Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  It made me think there was some truth in Harriet’s and my joke that our daughters were switched at birth. Harriet, who spent every weekday morning with her group of eleven other friends called Birthday Club, could have been dropped at the North Pole and had a dozen chums by nightfall. She possessed the need to be surrounded by her familiars. Both of them apparently taking comfort in human bodies, whether small or tall, making a fortress around them.

  I’d left Nolan’s room as it had been when he was alive, for my children, for Fannin’s little boys. It might be that she wanted to return there pregnant, to work out her daddy’s death in that way. Rankin she was going to name it, for Nolan, whatever the gender. “If I can put up with Fannin,” she’d said, “my daughter can put up with Rankin.”

  In the early days when we were together, Harriet and I had talked for hours about our parents. It had provided helpful insight, to see them through outside eyes.

  I remember Harriet asking, early on, “How does somebody get into something like spiders anyway? I can’t picture a little girl saying in the third grade, I think I’ll get famous for studying spiders when I grow up.”

  And my replying to her, “I think it did happen more or less that way.” Then telling her about my mother’s favorite grandfather, who used to sit her on his lap and talk about his mother, who’d been a naturalist, a word that young Edith must have seized upon. About how this great-grandmother Fannin had studied primarily carnivorous plants, spending her springs with the Venus flytraps in North Carolina, her summers in Florida watching the southern butterworts eat pollen and insects, her falls abroad observing pitcher plants intoxicating bugs. And how this naturalist had originally been interested in burrowing spiders in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, but had got sidetracked—flesh-eating plants being more dramatic and easier to get support for. And my concluding, what seemed clear to me, that my mother had felt compelled to complete what her great-grandmother had left undone. Which in part explained the sense I still had that my mother had a calling while I only had a job.

  Similarly, Harriet talked to me back then about her father, Nat Sloane, an engineer who loved to hunt, who always had the refrigerator stocked with something curing or basting. She told me how it embarrassed her that there was nothing ever ready to eat, but always pans of game birds with apple wedges tucked in slits to take out the bitter taste, frog legs soaking in cold salty water and vinegar, venison that had to marinate for days. Even, once, bear meat that her dad was trying to make edible. That had helped make clear to me why later she’d chosen to marry someone who hunted for sport, and why her favorite dinner was the Stagecoach Inn’s fancy specialty: wild boar terrine, blackened quail, venison au poivre, rabbit cacciatore.

  These days, a generation later, Harriet and I mostly talked about a later generation, our children. It made me wonder, watching a pair of produce trucks go by my porch, if our four in their thirties now talked to their closest companions about us, if they recounted Sarah and Harriet stories and shared memories of Nolan and Knox. It made me wonder if their friends replied, So that’s how you turned out the way you did, coming from them.

  HARRIET FOUND ME at the baggage carousel. She was in white linen shorts, a bright blue silk shirt, her wonderful legs tan as a berry. “You look straight from Tara,” she said, holding me at arm’s length, smiling to take the edge off her words. “Gone with the winds of change. A hat, yet.” Her own highlighted hair was sleek, curved under in what we used to call a pageboy, held back with a blue velvet bow the color of her shirt.

  Hugging my old friend, I felt as I always did when I arrived, like a boarding school roommate come to call for the first time. Perhaps we both liked that echo; it took us back in time.

  Heading us in her new-smelling Buick away from Houston, the country’s fourth largest city (which I thought of as a sort of Los Angeles on the Bayou), Harriet said, “Don’t think this ghoulish, Sarah, coming so soon after Nolan’s funeral and all, but we’re going straight to the family cemetery. We’ve time to get there for the covered-dish lunch. This is spring grave-cleaning, and Mom is counting on seeing you. I promised her. I use the word see loosely, since she can’t see and can’t hear and for the life of me I don’t know why she likes to spend all day at her age surrounded by tombstones and Dad’s relatives.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. In fact, it seemed a good idea, going to the Sloane plot where Knox Calhoun was buried. I had not been able to come to Knox’s funeral because Nolan was in the hospital, and then, when Nolan died, Harriet had said she wouldn’t come, there would be a mob, she’d wait for this visit instead. So although we’d made the trip for each other’s weddings and for the christenings of our four infants, we had missed out on standing together at the cemetery services. This would help with that. And when she came to see me in October, I could take her to the hillside at home with its fences and kudzu and show her Nolan’s stone. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

  “I wasn’t there either,” she said.

  “It was as high church, Nolan’s service, as St. Andrew’s in its little gray frame building without a single stained glass window can get. Our nice young new beanpole of a vicar was beside himself with such a crowd. I told you half the bankers in South Carolina were there, all with a white rose pinned to their lapels. And that tiny row of grandsons—”

  “You had time to plan it properly.”

  I agreed. “Yours was so sudden.”

  “At least neither of them had some awful lingering business.”

  “Yes.”

  “Imagine, both of us, at our age, widows.”

  “I’m having trouble with it,” I confessed.

  “I am, too. And, what’s creepy, I find myself still carrying on conversations with Knox. Worse, still speaking of we. We had such fun. We ate ourselves silly at your buffet. Thank you for having us. We should know better than to eat late at night. I had no idea I talked in the plural. I’ve even stood in the middle of the floor and said aloud, Now, where were we?”

  “We do that, too,” I told her, making a joke.

  “Maybe it’s a queen complex, the royal We. I’m going to have a cigarette, if you want to roll down your window.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You do, too. You wish you were still lighting up. I know. Remember how we used to sit out on your porch watching those ruby sunsets, having ourselves an after-supper smoke because Nolan couldn’t stand it in the house?”

  “You ought to quit.”

  “Tell me something new. But I am, I actually am. I’m down to half a pack a day. I figure no handsome younger man—whom I have just met one of—is going to want a smoker, not these days.”

  “You have some news,” I said. This was the way Harriet liked to do, spring a surprise. Have a bit of something new to show or tell me when I came. Sometimes it had been only a piece of jewelry, a new car, a promotion of Knox’s, but there was always something saved back, in the nature of a gift. I recognized this as such and asked, “Younger? But that’s grand. A new man?” Knox had died in the fall; this was spring.

  “Fifteen years younger.” Harriet blushed.

  “Well, and here I’ve been trying to work up my nerve to invite Nolan’s seventy-year-old doctor and his dog to go for a drive.”

  “Seventy? Sarah.” Harriet made a face. “Sorry. I guess you were a one-man woman so long that anyone else must seem—that you must have to go slow.”

  “I am going slow.…”

  Harriet pulled off the highway onto a state road and threw her cigarette out the window. “You don’t mind my talking about it, do you? Somebody I’ve met? I never know where you are about all that. You were always trying to get out of dates at Pritchard’s, sneaking off to practice scales on the piano or some other excuse. I don’t think you even looked at anyone before Nolan. I always wondered, to tell the truth, how he hammered his way through your barricades. Not that he wasn’t the most handsome thing ever.”

  “But not a ladies’ man like Knox. Not that ch
arm.” I didn’t want to get into my feelings for Nolan, still mixed and raw in my own mind. Certainly I didn’t want to talk about where I’d been with men. Her view had a truth to it, in its way, and I let it stand.

  We bypassed her hometown of La Salle and headed straight toward the loblolly pines which edged the acres of ancient hardwoods, dark and towering, known as the Big Thicket. A swampy world of egrets and alligators, water snakes and carnivorous plants, where we used to take the four children on day trips when they were small and our reunions included the whole family. I had always found the dense area alluring, the massed sweet gums, sugarberries, hawthornes, cypress, the pale light which reached the wings of wood ducks and the nets of golden spiders as if from an earlier geologic time. I saw it through my mother’s eyes. But I found it strange, too. These pines were not the pines of home.

  “Heading this way makes me think of your mother,” I said. “How is she?”

  “Like I said, losing it. I still can’t understand how Mom could have come back here to that falling-down place of her mother’s. She’s turned herself into a country person, Sarah. It’s as if she’s never known any other life. She might as well never have lived all those years with Dad.”

  “He won’t be here, will he?” Nat Sloane was one of my favorite people. In recent years he’d been laid up with back trouble at their old home on the other side of the Thicket on the border of Louisiana. I hadn’t seen him in years.

  “Certainly not, if Mom is.”

  “But it’s his family’s plot—”

  “Oh,” Harriet said, “after nearly sixty years, who remembers? Mom’s been a Sloane since Hector was a pup. Besides, they’re still legally married so nobody thinks anything. Most of them are so dimly related by now, they don’t know who’s who.”

  “I remember everything she fixed for us had a gravy or a sauce on it. Something thick and peppery or thick and sweet.” How I had loved Doll and Nat Sloane when we were at Pritchard’s. They’d been storybook parents to me: Doll, a dumpling of a woman, always in the kitchen; Nat, a good-natured hunter, bringing home his kill. Both of them ever-present in their daughter’s life.

  “She still cooks like that.”

  “Maybe our parents were switched at our births?”

  Harriet pulled off the highway onto a two-lane dirt road, and I decided this was as good a time as any to tell her my news. Knowing how she felt about her lack of grandchildren, I knew it would not be welcome. “Fannin is pregnant again,” I said.

  She slowed the car, then made a brittle laugh. “What on earth will they call it?”

  “She says Rankin, whatever the gender, after Nolan.” Fannin had giggled, saying that everyone was making jokes about the name for this one. Her boys were Matthew, Mack, Lucas and Jonathan. They, she and Johnny, hadn’t started out intending this echo of the Gospels. Matthew had been named for Johnny’s dad, and then the second was called MacDonald for mine and Bess’s, shortened to Mack. When the third was a boy, too, they’d dreamed up this scheme. The worst thing, they’d agreed, after reading up on the literature about same-sex siblings, was people getting them mixed up. The boys having to hear, Now, which one are you, little fellow? Now, son, what’s your name? Whereas anybody could silently count down: Matthew, Mack, Lucas, Jon, and get it right. Now, Fannin had said, they were saying if it was a boy it would be Acts and if it was a girl it would be Revelations. The rub was that good, serious eight-year-old Matthew had already got into trouble, telling his teacher they were getting a new baby named Revelations. Which had got him a note home suggesting to his parents that such levity was not appropriate for second graders. I’d wanted to tell my daughter that it wasn’t appropriate for grandmothers either, but she was smarting already at my fret about her newest pregnancy. Besides, by now the boys had grown into their names, had made them their own.

  “I might have known,” Harriet said, “we’d get off on daughters the minute we got in the car.” She fished around for a smoke. “I didn’t tell you my real surprise. Beyond depressing.”

  I put my hat on my lap and looked out the window. I had gone berserk when Fannin called, thinking of another on the way. Thinking that when this one came in November, Matthew would barely be nine. Surely Johnny, an OB, should have more sense. But I knew Harriet would hardly be feeling sympathy. “Pammy?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you on the phone. Anyway, it can wait; it can wait years, as it happens.” She maneuvered the Buick around a series of ruts. “She dropped it on me last week, cool as a cuke, out of the blue on the Bayou. I was down in Houston, having lunch, braving all that traffic and picking up the tab as well, for forty-five minutes of my daughter’s time. She showed up late in these heavy black killer shoes that looked as if they were taken off a telephone lineman, black legs, olive drab suit that was way past wrinkled, and a briefcase which must have cost as much as this car.…”

  I smiled. I knew Pammy’s taste in clothes was light-yards from her mother’s.

  “Then, over coffee—espresso, excuse me—she takes off her jacket and lifts her arm out so I can see where she’s had the contraceptive sticks, the tidy fan-shaped implant put in. I thought I was going to pass out right there in the lap of luxury. A Norplant. Making the decision not to get pregnant for five years and not even telling me. Not even mentioning that it was on her mind. She’s thirty years old, Sarah. How can she decide that now?”

  “What do you think?”

  “That all she cares about in this world is making partner at that zillion-dollar law firm, that’s what I think. That she hates her mother, that’s what I think.”

  “Fannin says she’s going for six. She says children from a big family are more resilient, more easygoing.”

  “You’re always saying they’re not us, our daughters,” Harriet said, her voice rising, becoming a cough. “But they are. Sarah, they are.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  Harriet lit a fresh cigarette. “At least we can talk about it with each other. What a relief. I used to go crazy bottling it up with Knox. You know how it is: no man wants to hear anything negative about his daughter, since he thinks she’s just this side of perfection, or any aspersion on his son, since that’s a reflection on his manhood. To husbands you can only say, ‘Great kids,’ ‘Honestly, those kids,’ ‘I miss the kids,’ ‘Did you hear from the kids?’ That’s it—all the allowable sentences about children you can utter to a man.”

  I laughed. Harriet never stayed down long.

  “HERE WE ARE.”

  Harriet pulled in at the Sloane family plot behind a red pickup with a bumper sticker which read STEERS AND QUEERS: NO PLACE BUT A&M. There were a dozen new-model American cars and a couple more pickups, clearly recreational, the wheels too clean, the back ends too waxed, to be really truckers’ trucks.

  The ground had been cleared long ago for plots, with only a few willows and pecans left for shade and a field of wildflowers available for future expansion. Trees hundreds of years old and a hundred feet high rose past the open pasture.

  I followed Harriet toward clumps of men in jump suits and zip-front hunting jackets, and women in pedal pushers, long-sleeved blouses and head scarves. She smiled at all of them, cousins of cousins, most of whom she did not know. The Sloanes had married other names and those names had married other names until by now all the people who knew the kinship lines were underground.

  “In the beginning,” Harriet said, “Knox thought my family, the Extended Sloanes, as he called them, were a bunch of nuts for coming out here twice every year to weed and rake a bunch of ancestors’ bones. But then he really got into it after a while. He’d be out here spring and fall glad-handing distant kin when he didn’t have the foggiest notion who they were. And they were always tickled to see Knox. The other men all liked him, they joked around with him. You know the way country men will make a male club out of anything.”

  “He was a charmer,” I agreed, wondering if she was missing him, wishing him still here offering his handshakes
, or if she was fortifying herself against seeing his grave.

  Harriet’s mother, Doll, was sitting under a pecan tree in the middle of the cemetery. She had on a lavender sun hat, a lavender Sunday dress, and a sweater someone had buttoned across her shoulders. Her hands were holding a cane, and her tiny little feet (how did old people have such small feet no matter their weight?) were in thick white walking shoes.

  “Mom,” Harriet said, leaning over and shouting at her mother’s hearing aid. “Here’s Sarah. SA-RAH.”

  “I know who it is.” Doll’s soft face crinkled. She reached up a hand to my cheek. “No need to holler. That’s a fine hat, honey, your straw. I can’t get my girl to wear one. You both look pretty as pictures.”

  “So do you. SO DO YOU.” Harriet turned away, trying to curb her impatience. She looked at me.

  I bent down and wrapped my arms around Doll. It didn’t matter whether she could hear; she’d never been much for words anyway. I felt years of gratitude well up in me for all the mothering this squat little old woman had provided back in boarding school days.

  “You girls are going to stay over with me, aren’t you? Stay the night? I’m counting on it. Both your men are buried now; nobody needs you at home.” Her voice was slightly metallic, the way with people who can no longer hear themselves. Canned. “Not a soul comes to stay with me anymore. I’ve got eight beds all made up. You can have your pick.”

  I met Harriet’s eyes over her mother’s head. It was her choice to make. My visits to East Texas had coincided with the spring grave-cleaning now and again, but our appearances here had been brief. We’d had dinner plans with Knox; we’d had reservations at the Stagecoach Inn.

  “Do you want to?” Harriet asked me in a normal tone.

  “I’d like that,” I told her truthfully, trying to read her face to see if this was all right. “I’m worn out from all the funeral aftermath, all the phone calls which don’t seem to stop. I always liked staying at her house, your house, when you were all living together on the other side of the Thicket.” I was also thinking that I had not got much sleep the night before.