by Cathy Holton
For a time her growing infatuation with him produced in her a kind of restless energy, and she went back to work on her novel with renewed vigor and resolve. But eventually she settled back into the writing doldrums. The drama of her life with Jacob seemed to overtake the drama of her novel, and she found it easier and easier to procrastinate, to spend long hours patching together their relationship rather than writing.
Yet she knew she was a good writer; her high school teachers and college professors had all told her so. Jake’s comment, so true in its implication, had shaken her. She knew he was right. She had to find a way to recapture the passion she had felt writing those first childhood stories.
She had to find something to write about that captivated her.
Our Town Is Rife with Suicides
After Alice Barron’s barbecue, the mood in the Woodburn house shifted. The barbecue seemed to have cemented something. There was an air now of accord and delicate expectation, as if everyone was tiptoeing around on eggshells. Even Josephine seemed to warm to Ava.
Ava and Will spent their evenings now going around to parties: supper clubs, cocktail parties, graduation barbecues.
Woodburn was a town of social ritual. In addition to the daily afternoon gathering for Toddy Time in the big houses lining River Road, there were teas, barbecues, birthday clubs, church fund-raisers, supper clubs, and Bunco groups. Ava had lost track of the invitations she’d received. The women were all very friendly and sweet. Regardless of their educations, their lives seemed to revolve around children, husbands, houses, and social events. The women’s movement might never have happened here. In addition to enjoying the indulgences of their nineteen-sixties counterparts (cocktail parties, dinner groups, prescription drugs), these women also engaged in something called “me time,” which included spa days, shopping jaunts to Nashville, and tennis trips to the beach.
One husband told Ava, “In my next life I want to come back as a Woodburn housewife,” but he was smiling indulgently at his wife when he said it, and Ava could see that he felt a certain masculine pride in her for accepting this lifestyle, and in himself for being able to provide it.
It was, after all, a very pleasant, carefree existence, a life of safety and security.
Woodburn seemed to be seeping into her bones like the heat. Accustomed to the hectic pace of Chicago, Ava had, at first, found the slow-moving, slow-talking townspeople hard to take. But gradually, effortlessly, she was succumbing to the languid charm of the place. How lovely to rise when she felt like it, to spend the morning reading in the cool library or beneath a slowly moving ceiling fan on the verandah; how wonderful the traditions of afternoon nap and Toddy Time. The slow pace of the days suited her, Ava realized. Instead of cramming as much as you possibly could into a twenty-four-hour space, you built your day around one daily task; shopping, reading, working in the garden. One day followed another with a kind of slumberous certainty.
And yet there was a worrisome aspect to this lifestyle: the fact that it was so easy to forget work, to put it aside indefinitely in the pursuit of pleasure. There was a slightly addictive quality to the way Will and his friends lived, Ava realized in brief moments of clarity, a quality that might be detrimental to a writer.
“I thought we might have a party,” Will said one evening.
It was the day before Ava was supposed to see Jake Woodburn again, to go out to his mother’s house, and she was in a very good mood. She was sitting in the library playing Scrabble with Will, Josephine, and Fanny. Toddy Time was over, and Maitland was in the kitchen finishing up dinner.
“Oh, yes, a party!” Fanny said, clapping her hands.
“For the young people, not for us,” Josephine said. She smiled serenely at Will. “I think that’s a marvelous idea.”
“At Longford,” he said.
If he had heard about her lunch with Jake, he hadn’t mentioned it. Ava had meant to tell him, but as the days wore on and his mood continued to be cheerful and sociable, she hadn’t wanted to spoil it. Now, of course, she’d left it too long and there was no casual way to bring it up.
“What do you think?” he said, turning to Ava.
Ava was remembering what Jake had said about writing to the man who might be her father and demanding that he explain his absence in her life. She had been thinking of this, off and on, for days. Yes, of course, he was right; she was owed an explanation. If nothing else, she was owed that.
“Ava?” Will said loudly and she looked up to see everyone at the table staring at her.
“Are you feeling all right, my dear?” Josephine said, not unkindly. “You seem a little flushed.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it my turn?”
“Did you hear what I said about the party?” Will’s eyes fastened on Ava. His smile thinned.
“Yes. A party. That would be great.” She looked down at her tiles, moving them around. She had dreaded the visit, in the days following her lunch with Jake, feeling that she had allowed herself to be manipulated into agreeing to go. But as the day approached, she found herself anticipating tomorrow’s lunch. The chance to gather more information on Charlie Woodburn was irresistible. And she had never seen a miniature horse.
“Will you help me?”
She looked up again. “Help you?”
He gave her a cool, studied look. “With the invitations?” he said. “With the planning?”
She smiled faintly. “Of course,” she said.
He continued to stare at her.
“There’s a stationery shop on the square that does a nice job with printing. Use them,” Josephine said. “They have a woman who does calligraphy so you can give your list to her.”
Will was quiet now, staring down at his tiles.
“Printed invitations!” Ava said, trying to restore his good spirits. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a party where printed invitations were sent.”
“Oh, really?” Fanny said.
“That will change,” Josephine said quietly.
Ava thought, What will change? She wanted life to go on just as it was. She didn’t want to think about what was coming later.
The following morning was overcast, and Ava rose earlier than usual and showered and dressed before going in to breakfast. Fanny and Josephine had gone downtown to see their lawyer but Clara and Alice were sitting at the table in the breakfast room, lingering over their coffee.
“You look nice,” Alice said, surprised at seeing her dressed. “Where are you off to this morning?”
Ava poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. “I’ve got some errands to run,” she said.
“Better take an umbrella,” Clara said. “It’s going to rain.”
Ava stirred her coffee and stared serenely out the window at the ominous sky. She had made arrangements to meet Jake at the barbecue place and follow him out to his mother’s in her car. She had been adamant about driving herself, not knowing how the visit might go and not wanting to be dependent upon him for a ride back. Besides, she didn’t want anyone to see her riding in a car with Jake, at least not until she’d had a chance to tell Will about befriending him. She glanced at the clock, noting that she had almost an hour before she was to meet him.
“The other morning when we were talking you said something interesting,” Ava said, not looking directly at either woman. She had found that although Fanny, Josephine, and Will refused to talk about Charlie Woodburn, she could sometimes coax Clara and Alice to speak of him if the aunts weren’t present. That was how she had discovered that the bedroom she slept in, the very bed she slept in, had once been used by Charlie.
“You said Charlie slept in the front bedroom where I’m sleeping now, but Fanny slept upstairs. Was that common in those days?”
Alice coughed lightly, her eyes darting to Clara. “It wasn’t uncommon in those days for married people to have separate bedrooms,” she said.
“But surely it was uncommon for newlyweds?” Ava tried not to appear too curious, turning t
o observe a framed photograph hanging on the wall beside her shoulder. It was of a young Fanny and Maitland dressed in pith helmets and standing over a downed water buffalo. Fanny was very petite and pretty, wearing riding jodhpurs and staring at the camera with a look of brash audacity. Maitland was muscular and bronzed and looked a little like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. There was a man in the foreground grinning widely, down on one knee beside the buffalo. He looked oddly familiar to Ava.
“He was a night owl,” Clara said, glancing at Alice, who snorted into her coffee cup. “Charlie could stay up all night but Fanny went to bed with the sun. At least she did in those days when she was expecting Sumner.”
“And Sumner was Charlie’s son,” Ava said smoothly, still examining the photo.
“Of course,” Alice said, as if any other suggestion was preposterous.
Ava nodded her head, wondering how to politely pose her next question. “And how long had Fanny and Charlie been married when she found herself pregnant with Sumner?”
“A little over a year,” Alice said quickly.
So it hadn’t been a shotgun wedding then. Fanny hadn’t been forced to marry Charlie because she was pregnant.
“He liked his cups,” Alice said.
“What?”
“Charlie. He was bad to drink,” Clara said.
“You mean he was an alcoholic?”
No one said anything. Behind them, the kitchen clock ticked steadily. Alice coughed again, delicately. “Josephine hated him with a passion,” she said. “She did everything she could to break up that marriage. He would bring low characters back to the house and sit up all hours of the night drinking and gambling. That’s why Fanny had her own room.”
Clara gave Alice a direct look. Ava could feel an undercurrent between the two women, some unspoken warning swirling through the room like smoke. She took the framed photograph off the wall and stared at it.
Despite Clara’s warning glance, Alice continued. “Maitland was brokenhearted when Fanny married that rascal. He’d loved Fanny all his life. When Mama asked Maitland why he didn’t marry someone else, he said, ‘Mama, some people are born to love only one person, and I have the fortunate distinction of being one of them.’ ”
“He was a patient man,” Clara agreed. “Waiting for her all those years.”
“She wouldn’t marry until Sumner was grown,” Alice said to Ava.
“But they traveled together?” Ava asked, tapping the photograph with her finger. “Even before they married?”
“Oh, yes. Everywhere. They were great travelers.”
Ava dipped her head and peered at the unknown man in the photograph. Why would Fanny and Maitland have traveled the world together and yet waited forty years to marry? She glanced again at the clock. It was when she looked back down at the photograph that it occurred to her who the man was.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Is that Ernest Hemingway?”
He was waiting for her when she arrived at Battle Smoove Barbecue. The sky was a gunmetal gray but the rain had held off. She smiled and waved and he gave her that two-finger salute they all gave each other down here in greeting. He was driving the same old Ford pickup, and she followed him out of the empty parking lot and down a narrow, curving asphalt road.
His mother’s place was on the opposite side of town from Longford, and Ava began to relax, realizing she probably wouldn’t run into Will. They drove past several subdivisions filled with small modern-looking houses, surrounded by wide flat fields. A distant forest stood wreathed in fog, and farther on the mountain range rose above a bank of low-lying clouds like islands in a milky sea.
She wondered what his mother would be like. Sally was her name, he’d told her. She raised miniature horses and worked part-time at a local vet’s office. “A large, plainspoken woman,” Jake had warned her. “Don’t expect any of the old-money polish you find with the Woodburn sisters.”
The sun broke briefly between the clouds and Ava took it as a hopeful sign.
They turned off the paved road finally and followed a sandy dirt trail between boxwood hedges. The hedges had been left to grow wild, and they were taller than the car and covered in trailing vines. Ava bounced along behind Jake as he pulled into a grassy clearing and parked beside a small log house shaded by two overhanging trees. Forest surrounded the house on three sides but to the back, Ava could see a vista of cleared rolling fields.
He climbed out of the truck carrying a large brown paper bag, waiting for her. She parked carefully in the gravel drive. The house was very small, with a steeply pitched roof. A stone walkway led from the drive up to the narrow front porch past a pair of geranium and ivy planters.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s very quiet,” she said.
He walked ahead of her along the walkway. “She must be out in the barn,” he said. She followed him up the narrow steps into the house.
It was a true log cabin, one big room opened all the way to the roof rafters. A tiny galley kitchen ran along the back wall, next to a pair of French doors that opened onto a small deck overlooking the long sweeping fields in the back. A bedroom and bath were tucked into a small wing opening off the side of the house, and a ladder led up into a sleeping loft overlooking the great room, which was sparsely furnished with an L-shaped sofa, bookshelves, a round oak table, and various antiques. Several colorful rag rugs were scattered across the wide-planked pine floors.
“This is wonderful,” Ava said, looking around. All the windows were bare and looked out onto the forest or the wide sloping fields.
“Thanks. I built it.” He set the bag down on the counter and she realized he had brought lunch with him. “Will and I built it,” he corrected himself.
“You and Will?” she said.
He went to the cupboard and took down three glasses. “One summer when we were in college. Mama ordered the kit from one of those prefab cabin places and when the logs came, Will and I put it together. Just like you would a Lincoln Log set, only about a thousand times harder. It took us all summer, which doesn’t say much for our skill set, but we learned a lot doing it.”
“Where did your mom live before that? Did you grow up in town?”
“I grew up out here,” he said. “The land’s been in the family for about thirty years but we lived in a trailer before the house was built. I grew up in a trailer.” He looked at her when he said it, as if to give her time to understand the kind of childhood he’d had, the kind of people he came from. There was an element of polite restraint in his manner that had not been there the other day at lunch.
They walked outside, down a narrow path to the barn, which was little more than a two-stall lean-to. “Mama, we’re here,” he called out as they approached, and Sally Woodburn stepped out to greet them.
She was a big woman, not fat but solid, and she spoke in the nasal twang used by Darlene Haney, only her voice was deeper. Her hair was brown and cut short like Ava’s, and she wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of muddy cowboy boots.
She gave Ava a quick, bashful hug. “Any friend of Jake’s is welcome here,” she said.
Ava felt suddenly shy, and she was glad when Sally said, “And this here is Sprinkles and this is Tinker Belle.”
The horses were adorable, neither one bigger than a large golden retriever, and when they walked back up the trail to the house, the two of them followed at Sally’s heels. They stood on the deck, their noses pressed against the French doors, watching as Jake, Ava, and Sally washed their hands and sat down at the table.
“Jake says they’re house-trained,” Ava said, laughing at the little horses’ forlorn expressions.
“Oh, yes,” Sally said. She had strong, regular features, and Ava realized that Jake got his lopsided grin from her. “They come in at night but during the day, when the weather’s nice, I insist that they stay outdoors. Horses are prone to respiratory problems, and they need clean fresh air to stay healthy.”
She set china plates out for t
hem. Jake took the barbecue out of the bag and put it on the table so they could help themselves, along with silverware and napkins.
Sally smiled at Ava, indicating that she should go first. “Jake says you’re from Chicago.”
“Yes,” Ava said.
“You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”
Ava wasn’t sure how much Jake had told his mother about her reasons for being in Woodburn, so she just smiled and said, “It’s been a real adjustment.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” Sally said, helping herself to some coleslaw. “Everyone does. Eventually.”
They talked for a while about the business of raising miniature horses. A blustery wind blew across the deck from time to time, stirring the tails of the little horses, and far off to the east a line of heavy storm clouds rode low on the horizon, wrapping the ridgetops in fog. Ava could see now how the Smoky Mountains got their name.
She and Jake were quiet during lunch, letting Sally do most of the talking. When she stopped, Ava put her fork down and said, “Jake told me you might know something about Charlie Woodburn.” She hadn’t meant to launch into it like that, to pose the question quite so boldly, but Jake’s continued silence was beginning to unnerve her. He seemed preoccupied today, and restless.
“I know a little,” Sally said.
“Was he related to you?”
Sally looked at Jake. “You didn’t tell her?” she said.
“Nope.”
“Boy, you surprise me.” She pushed her plate back and said sternly to Ava, “He has a fondness for the old Woodburn sisters that I don’t necessarily share. You should know that up front. Miss Fanny’s always been a kindhearted soul, but that Josephine’s as cold as a week-old enchilada.”
