Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  Molly leaned out of the truck to dump the undrunk half of her coffee in the gutter. How would it be possible to talk about Samuel Mordecai without it being stressful to the woman who’d raised him? she wondered.

  At ten exactly she rang Dorothy Huff’s doorbell. The gaunt, gray-haired woman who answered the door started speaking immediately, with no greeting or preamble. “Since you’ve drove all the way from Austin, I’m gonna try to get through this, but I don’t know. I just don’t rightly know if I’m up to it.” Her words were directed several feet to the left of where Molly was standing. “Some days is worse than others.” She turned and shuffled in her brown carpet slippers across the sparsely furnished living room. “The knees is just as bad as the sacroiliac today. I knowed from when I first opened my eyes before the sun come up and the pain started in so horrible I tell ya most people couldn’t take it. I never should’ve gotten out of that bed. Anyone in their right mind, sick as I am, would’ve just laid there. But then the good Lord knows not everyone does their Christian duty in this world. I told that poor Mrs. Bassett I wanted to help her and she asked me to talk to you, so talk I will. I never been one to baby myself. Never had that luxury. No, ma’am. Always had too much work to get done, keeping a clean and Christian household.” She stopped near a bulky gold velveteen recliner that faced a television set with a 35-inch screen. “Oh, there it is, hitting me bad—the arthritis, in both knees. Ow, Jesus. All this stress”—she waved a hand in Molly’s direction—“makes it worse’n usual.” She dropped into the recliner with a ploof sound. “Might as well take the load off, huh, Mrs. …”

  “Cates,” Molly said. “Molly Cates.” The stench of stale smoke and old cigarette butts, only slightly masked by Lysol spray, filled her nostrils, but when Molly glanced around there was no sign of an ashtray or a cigarette pack, or even a lighter. A secret smoker. “Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. Huff. I sure am sorry to hear you’re feeling poorly.”

  “Well, it’s not like that’s your headline news. Been going on a long time now, long as I can remember. But in this life you just have to take what the good Lord shovels onto you. Nothing for it but to grin and bear it.” To demonstrate her fortitude, she grinned in Molly’s direction. Then she relaxed in the chair and her thin lips snapped back to a pursed, sour position.

  Molly fought off a sudden impulse to run to her truck and drive away. Everything about this house and this woman made her want to bolt. But Dorothy Huff, however unappealing, was surely going through hell. Molly had recently read an article by the father of a serial killer. He had written that when you’re a parent, you think the worst thing in the world is to get a call in the middle of the night saying that your child has been murdered by a madman. He had learned, to his everlasting anguish, that there was something even worse. Samuel Mordecai’s grandmother, the woman who had reared him, must be experiencing some of that now.

  Molly looked around for a place to sit. The only option was a hard-looking brown vinyl sofa pushed against the wall. She sat on the end and said with total sincerity, “This sure must be a difficult time for you.”

  For the first time, Mrs. Huff looked directly at Molly. Her thin, horsey face was scored with cruel ruts that all slanted downward. “Well, honey, you just don’t know what difficult is. You raise up a boy best you can, teach him to be a good Christian God-fearing boy, and then something like this happens and people say behind your back, well, it must be that Dorothy Huff didn’t raise him up right for him to go and do a thing like that.” Her mouth tightened up so hard that her lips whitened. “Even though the boy is no blood kin of yours, and you never asked to get saddled with him.”

  “Mrs. Huff,” Molly said, “I think most parents who have children over the age of ten understand that anything can happen when you are raising a child. There are so many influences that are outside your control.”

  The old woman’s mouth relaxed a fraction. “Well, ain’t that the truth?”

  “It was so kind of you to call Thelma Bassett, Mrs. Huff. It meant a lot to her. She’s a fine woman and she needs some help right now. She thinks she might get a chance to talk to … Donnie Ray. You still call him Donnie Ray?”

  Mrs. Huff nodded. “When I call him anything.”

  “She wants to know what she might say to him that would persuade him to release the children. She thinks that maybe his being adopted might figure some way in this situation.”

  Dorothy Huff looked hard at Molly. “Before this goes any farther, we need to get something real clear. You know I don’t talk to no newspaper or TV people or none of that kind.”

  “Yes, you told me on the phone. And I appreciate your—”

  “Hold on, missy.” She raised a bony, yellowed palm to Molly. “Just hold on with all your appreciates and such. Let’s get one thing clear. You promised not to talk of this to anyone but Mrs. Bassett. I mean to no one. You clear on that?”

  Molly felt bruised by the woman’s bullying manner. “Yes, if that’s what you want.”

  Dorothy Huff slapped her hands down hard on the arms of her chair. “If that’s what I want? It’s not a matter of wanting, missy. You break that promise and I’m dead, Mrs. Cates. And you, too, most likely.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you put in the newspaper I said any of this, and I’m deader than Saturday’s meat loaf.”

  Molly felt the force of the woman’s certainty and her fear. “Who would kill you?”

  “I thought you knew something about cults, Mrs. Writer Woman.”

  “I know something about them,” Molly said.

  “Then you should know that this group Donnie Ray’s got hisself involved in don’t cotton to people talking about their business. Ain’t you wondered why there are no ex-members coming forward to tell about the group?”

  Molly felt a flush of heat. She had indeed wondered about it. Two years ago when she was writing the cult article, she had searched for former Hearth Jezreelites who would talk about Samuel Mordecai and what really went on behind the fences at Jezreel. She had gotten one or two leads, but never found a willing talker at the end of those leads. And the FBI intelligence gatherers were having the same problem now.

  “Like Annette.” The old woman shook her head. “You think she’d ever say word one about what life was like there or why she run off?”

  “Annette? You mean Donnie Ray’s wife—Annette Grimes?”

  “Who else? Pretty little Annette.”

  “She isn’t inside the compound?” Molly was stunned.

  “Nope. She was smart. Run off while she could. Months ago. Sent me a postcard saying goodbye and thanking me for being nice to her. I was nice to her, too, always liked Annette. Too good for Donnie Ray, if you ask me.”

  “Where is Annette now?”

  Dorothy Huff gave a snort that might have been an incipient laugh. “Who knows? She’s no dummy. I suppose the Sword Hand of God might have tracked her and she’s dead now.”

  “Sword Hand of God? Is that what he calls cult members on the outside?”

  “Yes. They don’t want to have all their eggs in one basket.”

  “Where are they, Mrs. Huff, and what do they do?”

  “They’re all over, probably some back in Austin where you come from. Probably some around here. They work outside and send their paychecks home to Jezreel. The main thing they do is make sure that members who get fed up and leave never talk about it.” She took her index finger and slashed it across her throat.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I used to visit Donnie Ray and Annette at Jezreel. Back before it got to be too much for me. I heard talk.”

  “Why did Annette leave?”

  “She just said she had to go and could never get in touch with me again, and she hoped I’d understand. And I do. I hope you do, too, Mrs. Cates.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Huff, I do. Nothing you tell me will go beyond me and Mrs. Bassett. I promise.”

  Dorothy Huff relaxed her head back onto the chair. “Well,
all right, then.”

  “Is it true that Donnie Ray was adopted by your daughter?” Molly asked.

  “Sure is. Just like I told poor Mrs. Bassett when I phoned her up.”

  “I’m wondering why you didn’t tell anyone this before.”

  “Oh, mercy. Evelyn—that’s my daughter—back then she didn’t want people to know she couldn’t have a baby on her own. Made her feel less womanly, I guess. So she went away to Austin and come back in a coupla months with this baby and claimed she had him there. I just went along with her story and it got to be a habit, I guess. We never talked about it, and no one asked.”

  “You didn’t tell the FBI when they came to see you?”

  “No, ma’am. Never thought about it.”

  “Is Thelma the first person you’ve told?”

  “I guess so. What happened was I saw her on the TV set, so sweet and alone, and I had this vision I should call her and explain it all. So I did. Like you say, anything can happen with children growing up nowadays and particularly when you really don’t know where they come from, I mean where they got their blood from. They could come from any sort of trash heap or even from the criminal class, and I just wanted her to know that Donnie Ray wasn’t really my own kin.”

  “Yes, I see. Evelyn adopted him in Austin?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “She was married at the time, wasn’t she?”

  “Well, sure. Back then, weren’t no adoption by unmarried people like happens now with preverts and all them trash kind of people adopting these innocent little babies. Isn’t that just a crime, Mrs. Cates, them homosexuals adopting babies?” The woman stopped and looked at Molly, raising her eyebrows and tipping her chin up expectantly. Molly kept her face neutral and waited it out.

  Mrs. Huff went on: “No, back then you had to be married and go for interviews and have some religious background. Evelyn was married to Jimmy Grimes.” A grimace of disgust twisted her face. “That man was worthless. Him and Evelyn dropped the burden on me without so much as a by-your-leave. You see, they found it was work. Raising up children is work. You’re all the time spooning food into them and cleaning it up as it mucks out of them. You have to put the fear of God almighty into them to keep them on a righteous path. Yes, ma’am, you have to teach them right from wrong, clean from unclean—all them things. It is righteous work, for sure.”

  For the first time since she had met Samuel Mordecai, Molly felt a pang of pity for him, or, rather, for Donnie Ray Grimes, the little boy who had had no choice but to depend on this woman. She had just a glimmer why someone would grow up longing for the world to end in fire and catastrophe. “So Donnie Ray lived with you from then on?”

  Dorothy Huff let her head drop back on the chair, as if the subject were too heavy to support. “Yes, ma’am. Never lived a day with his mama after that. And Donnie always said, ‘I want to stay right here with you, Gramma. This is my home. You take such good care of me, Gramma. Don’t let my mother have me.’ Well, no danger of that. She never asked for him, not once, never wanted him. He lived here with me in this house until he got to be seventeen and then he run off on me. Hardly said goodbye, never finished grade school, even, never held a real job, left all his junk here.”

  “His father—Jimmy Grimes—he’s been dead for some years, hasn’t he?”

  “Oh, a long time. He got himself killed shortly after he run off.” She stuck out her lower lip as if that helped her to remember. “Got drunk and run his truck off the road. It was God’s judgment. Jimmy Grimes pulled it down on hisself with both hands. Sure did. He ruined my daughter, never did live up to a obligation in all his life, that man.”

  “And your daughter? Evelyn?” Molly had read that Evelyn Huff Grimes had turned to prostitution and died of a drug overdose.

  The woman sighed. “Well. Evelyn. She stayed out there in that Las Vegas. Never wrote or called, not on my birthday or Donnie Ray’s neither. She … she got sick and died. Twelve years ago. You knew that, I reckon.”

  Molly nodded. “I read it. Did Donnie see much of her before she died?”

  “Only once in all them years. He went out there to see her one time.”

  “To Las Vegas? When was that?”

  “About four months before she died. When he was twenty-one. Just before he started in on all that preaching and apocalypsing business. I told him not to go, but he upped and hitched out there and he come back changed, I can tell you that—full of fury, brimstone. Had him a vision, he said, and God told him to change his name to Sam-u-el Mor-de-cai. And ever since then he’s been apocalypsing and doing all them cult things you read about in the newspaper.”

  “It sounds like you don’t hold with Donnie Ray’s beliefs, Mrs. Huff.”

  “I’m a good Christian woman. I believe every precious word the Bible says. I believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the wicked, but the Bible says no one can know the hour or the day, not even Donnie Ray Grimes, who now says he’s Sam-u-el Mor-de-cai, thank you very much. My preacher says the boy don’t hold to the Bible, he goes too far into his own imaginings—always did. His religion is more Donnie Ray Grimes than our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  “What advice can you give Mrs. Bassett? How can she make an appeal to him?”

  Dorothy Huff shrugged. “Don’t matter what she says. He don’t listen, anyways.”

  “Mrs. Huff, what can you tell me about the adoption?”

  The woman put a hand up to her cheek as if she’d just been slapped. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, do you know who his birth parents are? I’d like to locate them. I think it might be helpful.”

  “Birth parents?” She repeated it as if she were trying to figure out the meaning. “Oh, his real folks, you mean. No. I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “Do you know where Evelyn adopted him?”

  “I already told you. She went off to Austin.”

  “Yes, but where in Austin? Did she mention the name of an agency? Or was it maybe a private adoption from a lawyer?”

  Dorothy Huff’s bony hands tightened on the arms of the chair, as if it were about to be launched into space and she needed to hold on for dear life. The veins in the backs of her hands stuck out like black worms. “She never told me nothing about that. I guess she figured I was good enough to raise up this child but not to know where he come from. When I asked to know what sort of people he come from, she said nobody knowed.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody.”

  “But somebody would know,” Molly said, thinking aloud. “The agency, or wherever she adopted him from, might not tell her, but they would know where he came from.”

  “She said he was abandoned.”

  “Abandoned?” Molly felt the stirring of interest like an electric buzz in her chest.

  “That’s what she said.”

  Molly was almost afraid to ask the next question because if the answer was no, then this could be a dead end. “Are there some papers about the adoption somewhere?”

  Mrs. Huff set her mouth into its determined downward arc. “Papers. Haven’t thought about those since Donnie Ray asked me the last time.” She looked down at the threadbare blue rug.

  Molly waited. But the woman kept her eyes downcast until Molly couldn’t stand it anymore. “Are there some papers, Mrs. Huff? With dates and names? Something that might help us?”

  She looked up and Molly was surprised to see tears in her faded blue eyes. “Mrs. Bassett said you’d be nice and kindly and not ask me hurtful things. This is all so hard to remember.”

  Molly leaned forward, following her instinct to close in tight to extract information. She did not like inflicting pain, but if she needed to, she would walk over this woman’s body with hobnailed boots to find out what she needed to know. “Mrs. Huff, the last thing I want to do here is hurt you with my questions, but this might really help us help those children. Do you have any papers here that relate to Donnie Ray’s adoption?”

  Mrs. Huf
f crossed her arms over her bony chest. “Well, I might have.”

  Molly decided to back off and approach from a different direction. “You said Donnie had asked about the papers. Did he search?”

  The grooves running from Dorothy Huff’s nose to her downturned mouth deepened into valleys of bitterness. “Did he? He come to me when he was seventeen and he was getting all puffed up and big for his britches, you know the way they do, and he said he wanted to find out where he come from and would I help him. I was against it. For his own good, Mrs. Cates. For his own good. I knew for sure it would lead noplace. And even if he did find something out, it would just be trash he’d find.” She let out a huge sigh. “It sure beats me why you’d go to all that trouble to find someone who didn’t never want you in the first place. I told him so. And I told him it sure did hurt me bad that he wanted to find some other family, that I wasn’t good enough for him.”

  Molly said, “It seems to be a pretty common thing among people who are adopted—wanting to make some connection with birth parents.”

  “I reckon. I never seen him that het up. He wanted to find his mother in the worst way. Upset him bad when it happened just like I told him and he couldn’t find nothing out.”