Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  Georgia is lying when she says that she is glad to do it, but she doesn’t really resent it, either, she realizes.

  Forsythia’s route takes them first to a trailer park on the back side of Geddie itself, where Mary Draughon lives alone, having, at 88, outlived two husbands and both her sons, one claimed by a heart attack and the other by colon cancer. Her three grandchildren are “somewhere,” Forsythia says, snorting and looking out the side window.

  Mary Draughon, who seems to Georgia to be at least 100, is ensconced in a recliner, and it takes her five minutes to get out of it and unlock the front door.

  “Didn’t used to have to lock everything,” she says, by way of greeting, “before the niggers got so mean around here.”

  She notes that she doesn’t like cranberry sauce, and she hopes out loud that the dressing doesn’t have onions in it. She spends the next 10 minutes talking about her health, her family, and her neighbors. None of the news is good.

  Her complaints over, Mary Draughon asks them if they want some Russian tea, which is, Georgia sees, the opening for them to depart gracefully.

  “No, honey,” Forsythia says, “we have three more of these to deliver. Don’t want to keep folks waiting for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “Well, you all don’t have to go so soon,” she says, but after five more minutes of what Georgia used to refer to impatiently as mealy-mouthing, they are out the door. One down, three to go.

  “She’s had it tough,” Forsythia says, when they’re back in the car and she sees Georgia shaking her head. “But, you do have to take charge of your own fate, make people want to come see you. The thing is, I don’t believe I can remember Mary Draughon ever being that much fun, and it sure doesn’t get better when you’re going on 90.”

  Forsythia Crumpler laughs quietly, almost a giggle.

  “That’s un-Christian of me,” she says, shaking her head.

  “Well,” Georgia says, “you can’t please Jesus all the time.”

  She thinks she’s being far too flip for her old teacher, but Forsythia looks sharply at her and then breaks out laughing.

  “No, I don’t suppose you can.”

  Their next stop, almost to McNeil, is a little house, not much more than 1,000 square feet, Georgia estimates.

  Sam Lacy doesn’t go to Geddie Presbyterian. He used to go to the Baptist church, Forsythia says, but he hasn’t gone anywhere that anyone knows of for a few decades.

  “He’s had a stroke,” she adds. “I suppose he gets by on Social Security, such as it is.”

  Sam Lacy takes a long time to come to the front door. He drags his left foot, and his left arm hangs useless at his side. He mumbles his thanks as he leads them into his little kitchen, where he stands amid dirty plates and glasses while they unwrap everything. He looks as if he hasn’t combed his dingy yellow-gray hair, and he smells as if he hasn’t washed lately.

  “Dinner’s served, Sam,” Forsythia says. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  The man tries to say something else, and it’s clear to Georgia that his speech has been impaired as well.

  He seems shy, embarrassed in their presence. He doesn’t insist on them sitting down and visiting, and they’re out again in five minutes.

  “Poor thing,” Forsythia says, “I ought to come visit him once in a while. I taught him, too, you know.”

  “But he looks like he’s 10 years older than you, at least.” Georgia says it quietly as they’re walking down the dirt path back to the van.

  “The men around here age so fast, the ones that get to age at all. The sad thing is, I can still remember how most of them looked when I taught them, so I can see how far they’ve slipped.”

  “I guess that’s discouraging.”

  Forsythia looks at her.

  “Well, it happens. It’s sad, but I don’t know if it’s discouraging. It’s just what happens. People get old.”

  Their last two stops take perhaps 15 minutes each. One widow lives along the Ammon Road; the other has a trailer in East Geddie. By the last one, Georgia has the process down pat, is able to say all the pleasant and meaningless but essential things. She realizes that neither of the old ladies is going to complain about her having to leave to “get back and feed the hungry at my place.” They understand that’s what a woman does on Thanksgiving Day, if she’s lucky enough to have family.

  “Well,” the last one says, “you come see me some time when you can stay awhile longer, you hear?”

  And Georgia lies that she will.

  “So,” Forsythia says when they’re back in the car, “is everybody ready for the blessed arrival?”

  “As ready as can be expected. A marriage certificate would’ve been nice, I guess.”

  Georgia doesn’t know why she mentions it. She has promised herself to be supportive of her son, even if it kills her.

  Forsythia smiles.

  “I didn’t know anybody even got bothered by that these days. Things have changed so much. But that kind of thing has always gone on, as long as there’ve been men and women.”

  Georgia looks over at her as they pull out of the driveway.

  “Really? Were there women you knew who had children out of wedlock?”

  “Bastards.”

  It shocks Georgia to hear Forsythia Crumpler say the word.

  “That’s what they called them then,” the old lady continues. “Bastards. Such an ugly, hateful thing to label someone.”

  The look of Forsythia Crumpler’s face keeps Georgia from questioning her further.

  They are back by 2:45. Forsythia looks a little tired. Georgia asks her if she’d like an arm to lean on, and she is surprised when her old teacher takes her up on the offer. It worries her a little; Forsythia is not the kind of woman to accept help under almost any circumstances.

  To Georgia’s relief, Thanksgiving dinner is moving along smoothly, perhaps more smoothly, she thinks, than if I had been here to make everybody’s sphincter a little tighter.

  The turkey is well on its way to done, a little tinfoil tent on it now that it has browned enough. The side dishes are either in or ready to go in at the appointed times. The biscuits have been cooked already and smell wonderful, their scent mixing with the turkey and the pies.

  Leeza and Justin both have on aprons. They work well together, Georgia can see, even in the kind of kitchen where two people have to turn sideways to pass each other. She tries to help, but it’s clear that she would only be in the way. She says she’ll set the table, but that’s been taken care of, too.

  Kenny and Tommy get there just after she and Forsythia. The four of them sit in the den and wait to be called to dinner. Georgia and Forsythia both keep offering to get up and see if there’s anything they can do.

  “Let somebody else cook today,” Kenny says, after he’s headed them off for the third time. “You all have done your quota of Thanksgiving turkeys, I’m guessing. You’ve fed enough people already today.”

  “Some sad people out there,” Forsythia says.

  Kenny agrees that there are. Asked how his mother’s doing, he says that she’s having dinner with enough children and grandchildren that he suspects she’ll never even know he’s missing.

  “I doubt that,” Forsythia says, and Kenny nods.

  “We’re going by later,” he tells her.

  Dinner is achieved with scarcely a hitch. Kenny’s son doesn’t seem to like much of anything that is offered, other than the two helpings of bought pumpkin pie, but he doesn’t whine about it, and everyone else eats enthusiastically.

  Georgia and Kenny do the dishes, while Justin lets Tommy show him the place in the near woods where he says he saw a deer last weekend. Leeza goes to take a nap. Forsythia, who wanted to help, also falls asleep, in a recliner in the den within eyesight of the two dishwashers. It pleases Georgia that her older teacher is comfortable enough to do that.

  “So,” Kenny asks in a muted voice, “what’s the latest on Pooh?”

  Georgia shrugs.

  Sin
ce she found the shoe and saw that it matched the one Jenny McLaurin was wearing when she drowned, she has gradually given up on the idea of seeking Pooh Blackwell out. She wishes she had shown the matched set to Kenny before she took them to Wade Hairr. They are now property of the Scots County sheriff’s department, and Georgia wonders if she will ever see them again. Telling Kenny they were a perfect match was not as good as holding them up in front of his eyes.

  She hasn’t even mentioned the shoe issue to Justin. She’s not sure why. Maybe she doesn’t want to involve him, pull him into what everyone else sees as a wild-goose chase, and a potentially dangerous one at that. Maybe she doesn’t mention it for the same reason she doesn’t mention seeing a man who died 11 years ago: She doesn’t want Justin to think his mother is losing her mind.

  She finally told Kenny on Tuesday. She had come over to bring him some leftover chili. She was anxious, curious to see if one thoughtless kiss had changed anything between them, but Kenny seemed the same as ever, to her relief and slight disappointment.

  When she told him about the shoes, he listened to her, nodding his head, sympathizing, but he seemed willing to take the Occam’s razor approach. Go with the simplest and most straightforward answer. Jenny McLaurin couldn’t swim. She slipped in the pond and couldn’t get out.

  He suggested this to Georgia, as gently as he could.

  She did not take his lack of enthusiasm well, especially when the only thing that really seemed to upset him was that she had told Wade Hairr something that she didn’t want getting back to Pooh or his father.

  “You might as well put it in the newspaper,” he told her. “Maybe Wade Hairr won’t tell William about it. Maybe he’ll just tell one or two of his flap-jaw deputies, and one of them will tell William’s cousin, who’ll tell him, and he’ll tell Pooh.”

  “Maybe I ought to just shut up and let that fat piece of shit get away with it,” Georgia said, tears welling up.

  He told her, pinning her with his fierce eyes, that if he truly believed Pooh Blackwell had murdered Jenny, he’d be at the head of the lynch mob.

  “I think the Blackwells did what the Blackwells have always done,” he said, looking out across his land. “They saw a way to steal something within the bounds of the law, and they did. I do find it hard to believe they just flat-out killed her.

  “If they take it over the edge, you know I’m there. But I’ve got to live here, Georgia, right here, night and day. I can’t be playing Columbo, chasing wild-ass theories around, making enemies out of everybody. I don’t like carrying a loaded gun with me.”

  Neither, Georgia told him, do I.

  Now, she doesn’t know what to say. She is starting to doubt her own convictions. She knows it would be easier to just let it go. She knows she has always had trouble letting things go. Her analyst told her that, as did her first and third husbands.

  The diamond ring, if it was on her hand that day, could have been stolen by any of several individuals in the employ of the sheriff’s department, the fire department, the funeral home—God knows who else. The shoe could have been dragged there by a dog after it washed up on the bank of the pond, or it could have come from some other place and time entirely. They might one day drain Harold McLaurin’s snake pond and find a single, sensible shoe in the muck at the bottom, where it sank after it left Jenny’s thrashing foot.

  Anything was possible. Her answer was but one of several theories, and far from the most straightforward and likely.

  “I haven’t tried again to talk to Pooh,” she tells Kenny. “I don’t know what to do about all that. I guess I just wish it would all go away. I’m sorry I got you into it.”

  “I’m here, watching your back.”

  As he says this, he puts his right hand on the nape of her neck and rubs it. She leans into him. She turns at the same time he does, and they are wrapped in their second long, wet embrace of the week, their tongues deep in each other’s mouths. He pulls her away from the window, out of view of the recliner and Forsythia Crumpler. His hands are squeezing her bottom, and she is reaching for the zipper of his jeans. He grabs her hand and shakes his head. She nods hers but backs away. Neither of them says a word as they return to the dishes.

  They are almost finished when they see Tommy come running from the woods, looking frightened. Justin, walking fast and calling after him from 20 yards behind, also looks shaken.

  Tommy doesn’t say a word, just runs to his father and puts his arms around his waist, burying his head in his stomach.

  “What?” Kenny says, as Justin opens the screen door and stands there, looking as if he wants to hit someone.

  “The cat,” Justin says. “The goddamn cat. Nails. Jesus.”

  There had always been cats around the farmhouse, feral creatures living on the periphery, earning their keep by thinning out the rats and mice. Whatever humans were living there would feed them, leaving table scraps and water at the edge of the yard. No cat ever was allowed inside a house. Georgia was 24 before she realized she was allergic to them; she had not been in a culture until that time that regularly allowed them indoors.

  Occasionally, a younger family member would try to tame one of them, with mixed results. Georgia herself can remember a tabby kitten she once took in, when she was 10. It had been abandoned by its mother, and Littlejohn and Sarah let the kitten stay on the porch in the house they were living in, next door. Georgia could carry it around in her arms, as long as there were no dogs around. It was the only one of the woods cats in decades to have a name: Ginger.

  Ginger reached adulthood and left one day, never to return except for meals. Georgia tried for weeks to coax the animal back in from the hubcap holding the cats’ food, but it would never let her or another human come within 20 feet of it again.

  Leeza had always lived among cats. When she saw the half-dozen or so that frequented the farm—fed now mostly by Kenny—she wanted one of them for a pet. Justin didn’t remember that much about the farm, but he did remember the cats. He remembered picking one of the more careless ones up when he was 6 or 7 and getting scratched badly enough to require a rather painful shot.

  They’re wild, he told Leeza. They won’t even let you get near them.

  We’ll see, she said.

  She would wander out in the yard, into the fields and woods, sometimes carrying food with her, sometimes not. She would be gone for two hours or more, long enough to worry Justin.

  Within a week, one of the cats, another tabby, barely more than a kitten, was following her back to the yard. Leeza would lower herself awkwardly to the ground and sit cross-legged, talking to the animal, and it would sit, not 10 feet away, watching her. Then it was 8 feet, then 5.

  Two weeks after Justin told her the cats were wild, she was able to pet one of them. She would walk along with the cat rubbing against her legs. Justin worried that it would cause her to trip and fall.

  She named the cat Nails, because of its scruffy, street-wise demeanor, and she has been feeding it separately from the others, sitting on the brick back steps. Sometimes, the cat would sit beside her, both of them looking out at the fields and woods, the other cats staring back at them from across the yard.

  “Just don’t let them in the house,” Georgia said, the first time she saw this wonder for herself. Leeza never did, although with the weather getting colder, Georgia has figured it’s only a matter of time. She knows from personal experience that a woman eight months pregnant can get about anything she wants.

  Kenny leaves Tommy with Forsythia Crumpler, who has been roused from her nap by the commotion. Tommy wants to come with him, but when his father tells him to stay with Mrs. Crumpler, he obeys him. Kenny and Justin don’t want Georgia to come with them, either, but she insists.

  The cat is at the old tobacco barn, hanging by a cord from a hook over the door, its tongue sticking out like something from some sadistic cartoon, its legs dangling from its body, looking much smaller than it did when it was alive.

  Kenny walks around the
old farm every day or two. Even though the barn is on Blue and Annabelle’s land, it’s part of his route as well. He walked by here yesterday morning.

  They huddle and devise a plan. If they can get back to the house before Leeza gets up from her nap, and if they can get Tommy out of the house, they might be able to tell her that the cat ran off, disappeared, turned wild, whatever. There is a precedent, Georgia tells them. It seems cruel, but less cruel than having to tell a woman eight months pregnant that somebody has gone to the trouble to hang her pet cat.

  “Maybe,” Justin says, “after the baby is born.”

  Justin goes to get a shovel, and Kenny and Georgia return to the house before Leeza awakens. Kenny takes Tommy home. The boy is sitting, watching television with Forsythia, when they return, sharing the recliner. She has her arm around him. He has his thumb in his mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Georgia says as they both leave.

  “Maybe it’s some of the Armstrongs’ kids,” Kenny says. “This would be about their level of sorriness.”

  One look tells Georgia how little he believes this.

  Justin is back in half an hour, just as Leeza is getting settled in the den, apologizing for being “so lazy,” wondering where everyone has gone.

  “Has anyone fed the cats? And Nails?” she asks, and they’re silent for a couple of seconds.

  Finally, Justin says he did.

  “I just left some food for all of them in the hubcap out back. Nails got his share too,” he tells her. Still waking up, she nods her head and smiles.

  Georgia takes Forsythia home. They don’t talk much about the cat, and they both tell each other to be careful. It seems to be their mantra these days.

  When Forsythia makes no effort to get out of the car and go inside, Georgia starts to ask her if anything is wrong.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” the old lady says. “But something’s got me thinking about it today. Maybe it’s Leeza and her baby.”

  Her lower lip is trembling. Georgia puts her hand on Forsythia’s and listens.

  Forsythia McDonald grew up in a family that was almost wealthy by Port Campbell standards. She would be the only girl in her class to go on to college.