Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  It was June of 1966, and everything was thriving. There had been enough rain but not too much, and early summer had been mild by North Carolina standards. He drove them over the fields, through dirt lanes crisscrossing the land, waving and occasionally chatting with the men and women working there. He stopped the truck beneath a lone shade tree, a sycamore, beside the creek.

  “Listen,” Littlejohn McCain had said to his daughter, after they had sat there for several seconds. “Just listen.”

  Georgia listened, and then shrugged and looked at her father.

  “What?”

  He seemed genuinely disappointed that she couldn’t hear it, too.

  “If you sit real still,” he said, “you can hear things growing. I don’t know what it is exactly, but there’s a hum almost, underneath everything else, like the land is alive.”

  Georgia was only wishing by this time that the truck had a radio, and air conditioning. They were starting to attract mosquitoes and gnats.

  She really did try to listen, though. She wanted to at least humor her father, whom she loved but who represented The Farm and thus must be escaped.

  But she couldn’t hear it, and she told him so.

  “I reckon you hear it or you don’t,” he’d said, speaking softly and looking across in the eastern distance to the Blue Sandhills. “It ain’t possible to make somebody hear something if their ears can’t pick it up.”

  They sat quietly for a few more minutes, hardly talking at all. After what seemed like a decent interval, she asked if they could go back to the house, that the bugs were eating her up.

  He started the old truck.

  When they returned, and before she could escape the great outdoors, he put his big, freckled right hand over her small, tan left one.

  “I know this isn’t what you want,” he said. “It’s probably good you’re going off to school and all. Some people’s got a life for themselves that’s somewhere else altogether, and they’ve got to go find it. I was lucky, I reckon. I didn’t have to move.

  “You’re going to do just fine, whatever you do. But I want you to know, if things ever get tough, and sometimes they can, you’ve always got you a home, right here. Don’t forget that.”

  She said she wouldn’t, and she was moved to kiss his stubbly cheek. He already seemed so old to her, just turned 60, and this was his benediction. He’d hardly ever said so many words to her at one time. He tended to hoard them for special occasions.

  She understands now, and has for a painful while, what he meant about tough times, how they come to everyone. She’s always been proud, though, that she never did come limping back home, no matter what. She’s here now, she assures herself and everyone else, to sell the farm and get the hell out.

  So why does her son, so removed from all this, seem somehow drawn back to a world he only experienced peripherally, for one brief, needy summer?

  Maybe, she thinks, it skips a generation.

  Maybe East Geddie is just another foreign culture to absorb.

  Maybe, he just wants to drive me crazy.

  When you were down in Guatemala, she wants to ask him if the time is ever right, and you were helping those farmers keep the rats out of their grain, did you ever hear things growing?

  She’d like to know.

  The three of them, with Leeza opening doors and helping as much as she can, get the dresser moved into an unused back room. Georgia invites Kenny to stay for dinner, but he says he can’t, that he has to go somewhere.

  “I’m sure,” Georgia says with a smirk. He shakes his head, almost smiling.

  To Georgia’s relief, Leeza does decide that beef Wellington might be too ambitious, and she does let Georgia show her a tried-and-true recipe for roast beef that involves little more than opening a can of mushroom soup and slicing an onion.

  While they wait for the roast to cook, Georgia suggests that they play Scrabble. She and Justin have always enjoyed it and are well-matched rivals. Leeza has played with them on a couple of occasions, but not well. It will do her good, Georgia thinks, to be challenged, to expand her mind with something besides television and poorly written thrillers.

  Justin is lukewarm to her suggestion, and Leeza seems chilly to the idea.

  “Come on,” Georgia pleads. “Just a quick game. We’re not playing for money or anything.”

  “Just blood,” Leeza says, and then laughs nervously when Georgia looks at her.

  Justin and Leeza finally consent, and Georgia retrieves the faded set she found in the attic her first week down, the same one she and her mother once used. Littlejohn would play, too, on occasion, but he’d been illiterate for the first half of his life, and despite his late-quenched thirst for knowledge, he never was more than token opposition.

  She and her mother did play for blood, Georgia has to admit, challenging questionable words, sending each other to the dictionary, sometimes outright arguing about the legitimacy of a word, dictionary be damned.

  But she and Justin don’t play that way. At least, she doesn’t think they do.

  Georgia has to start peeling and mashing the potatoes 20 minutes before the roast is done, and she will admit later to herself that she does chafe a little when Leeza takes so much time to come up with what often turns out to be a depressingly simple word.

  There are only a few letters left to be uncovered when Leeza’s turn comes around. Georgia, poker-faced, is trying not to look at the bottom middle triple-word space. She is trailing Justin by only 10 points, and he’s just given her an unexpected chance at salvation by putting “bush” horizontally in such a position that the “u” is two letters above the triple word and one below a double-letter space. Q-U-I-T. Sixty-nine points, and dump the Q to boot. Game, set, match.

  She has already won, in her head, when Leeza puts the S and the E beneath the U. “Use,” she says, smiling apologetically. “Nine points. Sorry, that’s all I can do.”

  “Well,” Georgia says, feeling her face flush, “it’s enough. Enough to keep me from using this damn Q. Well, that’s it for me. You all finish up. I’ve got to fix those mashed potatoes.”

  She knows she’s being childish, and she knows she’s put a damper on what was a pleasant interlude with her son and the mother of her grandchild, but she can’t help it.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Leeza says, but Georgia wonders.

  She can’t resist scratching the forbidden itch.

  “You know, Leeza,” she says, “if you’ve got a S, you can do so many things. You can get, what, 22 points by putting one of the end of this word here, even if you don’t make up another word. Or you can get probably even more over here. Just think.”

  “I am thinking,” Leeza says, and Georgia sees that she has bullied the girl nearly to tears. “But I never played this damn game until you and Justin showed me how.”

  “I’m sorry,” Georgia says. She truly is, but it’s a case, she suspects, of too little, too late, mouth outdistancing brain again. She doesn’t know why Leeza sometimes sets her off. She is one of the most open, sweet-natured people Georgia knows. She sometimes suspects that she is predisposed to take advantage of such guilelessness, disrespecting it as a character flaw rather than the product of a conscious effort at goodness. And then, Georgia thinks, there’s the daughter-in-law thing, assuming she ever is my daughter-in-law. If she’s so sweet and innocent, why’d she let my son knock her up?

  “You know, Mom,” Justin says, a hard edge to his voice that cuts through Georgia and makes her draw up inside, “being queen of Scrabble doesn’t exactly make you ruler of the world. I mean, the last time we played hearts, Leeza kicked your butt, I believe.”

  “Yeah,” Leeza says, timidly.

  It’s true. Georgia never has been a great card player. She’s never really liked card games that much, always telling herself they were too simple, not mentally stimulating enough.

  “Well, anyway,” she says, retreating with her glass of white wine to the kitchen, “I’m sorry.”

/>   They have a too-quiet dinner, a good roast wasted. Afterward, Justin does the dishes, and Leeza says she’s tired and wants to go to bed. It’s almost nine o’clock. Georgia volunteers to help clean up so she can join him, but he declines her offer.

  Self-defeated, Georgia retreats to her own bedroom. First, though, she goes to take a quick look at her small inheritance from Jenny McLaurin.

  She takes out the old photo albums and flips through them, taking much more time than she had planned, because the past keeps coming up at her from pictures that go back more than a century. Jenny has scribbled names in barely legible pencil on the back of most, but some of them will never be identified.

  There are brownish-yellow photographs of her father as a boy, one of him standing next to his brother Lafe, the one he accidentally shot and killed. Lafe’s resemblance to Justin, the way she remembers him when he was 14 or 15, shakes her. They’re all there: the frowning grandmother she barely remembers, old Red John McCain, the grandfather who fought in the Civil War and died more than 20 years before Georgia was born, all of Littlejohn’s brothers and sisters, including Century, Jenny’s mother, who doesn’t look much like her at all. There are no photographs of Wallace.

  “I would’ve done that, too,” Georgia mutters.

  In another drawer, there are what seem like hundreds of letters, saved for decades. Letters from the ’30s, from World War II, from distant, now-dead relatives in Georgia and Florida and California, from people whose names in careful cursive script on the envelopes ring only the vaguest of bells.

  Georgia has been known to read letters and postcards sent to and from total strangers when they fall unwanted into the world of estate sales and cheap antique stores. She knows she could fall into a bottomless pit here, waking up face-down on the bedspread tomorrow morning with the soothing scent of old paper all around her.

  When she looks at her watch, she sees that it’s almost midnight.

  Then, as she is about to tear herself away from it all, she sees her own name and address. It’s a Christmas card, she can tell from the envelope, sent five years before, when Georgia still sent Christmas cards. She reads her own barely legible handwriting: “Best wishes. Hope to see you over the holidays. Love, Georgia.” Not that they had any plans of coming down to East Geddie that Christmas. She can remember that December, how tired she’d become of writing “all these goddamn cards,” swearing she’d never do it again. And she didn’t. But Jenny had saved it.

  Shuffling through the old stacks, she finds three more, all Christmas cards from earlier years. She remembers that they’d usually consign Jenny to the “B” stack, sending her the cheaper, more treacly, more (God forbid) religious cards while saving the more expensive and ecumenical ones (Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays, Peace) for other, more important people.

  Georgia sighs, then starts trying to stuff all the loose letters back into the drawer. Finally, she has to put some of them in the next drawer down, and that’s where she sees the jewelry box.

  She had forgotten it, and now, finding it, she has no great curiosity. It isn’t likely that Jenny McLaurin left her any precious gems.

  Then, Georgia remembers something.

  She opens the box, but all she encounters is a collection of earrings, necklaces and bracelets that could not possibly be worth $300 total.

  Well, she probably would have been wearing it, anyhow. The sheriff and the funeral home just forgot to mention it. Or she lost it. Or sold it because she was broke and her sorry-ass nearest kin didn’t even ask if she needed help.

  “Good Lord,” Georgia says. It’s after I o’clock. Fatigue dampens her frisson over this minor mystery, one she’s sure Forsythia Crumpler can easily clear up.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  November 10

  At church Sunday, Georgia learned that her old teacher was away visiting a cousin in Goldsboro and wouldn’t be back until sometime Tuesday.

  Now, on Wednesday morning, while Justin is taking Leeza to the obstetrician they’ve found in Port Campbell, Georgia calls her.

  “Mrs. Crumpler?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m sorry. This is Georgia. Georgia McCain? Sorry to disturb you.” She’s always apologizing to this woman, always reduced to seventh-grade status by her. “I was wondering if I could come by. There’s something I have to ask you, if you could spare a couple of minutes.”

  There’s a short pause.

  “Give me two hours. I’m doing laundry. Come about 1.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Crumpler. I won’t take up much of your time.”

  There’s no answer on the other end.

  “Well,” Georgia says, “goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Jesus,” Georgia mutters as she hangs up.

  Thinking about Jenny’s wedding ring, she looks down at her own, which she perversely continues to wear, despite the fact that it can sometimes send her mind tumbling back where she tries very hard not to let it go.

  She was 41 when she married for the second time, in May of 1989. Mark Hammaker was 49.

  “In fun years,” one of her friends told her, “he’s about 87.”

  The marriage had not been the best of ideas. After a trip to Europe the summer before—when Justin ran away to his grandfather’s farm—it had ended with them going their separate ways. They both thought that they might be, at best, occasional lovers. He was too anal. She was too irresponsible.

  Maybe it was loss that brought them back together. Her father died that summer. Mark, also an only child, lost his mother unexpectedly in November. Maybe it was just mutual sympathy. Georgia thought she saw a more flexible man after his mother’s death. She had been happy to have strong arms in which to fall, and happy to nurture him when it was his turn to mourn.

  One thing that made it at least possible was what Georgia thought of as the new, improved Justin. His dislike for Mark ebbed after his summer of exile in East Geddie, at least partly because there was nothing much now for the man Justin had called “Mark the Narc” to carp about.

  Justin came back to Montclair more focused, less rebellious. It was as if a switch had been turned on, or off. Georgia wondered if the precocious university brats didn’t just grow up more quickly, fast-forwarding through all the angst and mess, turning unexpectedly adult at 16. She knew it didn’t happen that way with all of them, though.

  Maybe he was just—like her—getting over the divorce. Jeff Bowman’s departure had really kick-started that very bad year-and-a-half in which Georgia lost both parents and her first husband.

  There was no more talk by Mark of Justin going to some military school, of “straightening him out.” Georgia never would have let that happen, but now it was a moot point. Justin had self-corrected, and while he would never really bond with Mark, there was a truce.

  “As long as you love him,” Justin told Georgia when she asked permission to marry from the only other male who mattered to her anymore, “I’ll keep my mouth shut. I promise. Just don’t try to make me call him Dad.”

  It wasn’t a problem for very long. Actually, for the 13 months she and Mark were married, Justin was no problem at all. He made only one B his junior and senior years, got into the University of Virginia and was her rock.

  She needed a rock. Mark Hammaker, it turned out, was more of a dead weight than something on which to lean.

  They had their first married argument on their honeymoon. On a cruise of the Greek isles, he was appalled when he learned that Georgia had signed up for the optional parasailing excursion. He acted as if she had lost her mind, and he sulked when she floated back down, landing softly as a leaf on the small boat that had launched her.

  “It’s just like being strapped to a kite,” she told Mark. “You need to loosen up, sweetie.”

  “You need to tighten up,” he responded.

  Good God, she thought when they went back, silently, to the cabin, what have I done? Jeff Bowman, for all his faults, at least was capable of having fun. He
just had a zipper problem.

  They rode it out, and when they couldn’t stand it any longer, they got a divorce that involved considerably less blood-letting and paperwork than her first one. They had agreed it would be wise to have a pre-nuptial agreement “just in case.”

  By the time Mark Hammaker moved out, Justin was ready to graduate from high school and leave, too. He had a job that summer at a record store, and Georgia spent a lot of time getting used to, for the first time in her life, an empty house. She had gone from their old farmhouse in East Geddie to dormitory rooms and apartments to married life with hardly a night spent by herself, it seemed to her in 1990. After Jeff left, there was Justin to take care of, to keep her company.

  Now she was alone.

  She got a cat, and while it was rather companionable for a cat, it was not much of a conversationalist. Get used to it, she told herself. Be a big girl. This is how it is.

  And that was how it was, for most of the next four years. She bought a new, smaller house, a mile from the university. She went out with old and new friends, she managed to get laid occasionally—it was easier now, with Justin gone at least nine months of the year. She threw herself into teaching. She took trips to Europe, using some of the money she inherited from her father. She even had a book published, by another university press, on Fitzgerald’s short stories.

  By the time she met Phil Macomb in January of 1994, she was not entirely unhappy with the thought of never again sharing her bed on a full-time basis. Only occasionally, on such occasions as snowy evenings or when the first dogwoods started blooming, did she think freedom might be overrated.

  He was not part of her usual crowd. He was not part of any crowd with which she had ever associated. He could, she told friends, actually do things. He ran his own home-construction company that specialized in renovating the old redbrick Virginia houses in the Montclair area that were drawing the come-heres from all over the East Coast. He was a genius at doing small, creative work.