush. As I followed him he said, “Didn’t you know her?”

  Touché. I explained about my mother’s second life, the one she shared with my sister, my father, and me. I told him that she never spoke of her time growing up here and I had come down here after her death to learn more. I wasn’t expecting to find the drowned town, or the dead first husband though.

  Nathan Forrest had to be in his late eighties, but I was having a hard time keeping up with him as he followed a faint trail through the woods and undergrowth of blooming mountain laurel. “May I call you Nathan?”

  �
�No, you can call me Buddy.”

  “Why Buddy?”

  “Because it’s my damn name.”

  I said, “Are you tracking something or can we slow down a bit?”

  He stopped and looked at me with that “are you stupid” face again. “Tracking something?”

  I wasn’t sure if he was repeating me because it was a dumb question or because he didn’t understand what I was asking. I tried to clarify. “Are you, you know, tracking? Hunting?”

  “Girl, you’re about to get on my last nerve. There’s no hunting season in the middle of the damn summer. If I answer your questions can I get a minute’s peace from you?”

  “Well, I don’t have any specific questions. I just want to know who my mom was growing up. What life was like for her here.”

  “Don’t you think if she wanted you to know that she’d have told you herself?” I was getting tired of people asking that question, but I wasn’t budging. He said, “Fine. If I tell you a few things will you go away so I can check my damn trees?”

  “Yes.”

  As we walked back to the house I asked what was wrong with his trees. He had very little patience with me. Apparently his black walnut trees were dropping nuts early because they were stressed over the drought. Well, that explained the attack of the killer green seedpods.

  I assumed that Buddy was a nickname, like Bubba or Bo, but he didn’t offer up that information. Buddy wasn’t a man to just start talking. I found I had to ask him very specific questions to get anything other than a yes or no out of him. When I asked the right question, however, he would get on a bit of a roll.

  We were sitting together on the edge of what was left of the front porch. I asked, “Did you blame my mother in some way for your son getting hurt in that fire?”

  “Of course not. I blamed Nate for trying to be a damn hero running into a burning house. That was stupid; she wasn’t even in there. Did you know that?” I nodded, having just learned that detail at the library. “Well, Nate grew up with them, Janie and George. He thought she was in there all alone and he couldn’t just let Janie burn to death now could he? She did right by him after that though. Damn near gave him every dollar she had for his recovery.” I was about to ask how long it took Nate to recover from his burns but Buddy didn’t pause long enough for me to ask. “Nate didn’t ask for it. The money, I mean. She just gave it to him. Guess she didn’t have the need for it anymore and she wanted him to have it. Damn Rutledges always had too much money anyway. That’s what made Win act so superior all the time. He was damn pushy even before he became a judge. Nate and Margaret moved down to Gulf Shores after all his surgeries were done. Bought a nice house down there.” He was drifting; he started to talk about the fish he had caught down in the Gulf.

  I pulled him back to my questions. “Do you know why she was in the lake? I mean it’s the middle of the night, her house catches on fire, and she heads out to the lake?”

  Buddy never looked at me while I asked that question, he just kept staring at his hands, checking his watch. Finally he said, “You can’t know what’s in a person’s mind.”

  Um, okay. After that little tidbit of wisdom I tried to ask my questions in a way that would avoid any need for Buddy to delve into hearsay or mind reading. “What was the story with the property line dispute you had with the Rutledges and that old church?”

  “Just foolishness.” He spit on the ground. “Foolishness and pride.” Buddy explained the way the two tributary creeks that fed into the river on either side of the small white church had begun to flood every spring. The edges of their banks would shift and change each year. “That water divided our properties. Sometimes the church was on my side, because of the water flow, and sometimes it was on his. I didn’t give a damn about the thing, I just wasn’t going to let Win Rutledge come in all high and mighty and take my land using some damn colored’s church as an excuse. That old thing was falling down anyway.”

  He rubbed his hands together, kneading the knuckles, while he talked. They were just as wrinkled as his face, and even more callused. The stiff fingers on his right hand were stubbornly refusing to unbuckle no matter how much he worked them.

  Buddy was obviously still a very active man, hiking out here alone in the woods. He smelled like wood smoke and Old Spice. I mean sure he was kind of a jerk and probably a total racist, but still, the old man was kind of growing on me. He seemed, underneath it all, to be really sweet.

  He barked at me. “What’re you grinning at me for?”

  I said, “I never knew my grandfather went by Win. And I don’t think they say ‘colored’ anymore. I think you should call it African American.”

  “Don’t sass me.”

  “Sorry. Did you know my grandmother?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited patiently hoping he would expand that answer. He didn’t. “Can you tell me about her?”

  “What do you want to know? She was real active in church, the Altar Guild. Martha had a big garden out there by the house, people always out there traipsing in and out, touring her flowers.” Buddy was staring off, trying to focus on some past memory. “She was so homely. I never did understand what Win saw in her. There wasn’t a nicer person you could meet. That was true, but she was so plain. And fat, she was always plump. Even when she got sick she didn’t thin out. We all thought it was so peculiar when Janie turned out so pretty. Martha was sick for a long time before she finally died. Win was never the same after she passed. If you ask me, that was the thing that made him turn into such an asshole.”

  So my grandmother was overweight and unattractive and my grandfather was a pretentious asshole. Please, Buddy, don’t hold back on my account. “We read something about a woman named Maudy. Did you know her too?”

  He nodded. I expanded the question. “Was she their maid?”

  “Of course she was their maid. What the hell kind of name is Maudy anyway?”

  After the usual prodding Buddy told me a bit about Maudy, mostly about the food she used to make. As he went through the list my stomach started growling, and it went a long way to explain why my mother had never needed to learn how to cook. Buddy’s stories about Maudy were smattered with colorful epithets. I didn’t think it was for shock value, but simply out of habit. I got the impression that Buddy still remembered feeling a certain way about those times, about the segregation, but it seemed as though his core views had evolved over time, even if he didn’t have the ability to change his language to match it.

  He told me that when Maudy’s son Robert began applying to colleges Win offered to pay his tuition. There was only one condition: Robert had to go to school up north. Win thought Robert had a better shot at some kind of equality if he went north. He ended up attending Northwestern. Eventually Maudy got too old to work, so Janie moved her into the Rutledge family house with Win. Janie ended up taking care of Maudy more than the other way around.

  Buddy was warming to me. I could tell he hardly even wanted to shoot me anymore. “So Buddy, what was it like when they dammed up the river to build the lake?”

  He looked sad then, and there is nothing sadder than an old person who’s sad. “I’m guessing that you don’t know much about rivers. But rivers are live things. That river had a personality; she had moods. She was different every day you went down there and every mile of her length. Angry and fast after a storm. Cool and slow in the summer. Dark in the fall. Then the damn government came in and strangled her. Killed her while she slept.”

  “I take it you don’t like the lake?”

  Buddy stood up to leave. He was finished with this little interview. “That lake is just a shallow grave for a dead thing.”

  I stood up too and brushed the dirt from my shorts. “What about all of the life that the lake has brought here? All of the people and boats and the marina?”

  “It’d do you good to stay away from damn Bryant and his marina. That man won’t care that you’re Janie’s daughter. He’d steal from you too just as soon as he’d look
at you.”

  “You mean Emory Bryant?” What did he mean, “steal from me too”?

  Buddy shook his head, as if I just didn’t understand life. “There may be reasons your mother didn’t talk to you about this place. Just let it go; what’s done is done. You can’t get it back.”

  I had so many more things I wanted to ask him. “I know you’re busy today.” It seemed absurd to say it, but I added, “With your trees. So can we talk again sometime? You said that your son Nate grew up with them? My mom and George, right? I would love to hear some stories about them growing up.”

  I gave Buddy the address of my rental house and my cell phone number. I had to stop myself from asking him if he had access to a telephone.

  I hiked back down the path toward my car listening to the thuds of the black walnuts hitting the ground. I also said a little prayer for rain, suddenly worrying about the fate of Buddy’s beloved trees.

  NINETEEN

  I woke up the next day sore from the small hike up to Buddy’s property and aching from being hit by the walnuts. Who knew that unshelled walnuts could make such good weapons? I spent most of the day wrapping up some things with work, not because I wanted to necessarily, but because it needed to be done and I could do it indoors. It had become unfathomably hot outside. I would put it on par with a solar detonation. The locals were referring to it as “summer.”

  Elliott arrived at four o’clock, just as he had said in his note, and as soon as he was in the door I was gushing information. I told him all about the articles I had read in the paper regarding the fire and about my sojourn to Buddy’s house. When I called him Buddy, Elliott knew immediately whom I was talking about. He knew all about the old man and his black walnut orchard up on the ridge. I showed him the purple-and-yellow bruise that had bloomed on my shoulder overnight.