Cancel the Wedding

by Carolyn T. Dingman

  Elliott asked, “Who’s Johnnie?”

  I pulled out the two pictures I had of Johnnie with Oliver, one in Vietnam and one at home and showed them to Elliott. “Do you think this guy still lives around here?”

  He looked at the shadowed faces. “I can’t really see his face.”

  My head was throbbing. I didn’t really care about Johnnie Bryant at the moment. “Who knows.” I looked back toward the lake. “I wonder if this is why my mom wants half her ashes scattered in the lake. Because that’s where Oliver died.”

  Elliott took his glasses off and stretched his back. We had all had a long day. “Maybe, but I think it’s more likely because that’s where her hometown was buried.”

  Logan scanned in the last of the pictures and planned to print them out after work the next day. She went off to bed as Elliott checked my head for the hundredth time.

  I said, “It’s fine, really. I just can’t wait to wash this dried blood out of my hair. So gross.”

  Elliott looked at me. “You scared me to death today.” He kissed my hand and pulled me in close to him. “I didn’t realize . . .”

  He was quiet for a long time, rubbing my back. Finally, he spoke, so low I could barely hear him. “You can’t leave.”

  “I’m right here.” I tried to make light of what he was saying, but he wouldn’t let me.

  He held me tighter. “You can’t leave . . . me.”

  My heart was beating so fast, and breaking into a million pieces, all at the same time. What was I doing here? How would I manage to get to the other side of this abyss I had turned my life into? I couldn’t think about any of it now. My head was splitting with pain and the fact that I had started crying wasn’t helping matters.

  I let Elliott hold me until I fell asleep and then he moved me into my room and tucked me in bed. All night I had dreams of Elliott’s voice echoing in my head. You can’t leave. That line rattled around in there until it bumped into Leo’s voice saying, You can’t stay.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Several people from town brought me casseroles because I had been injured falling down in the courthouse. I wasn’t quite sure what the correlation was between being a klutz and deserving to have food delivered. But it kept me from having to cook dinner so I just said thank you and accepted them. When the thirtieth rolled around Logan and I had a little celebration, or a small memorial depending on which minute you were referring to, for my mom. The two of us sat out on the porch overlooking the lake. A store-bought birthday cake sat between us and we were nibbling at it with forks, not bothering to slice it. One second we were laughing, remembering something about her. The next we were crying, remembering something about her. It was an emotional whiplash made more intense by the self-imposed deadline this day had once been in my mind.

  A few days later as Elliott and I were cleaning up the dinner dishes Logan announced that she was going to a movie with Graham and headed out the front door. Logan was feeling the same intense contraction of time that I was feeling. Georgia’s voice kept repeating in my head. You’re on borrowed time down there. I wondered when it would crack, when the pressure would be too great and this whole construct would break down. I waved good-bye to Logan absentmindedly over my shoulder, but I noticed that Elliott followed her outside and spoke with her for a minute.

  When he came back inside I asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Going to a movie is code in this town for going someplace to hook up.”

  “How do you know they’re not just going to a movie?”

  “Because the closest movie theater is twenty minutes away and Graham doesn’t have a car.” Elliott texted something on his phone as he spoke.

  His concern was so sweet; you could tell he had younger sisters. “Did you just threaten Graham with bodily harm if he did anything inappropriate with Logan?”

  He put his phone down. “Just reminding him to be a gentleman.”

  I wondered how much was wrapped up in Elliott’s idea of being a gentleman. He had certainly never tried to push me into anything and I was a grown woman. A grown woman who was definitely more willing than I was able to let on. I took the dish towel off his shoulder and dried a glass. “Good, because I’m in enough trouble down here as it is.”

  “Oh really?” He flicked water at me from the sink. “Just what kind of trouble are you in exactly?”

  I grabbed his hands to make him stop splashing me. “I’m in big trouble for throwing this guy I met into the lake because he kept taunting me.”

  Elliott forced my hands behind my back and held them there, his arms circling my waist. “Oh, you’re throwing me in the lake? You can barely walk across the room without breaking a bone.”

  “You better watch it or I’ll fall on you next time.”

  “Promise?”

  He leaned down and kissed me just as Logan came back into the house. She shielded her eyes. “Oh my God! Can you guys control yourselves for like five minutes? You are so embarrassing.” She tossed an envelope on the counter. “This was in the mailbox. I’ll be home by ten.”

  The envelope had been mailed to me from Mary Frances at Huntley Memorial Gardens. It was all of the information she had pulled from the files of grave 34B. I had forgotten all about that now that I knew who George Jones was. As I dried my hands, Elliott began to read through the papers, and as he did I could feel the mood change from across the room.

  “Olivia, wasn’t your father’s name Adam? Adam Hughes?”

  I looked over at him. “Yes. Why?”

  “Because these are all letters and they’re all from him.”

  There were six letters from my father to Huntley Memorial Gardens. The first one was a mimeograph copy from 1978. The other five were more recent, ranging from 2004 until just a few months before he died.

  I pored through them reading quickly, then went back and read each one again. I wasn’t sure what they all meant. They were painting a story but I didn’t know exactly how it related to my mother or how all of the pieces fit together.

  The oldest letter from 1978 was clearly a written follow-up to a previous conversation that my father had been having with the cemetery. And by “conversation” I mean “argument.” It was an admonishment to the director of the cemetery because my father could not get permission to have a body interred in section 30. Section 30, I knew, was the Joneses’ family plot. Why was my father trying to get someone buried in the Joneses’ family plot?

  My father wrote, “You knew full well the need to act quickly with this matter and yet you had the gall to claim that bureaucracy tied your hands. By the time we discovered the resting place of the body we had only one week to disinter it before the diversion tunnels were shut down. As a result of your most immoral behavior and dragging your feet I was forced to put the remains in a temporary grave. This will necessitate the reburial at a future date, which would have been unnecessary if you had done your job properly.”

  The rest of the letter was more of the same. I could hear my father’s voice in the scolding. After we had read through it I asked Elliott, “What’s a diversion tunnel?”

  “It’s a tunnel they build to divert a river when they’re building a dam.”

  “Okay, but the dam was built in the sixties. This letter is from nineteen seventy-eight.”

  He was pacing the room as I sat at the table with the research and letters spread out all around me.

  Elliott’s hands moved around the way they did when he was speculating. “They must have done some work on the dam in the seventies. If they needed to make any repairs to the infrastructure or if they were expanding the reservoir they would have had to use diversion tunnels.”

  I nodded; that made sense. “Let’s assume they did that. They did some more work to the dam and rerouted the river with diversion tunnels. But what would that mean?”

  “Well, part of the lake most likely dried up while the tunnels were in use.”

  I asked, “So when they shut the tunnels down?”


  “When they shut the tunnels down, after the repair to the dam, the water would begin filling up the lake again.”

  We were trying to fit the pieces together. “Okay, so if they were doing some work on the dam that caused a part of the lake to dry up? Just for a little while.”

  He continued my thought. “And when it dried up they were able to uncover a grave?”

  “Right. A grave that had previously been under the lake.”

  Elliott agreed. “And they had to move it quickly because they only got one shot before it was underwater again.”

  There were five other letters. The first of these was from the late 1980s and was an introduction from my father to the new director at the cemetery. The letter simply asked that he call my father when he had some time to discuss a “delicate matter.”

  Three of the letters were very short and to the point. They all basically said the same thing: “The genealogical documentation you requested is enclosed. Thank you for your time and help with this matter.” But none of the documentation had been copied for us. We didn’t know what my father was referring to.

  There was one last letter we thought might shed some light. Again it was clearly a response from my father regarding a previous conversation.

  It read:

  I am in agreement with you that enlisting the guidance of my wife in this matter would speed up the process, but I am afraid it is out of the question. It would be too painful for her to have to deal with moving the remains. I would like to be able to put the matter to rest once the transfer is fully complete and the two bodies are together again.

  She is unaware that I had the body exhumed from its original gravesite and that it is now buried in a temporary grave. Unfortunately, due to matters beyond my control, I am now dealing with yet another bureaucratic agency to disinter the body from the temporary grave. I am hoping this one will be more sympathetic to my request for the removal. (And might I say yet again, how relieved I was when you took over at the helm of the cemetery and I no longer had to deal with that obstinate dolt?)

  In conclusion, I have enclosed the remaining documents that you requested in order for me to purchase plot 34C and I am hopeful that we will be able to have the reinterment by the end of the year.

  Elliott looked up after reading the letter. “I love that your dad called him a dolt. Great word.”

  I had a twinge of sadness, missing my dad.

  Elliott asked, “What do you think this all means? Who was he moving around?”

  “I don’t know. Someone that meant a lot to my mother died. Agreed?”

  Elliott sat down. “Agreed.”

  “So my father had this body dug up and moved without telling my mother.”

  Elliott continued. “And your father wanted the body to go directly from wherever it had been under the lake, straight to Huntley Memorial Gardens. But he couldn’t get permission from the director.”

  “Right. Maybe because it’s a family plot you need to be a member of the Jones family?”

  Elliott just shrugged as he continued. “But because your dad couldn’t bury the body there he put it someplace temporary. He just had to get it out from under the lake in a hurry before the water came back.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know where the body was the first time or where it is now.”

  “No, but he said something about dealing with a bureaucracy so maybe it’s in a government-run place. Like a veteran’s cemetery.”

  I flipped through the letters. “I wish he’d said who it was.”

  “I wonder why your dad never told your mom he was doing all of this.”

  I was not surprised. “My mom was a burnt-out case when it came to her childhood. If you pushed her on it too far she would close down on you. I can understand why my dad wouldn’t have wanted to drag it out with her. He obviously wanted to wait until it was all sorted out before telling her. But it looks like he never got to finish it. Whoever he was trying to move never got there or we would’ve seen the grave, right? Was there anyone buried next to George? I can’t remember.”

  Elliott looked through the papers on the table until he found his notes from the cemetery. “No, not on his left. He was kind of at the end of that row, remember? And then to his right was his brother Oliver. He was buried there in nineteen sixty-eight, so that couldn’t have been who your father was talking about.”

  Just when I thought we were finished, at the end, all of the discoveries made, we find something new. Who would my mother have wanted to bury next to George? Did George have any other siblings? Did my mother? She always said she was an only child. But then again she said a lot of things, didn’t she? And there were even more things, enormous life-altering things, that she simply never mentioned.

  I added the letters to the other piles of stuff I didn’t understand that were stacked up on the table. Then I let my eyes wander across the Wall of Discovery. I was thinking of renaming it: My Mother’s Wall of Annoying Secrets and Untold Mysteries.

  I picked up the nearest stack of papers and went out to the porch with Elliott. I flipped through them while he busied himself hanging up an old rope hammock we had found in the closet.

  These were newspaper articles from the local paper about George and Janie in their younger years. I didn’t think we were consciously focusing on their youth, but there was the glaring omission from the Wall of Discovery about anything concerning George’s death. It was so hard to think about them being so young and happy and knowing what the future held for them. Maybe it was just easier to see them together, blissfully unaware of what lay ahead, if we left the rest of their story alone.

  There were two stories about George being spotlighted for baseball. One was for being voted Student Athlete of the Year for his high school team. The accompanying photo was of George and Janie. He was in his baseball uniform with dirt down the left side where he had clearly slid into base. The picture must have been taken right after a game had ended. The stands in the background were filled with people in midcheer. George was standing on the roof of the dugout while Janie was on the other side of the rail at the foot of the bleachers. She was looking out toward the scoreboard as George, dirty and sweaty, had both arms wrapped tightly around her waist. Were those two ever apart?

  Another article was about Janie registering people to vote in the “negro” neighborhoods. George was standing next to her holding a clipboard as she spoke with a pastor of one of the churches. I noticed that one of George’s hands was resting protectively on her shoulder. I was proud of my mother, looking at that photo. That was the mother I remembered. I was reminded that she did manage to go on living after she lost George. That she had kept going to become an amazing mother, a wonderful wife, and a respected professor of American history. Sometimes the Janie in those old photos with George was a separate person in my mind from my mother. Sometimes she was not.

  Elliott hopped into the hammock to make sure the rusted hooks in the wall would hold. I sat down on it too and tried to work my way into a horizontal position next to him. I yanked on the edge of the hammock, hoping to give myself leverage to move over, but all I managed to do was upset the entire equilibrium and we both flipped off of it landing with a thud on the floor.

  We were both laughing as we got to our feet. My head was throbbing and Elliott was holding his lower back.

  He saw me holding my head and asked, “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, but it hurt. We stumbled into the house together to make sure it hadn’t started bleeding again.

  Elliott teased me as he checked the stitches. “You did that on purpose to garner sympathy from me.”

  That made me laugh. I gingerly touched the back of my head. “It’s not bleeding again is it? This stupid thing still hurts.”

  “Maybe you should stop falling on it.”

  Elliott declared my wound okay. We spent the remainder of the evening in the safety of the rocking chairs out on the porch listening to the night sounds on the lake and talking about George and Janie and u
nknown gravesites.

  When Logan got home from her date with Graham, Elliott gathered up his things to head home. I walked him out to the street and we made plans for him to come back in the morning for breakfast.

  He said, “I have a surprise for you. I should have it all by tomorrow.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise.” He kissed the bump on my head lightly. “Can you make it back into the house by yourself? You might trip over a crack and lose a leg.”

  “You’re mean.” I pushed him down the sidewalk.

  “You’re a klutz.”

  “I hate you.”

  He called over his shoulder, “Ha! No, you don’t. You love me.”

  Elliott was walking away from me, down the sidewalk. You love me. Something possessed me in that instant and I closed the distance to him without even thinking. He heard me coming and turned just in time to catch me as I threw myself at him, nearly knocking him over into the bushes. I was holding on to him so tightly my feet weren’t touching the ground. I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t keep maintaining a distance from him. I couldn’t keep saying good-night and letting him go at the end of the evening. Elliott kissed me back with so much passion it was a wonder our clothes didn’t simply fall off. He kissed me down my neck and my ear and mumbled something into my hair.

  “What . . .”

  He said it again. “Come home with me.”

  Speech was becoming increasingly difficult. As was standing upright. I just nodded my head.

  The porch light burst on behind us and we stopped for a second, breathing heavily. I had forgotten about Logan.

  She cleared her throat from the porch. “Aunt Liv, my mom’s on the phone.” I saw her put the phone back to her ear. “Just a sec, Mom.”

  Elliott’s fingers were still digging into my back. His grip released and I slid down him until my feet touched the ground again. He laughed a little to himself and made a strange grunting sound. He kissed the top of my head, spun me around by the shoulders, and gave me a little push toward the house.