Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  Although part of her hopes he’s back in graduate school by the next fall semester.

  By the time Leeza rises from her nap, Justin has gone over to Kenny’s. Georgia can see Blue’s truck parked in the driveway.

  “Big business next door,” she says as Leeza looks out the window, holding her hands against the wall as she leans forward. Georgia wonders if she will need help standing up again, she is so front-heavy.

  “I think it’s really neat,” Leeza says, popping back to full vertical mode with hardly a hitch. “I mean, we’ll be growing our own crops, selling food for other people. We’re going to make it all organic.”

  Including the pork, Georgia thinks but doesn’t say. Leeza, she thinks, should have come of age in the late ’60s. She’d have been in her element in one of the communes, like the one a couple of Georgia’s friends joined. They tried to get her to come with them to some place out in Oregon, but she told them she went to college so she wouldn’t ever have to go back to the earth again.

  She wants to give Leeza the benefit of the doubt, allow for the possibility that this could turn out well, somehow. She doesn’t know when she got so judgmental, always thinking she knows what’s best, always having to stifle herself from giving one and all unsolicited advice.

  “Organic,” she says, and nods. “That’s good.”

  She gets up and makes them both some hot tea.

  “Thank you,” Leeza says when she returns.

  “You know,” she continues, sipping the tea, “Justin really respects you. What you say means a lot to him.”

  Georgia laughs.

  “He hides it well.”

  “No, I mean, he worries that you think he’s going to fuck—excuse me—mess up, that we won’t be able to make a go of it, with the farm and all.”

  “Well, nothing’s a lock.” It’s the best she can do. “I just remember all the hard work and dirt and chicken manure.”

  “He’s not afraid of any of that,” Leeza says. “Neither of us is.”

  I hope so, Georgia thinks.

  The weather is perfect for sitting by the fire, drinking tea, reading a book. But Leeza decides she wants to go outside and look for Nails again.

  “He might be hurt out there somewhere,” she says. “I can’t just let him suffer. Even if he’s dead, he ought not to just rot away out there somewhere.”

  Her lower lip is trembling.

  Georgia tries to talk her out of it, but she insists on going out into the cold to look for the cat they buried three days ago.

  Georgia doesn’t know why she does it. The only justification is her fear that walking through the woods on this cold, miserable day will somehow harm her grandchild, and maybe Leeza, too.

  “Sweetie,” she says, “sit down for a second, OK?”

  And she tells her that Nails is “gone.”

  “Run away?”

  Georgia has to stifle a laugh.

  “No. He died. On Thanksgiving Day. Justin didn’t want to upset you by telling you. He was going to wait until after the baby was born. We found him out by the barn. It looked like he just lay down and died. Animals do that sometimes.”

  And sometimes they’re hanged from a barn rafter like a piece of meat, by your friendly neighborhood psychopath.

  “Show me where,” Leeza says, and nothing will do but for Georgia to put on her heavy coat and take the girl to the place where Justin buried the poor tortured animal.

  She takes it well, after a few tears. She seems to understand that everyone had her best interests at heart.

  “Things do die on a farm,” Georgia tells her.

  “I know that!” Leeza exclaims. “I know that! I’m not an idiot. But Nails was going to be my pet.”

  There are plenty of cats, Georgia wants to say.

  The only thing left for her to do now is walk over to Kenny Locklear’s and tell her son and the others the official story on the demise of Nails the cat, so they’re all on the same page.

  The three men seem to be playing well together, but Georgia can tell there are issues not yet resolved. They seem relieved to have some excuse to break up their meeting.

  She can’t resist telling them about Leeza thinking “gone” meant “run away.” Kenny and Blue chuckle; Justin frowns, and she knows she’s stepped in it again.

  “I thought we weren’t going to tell her until after the baby came,” he says.

  “She was going to go trudging out through those woods, in freezing weather, looking for a cat that’s six feet under.”

  “Maybe a foot and a half,” Justin says, and everyone cracks up in spite of themselves.

  “I guess she really felt for that cat,” Blue says, “but, damn, cats don’t rate much above chickens around here, in the pecking order.”

  “Pecking order,” Kenny repeats it, then his face turns red and he starts howling with laughter, which sets everyone else off.

  “Pecking order.” Somebody will say the word again and start another round of laughter. Finally, they’re gasping and wheezing, all glad Leeza is still next door.

  It’s funny, Georgia thinks, what stays with you. She has friends who mourn the death of a cat the way they would the death of a child. Some of them spend more on the veterinarian than they do on their own doctors over a year. But she has retained from the farm a kind of hardness, a callousness where it comes to animals. It isn’t what she would have chosen to take with her, but she didn’t get to choose.

  “So,” Georgia says, “how is the big business merger going?”

  They’re all silent, suddenly somber. Justin finally speaks. He tells her they still have some details to work out.

  “Like what?”

  He gives her a look.

  “I’ll tell you later, Mom.”

  Justin excuses himself and goes to comfort Leeza. Blue says he has to get back as well.

  “I want it to work,” Kenny tells him as he leaves. Blue nods.

  While his truck is still backing out of the drive, Georgia is demanding that Kenny tell her what happened.

  “It does concern me, you know,” she says. “It determines whether I’m going to keep that damn white elephant in the real estate listings or not.”

  “Old business,” Kenny says, and explains it to her:

  Blue and his mother still harbor a grudge over the land they lost to the interstate. What the Geddies want in exchange for the three of them going into business together is a five-acre strip of land running along the eastern boundary of Kenny’s part, from the clay road to the southeast corner. He says it’s prime land for the berry crops and melons he wants to grow there.

  “It’s a holdup,” Kenny says, shaking his head, seeming more puzzled than angry. “Justin’s just about convinced me that we’ll all do well working together on this. That friend of his in New York does have the right connections, it seems like, and the three of us can give them what they want. But Blue’s got a burr up his ass about getting something back for the land the interstate took.”

  Georgia asks him if it would kill him to give him five acres.

  “Georgia,” he tells her, his jaw tight, “they aren’t making any more land. Nobody ever gave me much my whole life until your daddy, and I don’t aim to be strong-armed into giving it away. If we go out of business together, he’ll still have that land.”

  “Well,” she tells him, as she turns to leave, “you’re a smart guy. You’ll think of something.”

  “Some of the things I’ve done lately have been less than smart,” he says.

  “Yeah, I can relate,” Georgia says. She walks out the door before either of them can do or say anything else.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  November 30

  An all-day rain has set in. The last leaves have been blown and washed from the Bradford pears, whose late-turning foliage had given the back yard a brief second burst of fall color.

  The trees were planted by Georgia’s father, at her urging, three years before he died. Already they are 20 feet tall, an
d within another decade, they’ll start splitting and have to be taken down.

  Georgia thinks of the ones back in Montclair, the ones that inspired her to impose them on her father’s pine-dominated yard. They planted them in almost every median strip in town, 20 years ago. Now, the town is having to remove every last one and replace them with something slower growing but more lasting.

  If she were a tree, Georgia thinks as she gazes out through the horizontal rain, she would be a Bradford pear—fast starter, lots of splash and dazzle, but not built for the long haul. Not something you could depend on for shelter from the storm. Hell, it doesn’t even bear edible fruit. She realizes Littlejohn probably planted the pears to humor her as much as anything. His favorite tree was a bald cypress he had relocated from the swamp to a space near a wet-weather spring in back of the garage. He’d planted it there when Georgia was 10 years old and they were still living in their little house next door. She and her mother would laugh about the little tree, which seemed to grow about four inches a year and would lose its meager needles in September. It bore a striking resemblance, Georgia liked to say, to Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. Now, though, the tree is nearly 30 feet high, almost majestic among the evergreens. It could last, Georgia read somewhere, 1,500 years.

  She is washing the few dishes she has dirtied eating a haphazard breakfast. She is trying to decide what to do, where to go, how to do the least damage.

  Every day she stays in East Geddie, she kicks herself for not leaving. She has managed to incur the wrath of the village psychopath, leaving a helpless cat as an innocent victim. She has no faith in her judgment and is on the verge of conceding to Kenny, herself, and everyone else that Jenny McLaurin lost her balance, fell into her late husband’s snake pond, and drowned. Period. End of story.

  She wonders if she shouldn’t just go back to Pooh Blackwell’s house and tell him how wrong she was, beg his forgiveness, and try to get along.

  It would be the wise thing to do, especially with Justin’s idea to connect Carolina produce with Manhattan consumers now sidetracked by the kind of long-simmering disagreement that has always made small-town life so unappealing to her.

  She feels the need again to sell the damn farm. If someone offered her $20,000 less than the asking price right now, she probably would take it. Let Justin go back to the real world, forget a dream that would have worked better in the 19th century than at the tail end of the 20th. If the farm is ever going to get sold, she knows it would be in her best interests to stay in East Geddie for the time being, the Blackwells notwithstanding, to keep the heat on.

  She called the real-estate agent yesterday, and the woman gave her all the happy bullshit about “hard to sell just before the holidays” and “we’re going to really push it in the new year; it’ll sell before spring, I guarantee it.” And, of course, the teensiest bit of pessimism. “We might want to, you know, maybe think about lowering the price a little come January.” As if December, not even here yet, was written off already.

  There is something else, too. She admits that she does feel some responsibility to stay with Justin and Leeza until the baby is born. It isn’t as if she’ll be boiling water and applying cold compresses, urging the first-time mother to push harder, like some Scarlett O’Hara thrown into the breach. Leeza has a perfectly good obstetrician in Port Campbell, one the two of them found on their own. Georgia has always looked upon small-town doctors with a gimlet eye, but Dr. Haycock does seem to be competent enough, and very pleasant. The hospital, which serves four counties, appears adequate for birthing babies.

  But there is this sense of cluelessness on the parts of her son and his girlfriend.

  Georgia feels needed, even though no one has told her this.

  It isn’t just the Ouija-board names for the baby. They don’t seem to be doing the requisite reading on how to keep a helpless, 7-pound human being alive until it gets old enough to feed itself. They have done hardly anything to prepare a baby’s room.

  She can take some of the blame for this lapse, she supposes. “How do we know the place won’t sell next week, and we’ll have to move back up to Montclair?” Justin asked her the last time she broached the subject. It is as good a reason as any to give up selling the place at all, but if Justin can’t feed himself and his family down here, he’s going to have to go somewhere else and get a job, anyhow. She has no intention of giving him the old farm and then having him get as bored with East Geddie as she used to be, abandoning it for her to try to sell again. If you can make this deal with Kenny and Blue work, she told him yesterday, I’ll let you stay here. But you’ve got to do something. I’m trying, he told her.

  There wouldn’t even have been a baby shower if Georgia hadn’t arranged one. It’s set for Thursday night. Forsythia and several of the other women of the church will be there. Leeza’s sister is coming down from Montclair, along with a couple of girlfriends. Her mother sent her regrets, saying she couldn’t get off work. Leeza just shrugged when Georgia explained that as gently as she could. Annabelle Geddie and Blue’s wife, Sherita, have been invited as well. They seemed pleased to have been asked and said they would try to come.

  Georgia thinks sometimes that if she doesn’t stay around until the baby is born, she will be responsible for anything bad that might happen.

  Responsibility has traditionally worn on her like a 20-pound weight. She has shucked off more than her share. This time, though, she thinks she can carry it, if she can keep Pooh Blackwell at a safe distance.

  So, the strategy, as Georgia sees it through the rain that streaks the double-pane glass, is to sell the house if someone offers a reasonable price—unless the Three Amigos can come up with a business plan—and then hope the new owners can wait until sometime in the new year to move in. She supposes she soon will be looking for a Christmas tree and decking the halls in East Geddie.

  Justin and Leeza have gone to the doctor’s. Afterward, they plan to take in a movie and do some grocery shopping. Georgia thinks about visiting Forsythia, or taking a nostalgia trip to some of her old haunts, but the day is fit for nothing except watching an old movie on TV (thank God, Justin got cable installed) or taking a nap.

  Georgia opts for both. Even though she’s only been up for three hours, sleep finds her soon after she curls up on the old couch in front of the television.

  She doesn’t dream that much any more, and when she does, remembering the details is like trying to catch fog.

  This one, though, is different.

  She hasn’t been inside Jenny McLaurin’s former home in years. Awake, she could tell you very little about the house’s layout. Her memories are more tied to senses other than sight—the fat-laden smell of country cooking, or the jarring horn blasts from the Campbell and Cool Spring engine as it hauled a dozen flatcars toward the lumber yard at noon, returning like clockwork at 2:30.

  In the dream, though, everything seems clear. Stranger than that, it will remain clear after she awakens. She can remember small details that she wouldn’t have latched on to if she had been conscious.

  She is a little girl again, and the adults are all talking around her. Jenny and Harold and her parents are in some moribund conversation about the weather or the crops.

  Her father looks over every minute or so to tell her to be careful.

  Strangest of all, little Wallace is there. Georgia was only 10 when that Campbell and Cool Spring engine ended his life. He was in the second grade. She hasn’t given Wallace McLaurin more than the most passing thought in many years.

  Now, though, Wallace is before her, fully realized. She knows he soon will be dead. She knows everything, about Jenny and Harold and her parents, even as she is in the body of a little girl.

  She begins crying, wanting everything to stay as it is, not wanting the losses about which only she knows. Her mother tells her she is acting silly, and the other adults try to console her, but even her father doesn’t seem to take her discomfort very seriously. Wallace asks her if she will go and play
catch with him—he did beg her to do that, she will remember when she awakens. He had few playmates around and was always eager for attention from her, an older child.

  She goes outside. It is a sunny day; its brightness hurts her eyes. She can’t see the rubber ball Wallace throws to her. After it hits her in the chest several times, she runs back inside, crying again.

  When she re-enters the dark living room, only her father is there. She notices for the first time that he doesn’t look as he would have when she was a child. He seems very old, the way she last remembers him. The other adults have vanished, as has Wallace.

  She follows her father around the room. It is dominated by an old Curtis Mathis television set. Harold had bought one of the first TVs in the area. It has a frilly piece of embroidery on it, with the antenna box on top of that. There is a cheap, yellowish-brown plastic couch facing the TV, with two other unadorned straight chairs to the side. The room and most of the rest of the house are served by an oil heater. It sits in front of a fireplace that has been abandoned but never covered over.

  Littlejohn McCain touches various object as he circles the room. Georgia continues to follow, expecting something, knowing it’s coming.

  Finally, he stops at the heater. He turns to her and smiles. It will remind her, when she wakes up, of how seldom he really smiled in life, choosing to stay deadpan even when he was saying something truly funny, his twinkling eyes the only giveaway that your leg was being pulled. Later, she thinks it might have been the bad teeth that were almost guaranteed in the pre-fluoride days she can barely remember. He was ashamed of his teeth. Of course. That’s why he would hold his hand in front of his mouth sometimes, shyly, when something made him laugh. She never thought of that before now.

  He bends a little to duck under the stovepipe as he steps behind the heater.

  He stoops and reaches into the fireplace, touching the painted-over bricks. She can remember, when she awakens, exactly where he touched them. He motions for her to come closer, but she shakes her head. He looks disappointed.

  And then, she is distracted by the sound of birds, millions of them, crashing into the windows, and she is dragged harshly and unwillingly back into consciousness by the Hitchcock movie she had started watching.