Slow Heat in Heaven

by Sandra Brown

  When he had regained enough of his faculties to realize that she had come home, his ailing heart had swelled with gladness. But his heart attack hadn't erased his memory. When he recalled why she had gone away, all the bitter anguish returned. He couldn't forgive her.

  He thought it was odd that she kept coming to see him. Even though he never acknowledged that she was there, she faithfully visited him each day. He didn't want to admit it, but her visits were the brightest spots of his endless days for in this place there were no sunrises or sunsets. The hours were measured not by the position of the sun in the sky, which couldn't even be seen, but by the switching shifts of nurses and technicians. One could spend months in the hospital and never know the seasons had changed.

  Perhaps a season was too much to ask for, but he hoped he lived to see another sunset at Belle Terre. Jesus, he remembered the first sunset he'd viewed from the veranda like it was yesterday.

  He had been working for old man Laurent, the stingiest bastard ever to draw breath. The wages he had been earn­ing as a saw hand were paid out in scrip, which could only be used at the company store. The system stunk, but he had been grateful for the job.

  Macy Laurent had pulled up at the landing one day in a sleek red convertible. She epitomized forbidden fruit. With her blond hair and banana-yellow sundress, she looked ripe for the picking. But there might just as well have been a barbed wire fence around her since no one of Cotton's cali­ber could even get close to her. She didn't notice him any more than she noticed all the other loggers who ogled her while she weasled her daddy out of a crisp twenty-dollar bill, more than most of them earned in a week.

  Cotton credited fate with the flat tire that crippled Macy's red convertible a few days later. He'd been walk­ing to work from the boardinghouse he lived in—it was also company owned—when he spotted her on one of the back roads. She was wearing a swimming suit. Her legs rivaled Betty Grable's, and he'd been a big admirer of Miss Grable for years. He offered to change her tire. Even though he would be docked in pay for being late to work, he considered this good deed an investment.

  It paid off. Macy was impressed by his tall, brawny build and intrigued by his pale, almost white, hair. For changing her tire, she offered to pay him a dollar. He de­clined. So she invited him to her house for fresh peach ice cream that evening instead. He accepted.

  "Anytime after supper," she had said, giving him a wave as she sped off.

  Supper was at six o'clock at the boardinghouse. He didn't know that rich folks didn't eat until seven-thirty, so he arrived much too early. A massive black woman of in­determinate age—he was later amazed to discover that Veda Frances wasn't nearly as old as he had initially thought; her bearing was more indomitable than some of the sergeants he'd served under in combat in France— sternly told him to wait for Miss Macy on the veranda. He was given a glass of lemonade to quench the thirst he'd worked up on the long, dusty walk from town.

  Sipping from that tall, cool glass of lemonade, he had experienced his first sunset at Belle Terre. The colors had dazzled him. He had wanted to share it with Monique, but she was back in New Orleans where he had left her until he could send for her.

  Then Macy stepped out onto the veranda and spoke his name in a drawl that was as thick as honey and soft as a feather and he forgot all about Monique Boudreaux. Moni­que was as vibrant and vivid as a red rose. Macy was as sweet and subdued as a white orchid.

  Her skin was just about that translucent, too. He nearly burst with the protective, possessive instinct that seized him. She was so slightly built, so ethereal, that she barely disturbed the air as she moved to one of the fan-back wicker chairs and gestured him into the one beside it.

  The first time he kissed her, which came little more than a week later, he told her she tasted like honeysuckle. Her laughter tinkled like a tiny bell. She called him a foolish poet.

  The first time he touched her small, pointed breasts, she whimpered and told him that she felt faint and that if her daddy caught him at that, they'd have to get married.

  And Cotton said that was okay with him.

  News of their engagement rocked the town, of course. To placate their dainty as china, but stubborn as a mule, daughter, the Laurents allowed her to marry Cotton Cran­dall. To save face, they created a past for him that included a clan from Virginia. The fictitious family history was rife with calamity. Poor Cotton was the sole descendant of the unlucky bunch.

  He didn't care what the Laurents told their snooty friends about him. He was in love, with Macy, with Belle Terre. He didn't care that Macy's mother retired to her room in the evenings to keep from watching him desecrate the hallowed rooms of Belle Terre with his white trash mannerisms and rough language. When she died, he didn't moum her passing, nor that of his father-in-law only three months later.

  Like a well-greased piston, Cotton slipped into the man­agerial slot of the logging company. The first thing he ban­ished was the scrip system. He sold the company store and had the ratty boardinghouses condemned. When the board of directors unanimously disapproved his innovations, he solved that problem by disbanding the board.

  He promised the loggers that he would always put their interests first. They were wary but soon came to learn that

  Cotton Crandall was a man of his word. His promise was as long lasting as gold. The name on the company letter­head was changed as a sign of Cotton's sincerity and the dissolution of Laurent's autocracy. Considering the immen­sity of the changes in company policy, the transition was made smoothly.

  The same was not true in the mansion. Cotton discov­ered that his fair lady was accustomed to and fond of being pampered. To a man who had grown up believing in a strong work ethic, whose next meal depended on whether or not he did an honest day's work, her idleness was in­comprehensible.

  Equally as puzzling to him was Macy's aversion to sex. In that respect, she was as different from Monique as night to day. Of course Monique hadn't been a virgin. He had met her in a seedy nightclub in the French Quarter during the closing days of the war. The place had been crawling with soldiers and sailors, but she had picked him out.

  She flirted vivaciously; he offered to buy her a drink. He boasted his feats in battle; she'd acted suitably impressed. They made love that first night. Godamighty, she'd wrung him out. He had never met a woman with so generous an attitude toward sex. She loved fiercely but faithfully. From that first night Monique's bed was reserved for him.

  They had set up housekeeping in a rundown apartment house and hadn't spent a night apart until he had been forced to leave to look for work. By that time they had lived together for three years. The subject of marriage had never been broached. She didn't seem to expect or require it for her happiness.

  And in the back of Cotton's mind, he had known that something better was in store for him.

  He thought he had found it in Laurent Parish. The irony was that Macy hadn't been exaggerating when she told him his caresses made her faint. She almost fainted on their wedding night when he, after hours of unsuccessful per­suasion and coercion, forcibly consummated their mar­riage.

  While she wept, he remorsefully promised that the worst was over. But it never got better. No matter what he did, she never liked it. Intimate foreplay repulsed her. She re­fused to touch him "there" because it was so ugly and nasty. She either accepted him with scathing contempt or sacrificial stoicism. He distinctly remembered the day Macy cut him off completely.

  "Cotton?"

  "Hmm?"

  It had been raining, so he wasn't at the landing. His head had been bent over the ledgers on his desk in the study behind the stairs at Belle Terre.

  "Would you please look at me when I speak to you?"

  He raised his head. Macy was standing in the doorway. Her slender form was limned by the light in the hallway. "I'm sorry, darling. I was lost in thought." He laid down his pencil. "What is it?"

  "I moved your things today."

  "My things?"

  Nervously, she c
lasped her hands at her waist. "Out of the master suite and into the one across the hall."

  He never recalled a time in his life when he was angrier. "That'll cause you a helluva lot of trouble, my dear. Espe­cially since you'll have to move every single goddamn thing right back where it friggin' belongs."

  "I've asked you not to use profanity—"

  When he lunged out of his chair, it went rolling back­ward and crashed into the paneled wall. "What the hell are you trying to pull?"

  Her narrow chest rapidly rose and fell with indignation. "Mama and Daddy never shared a bedroom. Civilized peo­ple don't. The kind of. . . of. . . nightly rutting you're ac­customed to is—"

  "Fun." He stamped across the room and loomed over her. "Most people think it's fun."

  "Well I find it revolting."

  That cut him to the quick. He admitted that one of Macy's attractions had been her unattainability. That was probably most of his attraction, too. He'd been different from all the smooth-talking college boys who had courted her. It was the Cinderella story in reverse. He had thought he had scaled the walls of the castle and won the princess, but he hadn't. To her, he was still a redneck saw hand, uncouth and unprincipled—in a word, revolting.

  His ego wouldn't allow her to see how deeply she had wounded it. "What about children?" he asked coldly. "What about the dynasty we want to establish?"

  "I want to have babies, certainly."

  He lowered his face to within inches of hers. "Well, to have babies, Macy, you gotta fuck."

  He took perverse pleasure in watching her face drain of all color. She swayed as though he'd backhanded her. He had to admire the grit it took for her to stand her ground, though he wasn't surprised. One of her ancestors had been a Confederate hero.

  "I'll let you know the days each month when I'm fer­tile." Without a sound, without a rustle of her clothing, she left him.

  A few months later, he discovered the abandoned house on the bayou. He sent for Monique. To this day, he recalled that lusty afternoon when she arrived with her boy. It hadn't all been rosy. She'd pulled a knife on him and threatened to cut off his pecker when he broke the news that he was married. But he'd talked his way clear, and the fight had only heightened their passions.

  Naked as jaybirds and sleek as otters, they had loved away that afternoon in the sweltering upstairs bedroom. That was the last time he ever made love to her without using a rubber. All his seed had to be conserved for those periodic visitations he made into Macy's unresponsive, rigid, dry body.

  Cotton had never gone into Macy's bedroom without being invited. After they adopted the girls, he never went into it at all. He kept his word to Macy even after she died. Monique had lived according to the conditions he laid down the day of her arrival on Belle Terre.

  To the day she died, she had never complained about their arrangement. Each time he made the trip from the mansion to the house on the bayou, whatever time of day or night he arrived unexpectedly, she dropped whatever she was doing and gave him what he needed, whether it be a meal, a fight, sympathy, laughter, conversation, sex.

  Her curiosity about Macy never waned, but she wasn't jealous of her. Jealousy wouldn't have improved her situa­tion. It would have been a wasted emotion, and Monique poured all her emotion and energy into loving Cotton.

  Jesus, he had loved that woman.

  She'd been dead for almost four years, but the pain of her death was as keen as it had been when her smiling lips whispered his name for the last time and her fingers re­laxed their grip on his hand.

  Now, the guilty memory of her last smile squeezed tightly the fragile walls of his damaged heart.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  "Cash?" He stopped and turned. Schyler was poised in the doorway of the office. "Are you on your way home?"

  He squinted against the setting sun. "It's quitting time, isn't it?"

  "Yes, but if you can spare a minute, I'd like to talk to you."

  She thought he was going to ignore her because he turned his back and sauntered toward his pickup truck. He left it parked at the landing nearly every day and drove one of the company trailer rigs to wherever they were cutting.

  "Have you been cooped up inside that office all day?" he asked over his shoulder.

  "Yes."

  He leaned over the side of the truck and opened a cooler. He took an iced-down six-pack of beer out of it. "Come on. I'll treat you to a beer."

  "Where?"

  He looked at her long and hard. "Does it matter?"

  Schyler wouldn't back down from a challenge, no matter how subtly it was issued. "Just a sec." She went back in­side and turned off all but one light, then locked the office for the night before joining him beside the pickup. He had already downed one can of beer. He crushed the can in his fist and tossed it into the pickup's bed. It landed with a hollow, metallic clatter. He worked a can out of the plastic webbing for her and took another for himself before re­placing the six-pack in the cooler.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Over the river and through the woods."

  'To grandmother's house?" Laughing, Schyler fell into step beside him.

  "I never had a grandmother."

  Both her smile and her footsteps faltered. "Neither did I." He stopped in his tracks and gazed at her. "At least none I knew about," she said in an undertone. He began walking again. After a moment, she asked, "Why do you do that?"

  "What?"

  "Throw all your deprivations in my face."

  "To make you mad."

  "You admit it?"

  "Why not? It's true. I don't need a priest to confess my sins to."

  "You're a Catholic?"

  "My mother was."

  "And you?"

  "I can do without it. My mother's religion didn't do her any good, did it? I prized a rosary out of a dead soldier's hand in Nam. What good did prayers do him?"

  "How can you be so callous?"

  "Practice."

  They walked on, but Schyler wasn't ready to quit. "What about your mother's people?"

  "What about them?"

  "Where were they from?"

  'Terrebonne Parish, but I never met any of them that I remember."

  "Why?"

  "They kicked her out."

  Again Schyler stopped and faced him in the darkening twilight. "They kicked her out?"

  "Oui. Because of me. When my old man deserted us, her folks didn't want to have anything to do with us ei­ther."

  Not a trace of sadness was registered on his uncompro­misingly masculine features, but she knew that he must hurt. Somewhere deep down inside himself, Cash Bou­dreaux must feel the pain of rejection.

  They continued down the overgrown path that mean­dered through the woods. "Maybe that's why my real mother gave me up for adoption," she said. "Maybe her family threatened to disown her if she kept her illegitimate baby. Your mother must have loved you very much and wanted to keep you in spite of her family."

  "She did. But wanting to keep me sure as hell made life tough on her." He held aside a low dogwood branch for her. "There."

  He pointed toward the shallow and narrow tributary at the bottom of a slight decline. Trailing willow branches bent toward the water to tickle the knobby knees of cypress trees that poked out above the surface.

  "It's beautiful here," Schyler whispered. "And peaceful. The nearest town could be miles away."

  "Have a seat."

  She sat down on the boulder he indicated, close to the water's edge. Fragrant, yeasty vapor was belched out of the can of beer when she pulled the tab off. Foam spewed. She sipped it off the back of her hand. She drank from the can, then licked her lips. Cash was leaning against the trunk of a cypress, studying her. She looked up at Him and asked, "How do you find these places?"

  He gazed around. "I was as wild as an Indian when I was growing up. My favorite place to be was in the woods. I've tramped all over these bayous." He slid down the tree trunk until he was sitting on his haunches. He picked up a sti
ck and dug the tip into the soft mud at the water's edge.

  Bubbles popped up. When they burst, tiny holes were left. "Crawfish," he said.

  Schyler stared at him. This man intrigued her. He was an enigma, a study of contradictions. He was a diligent worker, but money wasn't his motivation. He didn't seem to mind living with scarcely any amenities. He neither scorned nor coveted material possessions but seemed genu­inely indifferent to them.

  "Did you ever think of doing something else, Cash?"

  He slurped his beer. "About what?"

  "With your life. I mean, didn't you ever have any ambi­tion to go somewhere else?"

  "Like where?"

  "I don't know," she said in exasperation. "Somewhere. Didn't you explore other career opportunities?"

  He shook his head. "I always wanted to work in the forest."

  "I know. You're excellent at your job. So you could have gotten work anywhere there is timber. Didn't you ever think of leaving Heaven?"

  He stared at the still surface of the water for a long time before answering. "I thought about it."

  "Then why didn't you go?"

  He finished his beer. "It just didn't work out."

  Dissatisfied with his answer, Schyler pressed. "What didn't work out? A promised job?"

  "No."

  "Then what?"

  "I couldn't leave." Impatiently, he rose to his feet.

  "Of course you could leave. What was holding you here?"

  He made several restless movements, then propped his hands on his hips and stared at his booted feet. He drew a deep breath and let it out. "My mother. I couldn't leave because of her."

  That was a more thorough answer than Schyler had hoped for, but it still didn't shed much light. She ran her fingertip around the top of the aluminum beer can. "And after she died? Why didn't you leave then?"

  He didn't answer her. She looked up expectantly. He was staring down at her. "I had promised her that I wouldn't." They stared at each other for so long that Schyler began to feel uncomfortable. Intuitively she knew that his reply implied something important, something that involved her, but she doubted she would ever know what it was. Cash Boudreaux was a mystery that would remain unsolved.