Cancel the Wedding

by Carolyn T. Dingman

  Our timeline was embellished with all of our evidence and printouts and pictures that had been on the Wall of Discovery. Logan and I had everything arranged on the dining room table in chronological order. I had just finished copying the yearbooks that Elliott had found because those had to be returned to the library. Elliott. When I thought of him I felt such a heavy sorrow that it was making me physically ill.

  Logan and I were waiting outside for Georgia by the time she finally drove into Tillman and pulled up to the rental house. We were sitting together on the front porch tapping our feet, anxious for her to arrive. All Georgia knew was that in the time we had been out of her sight her rule-following, completely neurotic, straightlaced little sister had dumped her fiancé, consorted with some strange man named Elliott, and was planning to rob a grave after sunset.

  Things had gotten a little weird.

  She had a worried look on her face as she got out of the car. It was the same look she carried around when our mom got sick.

  We ushered Georgia into the house without letting her have a second to stretch her legs after the long drive. I closed the door behind her and she took my hand, stopping me.

  “Olivia, are you okay?”

  “We can talk later, not now.”

  She ignored that. “Are you and Leo . . . officially over? Do you want to talk about it?”

  Everything that had happened with Leo seemed like a million years ago. I could feel it telescoping into my past. I was tired to my bones about it. So no, I didn’t really want to tell her about it. To relive it. To have to rehash eight months of doubts, six hours of conversation, and five spectacular minutes of shouting. But I knew saying nothing was not an option.

  I said simply, “Yes, it’s over. Officially. You could probably hear him screaming at me from the highway.”

  She had a confused look on her face when I said that. “I thought it would be a bit more cordial. More mutual. I think he’d been feeling the same way, Livie.”

  It had all been so very civilized, so amicable, but then I threw napalm on it in the form of an unexpected visit from Elliott. I was not faring well with unexpected visits. I didn’t feel like explaining everything to Georgia so I just gave her the shortest version of events I could muster. “Leo was here at the house and Elliott dropped by. It was bad. They both . . . It was bad.”

  Georgia looked slightly horrified. “Oh no. I didn’t see that one coming. If I had known Leo was going to fly down here I would’ve warned you. Is he still here?”

  “I doubt it. Look, we don’t have a lot of time. We need to be out of here when it gets dark in a few hours and we have so much to show you first.”

  She wanted to ask me more about it but I wasn’t answering. I dragged her over to the dining room table where she began to linger over the timeline, slowly following the events of Janie’s life as we had them laid out. It started on the left with the birth certificates of our mother and George. Then the years flowed by with the school photos, our grandmother’s death, and newspaper articles, some notes here and there from the stories Florence had shared with us. Georgia would stop at an article, something she hadn’t seen before, and read through it. Logan stood at her shoulder following her mother’s progress and answering questions as they came up.

  Georgia was shaking her head. “This is so sad. And he died so young.” She looked at me. “Mom’s first love.”

  I sat down across from her at the table and tried to explain what I thought George had been to Mom. “I feel like he was more than that. I mean he was the love of her life. He seemed to be her oldest friend. He was . . . everything to her.”

  “It’s amazing that you were able to find all of this.”

  Logan said, “We were lucky Mrs. Chatham found Florence and that Olivia recognized Buddy in that newspaper article. We got most of our pictures from him.” Logan ran her hand over the long line of articles from the newspaper archives. “But most of what we found was because Elliott was helping us.” Then she pointed to the copies from the yearbooks. “He got those from the library.”

  Georgia looked back and forth between Logan and me. “You want to tell me about Elliott?”

  “No.” I had made an inner pact instituting a total communication blackout with my sister on the subject of Elliott. Especially since I had basically, in one day, obliterated any need for her to know him at all.

  I could tell Georgia had decided not to push me. She said, “Okay then. So we know that Mom and George got married, and we know he got sick and died.”

  I had finally managed to get myself to find their wedding announcement. I hadn’t wanted to see it, to read the words, to feel as though some part of my mother could never have belonged to my own father. Because that part of her had always belonged to George. It felt like a betrayal to my father’s memory to know all of these things about my mother. But at the same time I felt as though I finally fully understood the person that my mother truly was.

  Georgia was reading over the announcement from the paper for the wedding of George Jones and Janie Rutledge. Accompanying the wedding announcement was a picture of the new Mr. and Mrs. George Jones. My mother was wearing an elegant cream silk wedding gown that had been her mother’s. It was a simple bias-cut sheath that skimmed her body. Knowing what Buddy had told me about Martha, I had to assume the dress had been altered quite a bit to fit Janie. She wore her hair in a loose bun; there were some wisps breaking free and blowing around her face on the breeze.

  George was wearing a formal black suit and had his arm around Janie’s waist. He had her pulled into him in a way that spoke of comfort and passion and belonging. There were no signs of a nervous groom or second thoughts. She was looking just past the camera. She seemed to be caught right at the moment of laughter when something out of the frame caught her eye. George was looking down at her, gazing at her face, with a look of complete devotion.

  That look of unmistakable bliss on both of their faces was haunting. It was the most emotionally charged of all of the photos we had been able to uncover. When I looked at it I felt an immense grief that their happiness was about to be shattered and they were completely oblivious about it.

  We were all three quiet for a few minutes while we took turns looking over the wedding announcement and photo. I noticed Georgia had tears in her eyes.

  I said, “I know. It’s really sad.”

  She wiped the tears. “It is. It’s awful. Look how happy she looks.”

  Logan was looking over her mother’s shoulder at the image. “You look a lot like her, Mom.” Georgia squeezed Logan’s hand.

  Now we were all crying. Grave robbers do not cry, people! I had to keep us moving at a faster pace if we were going to get through all of this in one night.

  I cleared my throat. “Okay, so they were married in nineteen sixty-six. I couldn’t find anything about what they were doing when they first got married.” I was trying to keep moving to the right on the tabletop, progressing through time in our timeline, and each step to the right was a few more years down the road. Georgia wanted to linger on the images of them in their teenage years that Buddy had given me, but I pushed her along.

  We arrived in the section that held items from 1968. I showed Georgia the photographs that Florence had given me of Oliver in Vietnam. Then I showed her his death certificate. She just took a deep breath and we moved one more step to the right.

  I pulled out a very bad copy of a building permit. “This was the next thing we could find. It was in November of nineteen sixty-eight.”

  The building permit was fairly basic. George Jones had applied for a permit to have the plumbing redone in the house, a detached garage added, and some renovations done on one of the upstairs bedrooms.

  I told Georgia my theory. “I’m pretty sure they were remodeling an upstairs bedroom to turn it into a nursery.”

  Georgia said in a whisper, “Good God. She was pregnant?”

  “Yes.” I handed her a copy of the birth certificate for Oliver Winchester Jon
es born to George and Jane Jones in February of 1969. This was what Elliott had uncovered. This was the discovery he had made that caused him to rush over to the house, unannounced. I kept seeing his face, red with fury, yelling at me. All of that passion in Elliott was so warm when it was directed at me with longing. Too bad it was now being hurled at me with the laser focus of anger.

  I looked back at the birth certificate, trying to stay focused. “We had looked for a birth certificate for a baby being born to George and Janie when they first got married, thinking that perhaps they had to get married when they were twenty. I mean I know it was a different time and place, but you know Mom wouldn’t have gotten married before she graduated from college unless it was necessary. But we couldn’t find anything to support the knocked-up theory so we stopped looking. It never occurred to me that there may have actually been a baby, only later. He was born, perfectly healthy.”

  Logan was even starting to tear up. “They named him Oliver Winchester after George’s brother and her father.” Logan ran her finger across the tiny black footprint on the certificate.

  I said, “So I think maybe I’m named after this Oliver, the baby. But we’re both named after the first Oliver I suppose.” I held my hand up to the tiny footprint, dwarfing it. “I don’t guess it really matters.”

  Georgia looked as stunned as I had felt when I first found out about this baby. She had always identified herself as the oldest, the first. And now, well, now she was the second. It would be hard to explain how life altering this discovery of another baby born to our mother was for us. A whole other life lived, lost, and forgotten.

  Georgia looked up at me. She seemed to suddenly think of our father. “Do you think Dad knew?”

  “Yes, he knew.”

  Georgia still had that shell-shocked look on her face that I had been feeling when I finally processed all of this. “How do you know?”

  I said, “That comes later.”

  “You’re killing me, Livie.”

  “Sorry, but I think it’s easier if you just hear it all in chronological order.” I winked at Logan. “Plus I think Logan kind of likes having the upper hand on you.”

  She clapped her hands in a tight quick clip and smiled. “I totally do.”

  Georgia wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “This is tragic. I know George died but where’s little Oliver?”

  I sighed, “That’s the worst part. He died too. When he was a baby, he had just turned two.” I pulled out the death certificate and showed it to Georgia.

  On the death certificate the cause of death was listed as primary streptococcal pneumonia. The same thing that had killed George. They died within weeks of each other. First, baby Oliver and then George. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it had been like for my mother to live through that.

  I finally revealed my plan to Georgia. “We’re going to go get the baby. We’re going to dig him up and move him to Huntley Memorial Gardens to be with his father. We’re going to bury him next to George.”

  Georgia felt the need to be the voice of reason in the room of body snatchers. She used her most stern motherly voice. “You’ve lost your mind. You seriously want to dig up a dead body? Why do we have to dig it up ourselves?”

  “Because getting permission will take too long.” I took out all of my evidence to show her how we had tracked the movement of little Oliver’s gravesite. First, I showed her the death notice in the newspaper that listed him as being laid to rest in the tiny churchyard where Janie and George had been married. The same small, white church whose steeple now haunted the depths of the lake.

  It would have been devastating to stand in that spot, the same church where they had been married just five years before, and bury their child. George must have been sick by then, probably weak from the ravages of the illness about to take his life. Janie overwhelmed with grief over the loss of little Oliver. They must not have been thinking clearly to bury the baby next to that church. They knew the location was unstable, the church in constant threat of flooding. But of course they weren’t thinking clearly; their baby had just died.

  Second, I pulled out the very long and dry TVA Repair and Expansion Plan of 1978 explaining the need to alleviate the flooding from one of the tributaries. There was a small creek that kept overflowing its banks in heavy rains. This was the same creek that had once caused the border dispute between the Forrests and the Rutledges. And this was the same flooding problem that had eventually swallowed that church whole and taken it back to the lake.

  By the time the TVA’s expansion plan had been approved, the ancient little church was long gone and its secret buried body had been all but forgotten by everyone except our father, Adam.

  Georgia was still not totally on board with the idea of digging up a grave. I pulled out the letters from our father. I said, “Remember when you asked me if Dad knew about all of this? About Mom’s past? Well, he knew. He’s the one who found the first grave of Oliver at the church and had him moved right before the lake could swallow that land up again. Dad had the body exhumed and moved temporarily until he could get permission to buy the plot next to George Jones at Huntley Memorial Gardens and have the baby buried there. It took him a long time to get the genealogical evidence required to prove that Oliver was a Jones so that the cemetery would let him buy the plot. By then Dad was sick; he never got to finish. So Oliver is still in that temporary grave, waiting to be moved, but Mom never knew that. She died thinking he was still under the lake.

  “This is the whole thing, Gigi. Mom wants to be scattered in the lake because she thinks her baby Oliver is still under there. In some unmarked grave under the waters of the lake. And she wants to be scattered over the grave of George so she can be with him again. This is it. This is the reason for all of this. She just wants to be with them again.”

  Georgia was reading the letters from our father to the cemetery. She flipped back to the death certificate of baby Oliver. And the wedding photo of our mother with George. She was talking to herself. “Dad must have really loved Mom to want to do this for her. I mean to do all the work to find the baby and to want to bring them all together again. It’s so completely selfless, so unconditional. He really was the only person who ever knew all of her.”

  Georgia seemed to be feeling all of this so deeply. Probably because she had children and was trying to get her mind around the idea of losing one. She said, “Can you imagine that? I mean losing your child and then days later losing your husband?”

  I sat down and moved some of the photos around on the table. “And she didn’t have anyone else. Her father was dead by then. George’s brother was dead. I don’t know if George had any other family, but Mom didn’t. She was completely alone.”

  I pulled out one of the last of the news articles and handed it to Georgia. “And here’s the kicker. It was only two months later when her house burned to the ground.”

  “Damn. No wonder she never wanted to talk about her life before.”

  I agreed. “I know. It’s amazing she lived through it at all.”

  We had always known in the abstract that our mother’s childhood home had burned down. That there were no mementos or pictures or family heirlooms because of that fire. But knowing all that we did now, sitting among the stories and pictures and proof of her life here made it so much more painful. So devastatingly real.

  I let Georgia sort through everything again, trying to digest all of it. “Livie, there has to be another way to move Oliver. We can’t just go out there with a shovel and do it ourselves.”

  Maybe it was crazy and illegal and sort of ghastly if I really thought about it, but I was finishing this quest. Now. Tonight. “Georgia, I blew up my entire life for this and I’m finishing it. With or without you.”

  Finally she looked up, committed. “Okay. Where do we go to dig up a body?”

  “I have a good idea, but I’m not positive.” I had a hunch the body was in the Rutledge family cemetery behind Mom’s old house, but we didn’t have enough time
for hunches. “We’re making a stop on the way to find out for sure.”

  Logan was two steps ahead of me, as usual. “Are we going to Buddy’s house?”

  “Yes. I bet he knows exactly where Oliver is.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Logan was pulling clothes out of her dresser drawers and flinging them over her shoulder. It was almost seven o’clock and it would be getting dark outside soon. We were trying to hurry. She said, “What do you wear to go grave robbing?”

  Hearing those words made me incredibly nervous. “Can we call it something else?” I was wondering if I could go through with this. But we had been over it and over it. If my father had been able to get permission to disinter the body from the historical society then he would have done it, which meant that the chances of us getting permission to do this through the proper channels were pretty slim. So if we wanted to get little Oliver moved next to his father, George, then we felt like this was the best way. And getting that family back together again, even if in death, seemed to be the whole point of this journey.

  Now that Georgia was committed to our little venture she had a giddiness to her that I hadn’t seen since we were kids and sneaking out of the house to break into the neighbor’s pool. She told Logan to wear something dark. Well sure, black is all the rage with grave robbers this season.

  We stopped by the inn and “borrowed” three shovels from the maintenance shed, and I had a flashlight in my car so we figured we were fully outfitted for our caper.

  I followed the GPS’s directions to the address Buddy had written on top of the box of pictures. We climbed the same switchback mountain roads that had led us to the old abandoned house, but then we were directed to take a turn following the crest of the ridge. The road ended in a large and mercifully flat plateau on which was a surprisingly grand and gorgeous mountain house.

  After double-checking that I had the correct address for Buddy, we climbed out of the car. The front door was reached through a courtyard lined with pea gravel and hedged by native plants. The house itself had a steeply pitched roofline, perfectly angled to shed snow. There were massive windows facing the valley, which must frame expansive and impressive views in the daylight. The house itself was constructed entirely of cedar shingles and planks. It was much more practical for this environment than the whitewashed pine house with the tin roof that had been abandoned lower down on his property. On either side of the house stood massive stone chimneys climbing up into the darkening night.