All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  There was also an article about the concealed handgun bill, saying the vote was set for the next day and the bill was expected to pass by a huge margin.

  Just before ten she pulled on shorts and an old T-shirt and located the padlock key in a kitchen drawer. Driving through the rain, she thought about Aunt Harriet and her powerful attachment to her worldly possessions.

  Three years earlier, when it had become clear to Molly that her aunt was too addled to live alone anymore, there had been a real battle. Harriet didn’t want to leave the house she’d lived in for fifty years but, after she nearly burned the house down by leaving a pot on the stove all night, Molly had convinced her it was time to move into the nursing home. That left the problem of what to do with a lifetime’s accumulation of furniture and china and clothes and knickknacks and books and pots and pans and, most difficult for Harriet, the voluminous Cates family archives. The old woman agreed to sell her furniture, but not the family antiques she had been particularly attached to. And she was nearly frantic over the archives, which occupied an entire room of her house—an accumulation of photos and letters and memorabilia of three generations of the Cates family, none of whom had ever thrown away so much as a single scrap of paper.

  Molly and Harriet finally reached a compromise: Molly would ship these precious things back to Austin and take good care of them. The antiques and the china she’d save for such time as Jo Beth might want them, and the archives Molly would personally maintain during her lifetime. She vowed she would preserve everything exactly as Harriet had done before her.

  With this reassurance, Harriet had relented and gone meekly into the Regency Oaks Senior Care Center.

  Of course, Molly didn’t have room in her townhouse for any of it, especially the five large file cabinets and all the cartons. Every nook and crevice of her small house was already filled with her own accumulation, which had burgeoned out into half the two-car garage and threatened the other half.

  So when the shipment arrived in Austin, Molly had it delivered to a storage unit she’d rented for the purpose. As a temporary measure until she had time to sort through it and find a place to keep it at home. But in the three years since then she had not once gone to check on the stuff. She paid the storage rent by the year and, each time it came due, she promised herself that this year she would take care of it.

  She pulled through the gates, resigned to a day of discomfort and misery. The place was deserted. Even in sunshine, Molly thought it the saddest and loneliest place in the world. In the rain on a Sunday morning, it was unspeakably bleak: long rows of identical flat-roofed barracks with locked doors stretched to infinity. It was a mausoleum for the old possessions people didn’t really want but couldn’t throw away—a pitiful limbo for material goods.

  Three years of rain and heat and nonusage had made the padlock stiff, but she managed to unlock it and open the door. Her energy melted away when she saw how much stuff was crammed in the small unit, much more than she remembered, as if some reverse-thief had sneaked in and added all his family rejects to hers. The hot, stale, dusty air filled her lungs with regret. Before we die, she decided, we should burn our accumulated possessions in a Viking funeral, so our families don’t have to contend with them.

  Piled to the top of the unit on one side was the old furniture Harriet couldn’t bear to sell off: a mahogany end table that had belonged to her grandmother, a carved chair that had been Donald’s mother’s favorite, a small oak dresser, a painted hope chest, and at the top, wrapped in green garbage bags, some shapes Molly couldn’t identify. There were also cartons of books, china, and glassware. Harriet had been certain Jo Beth would “marry well” and want all this someday when she had a big house to fill.

  On the other side, the archives were packed in tight: five three-drawer file cabinets with four bulging cartons stacked on top. It was enough to make you wish your ancestors had been illiterate.

  Molly thought the letters were most likely to be in the file cabinets. She pulled the drawer on one and found it stuck. She tried every one of the fifteen drawers before accepting that they were locked. Was she supposed to have a key? Had Harriet given her one? She had a sudden memory of her last visit to the nursing home. In the lockbox where Harriet’s jewelry was kept, there had been some keys. Molly hadn’t even wondered about them at the time. Well, damn. She wasn’t about to go back to Lubbock.

  She got in her truck and called Information for the numbers of some locksmiths with Sunday hours. After four rejections, she finally found one who could come immediately.

  The white truck arrived in nineteen minutes. It took him ten seconds to open all five filing cabinets, for which he charged her forty dollars. She paid him in cash, then started the tedious job of going through the files.

  Aunt Harriet had kept everything, including the grade school report cards for every member of the family, every tax return of her life, all her canceled checks, her papers from college, her mother’s sixty years of daily diaries, her husband Donald’s engineering notebooks, maps of every city she’d ever been to, menus, birthday cards. When Molly got to the fourth cabinet, she found Harriet’s personal correspondence—an entire lifetime of it. One whole drawer was filled with letters from her childhood friend who’d moved to Chicago and from a pen pal in Tokyo.

  In the bottom drawer Molly finally found what she was looking for—letters from her daddy, organized, thank God, in a roughly chronological fashion, beginning from when he’d gone to camp in San Marcos the summer he was nine and moving through college and vacations away from Lubbock. Even back then his handwriting had been exquisite, a legacy from the days when they taught the Palmer method in schools. Seeing the familiar flourish on his w’s brought back the scritch of his pen on paper, the silences when he’d look off into space between sentences.

  Toward the back of the bottom drawer she found the letters that began in June 1969 when Molly and her father had moved to Lake Travis. All were written with a real ink pen on sturdy gray stationery. Even though he had been an excellent typist and did his magazine work on an old Underwood, Vernon Cates believed personal letters should be handwritten, a prejudice his daughter shared.

  The storage unit was hot and stuffy, so Molly took two handfuls of letters and, hunching over to protect them from the rain, ran back to the truck. She turned on the air conditioning and put her feet up on the dashboard, settling in.

  The letters from their first summer at the lake talked about the move, about meeting Franny Lawrence—“this sweet and gorgeous redhead”—and how much both he and Molly loved living on the lake. He wrote a lot about his financial difficulties and thanked Harriet for the loan to help them with the move, something Molly had not been aware of. He wrote about Molly and her adjustment to the move, her initial loneliness, his concern that he was doing the right thing, issues she hadn’t realized worried him. By January 1970 the letters talked increasingly about Franny and his growing love for her.

  Every letter repeated his wish that Harriet would move to Lake Travis or Austin to be closer to them. Molly was amazed at how dependent he seemed to be on his sister. He asked for her advice constantly; he seemed to need her approval on everything, no matter how small.

  Molly had always believed he tried to get Harriet to move with them because he was worried about her being lonely in Lubbock, but really, she discovered, it was because he depended on her for everything and felt lost without her.

  There was one brief mention of having seen Parnell and Rose in Austin.

  She finished reading the stack she had and ran through the rain to get the rest of them.

  Finally, after nearly two hours, she arrived at May 1970. The last letter, dated May ninth, was the one she was looking for. She could have gone to it right away, but she didn’t. She’d felt the need to take the letters in order and work her way gradually to the end, to her father’s inevitable last letter.

  It was two pages long.

  May 9, 1970

  Dearest H,

&nbs
p; After our conversation last night, I was able to sleep, finally.

  Thank you. Thank you, dear sister, for taking this on. You have always been so good to me, but this is above and beyond everything. You are an angel. I will never ask you for anything else ever again.

  I really think it will be easier coming from you. And she’ll have a chance to calm down before I am likely to see her. And then there will be other people around, so she will have to behave and not be so melodramatic.

  The fourteenth will be perfect. She’s planning to be in Lubbock without Parnell because he is involved in the finance bill and she needs to see her mother. It will be the perfect time for you to tell her. If there is a perfect time for such a thing.

  About the wedding—Parnell will want to come, of course, but I wish they wouldn’t. Can you think of any way around that problem? I don’t trust her to hold up emotionally, she’s so fragile, and it’s just too awkward. If I said it was just family, maybe that would do it. But I’m afraid he’ll still insist on coming and that would be disaster. I don’t think she could make it through the ceremony. Do you have any ideas for me, big sister?

  Oh, Harriet, I’m so sorry for all this mess. I wish I’d listened to you back in high school when it all started, but I couldn’t help myself. She was so beautiful and I’m such a weak man. I know it’s been hard for you to understand how we could have kept the relationship going all these years. But you know how hard I tried to end it before and what happened then. But we’re older now, and wiser, I hope, so maybe she will take it in stride this time.

  The move has certainly helped, as I hoped it might; I’ve only seen her alone once since we came here, so the old pattern is already broken, which should make this a little easier to take.

  Tell her I will always love her as a dear friend, but she can see this new development makes it impossible for me to ever be alone with her again. We have been lucky all these years that Josephine and Parnell and Molly never found out about us, and so we never really hurt anyone with it.

  Thank you, sister mine, dearest Harriet, thank you. I owe you the world for taking this on.

  Call me when you have talked with her, will you? So I know it is done and can breathe easy. I’ve been so dreading it. It is the only thing that stands in the way of my great happiness with the soul mate I have finally found.

  I remain your little brother, repentant, and happier than ever.

  V

  Molly sat motionless with the letter in her hand.

  Her father and Rose Morrisey.

  For more than twenty years her father had carried on an affair with his best friend’s wife. It had started during high school before they were married; it had continued while they were married to other people, while her mother was still alive, while she was dying. And Aunt Harriet knew about it all along.

  He was asking Harriet to tell his lover he was finished with her, and she was going to do it for him. Her father was not just an adulterer; he was also a buck-passer who got his sister to do his dirty work.

  But as she thought about it, Molly saw that passing the buck had always been his style. Whenever she had been in need of disciplining or scolding, he had gotten Harriet to take it on, hadn’t he? It was always Aunt Harriet who undertook the unpleasant jobs, played the heavy. How could she have missed seeing that?

  And, my God, here was Parnell’s motive. He had always adored and treasured Rose. To find out about this could send anyone over the edge.

  Molly looked down at the letter in her hand. It was shaking as if in a strong wind.

  Parnell had paid Crocker to call the death a suicide.

  Parnell had had a powerful motive to want Vernon Cates dead.

  Her hand still shaking, Molly folded the letter and stuck it on the dashboard. She bundled up the rest of the letters and put them back in the file cabinet, carefully, exactly as Harriet had left them, keeping the archives intact as she had promised. She closed the door and replaced the lock. It would be a good while, she knew, before she ever came back here.

  She sat in the truck for a while, watching the rain fall on this godforsaken place, wondering what to do next. Now that she’d learned this, she was going to have to do something with it. She was going to have to confront Parnell and Rose. She’d come this far; there was no going back.

  She rested her forehead against the steering wheel. The whole world was tilting. Her daddy was not the man she had thought he was. Aunt Harriet was not the woman she had thought she was. Rose was nothing like what she appeared. And Parnell—what was he? A murderer? Suddenly there were no constants, nothing to depend on.

  The problem with learning a secret like this was that you could never unlearn it.

  THERE WERE ONCE TWO CATS OF KILKENNY.

  EACH THOUGHT THERE WAS ONE CAT TOO MANY;

  SO THEY FOUGHT AND THEY FIT,

  AND THEY SCRATCHED AND THEY BIT,

  TILL, EXCEPTING THEIR NAILS,

  AND THE TIPS OF THEIR TAILS.

  INSTEAD OF TWO CATS, THERE WEREN’T ANY.

  —MOTHER GOOSE

  Sarah Jane knows as soon as she hears the hissy male voices that the magic is over. She keeps her eyes closed tight so they will not know she is awake. They are talking in quiet, mean voices. “Tell him we got something he wants real bad,” one of them says, “and we’re willing to sell it. If he asks what we got, you just say this: ‘Mooooo!’ ”The voice wails at the end like a cow in great pain, and they all laugh.

  Alarmed, Sarah Jane lets her eyes open a slit, but the tiny hut is empty. The men must be just outside the door. It seems to be her fate to have to listen to men talking about things she doesn’t want to hear.

  “Now listen, Zippo,” says the voice, “if he ain’t at this number, you just keep on calling. He’ll come a-runnin’. He wants what we got, and he’ll pay, so don’t give up. You got that?”

  Suddenly the blanket covering the door is pushed aside and two men enter. They are bent over because the hut is so low. Sarah Jane squeezes her eyes shut, but not before she sees who the two men are: Squint and Roylee.

  She has fallen from the frying pan right into the fire. It is amazing how much trouble you can get into just by being alive.

  “So where the fuck is she?”

  Sarah Jane feels spittle and hot stinking breath on her face. She lies very still.

  “You’re not sleeping, you old bum-cunt. Where’d she go to?”

  A sudden sharp blow to her ribs makes her eyes fly open. Roylee’s there with a gun, and he’s about to hit her with it again. “Don’t!” she squeals, trying to roll away, but she is already pressed up against the wall.

  “Where is she?” Squint brings his face in close.

  “Who?” she wails. “Where’s who?”

  “The crazy nigger bitch that lives here,” says Squint. “Who do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah Jane cries. “I been sick!”

  Squint glares down at her, his tiny eyes like sparks under his jutting brows. Sarah Jane feels sure he can see better than he lets on. “Now you listen up, Cow Lady. I’m gonna teach you a real important lesson.”

  Sarah Jane wishes she were unconscious again, floating on her magic carpet, escaping this. It occurs to her that all her life she has been wishing to escape from whatever was happening, and that usually she has found a way. She is an escape artist, so maybe she can figure how to escape this.

  Squint says, “You got asked a question, cunt, and you gonna answer it.” He nudges Roylee, who puts the muzzle of the gun on her stomach and starts to press it down.

  Sarah Jane lets out a gasp.

  “Where did she go to?” Squint asks.

  “You just woke me up,” she says. “She’s gone. I don’t know where.”

  “She have a hot date, maybe?” Squint says, and Roylee laughs like a hyena. “No? Well, then maybe she went to church. It’s Sunday, ain’t it?”

  Sunday, Sarah Jane thinks. Good. There’s still time before Monday.

  “Give
the cunt some help, Roylee,” Squint says.

  Roylee shoves the gun into her gut so hard that Sarah Jane gags. She tries to talk but can’t catch her breath. She holds a hand up to get them to stop.

  “Oh,” says Squint, “Look, Roylee, she got the white flag up. She’s gonna answer our questions.” He puts his face even closer to Sarah Jane’s so she can smell the beer and rotting meat on his breath. “Now you gonna tell us where the nigger went. And I want to know how an old bum like you got so popular all of a sudden. What does that big Kraut want with you, Cow Lady? My eyesight is none too good.” He glances at Roylee. “Is she a total dog or what, Roylee?”

  “I seen worse,” Roylee says and then laughs like a maniac, “but I sure can’t recall when.”

  Squint takes the revolver from Roylee. He holds it against Sarah Jane’s temple. “Now you gonna tell Papa Squint all about it. When’s the nigger coming back? See, Roylee and me might need to plan a welcome home party for her to show we ain’t prejudiced. Right, Roylee?”

  Sarah Jane wishes she were brave enough to resist this, but she knows from past experience that she isn’t.

  CACKLE, CACKLE, MOTHER GOOSE,

  HAVE YOU ANY FEATHERS LOOSE?

  —MOTHER GOOSE

  As she walked in the door the phone was ringing. Usually she let the machine take it, but on an impulse she made a dash for it and answered before the fourth ring.

  “You are Missus Molly Cates?” The voice was high and lilting.

  “Yes?”

  “The Cow Lady say she need you to come to her please.”

  Molly braced herself against the counter. The police had been looking everywhere for Sarah Jane Hurley, and Molly was eager to talk to her too. She tried to keep her voice calm. “Where is she?”

  “She sick, got a fever.”

  “Who are you?”