Sweeter Than Tea

by Deborah Grace Staley

  Here in Freedom County, everything moved at a glacial pace. It had taken the Devil Oak in the center of Watson’s Creek 1500 years to grow 65 feet high, and it took about that long to get through the Way-Things-Have-Always-Been-Bureaucracy to get anything done. That was just one more reason why I needed to get out.

  In New York City, they had the Museum of Modern Art, countless art schools and galleries, and if I got nostalgic for mummies or ancient relics, I could find those at the Metropolitan Museum. I was certain they would have the lights back on in New York City a day or two after a storm at worst. In Watson’s Creek, we had the Resurrection Tavern and the Betting Board, and all the old relics would be laying odds whether it would be two days or a week from Tuesday before electricity flowed again.

  I fixed Mama a chicken sandwich and poured her a glass of sweet tea. After that, I settled her in the parlor with a fire, enough lighted candles to fill the pricket stand at the Episcopal Church, and an Agatha Christie mystery she had already read at least twenty times.

  “I’m going up to the attics for a few minutes,” I said, hoping she’d be asleep before she reached the end of Chapter Three. Reading always made her tired.

  Two dusty hours later, I had covered about fifteen miles of moth-eaten sofas with sheeting from the box we kept next to Grandma Dupree’s Easter china. I’d also checked stacks of molding, battered chests and bureaus for anything remotely valuable. Rocking back on my heels in front of a trunk of yellowing letters and old, stained petticoats, I contemplated the small haul of antique linens and silver-backed hairbrushes I had set aside to sell. I’d also found a horseshoe-shaped ladies writing desk that might bring a couple thousand dollars if I refinished it and drove it up to Charleston.

  What I really needed was something more portable and quick to turn around, but there was nothing left. About the only thing I hadn’t already raided—hadn’t been able to bring myself to raid in the three years since my daddy had drunk himself into a stupor down at the Resurrection and tragically insisted on driving home—was Grandpa Watson’s collection of first editions. I hated even to think about selling those. Trouble was, Mama refused to believe things were dire. Our setbacks, as she called them, were bound to turn around just as soon as the economy righted itself.

  “Interest rates will go back up, Ginnie Mae. Always do. You wait and see,” she would tell me. And no matter how many times I explained that it didn’t matter whether you were getting a quarter-percent or twenty-five percent, the interest on zero was still going to be the same.

  The only way anything got sold to pay the bills was if Mama didn’t know. Even searching the library was going to have to wait until after she went to bed.

  Back downstairs, I prepared her heart medicine and a pot of tea, hot this time and liberally soaked with brandy. The knocker on the front door sounded before I could take it in. Blowing out a breath of frustration, I answered to find Joe Beaufort standing on the step, muscled forearm braced above him on the jamb.

  Rain dripped off his new unfamiliar lawyer haircut and the same old Barbour jacket he’d worn since high school. “Came over to make sure you and your Mama are both all right,” he said. “Trees down all over the road, and the phone lines may be out a while yet. Cell towers are out, too.” He lowered his voice. “Is she driving you crazy?”

  “She’s just worried,” I answered quietly. “It isn’t too bad.” I stepped back to invite him in. “We have some limbs down, but it’s mostly shingles off the roof,” I said more loudly. “How’s everything in town? Your house? Your folks?”

  His teeth flashed white and strong in the candlelight. Wiping his feet on the mat, he said, “They’re both fine, and you know it would take more than a Category Two to do much damage to that old house. We have a few limbs down, but I’ll take care of those in the morning. Then I’ll come help you clean up, if you don’t need anything tonight.”

  My lips tightened, but I stretched them into a painful smile. His help was the last thing I wanted. The more I let Joe help, the more he would tie me up with invisible strings. The next thing I knew, I’d be bound so tight, I’d be walking down the church aisle and sending our children to school in the same building where Emmy Jenkins had made me pinky swear we were both getting out of Freedom County to see the world.

  Emmy had made it out. She had gone away to NYU and never came back. Even now she was living in New York eating real bagels for breakfast and pizza for dinner, and she had a spare room she was keeping warm for me. As long as I didn’t let myself get sucked into staying in Watson’s Creek forever.

  “I don’t need you,” I said to Joe, softening it as much as I could with a smile, “but it’s sweet of you to check on us. Can I get you a glass of tea or a cup of coffee? Something to eat? I made a roast chicken salad for Mama earlier. There’s plenty left.”

  “Does that mean you finally got that generator like I suggested?” Joe asked, his eyes warming up.

  “Not yet.” I leaned back against the wall and crossed my arms. “It just means I’ve got an old camp stove in the back of the pantry, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  He looked at me long and hard. Nothing had really changed between us. He’d come back, but I was still set on leaving. I didn’t know why he expected a little hurricane would have made a difference.

  “Well, all right then,” he said. “I’ll be back sometime after noon, I guess.”

  I watched him slide his long legs into the Mercedes he’d gotten as a high school graduation present before he went off to college and law school. He could have gone anywhere after that. Anywhere in the whole, wide world. Except maybe the Mercedes was another one of those invisible strings, tying him back to his daddy’s law practice and Beaufort Ridge, his family’s huge old albatross of a house. In its own way, that responsibility hung as heavily around Joe’s neck as Watson’s Landing did on mine.

  The headlights on the Mercedes bounced off the ruts in the drive and paused before turning left down the highway back toward town. I waved even though I knew Joe couldn’t see me. And then I shut the door.

  “Was that Joe Beaufort I heard?” Mama asked when I went in with the tea and medicine. “Why didn’t you invite him back? Lord knows I need someone to talk to. No one else in town has even bothered calling. We could have been dead out here.”

  “Well,” I said, “the phones are down, so that would explain it.”

  Mama rested her head back against the cushion. “Maybe a game of cards would help steady my poor nerves. I haven’t been this upset since the tragedy. This storm has about worn me out.”

  I sat through three distracted games of Rummy and another pot of brandy-laced tea before I got her off to bed. Then I snuck back down to the library and plopped into Grandpa Watson’s mahogany swivel chair, contemplating the desk drawer and trying to figure out where he might have hidden the key to the glass first edition cabinet.

  Twenty minutes later, I’d searched the whole room and was no closer to finding it. But it had to be somewhere.

  I started all over again with the Georgian desk, and this time I took everything out of the drawers and patted down the sides and tops and underneaths. Grandpa Watson had been a tricky old bastard, especially after Lula left. He learned his lesson the first time, apparently, and wasn’t about to leave anything valuable and portable lying around to provide Mama with the means or temptation to leave herself. Maybe that was also why he’d wasted every little bit that was left of what had once been the Watson fortune.

  Searching the left-hand bottom drawer of his desk, I heard a faint click. A small indentation on the side gave way when I pulled my fingers back, and the end of the drawer swung open revealing a hidden space.

  My breath caught on a wisp of hope. For a moment, I let my mind play with what might be inside. Stocks, bonds, jewelry, silver . . . Leaning forward, I probed inside. My fingers closed around the cold brass of a small
key, and I took an extra breath before I dared pull it out to look if it was even the right size to open the leaded glass cabinet in the center of the wall of bookshelves. It was, and I was so relieved I almost closed the drawer before checking to see if there was anything else.

  There was also a small packet of letters wrapped in string. The paper was brittle and yellowed. I slid the string off and removed a sheet of stationery from an envelope someone had already slit with a letter opener.

  “Dear Pru,” the letter began, in a flamboyant, sloping script. “I don’t know what to think since you haven’t answered any of my other letters. Either the old devil hasn’t let you see them, or you don’t want to hear from me. I can’t exactly blame you. I’m not certain I could forgive either, if I was still standing where you are. All I knew at the time was that if I didn’t get out, I was going to shrivel and die in that house, and if you had tried to talk me out of it, I wouldn’t have had the courage to leave. It doesn’t matter that corsets went out of style back when Grandma Dupree was a girl. In Watson’s Creek they are always going to be in fashion. A bird can’t spread its wings to fly if it can’t fill its lungs to breathe. Can you understand that at all? I hope you can. I flew, Sister, because I had to. As it happens, I didn’t get very far. There was an accident, and while I lay in bed recovering, I kept hoping all the platitudes about time healing all wounds might come true. I’m not done hoping yet, so don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel obligated either, but if you have any forgiveness in your heart, I would like to see you. The old man made it clear I will never be welcome back at Watson’s Landing. You’ll always have a place here with me, if you want it. Isn’t it odd how you only miss a place after someone tells you it’s off limits? Ever yours, Lula.”

  My hands shook as I read the letter. Tears blurred the handwriting, but I felt as if I knew Lula Watson from her words, as if I could have written them myself. My chest ached with the heartbreak of waiting for Pru, my mother, to write back, to say something, anything.

  Reading through the rest of the letters, I realized Grandpa Watson must never have let Mama see them, any of them. It didn’t surprise me, really. That was just the kind of sour, self-righteous, stubborn bastard Grandpa Watson had been. I knew he’d gone to his deathbed and never once said a word about these letters from Lula. As far as I knew, he had never spoken her name after the night she left.

  I swiveled in the chair and studied the portrait of Grandpa and his wife, Eugenia, hanging above the fireplace. Eugenia Mae Tatinall Watson, who I was named after, looked like she might have once had a spark of life in her, too, before Grandpa snuffed it out. I remembered the old man as a source of terror, his loud voice jumping out at me as I tiptoed down the hall to run out and play, asking had I completed my homework, had I practiced my piano, had I done my drawing, and had I done it right? Maybe he was the reason I painted my landscape in shades of blue, mixing realism with sweeping abstract curves and thick blots of paint instead of the careful, precise still-lifes Grandpa thought were suitable. As if dead pheasants and rabbits and bowls of moldering fruits and cheeses suited anything except a bad case of indigestion. Probably it was Grandpa Watson’s ghost that still clung to the dark, damp corners of the house and filled them with the stifling, claustrophobic sense of obligation.

  I wondered what had happened to Lula. Had the broken bird ever flown again? Turning over an envelope, I peered at the San Francisco address. Had clear across the country been far enough to fly? Had she been happy all these years? Was she even still alive?

  I wondered how different Mama’s life, Mama’s personality even, would have been if Lula had stayed in Watson’s Landing. Wondered if Mama might have ventured a little farther out of her shell if Lula hadn’t strayed quite so far.

  I went to sleep that night still wondering and woke up with thoughts of Lula running in my head. Why hadn’t she ever tried to get back in touch with Mama? Grandpa Watson had been dead almost fifteen years now. Did she even know that? Or had she stopped caring, stopped thinking about Mama and Watson’s Creek so long ago that it didn’t matter. If I left, and Mama told me she would never speak to me again—which she was likely to do—how long would it be before I stopped caring? Never probably.

  But the alternative was staying here, slowly selling pieces of the past to survive the present, something most of the rest of the South had given up on fifty or sixty years ago. If I stayed, I would spend the rest of my life working at the library and painting sweet, insipid murals for the Sunday school classes and backdrops for high school productions of Peter Pan, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and High School Musical.

  I wished I had Aunt Lula’s courage. Maybe I could borrow a little of it.

  When Joe came by that afternoon, I took advantage of his being around to keep an eye on Mama. I drove to Charleston with a first edition of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and, the jewel of Grandpa’s collection, a signed first of The Catcher in the Rye. That should have been good enough for a roof all by itself. With change left over to fix the crumbling chimney.

  The way to the shop on King Street had become so familiar, the car seemed to know the way all by itself. In the odd way storms can, the hurricane seemed to have passed Charleston by with a light brush of wind that only dropped branches and leaves on the streets and washed away the summer dirt from the houses. Inside, C. Birleigh’s & Co Fine Antiques looked the same as always. Hepplewhite sideboards rubbed elbows with Chippendale chairs and Sheraton dressing tables, all of them loaded down with Sheffield silver and crystal decanters.

  “Back again, Ginnie?” Shoulders stooped and footsteps brisk, Charles Birleigh strode around the corner in his customary blue oxford shirt and yellow bow tie to shake my hand, the top of his scalp gleaming in the brilliant light of the Czech crystal chandeliers hanging on display.

  “How are you, Charles? How is it an extra birthday actually made you younger?”

  His eyes twinkled behind his bifocals, and he stood a little straighter. “Now you know I haven’t aged a day since I turned eighty-five, young lady. Don’t intend to either.”

  “I brought you a very little something.” I handed him a small canvas wrapped in silver paper.

  “How many times have I told you, there’s no need to butter me up? For you, I’ll always give a good price.” But he smiled with pleasure as he took the package to the counter.

  My stomach twisted, and my palms started to sweat. I’d thought I was ready, but I hadn’t been.

  It took him too long to unwrap it. He stood even longer silently looking down at it. “Is this one of yours?” he asked me finally.

  Heat pricking my cheeks, I set down the parcel of first editions and carefully began to remove the multiple layers of plastic bags and wrappings. “Yes,” I said.

  “You know I can’t accept it,” he said, gently.

  The room blurred, and the floor seemed to wiggle under my feet as I stepped over to take the painting back.

  “It isn’t in my ordinary style at all, I’ll admit,” he continued. His voice was soft, and he raised my chin with his fingers so that I would look at him. “But it’s lovely. Truly amazing, really. With the indigo wash you’ve used over everything, the mood should be dark. Somehow you’ve captured hope in the blue of possibility.”

  Tears swelled in my chest and rose up to clog my throat. For the first time in what felt like years, I could almost breathe again. “Oh, I’m so relieved. And I want you to have it. Happy belated birthday.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’ll hang it here in the shop and point anyone who asks about it back to you. Then I can enjoy it for however many years I have left without feeling guilty for taking advantage of you.”

  “Speaking of which . . .” I pushed the two first editions toward him.

  He nudged his glasses up his nose and bent over. His eyes widened. Putting on a fresh set of surgical gloves from under t
he counter before picking it up, he examined the Salinger first. The slight flare of his nose and the miniscule, acquisitive tightening of his fingers on the book were the only signs of his excitement. He set the book down and picked up the other without saying a single word.

  “Regretfully,” he said, when he eventually put that down as well and turned back to face me, “I can’t take these either.” He held up a finger to stifle my protest as I grasped at the edge of the counter. “But I will pass them on to a friend at an auction house who can do a better job with them.”

  I closed my eyes and took a breath, uncurled my fingers. “How fast?”

  “How much do you need to get by?” he asked, taking my shaking hands in his own.

  “Enough for a deposit on a new roof.” I pushed the words past a tongue made awkward by guilt and pride and a hundred other emotions bred into my blood by generations of stubborn Watson ancestors. “On the condition that you’ll take a commission for passing them along.”

  “Done,” he said, and I got the impression as I left that he was happier with the transaction than I was. I’d been selling off pieces of Watson’s Landing so long that somehow he’d become a friend.

  I drove to the library with his check in my pocket, and I didn’t feel any better about that than I did about this next errand. Despite my lack of certainty though, even without the lack of Internet and electricity back in Watson’s Creek, it was best handled here in Charleston. At least here, every move I made wouldn’t be known and dissected over Sunday chicken and biscuits at half the houses on Harper Hill. The last thing I needed was any of it getting back to Mama.

  The one good part of searching for Lula, she wasn’t hard to find. No need to wade through four-hundred-and-eight thousand Google entries. Even in a city the size of San Francisco, there was only one Lula Elizabeth Lucas Watson.