Leaving Eden

by Anne Leclaire

  It lasted about a hundred hours. You wouldn’t believe a service could last that long, even for an important man like Mr. Reynolds. The preacher talked first, saying how this was not a sad occasion, but a celebration of a life and like that. Then Mrs. Duval sang again. Then the preacher read some passages from the Bible, the one about the mansion with many rooms. I think it’s a law or something that you have to read that at funerals. Then we all had to stand and sing from the hymnal. “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” All five verses. One would have been more than enough, as far as I was concerned. But that was only the beginning. Mr. Reynolds’s brother got up and stood at the pulpit and read some more from the Bible, and another man got up and said he knew Mr. Reynolds from working with him at the chamber and a finer man never was born and ours was not to reason why or question the will of God but to remember the good things about Mr. Reynolds and carry on his work. It sounded like he wanted people to send money to the chamber in memory of Mr. Reynolds. Then we had to sing another hymn, “Abide with Me,” which only had three verses, thank the Lord. Everyone was sweating, and my new skirt was getting all wrinkled from all the sitting and standing and sitting again. After a while I stopped listening to what was going on up front. I found if I moved a little to the left, crowding so close to Mrs. Purvis I was practically sitting on her lap, I could catch sight of the back of Spy. He didn’t move at all. Not once. Then I looked at the picture of Mr. Reynolds they’d printed in the program. Gone to clay. Just like Mama. And Sarah. And Granddaddy Adams. And the people on the train in that tunnel collapse in Lynchburg. And all the people in the Eden Cemetery. And in the black cemetery out by Elijah Baptist. And movie stars, like Natalie Wood. And all the people who had ever died anywhere in the world, since time began. And dogs, too. And birds. And butterflies. It didn’t seem like there was enough ground to hold all the dead, even with the dead people in India being burned. It made me wonder why the earth didn’t weep, just holding all those bones.

  When it was over, the preacher announced that Mrs. Reynolds had invited everyone back to the family’s home for libations. I couldn’t imagine how they expected to fit everyone in, but later Raylene told me they’d set up a tent and that caterers brought in all the way from Lynchburg did the food. I went directly home. I stripped off my new clothes and put on one of my daddy’s old shirts and sat on the glider, trying to figure out the puzzle of life. The summer she’d passed I heard Mama tell Martha Lee that life was short. “Even if you get the full measure of years, it’s brief,” she’d said. “Why don’t we know that? Why do we waste time?” Sitting on the glider, I thought about Mr. Reynolds and how he must have thought he was going to live to see Spy graduate and become a lawyer and take over the business. And Mama—what had she believed she’d live to see? And the people buried beneath a tunnel in Lynchburg? What would they do different if they had the chance? “Regret,” Mama’d said to Martha Lee, “regret is a pitiful thing, and I don’t know which is worse, regret for what you’ve done or remorse for all the things you never got to do.” “You can’t live life backwards,” Martha Lee’d told her. “Best we can do is go forward, doing what makes sense at the time.”

  I thought they were both right. Then and there, still holding the memory of Mr. Reynolds’s funeral and Mama’s words about regret being a pitiful thing, I decided to move forward. You might not believe this, but I marched straight to the phone and dialed the Lynchburg airport. When she asked, I told the lady my departure was Wednesday. That would give me enough time to get prepared. And I wanted to go to the Kurl one more time. I wanted to say good-bye, even if Raylene didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I believed a person should always say her good-byes when she had a chance. Just in case. The reservations lady said if I wasn’t charging the ticket on a card, I’d have to pick it up within twenty-four hours, and I told her no problem. I knew where I’d get the money, and it didn’t seem wrong. Not one bit. Life was so short, you had to grab what you wanted. You had to move forward. I started packing that night. I didn’t have much to take. My stuff didn’t begin to fill Mama’s gray suitcase. I had just the clothes Martha Lee had bought me, my Glamour Day photos, my rule book, Mama’s red sweater and her Hollywood scrapbook. I put in the postcards she’d sent me, too, and the envelope I’d taken from Martha Lee with the mystifying pictures of Mama and the paper with the address and phone number of Sasha, whoever she was. I’d tried to call the number Mama’d put down but had just gotten a recording telling me that number had been disconnected at the party’s request. Then I’d called the information operator, but she’d said the only listing they had for a Sasha Upton on Mississippi Street was unlisted. I figured I’d just have to look her up when I got there.

  The other thing I planned to do when I arrived in L.A. was to go see all the places Mama’d written about: the sidewalk with the handprints of the stars; the Hollywood sign the actress had jumped off; Paramount Studios. I figured I’d go to the studio since someone there might remember Mama and that would help me get started. Then, in the back of my rule book, I copied my Uncle Grayson’s number. And Goody’s number in Florida, too, in case I had a real emergency, though I’d have to be close to dead to call her. I was finishing up when I heard my daddy’s truck pull in.

  I shoved the suitcase back in the closet and listened while he came up the steps. No stumbling or falling. Still, I held my breath. You could have knocked me over with a sneeze when he stopped at my door. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi.” I wondered if somehow he could tell my plans, if my face revealed my thoughts.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How was the funeral?”

  “Crowded,” I said. “And hot.” It was weird, talking to him like this, and it made me about crazy with wondering what was wrong.

  “I’ll bet,” he said. “No telling how long this dry spell will last.” He came in my room and sat down on the foot of my bed. He’d had a few, I could smell the beer, but he wasn’t drunk.

  “They had to set up extra chairs,” I said.

  He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Guess he was an important man,” he said. My daddy never spoke ill of anyone, even Goody; in that way he was like Mama, but the funny way he stressed important told me he hadn’t liked Mr. Reynolds.

  “There was a bagpipe,” I told him.

  He looked up, surprised. “A piper?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing like a pipe,” he said. “They can crack a grown man’s heart in half.”

  “I know,” I said. “It kind of hurt to listen.”

  “I knew a man once who played. Friend of my daddy’s. Your Granddaddy Brock.”

  “Really?” My daddy never talked about his mama and daddy, who’d died before I was born.

  “You know, he played the fiddle.”

  “Who?” It was weird, having a real conversation like normal people, but nice, too. It reminded me of when he’d take me to the mill and explain about the different grains, real patient, even when I couldn’t tell the difference. “Who played the fiddle?”

  “Your granddaddy. He could make a cat dance just with the pleasure of hearing him play.” He stood up. “It’s getting late. Best you be getting some sleep.”

  I didn’t want him to go.

  At the door, he looked directly at me. “You’re getting tall, girl,” he said, and shook his head like he was trying to remember something.

  I looked over toward the closet where I’d hid Mama’s suitcase. Up to then I hadn’t given a thought as to how it would be to leave my daddy. It seemed he’d pretty much forgotten I existed. It was peculiar him coming in that way, suddenly behaving like a father, acting like he liked me, now that I was preparing to leave. It made me sad, like the music of the pipes. But if I was going to be having regrets, I’d rather they be ’cause I’d gone rather than ’cause I’d stayed.

  I was dreaming of my Granddaddy Brock, at least I guess it was him. He looked a little like
my daddy, but he was old and he was playing a fiddle and there was a cat dancing a jig. It was dressed in a little suit, like this picture I had in a book when I was a little girl. Someone was calling my granddaddy and whistling for him and they kept it up and I was sorry because I didn’t want him to stop the music. Then I woke up. There was a sound at the window, the old willow I thought, and turned over, wondering if I could settle back in the dream of my granddaddy, like sometimes you can if you don’t wake too much, but the noise came again. It wasn’t the willow, it was someone scratching at the screen and whispering my name.

  I held still, barely breathing.

  “Tallie? It’s me. Spy.”

  “Spy?” It was a night for big surprises. First my daddy, coming home and talking to me regular-like, then Spy showing up at my window. “What’re you doing here?” I whispered back.

  “Can you come out?”

  “Now?” I was wearing nothing but my daddy’s old shirt.

  “Yeah.”

  “In a sec,” I said.

  “I’ll wait,” he said. “On the porch.”

  I brushed my hair and put on the clothes I’d worn to the funeral. It seemed like a million years ago I’d sat in the church and heard the bagpipes and squeezed next to Mrs. Purvis so I could get a better look at Spy.

  When I went outside, he was sitting on the glider. I looked around but the Camaro wasn’t in the drive or anywhere as far as I could see. “How’d you get here?”

  “Walked.”

  “You walked? From your house?”

  “Yeah,” he said, like it was normal to walk five miles in the middle of the night and scratch at someone’s screen until you woke someone you hadn’t seen in days and who you’d acted like you never wanted to see again as long as you lived.

  “I was there today,” I told him. “At the funeral, I mean.”

  “A Dreck Girl production,” he said, his voice tight and mean.

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I shut up. I was filled with a million questions, but I didn’t ask one. I figured if he came all this way, he must have something on his mind and I’d let him tell me in his own fashion.

  We sat on the glider and stared out into the night. Whatever brought him to my window, he wasn’t in any hurry to get around to it. I was real conscious of him sitting so close, and it was a mixed-up feeling, sort of comfortable, like we were friends, but nervous, too, with that electric feeling he always caused in my stomach. I wondered if he could hear my heart beating. Fireflies flickered over the grass. I told him what my mama’d said, about them being a kind of beetle and how beetles signified change. Sitting next to him in the dark, I was seized by a feeling I couldn’t name and I told him a secret I hadn’t told anyone. Not Rula or Martha Lee or Goody. I told him about burying the Queen of Cures that Allie Rucker had given me. But that wasn’t the real secret. The real secret was something close to a miracle, ’cause there was no other explanation for how it had occurred. The real secret was that the spring after Mama died, in the exact spot I’d buried that mess of seeds and bark Allie called a Cure, in that exact spot, a butterfly bush appeared. I’m not making that up. Honestly. In the exact same spot. I thought Spy might laugh or think I was making it up, but he didn’t.

  “You miss your mama?” he asked.

  “Every day,” I said. “I guess you’ll be missing your daddy, too.”

  He didn’t answer, just stared out at the dark. I wished there was a moon, something to give a little light on his face, something so I could get a hint of what he was thinking.

  Then he turned and put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me to him. The electric feeling shot straight through me, so strong that, if I’d been a lamp, I would have lit up like neon. Then he kissed me and there was hunger near desperation in that kiss and it roused something answering in me, something I hadn’t even known was there, but that had been building all day, starting with the bagpipe music and the knowledge that everyone died, even me someday. He kissed me long and deep and it was nowhere near enough. The feelings ran so fierce, I thought it must mean we were made for each other.

  Of course, now I know that being around death always makes you hunger for life, makes you reach for it however and wherever you can find it, but that night I thought it was magic reserved for us. He pushed me back on the glider and I welcomed the weight of him, welcomed the astonishing hardness of him, knowing what it was and that it came from wanting me. When he slipped his hand beneath me, I shifted my hips to make it easy. My body rose to meet his in a rhythm that flowed as natural as the water in a stream.

  He pulled back and looked down at me. “Is your daddy home?” he whispered.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Can we go in?” he said. “Your bed?”

  I didn’t hesitate one instant. I figured before it was my time to pass, I’d be answering for plenty of regrets and I’d have my share of sorrows, but that night I didn’t think there was one thing about being with Spy that I could live long enough to regret. Not if I lived to be twice as old as Easter Davis.

  Tallie’s Book

  Always say good-bye when you have the chance.

  Regret is a pitiful thing.

  Being around death makes you hunger for life.

  Magical things rise up out of unlikely beginnings.

  A boy who looks like a pirate can have a choir singer’s soul.

  eighteen

  In the morning, Spy was gone and for one moment, before I fully woke, I truly believed that everything had been a dream, that his coming to me had no more happened than my Granddaddy Brock’d played a fiddle and a cat dressed in green velvet had danced a jig.

  But dreams didn’t leave your body aching and sore, or the smell of a man on your skin. For sure dreams didn’t leave blood on your sheets. Proof I was no longer a virgin, which was supposed to be some big deal or something. Truth was, I was happy to be done with it. I mean, virgin sounded stupid. Like a disease you needed to get over. Spy had been my cure.

  My daddy was in the kitchen, whistling and making coffee. I was absolutely not ready to face him and I decided to stay right where I was until he left for the mill. I believed that all that had occurred in the night must show clear on my face, show as openly as a birthmark, like one of those port-wine stains Willie Purvis had, so dark, it made you avert your gaze.

  While I was waiting for Daddy to leave, I replayed the night from the beginning, running it through my mind like a Technicolor movie, starting from the instant when I woke to Spy calling at my window. I saw myself get out of bed, unpack my new skirt and shirt from Mama’s gray suitcase, then slip out to the porch. I saw Spy and me sitting on the glider, listening to the cicadas, watching the signals of fireflies. I remember telling him the secret of the butterfly bush. And I recalled that first hungry kiss, which just remembering made my belly heat up. I remembered how right it felt. All of it. I thought of how I’d led Spy inside, to my room, my bed.

  In the clear light of morning, it seemed impossible— crazy—that we’d have used my bed, that we’d head there without the least concern or fear that my daddy’d wake and find us. There was only the urgent need. Nothing else. My daddy could have been sitting in the front room with a shotgun laid ’cross his lap and it wouldn’t have prevented me from bringing Spy to my bed. I was pure amazed to find myself capable of such desire. That’s what I remembered most, the deep, insistent desire and the fiery need to meet it. Spy’d undressed me. (My skirt and shirt were still pooled on the floor, exactly where he’d dropped them.) I remembered the sharp, quick sound of his breath— nearly a sob—when his fingers touched my skin, my breasts and belly, and then his whispered Jesus. I’d started to undress him, too, but I was too slow. He was faster with the buttons and belt and zipper. I’d longed for a moon, even a crescent, so there’d be light. In the shadows, our fingers had become our eyes. I recalled the electric jolt when skin touched skin, our bodies sweat-soaked from desire as much as heavy summer heat. I remembered the salty taste of kisses, and t
he way our bodies moved, without thought, in natural rhythm, like they’d been made for just that. Exactly that. And maybe they had. More than walking or working or playing or praying, maybe that was what we’d been born for. I’d made cat noises, little moans I didn’t even know I was making till Spy’d whispered in my ear Shhhh, Shhhh, Shhhhh, but I was beyond caution. Then his hand over my lips, gently muting my cries. Urgency drove us, drove me, so that nothing could stop me, not even the shock of that first cutting pain when he, grown harder than you’d imagine possible, entered me, and our bodies carried us forward, soaked and slippery with sweat.

  I remembered Spy holding me and then I must have fallen off to sleep. I woke to someone’s touch and I’d believed it was my mama. Oh, the pure joy of it. Of knowing she was there, holding me, rocking me, stroking me, telling me how sweet I was. I was so happy to have her back, so joyful her passing had only been a wicked dream. Then I woke fully and saw it was Spy, not Mama, and I felt a confusion of sorrow and joy. We kissed again, slower and more deliberate at first, with me still filled with the waking grief of knowing Mama was truly gone. I’d felt an answering heartache in Spy, as surely as if he’d spoken it aloud, and I believed he was thinking of his daddy. And of Sarah. It was like we were taking all the sorrow we’d ever borne and were pouring it into each other, trying to make something else of it. Something good. There was more I half recalled, not trusting memory. Had I licked tears from Spy’s cheeks? Had he really wept? Or was it sweat? Or had I dreamed that, too, like Granddaddy and the cat?