Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

The figure in the near distance did not seem to notice her. He was leaning against the rock, hands in his pockets, facing 90 degrees away from her, toward the lush land now owned by Annabelle and Blue. She was marginally aware of the low, mechanical hum of traffic from the interstate.

  He sat like that for at least 5 minutes, neither he nor Georgia moving.

  Then, he eased up to his full height and turned toward her as if he’d known she was there all along. The light was almost gone, but she was sure she could see him smile. He might or might not have motioned to her.

  Georgia croaked his name out, once, and the figure moved slowly behind the rock. The only sound, other than the distant traffic, was a beagle barking in the next field.

  She moved a few steps closer but could not work up the courage to go farther and retrieve the sunglasses.

  She knew the posture, the shy grin, even the shirt and overalls.

  She called his name again, and when there was no answer, she turned and walked fast, chilled to the bone now, forcing herself not to run.

  “You’re still cold,” Kenny says. “I probably ought to get you some coffee, something warm. Want a blanket?”

  Georgia shakes her head.

  “What is it? Did something scare you?”

  She takes another sip of beer.

  “Kenny, do you ever see anything—anybody—out there at the rock? I mean, just standing there?”

  He gets up and walks halfway across the room, his back to her, then turns around.

  “You know what they say about it, Georgia?”

  She shakes her head.

  “They say that you can see just about anything you want to see out there. At least 10 times a year, people, almost all Lumbees, will come here—usually they ask me first—and spend the night out there by the rock. You saw where the grass was worn down around it? That’s from the people spreading out on blankets and waiting out the night, thinking they’ll see their ancestors.”

  Georgia puts down the beer.

  “And do they?”

  “See their ancestors? Some say they do. Some say they didn’t see anything. And there’s always kids around here, raising Cain, sneaking down there and trying to scare folks who are already half-sure they’re going to see a ghost.”

  “How about you? You live here all the time. Have you ever seen one?”

  “Ghosts? Nah, not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “Well, there was one time. It’s been at least 4 years ago. I was out trying to get one of my dogs back. I turn ’em loose to run rabbits, and sometimes they decide they’d rather run half the night than eat. Then, they come back here about midnight, sit under my window, and howl until I feed ’em.

  “Anyhow, this one night, I was walking out there, between the rock and your family’s old graveyard, the one where your daddy’s buried, whistling for the dogs. And I saw a man—I’m sure it was a man, kind of old and slow-moving, walking away from the rock, away from me. I called out to him. He looked back, and then—and this was the strange part—despite the fact that he seemed kind of old and creaky, he somehow put distance between me and him. The last I saw of him, he was headed toward the woods over on Blue’s land.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know, Georgia. I don’t even know if I saw anybody or not. It was almost dark, and I’d had a few beers after work. I was not what you would call a reliable witness.”

  “Did he look like anybody you knew?”

  “It was too far to tell.”

  Georgia refuses another beer, and Kenny sees her to the door.

  “Sure you won’t stay and talk? I can rent a movie or something.”

  “Rent a movie? On a Friday night?” Georgia laughs. “Maybe I did get some bad information about you.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” he tells her as she walks down the front steps.

  She laughs, but after Kenny closes the door, she feels the goose bumps. They run up her arms to the back of her neck, up to her scalp. They don’t go away until she is back inside her late father’s house, breathing hard.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  October 31

  Georgia removes the hymnal from its rack and thumbs her way to No. 47, “Sweet Hour of Prayer.”

  The last few years in Montclair, she never went to church, except sometimes on Christmas or Easter, and then just for the pageantry and nostalgia. She and Jeff had taken Justin. They had even been moderately, disinterestedly involved themselves—drafted into the choir, or helping to coach a youth basketball team.

  All that changed with the divorce. It was all up to Georgia after that, and she just didn’t have will or faith enough to keep going.

  She went to Geddie Presbyterian for homecoming two weeks ago because she thought she might see old friends, back visiting from some other city, shamed there by aging parents. There were a couple, but none of the ones she really wanted to see. Mostly, there were older people she had never really known that well, the ones who would come up and say, “I’ll bet you don’t remember me.”

  The morning of Halloween, though, brings a strange craving to go back. Getting to the 11 o’clock service is no problem; she’s been awake since 4:30.

  The monkey has been riding her harder than ever the last two nights. She retrieved her sunglasses yesterday morning, and there were no footprints she could discern other than hers and Kenny’s, but there had been a brief shower Friday night.

  She knows she stands an almost 100 percent chance of seeing Forsythia Crumpler if she goes to church, and that’s part of the pull, she supposes. One more chance.

  Justin and Leeza rise at last and come downstairs at 9. Georgia asks them without any expectations if they’d like to come with her, and after they surprise her by saying yes, she wonders what all the church ladies are thinking about Leeza’s little coming attraction. It doesn’t bother her that much that her first grandchild’s parents are not married. But what about the congregation of Geddie Presbyterian Church? She can’t ask Justin and Leeza to lie. And the ones at the funeral probably know, anyhow. Finally, she realizes that her stock can’t fall much lower among her father’s old friends and neighbors, and that she is a hypocrite for worrying about it in the first place.

  Justin’s idea of church wear is a blue shirt and leather jacket, no tie. His Top-Siders look as if they won’t last out the fall. Leeza has on a loose-fitting everyday dress that accentuates her pregnancy. Georgia chose the one item she brought along in her hurried packing that fits her idea of church clothes, a jewel-necked, rust-colored Ann Taylor dress with long sleeves, almost new.

  “Believe it or not,” she tells them, “this is what people used to wear when they went to church.”

  “Back in the day,” Justin says, laughing.

  Geddie Presbyterian sits on the south side of Old Geddie Road, a graying piece of asphalt that long ago was the main road to Port Campbell. The church is equidistant from East Geddie and the mostly black community of Old Geddie. The two towns, and Geddie itself, to their north, inch closer together every year but stubbornly resist merging.

  Now, there are houses on both sides of the brick church, mostly black on the west side, mostly white on the east. A cluster of more expensive homes, aimed at city people yearning for two acres of land and 2,500 square feet for under $150,000, as long as they don’t mind putting in their own wells and septic tanks and hauling their own garbage to the dump, winds around back of Old Geddie.

  Any new blood that has infiltrated the area has either flowed to the Baptist church near the center of town or to the AME Zion church half a mile to the west. Georgia counts 36 worshipers this Sunday morning, including the three visitors. At least 25 are past retirement age. Of those, only two are men.

  Well, she thinks, you don’t have to live on pork fat for the wives to outlive the husbands. Happens everywhere.

  The choir is the saddest thing of all. When Georgia was a girl, there were a dozen members, and most of them were competent. Her fa
ther sang bass, and five other men, all with voices that filled the old church, were also regulars. Her mother was usually among the women, harmonizing well, a team player. The choir would rehearse on Wednesday nights, and there was a certain amount of jollity, even horseplay, involved, something not easy to sustain in a country Presbyterian church. She heard the story many times of how her parents had their first date after a choir practice.

  What stands before her now, moving turbidly through “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” is something else entirely. There are four of them, and three were choir members when Georgia was in high school. Alberta Horne and Minnie McCauley are both nearly 80, stooped over so much that they seem in danger of tumbling down into the pulpit, where Reverend Weeks sits looking off into space as if willing himself somewhere else, perhaps in a church with two full choirs and an organ instead of a barely tuned piano. The only man, Murphy Lee Roslin, is older than either of the women. His voice is weak and reedy, and he has to hold the hymnal so close that his face is obscured.

  The one younger woman is the minister’s wife, referred to by all, even the women more than twice her age, as Mrs. Weeks. Her voice is the best by far, but it has no connection with the other three. She seems to be trying to drown them out.

  When the tithes and offerings are collected, by two deacons who are father and son, Georgia fishes around in her purse for something suitable. The father, waiting patiently at the end of the aisle, mouths “Thank you” and winks when she puts in a 10-dollar bill.

  The sermon itself is mercifully short. Afterward, some of the church members come over to speak. She tells Alberta Horne how much she enjoyed the choir, and the old woman blushes. She compliments Reverend Weeks on his sermon.

  No one is paying very much attention to Justin and Leeza, but no one is shunning her son or his pregnant girlfriend, either.

  Georgia tries to make her way toward Forsythia Crumpler but is intercepted twice by older people wanting, it seems, just to squeeze her hand and tell her how pleased they are that she came again.

  Justin and Leeza stay close to her. As they are all heading out the door, a woman Georgia doesn’t remember, with snow-white hair and bright blue eyes, asks Leeza how long they’ve been married.

  Georgia, in spite of herself, feels a little sorry for the girl.

  “Ah,” Leeza says, “actually, we’re not married yet.” She smiles and shrugs. There seems to Georgia to be a sudden stillness.

  But the white-haired woman is not fazed.

  “Well,” she says, patting Leeza’s full front, “you’ve still got a little time.”

  The woman totters off, and another, at least as old, and no more than 5 feet tall, reaches up and pats Leeza on the back. “Don’t pay her no mind,” she says. “You get married if you want to. My grandson, him and his girlfriend didn’t get married, and they got the cutest little baby you ever seen. I wouldn’t take nothing for him.”

  “Jesus,” Justin says, and chuckles. Georgia shushes him, and they slip away.

  She sees her old teacher getting into a car three down from Justin’s.

  “Wait here a minute,” she says.

  “Mrs. Crumpler?”

  The woman turns toward her.

  “Do you think … I mean, would it be all right if I came by your house sometime? I wanted to talk to you.”

  Forsythia Crumpler shrugs.

  “I’m usually there.”

  The older woman looks at her for a second, then turns to get into her car.

  After a roast-beef dinner, Leeza and Justin offer to do the dishes. Georgia thanks them and goes back to her bedroom to change. She wonders if getting a dishwasher would make the house more attractive.

  There is a mantel across from her bed, above what once was a working fireplace. On the mantel is the old clock that goes back at least as far as her grandparents. She never bothered to take it with her to Montclair after her father died, and neither set of thieves bothered to steal it, perhaps because it hasn’t worked for years. The last tenants did not even use this room, and Georgia appreciated the fact that Justin had it cleaned and ready for her when she arrived. Someday soon, she promises herself, she’ll take the old clock to a shop in Raleigh and have it repaired.

  Tunes get in her head and won’t leave. Her mind seems to be completely indiscriminate. It could be a jingle on TV advertising toilet paper, or it could be Mozart on public radio—just whatever gets there first.

  Today, the tenant is “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” She isn’t conscious of having heard the hymn in the last 20 years, and perhaps she never really listened to the lyrics, just mouthed them impatiently when she was young, waiting for the final stanza to end.

  Now the old hymn won’t leave her alone: “In seasons of distress and grief,/ my soul has often found relief,/ and oft escaped the tempter’s snare/ by thy return, sweet hour of prayer.”

  Seasons of distress and grief. Well, she thinks, been there. Not since her mother’s death and the breakup of her marriage in the same year, followed by her father’s passing the next August, has she experienced such a season of distress and grief as has visited her in the last year of the century.

  She supposes her tempter is the thing that whispers in her ear in the darkness, telling her to abandon all hope. Her monkey is a persuasive little beast. You’ve lost another husband, it says. You’re going through the change. Most of what you loved is gone. It won’t get better. You’re probably losing your mind, too. Why fight it? Do a swan dive into your grief.

  She envies anyone who can chase all that away with an hour of prayer. She remembers praying, as a little girl, and even then not being able completely to suspend the disbelief she could never admit to her parents.

  The last time she tried it was on the frantic trip back to East Geddie that summer, after they had gotten home and learned that her father was in the hospital, near death.

  She thinks she must have been delirious, because she let Justin, who had only barely gotten his license, drive part of the way. She sat there, in the passenger seat, closed her eyes and silently asked God to spare Littlejohn McCain’s life. She was apologetic about having the gall to ask for anything after so long an absence, and she could not make herself really believe Anyone was listening. She wondered, after they got to the hospital and learned from a dispassionate nurse that he was gone, if more faith could have saved him.

  The monkey talks to her about that, too. Faith and acts, it says. You’re not much on either one, are you?

  CHAPTER SIX

  After Phil died, I soldiered on through the rest of the spring semester.

  I was handling it well enough, I assured myself, even if I did sleep in our old bed only once in three months, preferring instead to curl up on the big leather couch, wrapped in the wool blanket we’d bought on our trip to Scotland. The couch was where he and I would half-sit, half-lie, and read or watch television. I would sink back into his big, comfortable body, and his sure, wonderful hands would caress my hair, massage the back of my head, rub all the knots out of my neck, and sometimes slip smoothly down my blouse and stroke me until his intentions were hard to hide, and we would adjourn to the bedroom or the floor. Fifty-one years old and borne away by lust for my husband. You never appreciate your own luck sometimes until it’s too late.

  For weeks afterward, I could smell him, or thought I could, when I buried my face into the couch’s wrinkled leather. I’d leave the television on like a night-light, waking sometimes at odd hours in the middle of an infomercial or a movie so bad I’d have to check the listings later to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it.

  True, I was losing my temper more than before. There seemed to be no penalty attached. Everybody was either too kind or just plain afraid to deal with the bereaved widow. My graduate students in particular gave me a very wide berth.

  I should have been thrilled when Justin asked if he and Leeza could move into the big house in early June, about the time summer school was starting. They had been living with her parents, in a three-bedroom
Cape Cod on 15th Street, and Leeza still had a younger brother in high school. We’re talking five people, 1,600 square feet.

  Truthfully, though, I was afraid. Didn’t want company; didn’t want to be alone. What a bitch.

  As usual, I taught one summer school course, on short stories from The New Yorker. I loved that course and had taught it for eight years, in the fall and again in summer.

  This time, though, I found I was tired beyond redemption of all the fine-boned, delicate stories I’d always enjoyed. Somehow, I got through, and then it was vacation time.

  I turned down two offers from friends to spend a week with them at the beach. I was afraid to let myself be in a place where enjoyment was expected, where not smiling would have been ill-mannered.

  By the Fourth of July, Justin and Leeza were giving me a lot of space. She was selling cosmetics at the mall, and he was doing manual labor, working with a construction crew building houses. I would mention to him occasionally how unbefitting this was for a summa cum laude graduate from the University of Virginia.

  “I’ve got plenty of time, Mom,” he would tell me, and it reminded me of the way he used to put off homework.

  And what to make of Leeza? She is a pretty girl, I’ll grant you. Beautiful hair the color of a new penny, the kind most girls are trying to get from a bottle, eyes full of fun, bubbly personality, loves dogs and cats. She’s probably great at selling lipstick and eye shadow. She certainly knows how to use it.

  Maybe we would have gotten along better if she had more than a high school diploma and some random courses at Montclair, which was more college than the rest of the Calloways could boast, granted. Maybe if she hadn’t had that unjustifiably confident Attitude of the Young, exuding certainty that her ideas and beliefs had to be superior to those of old hags like me.

  Maybe, if Justin hadn’t told me she was two months pregnant right after they moved in.

  “What are you going to do about it?” I’d asked him.

  “Do?”

  “Yes, do.”

  “Like get married? Or what?”