Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  James Gilley was the son of the town’s police chief, a wild, handsome boy.

  “I just loved him to death,” Forsythia says, clutching a handkerchief.

  They were 16, seniors three months from graduation, when Forsythia knew she was pregnant and had been for at least two months.

  “We could have gotten married. It would have been a disaster, though, and I’m sure James Gilley didn’t want to, not really. Nobody knew what to do. It was an awful time, and it should have been so grand, with graduation coming, and then college.

  “Everyone was just so ashamed of me. They talk now about boys taking their share of the responsibility when something like that happens. That wasn’t the way it was back then.”

  The chief sent his son away to live with relatives in Greensboro. Forsythia McDonald’s parents sent her away, too, to Evergreen.

  “It was a place for ‘bad’ girls like me. It was like a prison. I was able to graduate from high school there, among other girls waiting to have their babies, too. I was so scared. My parents came to see me twice the whole time, and it was only 60 miles away.”

  The baby was born in early September.

  “I saw her just once, and I wish I’d never seen her at all. They wouldn’t even let me touch her. I can see her face right now.”

  The adoptive parents took her away, and Forsythia came home later that month, to a household that never truly forgave but insisted on forgetting.

  “We never mentioned it again, ever. The next year I started college, a year late, and I suppose, considering the times, I’m lucky they didn’t just disown me or something. Everybody in Port Campbell knew about it, of course. You couldn’t keep something like that a secret.

  “They treated me like I was lucky, lucky to still have a life in front of me, not condemned to carrying some bastard child around like a mark of shame. But all I could feel was emptiness.”

  She went on to graduate with honors from the women’s college in Greensboro, driven by a determination to erase the stain. Two years after she came back to Scots County to teach, she met and soon married Whit Crumpler, a prosperous farmer who adored her. He was a plain man in intellect and appearance.

  She would see James Gilley from time to time, here and there, but he seemed to want to avoid her, and he eventually moved away for good.

  “I never did right by Whit,” she says, looking across the barren fields. “He seemed to worship me, but I never got over the loss—the losses, really. In spite of everything James Gilley did or didn’t do, I never really got over him.

  “But the baby. Oh, Lord, how many times have I wondered whatever happened to her? They had a fire at Evergreen some years back that destroyed all their records, and you couldn’t find her now even if you wanted to.”

  Forsythia and Whit Crumpler never had children.

  “I can go for a day sometimes without thinking about her, but that’s about it. I even gave her a name, in my mind. Geneva. Sometimes, I talk to her. Isn’t that silly?”

  “No. That’s not the least bit silly. Does anyone else know—I mean, I’ve never heard anyone saying anything—” Georgia struggles to find the words.

  “Oh, they must know, or at least the ones in my generation do, even out here in East Geddie. But they don’t talk about it. I suppose they afford me that courtesy. But they know.”

  “Well,” Georgia says, “anyone who doesn’t know will never know from me.”

  Forsythia pats her on her knee.

  “That’s why I told you, I guess.”

  Georgia has been home half an hour when the phone rings.

  When she answers, there is no response for two or three seconds, and she thinks at first that the telemarketers are even working on national holidays. Then, just as she starts to put the receiver back, she hears the voice, low but distinct.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, bitch. Sorry about your cat.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  November 28

  Georgia finds herself daydreaming in the mostly empty sanctuary. She wonders if this is part of what she is supposed to get out of organized religion—a small patch of peace that might carry outside the walls of the church. Like yoga, without all that twisting and bending.

  The last three days have not been in the least peaceful.

  She and Justin have both spent an inordinate amount of time looking for a nonexistent cat. Georgia would walk through the fields, within earshot of Leeza, calling, “Here, kitty, kitty. Here, Nails. Come here, boy,” and feeling like an utter fool.

  She asked her son if he didn’t think it would be better just to tell Leeza about the cat’s demise, but he told her he didn’t think so, that he just didn’t want to deal with that kind of drama right now.

  Someday, he told her, we’ll all laugh about this.

  God knows, Georgia thinks, there is drama enough already. She has no doubt as to whose voice she heard on the phone Thanksgiving night. She hasn’t told anyone except Kenny about it. When she told him, on Friday, he said it sounded about right.

  She wondered if they shouldn’t go to the sheriff, and realized how fruitless that would be even as she suggested it.

  “I know you’d like to go over there and shoot his nuts off,” Kenny told her. “It’s going to take a little patience, though. We’re going to have to have some kind of evidence.”

  “With the quality of local law enforcement,” Georgia said, “he’s probably going to have to make a confession in the middle of High Street and have it notarized. I don’t know if that would do it.”

  Kenny had something else to say, too, and he said it carefully, back on his heels.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, and I believe you totally when you say it was Pooh on the phone. It sounds like something the sick bastard would do. But, just because he’s mad enough at you to kill that cat still doesn’t prove he did anything to Miss Jenny.”

  “If he’s sick enough to hang a cat,” Georgia said, “he’s sick enough to kill a defenseless old lady. Hell, the cat probably put up a better fight.”

  She is still furious at Wade Hairr and his useless, loose-lipped office, and furious at herself for giving them something they could blab to Pooh Blackwell and his father.

  Kenny told her it would be easy for a person to park in a certain lane that leads into the woods off the Old Geddie Road and walk from there to the edge of the field, where the cats usually congregated.

  Probably, Georgia realized, that person could see them clearly in the house from there, too.

  “That one was probably easier to catch,” Kenny added, “being half tame and all.”

  No good deed goes unpunished, Georgia thought. They’ll keep that little bit of information from Leeza even after the baby is born and they have to tell her what happened to Nails.

  This morning, her nerves are so shaky that, when one of the two children in Geddie Presbyterian drops a hymnal to the wooden floor in the middle of Reverend Weeks’ tepid sermon, she jumps and turns to glare at the boy. The little pistol sits in her jacket pocket, wrapped inside a rag. Every once in a while, she reaches in to feel it there. She is ashamed of how much comfort it gives her, perhaps as much as she is getting from Reverend Weeks’ half-heard sermon.

  Neither Justin nor Leeza came this morning. Georgia sits next to Forsythia. Neither of them mention Forsythia’s Thanksgiving revelation, and Georgia doubts they ever will.

  Afterward she speaks to Minnie McCauley, Alberta Horne, and some of the other older women.

  “You’re gettin’ to be a regular around here,” Murphy Lee Roslin says, and Georgia smiles. She wonders how long she can stay. Common sense tells her to get in her van and head north this very afternoon. Let Justin handle the sale of the house and land, if such a sale ever comes about. Something else, stubbornness, she supposes, keeps her in East Geddie. She wonders if she isn’t staying the course just to make up for the times she didn’t, and if she isn’t compounding her problems by doing so.

  On top of everything, it loo
ks as if Justin, Kenny, and Blue really are going to go into this blue-sky business venture, selling Carolina watermelons, strawberries, greens, pork, and whatever else they can produce to Manhattanites. They’ve talked twice more, and they’ll meet this afternoon to see if they can agree on enough things to take it to a lawyer.

  If that happens, Georgia supposes, the idea of selling Littlejohn McCain’s farm is a moot point. As much as she cringes at the thought of her well-educated son living permanently in this place, she won’t sell it out from under him if that’s what he wants. She’s told him, after finally expressing her reservations, that she’ll charge him some nominal rent if he wants to do this.

  Part of keeping Justin in the dark about some of Pooh’s meanness is the realization that, if her son really is going to live down here—night and day, as Kenny says—he’s not going to need a blood feud with the Blackwells. She doesn’t want Justin carrying a gun around with him, or a carpet knife.

  Sunday afternoon, after all the dishes have been washed, Leeza goes to rest, and Georgia and her son are alone. One of the benefits of this self-imposed exile has been the occasional quiet time with Justin. They didn’t have as many of those as she would have hoped when they were living in the same house in Montclair. Leeza wasn’t taking afternoon naps then, for one thing, and Justin was working, and Georgia was still teaching. And, she thinks now, she was crazy. That didn’t help.

  Now, a few of those moments do ambush them and thus make them drop their guards.

  They have the old fireplace working. Justin cut up some fallen pines back in the early fall and has been chopping them into more or less firewood-size chunks. He says it’s good exercise.

  They’ve only had three or four fires so far, and Georgia is still afraid that the chimney will catch from whatever they haven’t cleaned out of there. She can still remember how the house in which she grew up was totaled by tenants misusing a faulty fireplace.

  Today, though, it feels good. For all its improvements, the old house is drafty. She sits on an old sofa they’ve moved within 10 feet of the fire and puts her sock-clad feet on the coffee table. She has a book in her hand that she never gets around to opening.

  Lost in thought, she is half-asleep when Justin flops down beside her.

  “So,” he says, “is this the way you remember the old home place? I mean, is this how it was when you were a girl?”

  “You forget, I didn’t live here as a girl. I was already in college when Mom and Daddy moved in here, after his mother and brother and sister died.”

  She wondered at the time if they had lost their minds, taking a couple of steps back in terms of modern comforts from their comfortable little house next door, but they—her mother, really—brought the old place back to and beyond whatever it had been in its so-called heyday.

  “So you grew up in the other house, the one that burned down?”

  “There used to be a crêpe myrtle out there to mark it,” Georgia says, staring into the fire. “I guess it died, too. I don’t remember when.”

  “I thought this place was so cool when I was a little kid.”

  Georgia looks at him in disbelief.

  “You were bored to tears by this place, Justin. We had to threaten you or bribe you to get you to come down here.”

  “Well,” he says, shrugging, “maybe when I was older. But I don’t remember it like that.”

  “I hated it here,” Georgia says. “I could not wait to get away. I guess those farmer genes just skip a generation.”

  Justin looks over at her.

  “I don’t think it’s genetic. You know, I’d never grown anything in my life until Guatemala. We didn’t even have a garden.”

  “That was the plan.”

  “But there was something about the way they were living down there. I don’t mean the poverty and the oppression. The farming cycle, the seasons—I know you think harmony with nature and all that is a bunch of bullshit, but it felt right to me. I think that was what made life bearable for them in spite of everything else. I didn’t plan on anything like this, didn’t think about it until you decided to sell the farm, but it occurred to me more than once down there that, if you had your own place and some good topsoil and didn’t have to live such a hand-to-mouth existence, working the land wouldn’t be such a bad thing to do.”

  Georgia thinks it must be her and Jeff’s total denial of the natural world when he was growing up that has made Justin see Littlejohn McCain’s old farm, or what’s left of it, as some kind of Eden. They’d both grown up in the lonesome, sandspurs-and-pines Carolina country and had had enough to last a lifetime, they assured each other.

  “If your granddad had known you were going to become such a son of the soil,” she tells him, “maybe he’d have left you a bigger piece of it. And we could have saved all that money on college tuition.”

  “Well,” he says, “it might not work out. You’ve always told me that you shouldn’t be afraid to try different things, otherwise how are you going to find what makes you happy?”

  Hoisted, Georgia thinks, by my own petard.

  “Some of it,” she says, taking an intuitive leap, “might be the same thing that got you into the Peace Corps.”

  He looks at her, then back into the fire.

  “Huh,” he says. “I never thought of that. I mean, East Geddie isn’t exactly Guatemala, and Kenny and Blue can teach me a hell of a lot more than I can teach them. All I’m bringing is a little bit of land and some contacts up north.”

  He leaves to bring in another log from the back porch and tosses it into the fire, making sparks fly out on the floor in front of them.

  “But, yeah, OK. Maybe I like the idea that I’m not living some place where everybody is just like me. Maybe everything you always taught me, about everyone being equal, not looking down your nose at people just because they didn’t pick their parents or place of birth better, maybe that does mean something to me.”

  Georgia wonders how he has managed to give her credit for instilling all the right values in him and at the same time make it seem like a rebuke of her entire life. You didn’t have to do all that stuff, she wants to tell him. They were just general guidelines. Do as I do, not as I say.

  Justin doesn’t raise his voice during any of this. He is calm and determined, the way Georgia has seen him at times in his life since he was old enough to reason. He was like this before he decided he was going to play midget football, and he stuck with it through three seasons despite the fact that anyone could see he didn’t even like the sport that much or have any aptitude for it. He was like this when he told her he was joining the Peace Corps.

  Arguing won’t do any good.

  She can’t resist one more shot, though.

  “Why,” she asks him, “weren’t you listening to me when I would wail and moan about what a boring, dead-end place East Geddie was? Why didn’t that take?”

  He laughs.

  “I don’t know. There was always this feeling I had that you were protesting too much, like if you didn’t keep up this barrier, you’d be drawn right back down here, and you’d feel like a failure, like you were trapped.”

  “And,” Georgia says, holding out her arms, “here I am, God help me.”

  She could, she feels sure, live here if she had to, if there were no other place to go. The thing she doesn’t have, she supposes, is that oft-referenced sense of place. She’s never felt as if she was “from” Montclair, and she doesn’t feel she’s “from” East Geddie, either. The whole point, when she left home, was to be comfortable everywhere, be a citizen of the world.

  The only problem, she thinks, is that sometimes she is not really comfortable anywhere these days. She almost envies Wade Hairr and William Blackwell and the others who don’t seem to have to go anywhere new, learn anything new, see anything new.

  “How about Leeza?” she asks. “How is she going to take to all this?”

  “She’s more into it than I am,” Justin says. “She’s always lived in these
little houses, smaller than ours, nowhere to be by yourself, nothing to call her own. She thinks she’ll love it, our kids running all around the yard, lots of dogs and cats.”

  At the mention of cats, they both wince.

  “I know you’re not happy that we’re not married,” he says, and Georgia is quiet. “I know this isn’t the way you imagined it would be. You probably saw me getting my Ph.D., maybe going to some Ivy League school, marrying somebody with two or three degrees.”

  Georgia tries to protest, weakly, but Justin continues over her.

  “But I love her, Mom. And if she’ll ever agree to marry me, I’ll take her up on it in a heartbeat.”

  “If she’ll …?”

  “That’s just between you and me.”

  Georgia finds that, the older she gets, the more her assumptions about life are embarrassingly, achingly wrong.

  Leeza, it turns out, is so soured on the whole concept of marriage after 19 years under her parents’ roof that she is convinced a wedding will ruin whatever happiness they have.

  “Her parents should have gotten divorced a long time ago,” Justin says. “They made you and Dad look like great role models.”

  He looks over at her quickly.

  “Sorry. I mean, you were great role models. Just because you didn’t get along didn’t mean you didn’t love me. I know that now.”

  Georgia thanks him for that, patting him on his knee. She’s truly glad that Jeff and Justin have stayed fairly close, although Jeff’s second family out in California has put some distance between them.

  We did get along, though, she thinks. If Jeff could have kept his dick in his pants when he wasn’t in her company, it would have all been different. They’d probably still be married. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad, nothing to break up a family over. Except for that. It isn’t hard to understand, but she isn’t up, even now, to explaining it to her son.

  “Well, honey,” Georgia says, realizing she hasn’t called him that in years, “I hope this farming idea turns out to be the thing that makes you happy.”