At exactly four o’clock Florence rang the doorbell. She breezed in, as much of a force as she had been the day before. She gushed over Logan and then me and then the view of the lake from the porch. She emanated so much energy the little house felt smaller with her inside of it.
We had a nervous few minutes where we all four stood in the small living room making bits of small talk about the weather and the house, not sure where to begin. Logan cut through it, not one to bother with such formalities; she just wanted to dive in.
“Mrs. Baker, would you mind if I set up my computer to record you? I promised my mom we would try.”
Florence sat down, looking relieved at the idea of getting down to it. “I don’t mind at all.” She looked at me as Elliott and I sat across from her. “And I want you to know that I will answer every question you ask, fully and truthfully, but I was thinking about this all night. There must have been reasons that your mom didn’t want to talk about her life here, and I need to respect that.”
I looked up from my notes. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
Florence’s gaze was firm. “I mean I’ll answer what you ask, but I won’t offer up information if you haven’t asked about it.”
Logan looked at me and then to Florence. “Is there something we don’t know about?”
Florence sighed as she sat back crossing her legs, our interview apparently beginning. “Honey, I’m meeting Janie’s daughters”—she motioned between me and the computer that represented Georgia—“who don’t even realize they’re named after George and Oliver Jones, so yes, I’d say there’s a fair amount you don’t know about.”
Of course. We must be named after them and I didn’t even see it. What else wasn’t I seeing? I said, “It hadn’t occurred to me that we were named after them.” I felt stunned, not the best way to begin an interview. And now I knew that if I didn’t ask about something, she wouldn’t talk about it. I pulled out my list of questions, which seemed completely inadequate. Did I really care what the house at Rutledge Ridge looked like? My eyes were going back and forth between the list and Florence as she waited expectantly for me to ask her a question. I was at a loss. “How could she just keep all of this from us?” That wasn’t on my list of questions.
Florence sounded sympathetic about my frustration, but it wasn’t the kind of question she could answer. All she said was, “People always have their reasons.”
Right. I looked at the first question on my list. “Did you know my mom when you were little? Did you know her when her mother died?”
Florence and Janie grew up together. There wasn’t a time she could remember when she didn’t know Janie. And yes, everyone knew Janie’s mother, Martha, not just because the town was so small, but because Martha was so kind.
Florence explained that the illness had been hard on Janie; she hadn’t really understood how dire the circumstances were. “People didn’t talk about things like that the way they do now. And we were just kids.” Florence shrugged. “Mrs. Rutledge coughed a lot. That was really all we knew.”
Then she told us her fragmented memory of the funeral. Janie, just ten years old, had become hysterical when the lid to the coffin was closed. She began crying in the church and screaming that her mother couldn’t breathe. Janie was so bereaved they had to carry her out.
She obviously wasn’t able to comprehend the fact that the coffin held the body of her mother but her mother was gone.
I knew the closing of that lid was the event that created my mother’s claustrophobia and suddenly I felt horrible for every time Georgia and I had hidden under the bed and dared her to come in after us. The first days after the funeral were the worst for Janie. She couldn’t be in any confined space; she couldn’t even sleep in her canopy bed.
The week following the services Janie camped out in her backyard with George and Oliver every night. She needed to have nothing but air above her head. George set up the pallets and built the campfire; Oliver provisioned the food. The memory of that made Florence laugh a little. “I tried to get my parents to let me stay with them, but they wouldn’t hear of it.” She affected an old Southern accent. “Young ladies do not camp out for days at a time with young men.”
Logan spoke up. “But they were just little kids, right? I mean it’s not like they were dating when they were ten years old.”
I jumped in. “When did they start dating?”
Florence shared the story. It was Margaret’s birthday party; she was turning fourteen. I remembered Margaret’s name from talking to Buddy. She was the girl that Nate Jr. married. She was the young wife who had called the sheriff when my mother’s house caught on fire.
The birthday party was being held in the deliberately dim basement with the long brown plaid couch pushed to one side and a small table against the wall stacked with bowls of chips and pretzels. In the background a long-playing album was scratching out ballads on a record player.
Grant and Florence were already dating at this point. They stood against the far wall with George, the three of them looking on at the latest party game. Someone, probably Oliver, had suggested a game of spin the bottle. The players were all in the center of the room sitting in a circle atop a dusty oval braided rug, tugging at collars and smoothing out skirts. Everyone was nervously picking at their nails or playing with their hair trying to look as if they weren’t nervous. Except for Oliver, of course. Oliver was never nervous.
Florence could tell that George wanted Janie to leave the circle. He was staring at the back of her head with an intensity that he thought could bring on mind reading. Leave. Quit this stupid game. Everyone could tell they were starting to like each other, starting to see each other differently. They weren’t just best friends anymore or neighbors who had known each other their whole lives. There was a new tension when they were together that anyone could feel. And watching Janie sit there and potentially get her first kiss with some other boy was about to undo George.
With a flick of Oliver’s wrist the thick green bottle whirled around and finally came to a slow wobbling stop right in front of Janie. Florence remembers hearing George gasp a little and then Grant said, under his breath, “This ought to be good.”
Janie’s back became ramrod straight and she was visibly fighting the urge to turn and catch George’s eye to see his reaction. She didn’t dare turn around. Everyone knew Janie wouldn’t want to kiss Oliver of all people. He was like her brother. Everyone’s eyes were darting back and forth between Janie and George, knowing something was about to blow.
Oliver didn’t seem to care about the growing tension or maybe he just wanted to get George’s goat. He made a big show of licking his lips as he leaned in to the center of the circle to kiss Janie. Janie sat there frozen to her spot. She was supposed to meet him in the middle for the payoff. Oliver glanced up at George and raised his eyebrows like, I bet this is gonna bug you. George got across the room in two steps, pulled Janie to her feet and announced, “Janie and I are going out.”
George dragged Janie up the stairs and out the front door. The wolf whistles and laughter followed them all the way outside. There was a horrible screech as someone dragged the needle off the record so that everyone in the room could better hear the fight outside. Everyone ran to the tiny windows at the top of the basement wall to eavesdrop. Florence could see Janie’s feet as she paced back and forth, stomping occasionally. How dare he do that to her. He had no right, the nerve! She went on and on and poor George was just standing there like a fool staring at her, taking it all, saying nothing.
She finally realized he wasn’t fighting back and she stopped yelling at him. Florence couldn’t hear what George whispered to her at that moment, but the next thing you know Janie was walking over to him and they were kissing. Just like that. That was the night they officially started dating.
I could picture the whole scene in my mind. I imagined the embarrassed look on her face when he dragged her away in front of all of their friends. The look in George’s eyes when
he whispered something so sweet to her that she stopped yelling and started kissing. I decided that this was each one’s first kiss. Whether it truly was or not seemed irrelevant. How sweet that George didn’t want anyone else to have Janie’s first kiss? This was the exact kind of sappy romantic crap I usually hated, but I just couldn’t help myself. It was flowing effortlessly out of my subconscious. The whole vision was causing me to feel heartbroken for young Janie and perhaps a little bit infatuated with my dead mother’s dead first husband.
I glanced over to Elliott to try to snap myself out of it. The bridge of his nose and cheeks were sunburned; he brushed the hair out of his face. He caught my eye and gave me a complex look that said, Isn’t this great? But I know it’s probably making you sad. Sorry. And just like that I was cured of my infatuation with the past and fully reengaged in my infatuation with the present.
I asked Florence about the house at Rutledge Ridge and what it looked like. She relayed a vague report of the house itself, but the elaborate descriptions she gave of the way it smelled when it was filled with Maudy’s cooking were painstakingly detailed. Florence reinforced the impression I had gained of Maudy when I had spoken to Buddy about her.
I asked about the school they attended. The first through eighth grades of their schooling occurred in a three-room schoolhouse in the town of Huntley proper. Florence mentioned apologetically that the school was segregated. The school for the black students was located up the mountain. When it came time for high school, the townie kids all went to the prestigious Country Day School, which was a short bus ride through the valley. The country kids had had enough schooling and went to work, and the black kids remained at their school up the mountain.
Florence said, “You know what’s funny? The lake took those segregated schools for the white kids in the valley, wiped them both out. But that little school up the hill where the black kids had to go? It’s still standing. I think it’s a Friends School now. I always thought of that as poetic justice. So much disappeared when they built the lake. The house that my husband, Grant, grew up in”—Florence was counting it off on her fingers—“our school, the church Grant and I got married in, the baseball fields where he, Oliver, and George spent every minute of daylight growing up . . . they’re all under the water now. When people asked Grant where we were from his answer was always Atlantis.”
I knew from Florence’s presentation to the garden club that Grant had played professional baseball, served in Vietnam, and gone on to become a lawyer. I didn’t know anything about George or Oliver.
I said, “I know my mom went on to college. What happened to George and Oliver after high school?” The three of them, George, Janie, and Oliver were apparently one system, one unit. They did everything together, Oliver always screwing something up, George coming in to fix it, Janie smoothing things over.
Florence took her glasses off again and wiped them down with a handkerchief. I think it was more out of habit than a necessary cleaning. No one’s glasses needed that much attention. “George was in school with your mom. They went to college together.” She didn’t pause long enough for me to process the feeling of surprise at that comment. Florence continued. “I think it was hard for all three of them when your mom and George went off to school. It wasn’t long after that when Oliver left for Vietnam.”
Florence gave me the impression that George and Oliver, although identical twins, were complete opposites. George was apparently the steadfast intellect and Oliver was the lovable delinquent.
I asked her about this and a smile bloomed on Florence’s face. “You couldn’t help but love Oliver. I mean you wanted to beat him silly one minute and then hope he’d bless you with his presence the next. You never knew what might happen when you went out with him, but you knew it’d be a good story if you lived to tell about it.”
I asked, “So what happened to Oliver?” Now I was curious about Oliver too. Add it to the list.
Florence explained that Oliver felt his time to be called up in the draft was imminent. He didn’t want to be conscripted into the army so he enlisted in the navy. Florence confided that George had actually been the one to take Oliver’s aptitude exams that allowed him to earn a commission.
Logan asked, “They looked that much alike?”
“Well, not if you knew them like we did. But if they were strangers to you, they were identical.”
I asked, “So was Oliver unprepared to be in the navy? I mean if George took his tests?”
Florence shook her head like I had it all wrong. “There wasn’t anything Oliver couldn’t do in the water, but he would never have passed those written tests. Nowadays we would’ve recognized it as dyslexia or some other diagnosable disorder. Back then it was just that Olivier wasn’t very good with tests. And there wasn’t a thing George wouldn’t do for him so when Oliver asked him, George said yes. I think George might’ve regretted it later, after Oliver was shipped out to Vietnam. But he was going somewhere anyway, the army or jail or a ditch after being caught by someone’s husband. He just ran too hard and too fast for anything good to come of it. George probably did the right thing. Must’ve wrecked the two of them when Oliver died though.”
“Did he die in Vietnam?”
Florence was staring out the window toward the lake. The light had changed while we had been sitting here drifting back in time. She said, “Well, I think it was probably the war that killed him, but he didn’t die over there.” She began to rummage around in her oversized bag. “He came home, but I guess he was changed by everything.” I wanted to ask her what she meant exactly, but she kept talking. “I wasn’t here during that time.” She couldn’t seem to find what she was looking for and dumped the bag out on the coffee table. “Where is that darn thing?” Florence looked up briefly. “Grant and I were married and we were living in Florida when Oliver came home. Grant had been playing ball and then he got drafted in the army. I lived on base with the other army wives. When he came home we moved to Birmingham. I worked while he went to law school. I never did come back here, and by then of course ‘here’ was underwater.” She pulled a bundle out of the pile on the table and shouted, “Ah-ha!” Then she held up an old envelope yellowed with age and stamped with a red-and-blue “Par Avion” across the top.
She handed it to me. “These are some letters we got from Oliver when he was in the navy. There’re some pictures in there too. You’re welcome to keep them.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. I pulled out the letters, wanting to read them right there, but also not wanting to be rude.
Florence waved that away. “You’re Janie’s family so I guess you’re his too. You keep them. Besides, what good are they doing him or me stuffed in a box somewhere? All of my old pictures and letters are still in storage from when I moved to the condo after Grant died. This was all I could find in his desk.”
Florence described them for us as I held them up. The first one was a photo of Oliver sitting on a squat green-gray river patrol boat with four other men. Oliver looked just like the pictures we had seen of George. The men on the boat were all smoking; one held a can of beer in his hand. They were smiling at the camera. They looked tan and relaxed and completely unaware of what the next few months probably had in store for them in the Brown Water Navy, as they called the naval forces patrolling the rivers in Vietnam. I flipped the picture over and read the names written on the back: Me, Whitey, Johnnie, Turk, and Slim.
The second picture was obviously taken sometime later, perhaps years later. It showed Oliver standing alone on the bow of his small boat. His hair was long and shaggy. He no longer looked much like George. He was wearing an olive drab flak vest with no shirt underneath to hide his much thinner chest. His camo pants were loose on his waist and cut off above the knee with long strands of threads hanging down and sticking to his tan sweaty legs. He stood there alone staring out at the flat brown river, loosely holding a machine gun at waist height. The sky behind him was gray with the threat of rain.
Elliott spok
e up, breaking the spell that had fallen over the room. “Florence, may I get you something to drink?”
TWENTY-ONE
The clatter of Elliott mixing drinks in the kitchen allowed Florence the opportunity to move around the room looking at the piles of printouts and articles stacked on the dining room table. A few images caused her to recall things and she shared a few unsolicited stories about George, Oliver, and Janie. Each snippet seemed to have the three of them woven together. The car the three of them bought together when they were fifteen that they could never get to run. The time George almost drowned in the swollen river going after Janie’s dog, and how Oliver had had to jump in and rescue him. The huge summer birthday party the three of them always threw together at the barn on the Joneses’ property. The way Janie and George were always bailing Oliver out of some trouble with the principal, or the coach, or the sheriff.
Elliott, Logan, Florence, and I took our drinks out to the screen porch. Logan brought a tray of food and repositioned her laptop to keep recording. Dusk was beginning settle on the lake as we indulged in our cocktails. Florence didn’t sip; she drank. In no time Elliott was mixing her a third gin and tonic and Florence’s self-imposed restrictions were waning.
Logan was nursing a lemonade, her feet tucked underneath her in the rocking chair. She looked over to Florence. “How come they got married so young?”
Florence laughed—her laugh being considerably louder soaked in gin—saying she thought they waited as long as they could. She was inferring that the two of them were having a hard time remaining virgins until the wedding night. I had to resist the urge to put my fingers in my ears and hum loudly.
Florence sounded wistful and nostalgic. “It was a strange time; everything changed that summer, the summer of sixty-six. It was the last year that we were able to be on the river.” She wasn’t slurring her speech but it was much looser now, slower. Her accent became much more exaggerated, she sounded more and more like Betty Chatham with each sip. “The dam was under construction and Huntley was being evacuated; most people left to find houses or work somewhere out of the valley.” She was staring at the trees across the lake, but that’s not what she saw. She was looking back. “Grant was in Florida playing Triple-A ball. Oliver was getting ready to join the navy. It was the beginning of the end of that time for us. Janie and George just wanted to get married before it all vanished.”
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