Leaving Eden

by Anne Leclaire

  Guitar music floated in from the kitchen. Daddy’d turned on the radio, and I was wondering if he was ever going to get going for the mill. I was desperate to pee. I was hungry, too, like I hadn’t seen food in days. Then I smelled the nutty, burnt smell of butter frying in the skillet and knew he was making pancakes. That’s how I remembered it was Sunday and he wouldn’t be heading off to the mill. I got up and stripped the stained sheet off the bed. I’d have to soak it in vinegar water later. I left the pillow slip on my pillow. It still smelled of Spy, his aftershave and sweat. Then I saw the rhinestone hair clip sitting on my dresser top. I picked it up and held it, the edges of the little stones digging in my palm. It was proof Spy’d really been there, as if I needed more beyond the stained sheet and my sore body. I took out Mama’s suitcase and put the clip inside, so I’d have it with me. It was all I had of Spy to take, all I had to remind me of our night, and I was glad for it. In the bathroom, it stung when I peed, a fleeting reminder.

  “Another hot one,” Daddy said in the kitchen. He smiled at me, and I caught my breath, but he didn’t notice anything after all. He told me the weatherman was predicting it’d go over a hundred. If the farmers lost the crops, it would hurt the mill. He said other things, too, but I wasn’t paying attention. Ronnie Milsap was on the radio. Later, I remembered that ’cause he was singing “Daydreams About Night Things,” and it seemed the perfect song for that morning. I wondered if somewhere Spy was listening to it, too. I hoped so. It was funny, the way I was calm thinking about him, not like the girls at school, who’d gather in the girls’ room and go on and on about some boy they’d gone parking with the night before. They’d carry on like it was some disaster, holding conferences about whether they would dare phone the boy if he didn’t call. Elizabeth Talmadge would be combing her hair and giving out advice, she who never in her life had to wait for any boy to call her. Ronnie Milsap stopped singing and a man came on with a bulletin, but I was still lost in a reverie of Spy. Daddy went over and turned up the volume and that was when I finally listened. “An arrest had been made in the murder of an Eden man,” the man said. “The son of prominent businessman George Reynolds has confessed to the fatal shooting.”

  He promised more news to come, but I didn’t—couldn’t— listen fully. I felt like a yard dog sideswiped by a truck, lying in a ditch too stunned to move or to rise and see if walking was a possibility. I must have made a sound, said something, ’cause Daddy said, “You know the boy?” Of course he knew I did. Everyone knew everyone in Eden. I nodded. The part of me that could think—the little part that seemed to be standing apart—wondered what my daddy’d say if he knew Spy had been in his house, in my bed. The other part wasn’t thinking, it was just saying over and over that it was all a mistake. Boys like Spy didn’t kill their daddies. They just didn’t.

  The pancakes stuck in my throat like sawdust, and after a while I gave up even trying to eat. In my bedroom, I buried my head in my pillow, inhaling Spy. He couldn’t have done it, I told myself. Couldn’t have done it. I cleaned up the sheet and pinned it on the line. I washed my skirt and top and hung those out, too.

  Finally I headed out. “I’ll be back,” I yelled, slipping away before he could ask where I was going. I rode the Raleigh straight downtown. It was a zoo there. I swear it was worse than right after Mr. Reynolds died. Reporters and cameramen were swarming the streets, taking over the diner and standing outside the courthouse, even though it was Sunday and the place was shut up tight. I headed for Wayland’s and ordered a cherry Coke. The reporters were talking a mile a minute and I listened hard, trying to sort fact from pure rumor and there was plenty of that, no surprise. Rumors were spreading through the place like spilt milk on linoleum. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they were saying. One reporter said Spy was a student at Washington and Lee, reporting it like gospel, and then another said, no, he was enrolled at Liberty University, a Bible student. It almost made me laugh. The only thing they all agreed on was that Spy’d confessed. They’d gotten that directly from Sheriff Craw. The sheriff said Spy’d even turned over the gun, case closed. The lady who was sure Spy went to Washington and Lee said she’d heard Spy was protecting his mama.

  “The son’s covering for the wife,” she said. She had a nasty, nasal voice.

  “No way,” said the man who’d made Spy a Bible student. He had greasy hair and a bad case of dandruff. “The boy did it. Open and closed.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the nasty lady. “I say it was the wife. She killed the husband and got the boy to take the rap.”

  “Didn’t happen,” the man said.

  “Motive,” the lady said flatly. “That’s why I think it’s the wife. What would the son’s motive be?”

  “Who knows,” the man said. “Probably drugs.”

  They acted like they were talking about people in a movie or something, and I hated them, even if hating was a sin.

  “My money’s still on the wife,” the lady said.

  “How much?” said the man.

  “Ten bucks.”

  “You’re on.” They actually bet on it, shaking hands and everything.

  You’re wrong, I wanted to shout. You’re stupid and you’re wrong and you have dandruff all over your shoulders. I didn’t care what the hell they said. Not one damn thing about it made sense. I recalled Spy’s hands on me, stroking my back, caressing every part of me. I tried to imagine those same hands pointing a gun at his daddy’s head, pulling the trigger. It seemed impossible. Even knowing he had a gun, even remembering the night up on the Blue Ridge when he’d fired it, I couldn’t believe Spy’d really shot his daddy.

  On the way out of the diner, I pretended to stumble and bumped the table where the stupid reporters sat, spilling their coffee.

  “Fuck,” the lady said right out loud, brushing furiously at her skirt with a handful of napkins.

  “Sorry,” I said in a perfect imitation of Elizabeth Talmadge, a tone that said I wasn’t sorry in the least. I didn’t just want to get away from Wayland’s, I wanted to run from Eden, too. I needed to escape and I didn’t think I could wait until Wednesday. You might think with all that was going on—Spy and me making love, his confessing to his father’s murder—all that would make me want to stick around, but in some way I couldn’t explain, it made me want to go more than ever. My chest felt tight, like I wasn’t getting enough air. It was like everything was closing down, like I could suddenly see my whole life playing out in front of me. If I didn’t escape, I’d go to the cosmetology school in Lynchburg and then work for Raylene and we wouldn’t talk about it but there’d be an understanding that someday I’d take the shop over from her, like she had from Lenora. Jeez, I’d probably end up marrying someone like Wiley Bettis.

  I thought about Mama heading to L.A. and Goody going all the way to Florida after my granddaddy died. In science class, Mr. Brown told us that genes determined the color hair you got and the color of your eyes and height and things like that. Everything, he said, was determined by genes. So I had to wonder if our family carried an Escape Gene and if so, was it a dominant gene, one that twisted our hearts into always wanting something more. Just as another family might have girls with curly hair, I wondered if the women in my family were born wanting to escape. Goody wanted to get away to Florida, and before that, she drove my granddaddy to becoming a doctor so she could avoid the life of a store clerk’s wife. Mama wanted to go to Hollywood and be a star so she could live the life she was truly fated to live. And I wanted to become famous, too, and flee a future that went no farther than cosmetology school in Lynchburg.

  Maybe it wasn’t exactly an Escape Gene we had. Maybe we had the chromosome for Wanting so that we were always desiring something more, confusing our lives by longing for something other than what life handed out. As Mama would say, we were capable of imagination, and imagination—the power to dream—could make you discontent. Mama said once we’re denied something, we want it even more, like the denying was what held the power
. For years I’d been wanting Spy Reynolds, but now that we’d made love—and I didn’t regret one moment of it—the terrible desire had eased.

  Still, I wanted to talk with him. I owed him that before I left. With my daddy off from the mill, I knew I couldn’t use the phone at home, so I headed over to the Cash Store. In the pay booth, I dropped in my dime and waited, expecting to get the machine with the “leave your number and name” message, but on the second ring, Mrs. Reynolds picked up. I wasn’t prepared, and she had to say hello twice before I managed to ask for Spy. “Who is calling?” she demanded. She said that in a precise way, three clipped and separate words, unlike her normal tone. I remembered how shrunken she’d seemed at the funeral, leaning on Spy, and what Rula’d said about her at Sarah’s funeral, grasping at hands and not letting go, talking of how her beautiful angel’d gone to heaven. Now her voice sounded as hard and shiny as a sheet of steel. Who is calling? I remembered what the reporter said about her being the one to kill Mr. Reynolds. For the first time I believed it could be true. Someone with a voice that’d cut through stone would be capable of anything. “It’s Tallie,” I said. “Tallie Brock.” I was hoping she’d remember me from when I used to swim with Sarah. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice brittle as baled hay. “Spaulding isn’t taking any calls.” She hung up before I could say more. For the moment, it calmed me, knowing he was at home, that at least he wasn’t sitting in the county jail.

  Daddy was asleep when I got home. He was sprawled on the sofa in the front room, TV blaring out some ballgame. There were empty beer cans on the floor. The dirty dishes were still on the kitchen table. Wednesday, I thought, I’m out of here on Wednesday.

  I put the dishes in the sink and was squirting detergent on them when the phone rang. I picked it right up, hands still wet, sure it was Spy.

  “Tallie?” Rula said.

  “Hi,” I said. Rula hadn’t called since school ended in June, and I couldn’t imagine why she was calling now. “What’s up?”

  “Have you heard? About Spy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was on the radio.” I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Isn’t it awful?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “God, it’s so creepy. It makes me sick to think about it.”

  “Me, too.”

  “My Daddy says it didn’t surprise him a bit. He never liked him.”

  “Your daddy didn’t like Spy?”

  “Jeez, Tallie. Where’re your brains? Mr. Reynolds. He didn’t like Mr. Reynolds.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I can’t stop thinking about poor Sarah. It’s soooo creepy.”

  “Rula,” I said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you said you knew.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “You don’t know about Sarah and her daddy?”

  “Shit, Rula,” I practically screamed. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Stop driving me crazy and just tell me.”

  According to Rula’s daddy, who worked nights mopping floors at the courthouse and county jail, Sheriff Craw’d been talking about Spy and how he’d shot his daddy.

  “They think he shot his daddy,” I said.

  “Oh,” Rula said, “he did it, no lie. He did it ’cause Sarah killed herself, just like some of the girls at school were always whispering. She drowned herself because her daddy’d been coming to her bed,” Rula said.

  Rula had that wrong. She had to. “But she was only eleven,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Rula said. “Don’t you want to puke just thinking about it?”

  I couldn’t even answer. My mind shut down. What I wanted to do was go back to when before Rula called, back to when I hadn’t heard anything, back to before the picture of Sarah and Mr. Reynolds took hold in my mind. Rula kept on talking. Spy had known about it, she said, and he hated his daddy for what he’d done to Sarah.

  I just couldn’t talk about it anymore.

  “You still there?” Rula asked.

  “I’m here.”

  “ ’Cause there’s more. Spy told the sheriff that their mama’d known, too.”

  “Mrs. Reynolds knew about it?”

  “According to Spy. But then Mrs. Reynolds told the sheriff it was all a bunch of lies. Every bit of it. She said she didn’t know why Spy had killed his daddy or why he was making up all those terrible lies. She said he was clearly disturbed but he was her son and she’d see he got the best counsel money could buy. And that was all my daddy heard,” Rula said, finally out of breath.

  The black place in my chest hurt so, I thought I might be having a heart attack. “Gotta go,” I told Rula. She’d be mad I hung up like that, but I couldn’t help it.

  I had to sit quiet-like for a while, until the stone sitting in my chest eased a bit. The ballgame was blaring in the living room and beneath the sound, I heard the soft snoring of my daddy. I thought back to when I used to wish Mr. Reynolds was my daddy, and I came as close to crying as I had since my mama got sick. My daddy was weak, no question, but he was a good man. He wasn’t rich and he didn’t wear fancy suits, but he’d loved my mama as much as it was possible to love someone and that was his strength and his weakness. Mr. Reynolds had a weakness, one I could hardly bear thinking on, but his wasn’t born of any strength. His was pure evil, and just then sitting there thinking of my little friend Sarah, I was glad Spy’d shot his daddy. I wished he’d shot his mama, too.

  Tallie’s Book

  Vinegar water washes out bloodstains.

  Don’t believe everything you hear.

  There are two kinds of weakness: one born of evil and one born of good.

  nineteen

  As soon as Daddy left for the mill on Monday, I set out for Martha Lee’s. I figured it would take me about an hour to bike over to Lynchburg and of course I had to stop by Martha Lee’s on the way. The only hitch in the plan—the huge hitch— would be if Martha Lee was home, preventing me from taking the money. The whole idea that I was turning into a major league thief made me such a wreck, I practically got in an accident turning onto the main road. As I passed the Tyree place, the sisters were on the porch. They lifted their hands to wave as I went by and I wondered if later they’d tell anyone they remembered seeing me ride by. I figured Martha Lee’d call Sheriff Craw when she discovered the missing cash and he’d go snooping around. I was hoping he’d think some tramp broke in. Or that it was someone needing money for drugs, like the reporters thought when Mr. Reynolds got shot. The idea of an official investigation got me so riled, I almost got in another accident turning onto High Tower Road. By the time I got to Martha Lee’s and saw the pickup was gone, I honestly didn’t know whether I was relieved or not.

  I found the key and let myself in. She’d fried up some bacon for breakfast, and the greasy smell hung thick in the air, making me queasy. One thing about Martha Lee, she loved pork. All kinds. Bacon. Ham steak. Pork barbecued or roasted, even sliced cold, which I personally couldn’t stand ’cause of the way the fat coated your mouth. One time when she and Mama were playing gin rummy she said, “I’m so hungry I could crawl up a pig’s ass and eat a pork sandwich,” which made Goody slap down her magazine and stamp out of the room. Martha Lee was always saying things like that in front of Goody just to get her goat. The time she said she was sweating like a whore in church, Goody near turned purple.

  The gray envelope from the bank was on the kitchen shelf, right where I’d last seen it. Taking it was harder than I’d imagined. It was one thing to steal fifteen dollars and another to take a thousand. I briefly reconsidered, thinking maybe I’d call Uncle Grayson. Hadn’t Mama said I could always count on him? I just wasn’t sure I could count on him for that much money without him insisting on an explanation. Plus, even if he gave to it me, I’d have to wait at least a week for the money to arrive from Atlanta. My choices seemed clear. I could take the money from Martha Lee and pick up
my ticket for L.A. or I could leave it where it was and head back home, probably staying in Eden for the rest of my natural life. Finally I convinced myself it was just a loan I was taking and I had full intentions of paying it back.

  That wad of money heated up my pocket all the way to Lynchburg. Still, none of it seemed real until the lady at the counter handed me the ticket. That was when it hit that I was actually going to L.A. The lady explained that the flight had two connections—one in D.C. and one in Denver—and was scheduled to depart at nine-forty, Wednesday morning. Then she told me I should plan on arriving an hour before my flight and that I’d need some identification—driver’s license or birth certificate or something—to show at the gate before they’d let me on the plane.

  “No problem,” I said, as natural as you please, like I flew to L.A. every day of the week.

  On my way back to Eden I stopped at the dollar store and bought myself a pocketbook. I still had six hundred and forty-three dollars of Martha Lee’s money and I didn’t want to risk losing it. I figured I’d be needing every penny when I arrived in Hollywood.

  The rest of the day hung heavy, and I was riding by the Eden library when I was struck by an idea straight out of the blue. I parked the Raleigh, marched straight in, and asked old Mrs. Boles if they had the yearbooks from Eden High.

  “Yearbooks?” she said, squinting at me through glasses thick as half-inch plywood. She was so old, I swear she must have been librarian back when Easter Davis was a child. “That’d be the Resources Room,” she said. “You’ll find it over there, directly beyond the nonfiction department.” Then she pointed me off to this little section that was divided by one of those movable partitions, and it turned out that the “Resources Room” was really comprised of three long shelves. There were a bunch of telephone directories, one dictionary and a world atlas, a set of encyclopedias that was missing the second and seventh volumes, and The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Way off to the far end I caught sight of a bunch of yearbooks that I recognized by the blue and gold writing on the spine. To my immense disappointment, there were only the ones from the past five years. I headed back to the front desk.