“I see him running for a bigger office someday.
The pictures on his walls are pretty impressive.”
Butterfield gives me his only frown of the day.
“Bonner’s been running for something since the day he was born. He’s a good sheriff,” he adds quickly.
I resist asking the prosecutor what he will be running for next. I should have realized he and Bonner see themselves as natural competitors in this area of the state. With all the whites leaving, they have political opportunities they never dreamed possible when they were growing up.
The phone rings, and when Butterfield gets off, he promises to get me a
copy of the file tomorrow after the arraignment, and I leave his office understanding that Butterfield wants to convict Paul in the worst way.
What better springboard to office than the murder conviction of the biggest planter in the county? He probably doesn’t care about Bledsoe at all. Behind the courthouse I start up the Blazer. It is time to begin finding out about Paul Taylor.
Before it gets too dark, I drive around Bear Creek’s residential areas.
Though I was here three months ago, I am struck this visit by my hometown’s desolation on the eve of spring. The houses and businesses show the effects of years of neglect, a dismaying shabbiness I had not noticed earlier. In the summer the abundant honeysuckle vines, tiger lilies, and chinaberry trees framed by giant magnolia, pecan, and even persimmon trees hide the decay. As a child my favorite tree was the weeping willow. My friends and I stuffed the droopy branches down the backs of our britches and pretended we were horses.
On Sharp Street I drive slowly past our original family home. A wood two-story structure, it needs a paint job. Scott Nightingale, the town dentist whose work always required aspirin for days afterward, bought the house after Mother died, but he, too, is dead. Though there is a middle class and even some wealthy people still left in Bear Creek, many of the homes and yards seem shrunken. This area north of Hazelnut was my childhood universe. It occurs to me, for the first time in years, how much I loved it here.
From morning to night Elmer Burton, Joe Hood, Hannah Carlton and I played “Army” in these yards, shooting each other and dying and rising
to fight another day. The owners all knew us and our families intimately and watched out for us.
Two houses down from us lived the Carltons, my parents’ closest friends. For years it seemed that I spent every rainy day playing with Hannah in their attic. She was a year younger but truly, in those prepuberty years, my best pal. A smiling, happy tomboy wise beyond her years, Hannah never cried or got mad no matter how many games of go fish, blackjack, or checkers she lost.
To her, competition was merely an excuse for companionship. Winning was never the point, friendship was. To satisfy my curiosity one stormy Saturday morning we went in the bathroom, shut the door, and she pulled down her pants and showed me that bizarre, defenseless little crack between her legs. I reciprocated by exposing my equally exotic nub and its microscopic attachments.
That done, we went back to our games.
As I cruise by the tennis courts at the old high school where Tommy and I competed against each other more than three decades ago, I marvel at our innocence in those days. It was a life so safe and secure it seems almost laughable now.
No houses or cars were locked at night, much less during the day.
On Orchard Lane, I stop the Blazer in front of my old girlfriend’s house, knowing she could be a major source of information if she feels like talking.
Despite my status as a hometown boy, there are few, if any, people I feel I know well enough after all this time to trust completely or for them to feel like talking to me. Angela Marr is one of these few.
As I get out of the Blazer, I am reminded of the note she sent me last month after a case of mine was in the Democrat-Gazette. When I saw the return address, egotistical beyond all reason, I had assumed she was writing to congratulate me, when, in fact, she was letting me know that Dwight had died in December after a long battle with cancer. I had missed her husband’s obituary in the paper.
The letter unleashed a flood of warm memories.
Angela and I had started dating the summer after our senior year in high school. Both of us were almost strangers in Bear Creek that last summer before college. She had moved to town in January with her father, the new manager of Bear Creek’s one industry, a pants factory.
I had been off at Subiaco all through high school. So when we met the first week in June at the public library, we hit it off immediately.
For the rest of the summer we were inseparable.
Angela was the first liberal I had ever met, and before I was ever permitted to make love to her that summer in the back of my mother’s ‘58 Fairlane, I had to endure an earful about the South. It was 1963, the year of the civil rights march on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Segregation, with all its humiliations, was still in full flower in Bear Creek. Angela was appalled by our treatment of blacks and told me so at every opportunity, which was practically every
night, since there was only one movie theater and nowhere to go except the Dairy Delight.
When I confided to her how the Taylors had cheated my mother and then ostracized my family, it was simply confirmation of all she had read about our “morally bankrupt Southern way of life,” as she used to delight in calling it. That summer she must have been so grateful I took her seriously that one night our necking on Spire Road outside of town got out of hand, and in timehonored fashion, we made love by the glow of the dashboard lights. What actually bonded us forever that night was less our lovemaking than our frantic but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to get a speck of Angela’s virgin blood out of the seat covers That fall I drove off to the University in Fayetteville in the ‘58 Fairlane, and Angela flew east to Goucher College in Baltimore, but each summer we resumed our romance in Bear Creek until I did my Peace Corps training the summer after I graduated. After I left, Angela began to date Dwight Marr, whose father had just died and left him and his brother a thousand-acre farm east of Bear Creek. When I came back that summer from Albuquerque after completing my training, Angela was engaged. She married Dwight that December. He was a super guy, the kind who wins the county “Farmer of the Year” award, and Angela, who originally had hated the South, became a farmer’s wife. If she had been willing to wait on me, I am convinced we would have married, but it worked out for the best. In her December letter she called Dwight, a couple of years younger, as fine a man as she had ever known, and though I haven’t kept up with Angela much over the years, I have never heard a word differently. And, in my own case, I was truly happy with Rosa, who, as the saying goes, melted my butter like nobody ever has before or since.
“I was afraid you’d be out digging ditches or whatever farmers do in
winter,” I say when Angela opens her front door to me.
After registering a look of total surprise, she smiles broadly, making me glad I decided to stop by.
“You never did know a thing about farmers,” she says, as if we were continuing a conversation we had begun earlier this morning.
“You look cold. Come on in. I was about to heat up some vegetable soup.”
As I come through the door, she steps forward and hugs me.
“I got your letter,” she sniffs, beginning to cry.
“It was sweet.”
I press her close to me, amazed at how familiar her body feels after thirty years. I had written her back and told her how sorry I was about Dwight.
A great marriage is hard to find.
I stand back from her and take her in. She looks wonderful for a woman who, if memory serves, has just had her forty-eighth birthday. I notice a few crow’s-feet around her brown eyes, and there is some gray in her once jet-black hair, but she is still petite despite the birth of two kids, twin boys whom I presume are in their second semester at Arkansas State in Jonesboro. As a teenager, Angela�
��s most discussed physical feature among the boys was her perfectly rounded ass, but today, dressed in a roomy green and purple wind suit, the evidence of any damage done
by thirty years of gravity is well camouflaged.
“Are you doing okay?” I ask.
For an answer she wipes her eyes. What a stupid question.
“Follow me to the kitchen. What are you doing here?” she asks over her shoulder as she leads me through a living room filled with furniture that has seen better days.
“You’ve got that serious expression you used to get when you’d try to convert me to Catholicism. You want some coffee or a drink?”
Facing a two-hour drive, I say I’ll take some coffee and sit at her kitchen table and marvel at how easy this feels, as if she has been patiently expecting my call for the last quarter of a century.
She takes a sack of coffee beans and empties them into a clear plastic container and pushes a button.
The noise prohibits an immediate response, and I look around her kitchen to keep from staring at her. Though spotless as I had expected, the appliances look ancient, and I remember a sentence from her letter that farming in eastern Arkansas has been very difficult in the past twenty years. In the driveway stands an ‘87 Mustang. There obviously hasn’t been much replacing of big ticket items in the Marr household lately.
“I know I mentioned my little epiphany the summer I met you,” I say when the grinding stops, “but did I talk about it that much?”
“Night and day,” she teases me, pouring water into her coffee maker.
“You were such a zealot!”
“I was?” An agnostic now since Rosa’s death, I find it hard to believe I ever proselytized anyone, especially Angela.
“With all those hormones flowing,” I ask, already comfortable bantering with her, “how did the subject of religion even come up?”
“You were such a talker,” she says, smiling, “I was afraid you’d never shut up long enough to ever kiss me.”
What different memories we have.
“Sarah went through a period her senior year in high school of being a fundamentalist,” I admit.
“Maybe it’s in the genes.”
Angela sits down across from me to wait for the coffee to brew.
“My boys couldn’t find the inside of a church if they tried,” she says, sounding regretful.
“And after their grades this semester, I’m worried about them. But they can’t come back here and farm. This place isn’t going to be here.”
So much for sex. Like a married couple, we substitute in its place talk of children and money.
Angela’s lower lip pooches out just a bit the way it did when she was upset three decades ago.
“It’s that bad, huh?” I say softly.
“I’m really sorry.”
Tears come again to Angela’s eyes. She never knew how to hide anything. Maybe that was why I was attracted to her. In the South women were taught to play games. Angela didn’t know how and was too honest to learn.
“Dwight didn’t really have anything to keep on living for. The farm has been going broke for years,” she says softly, looking out her kitchen window.
“And farming was all he ever wanted to do. He loved it.
There aren’t any jobs here anyway.”
Behind his back, we made fun of Dwight.
What a hick! A living teenage country legend.
4-H Club President. Won ribbons at the State Fair every October for pigs, for God’s sake. Dwight wasn’t cool. I pretended to be shocked when Angela told me after I returned from Peace Corps training that she and Dwight were getting married. I wasn’t. Dwight had been in love with her for years, and finally she had the good sense to realize it. The only
thing she asked of him was that they live in town. Never a fool, he bought a house in the city limits and commuted every day twenty minutes to his farm.
“What are you going to do?” I ask, beginning to feel awkward.
“This isn’t your problem,” Angela apologizes, pouring coffee into two chipped mugs.
“It’s just that I’ve been dealing with the bank again this week. They keep telling me to rent out my land.
Dwight’s brother wants to buy me out and carry the mortgage, but I know he can’t pay me.”
I am taken aback by how much she is revealing to me, but I shouldn’t be. For some reason we trusted each other from the moment we met.
That first night on her front steps she had confided how upset she had been when she had learned her father was moving to Arkansas, of all places. Obviously, I had talked about the marvels of Catholicism. I stand up to take the cup she hands me. Her hand is shaking. Family businesses.
They’re messes, whatever the nationality.
“What is Cecil like?” I ask, retrieving somehow the name of Dwight’s brother. Odd what is in the memory bank. Cecil was two years younger, and since those kids worked all the time on the farm, I just barely knew him.
“You’re not obligated to sell to him.”
Angela makes a face before sipping at her own coffee. I should know better, her expression says.
“Of course I am,” she says, her voice slightly bitter as she sits down at the table across from me.
“He’s my husband’s brother. What is Cecil like? He’s like every younger brother. If Dwight had planted beans instead of cotton, if they had bought more land instead of renting … the last two years as things were going from bad to worse it got pretty tense between them.
His wife, Nancy-you may not remember her since she was a lot younger-has been good to me and the boys, but it’s been a strain on everybody.”
I require some milk for my coffee, and, not wanting to make her get up again, I walk over to her ancient GE and open it. Damn. The top shelves are as bare as my own. Three cartons of Dannon fat-free plain yogurt, a quart of Carnation Coffee-mate Lite creamer, a quart of Minute Maid orange juice and four cans of diet Coke. No wonder she’s thin: she hasn’t eaten solid food since high school. I flavor my brew, and wonder why I like instant better than the real thing. A character defect, undoubtedly. I like cheap bourbon better than the expensive stuff. It tastes better with Coke. Angela looks up at me and forces another smile.
“How’s Sarah?”
I nod, glad to talk about a more pleasant subject.
My daughter has been the only thing between me and the nut house most of the time for the last seven years. I sit down again, making the oak chair squeak under my weight. Twenty years ago she must have had nice furniture in this room. Today, it could stand some glue.
“She’s great. First semester she became a raging feminist and quit junior varsity cheer leading because the costumes exploited women. I think she’s calming down a little, but next year it’ll be something else. She’s very passionate, like her mother was.”
Angela pushes back a lock of hair from her forehead.
“Do you still miss Rosa?”
I take off my jacket and hang it on the back of the chair to give myself time to think.
“Not consciously so much anymore,” I say candidly.
“But she was so alive that there’s a big hole I’ve had to realize can’t be filled. You really learn the hard way that people are unique and can’t be replaced.
She wasn’t perfect, but she was good in a way I’m not. She cared about others past the point of just wanting to be liked herself. Do you know what I mean? You would have been friends.”
Angela studies me carefully and strokes the left side of her face.
“Do you have a picture of Sarah?”
From my right hip pocket I tug out my wallet, which as usual is too full of laundry slips, business cards, and ancient notes to myself to make a smooth exit.
“This is Sarah last year,” I say handing her the wallet.
“She looks just like her mother when I met her in Colombia.”
Angela examines the photograph and winks at me.
“God, Gideon, no wonder you
married Rosa.
She’s just stunning! I bet she has all the boys going crazy.”
She doesn’t know the half of it.
“Let’s see your boys,” I say, taking my wallet back. To be so serious, Angela could be a real flirt. Though it was the first time for both of us, sex was, I seem to recall, her idea. I thought I was going to hell.
Still, I can’t say I needed much encouragement.
“Sure,” she says, getting up.
“I’ve got my favorite picture of them in the bedroom.”
I watch her glide from the kitchen and wonder if she has begun to miss
sex. Maybe she isn’t missing it. Somehow, though? I don’t think Angela is much of a date these days. She seems too emotional. Still, I can’t deny that I’m interested in her.
When she returns, she hands me a framed picture.
“They look just like my dad. This is Brad on the left and Curt on the right.”
I study the photo and am reminded of her father’s square jaw. He was a bear of a man, and I was scared to death of him. If he had known what his daughter was doing in my mother’s ‘58 Fairlane all those summers, he would have killed me.
A widower himself, he died from a massive heart attack, my mother wrote me in Colombia, while Angela and Dwight were on their honeymoon.
“This is terrible to say, but when I heard he had died, I was a little relieved. I was scared shitless of him,” I admit.
“Even in South America I was afraid he would find out what we did those summers and come get me.”
“I remember how you used to worry,” Angela laughs, as she sits down across from me.
“Either God or Dad was going to get you. It was just a matter of time.”
There is a twinkle in her eye. I feel good, thinking this conversation must be providing some relief for her. Women allow themselves to grieve,
and it is obvious to me that Dwight’s death has affected her greatly. Still, she will have to make a living. She wrote in December that she had kept the books for the farm, but she had never worked in town. Who would hire a woman almost fifty with no skills? There were no jobs anyway.
“It’s not too late for God,” I say, pretending to look out the window.
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