Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “I liked your daddy’s story,” I said.

  “Lucky for me, David did, too.”

  I’d liked a lot hearing how Nat Sloane had put together the first wireless telegraph receiver, as they were called then, in East Texas. Winding twenty-four insulated copper wires around an oatmeal box to get the right wavelength, using a galena crystal. I’d liked hearing him recite the chronology, warm up to the finale. The first beep transmitted across the country signalling the hour. The first radio receiver, after World War I, built in the back of a Ford garage, using dry cells and an auto storage battery, which could pick up music all the way from Chicago, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa. The thrill of completing his first Armstrong super-heterodyne radio in time for the first-ever broadcast of the Rose Bowl game from Pasadena, California. “I worked on that thing, racing time like Lindbergh or Marconi,” he would say. And, on cue, I would ask, “What was the score?” “Notre Dame twenty-seven, Stanford ten.” I still remembered.

  He had reminded me of Edith, not his retelling of his story, but his passion for electronics, for something out there, beyond himself. Nat’s fingers winding that wire around a cardboard box to pick up sound was as amazing to me as Edith crouched under a stand of pines, waiting quiet as the spider’s web, watchful as the spider herself. I’d wished that for myself and later for my children—but that long-term, lifetime commitment to the daily details that lead to something new seemed out of style.

  “Anyway,” Harriet was saying, “Dad told him to look me up. ‘You young people ought to get together,’ he told David. I was so embarrassed I could have died. But David thought it was charming. ‘Your father fancies himself a matchmaker,’ he said. So I told him about the kills in the refrigerator back in Dad’s hunting days, and then I took him to the Stagecoach Inn for their game dinner, pretending it was the same.” Harriet flushed slightly. “You don’t mind my talking about this, do you? So soon after—”

  “I’m glad for you,” I said truthfully. “Did he stay over?”

  “I wish.” Harriet stretched her legs. “I guess I thought we’d hop right in bed. Don’t be shocked. But he’s just getting over a painful divorce, he says, and he wants to go slow. He’s into the New Chastity. I wanted to tell him: Not me. I grew up on the Old Chastity and once was enough. I guess it hurt my feelings.…” Harriet shut her eyes, then opened them. “I mean, I sort of made a pass.”

  “But surely he must realize, whatever his age, how lucky he is, to have you interested—”

  “I guess. I mean, I think so. He calls a lot. And he says we’ll take a trip when his semester is over and we have time to get ‘better acquainted.’ I hope that means what I hope that means.”

  “I’m not surprised you found someone already.”

  “It may seem soon to you. I mean, you—But to me it was a long four months without a man.” Harriet clapped her hands and got to her feet. “Come on. I’ll show you what I did to Knox’s room, although I shouldn’t call it that anymore, should I?”

  I FOLLOWED HARRIET around what had once been her son Dwayne’s room, listening to her and looking at the results. She’d mounted Knox’s antique muzzle-loaders on the wall, a dozen of them, and, on each side, put framed photos of her family and his. His Civil War books were cased behind glass where his TV had once stood. The country-looking bedspread and pillow shams in ivory had an old-fashioned look against the gray papered walls. Knox’s neat twin beds (Dwayne’s before that) had been replaced by a four-poster high off the floor. It was history, that was the message. This room was history.

  “I fixed it up so David wouldn’t think my husband’s ghost was across the hall,” Harriet said. “I found all sorts of stuff when I cleaned everything out.” She gestured toward the chest of drawers and the closet. “Belated musket shots fired after he died, you could say. For instance, in his wallet, I found the list of my sizes I’d given him when we married, yellow as parchment and permanently creased. My dress size, gloves—imagine, shoes, panties, hat—really. I almost tore it up. You could tell he’d never used it.”

  I felt suddenly uneasy, guessing what was coming. Knox, the ladies’ man, had been careless, foolish.

  “Sit over here by me on the window seat,” Harriet said, patting a place.

  “What else did you find?” I asked reluctantly.

  “Oh, Sarah, how do you always know?” She started to light a cigarette but then stopped. “No, I mustn’t smoke up this room. Young men …” She took a breath. “I found a blouse, stuck up on his closet shelf. This was, remember, November when he died, It was gift-wrapped in red from Neiman’s. I told myself it was an early Christmas present.” She swung her foot up and down, her toes barely touching the polished floorboards. “It was a silk blouse, white with a big bow tie, and printed all over it were tiny red and black bow ties. Tacky. It wasn’t in my colors and it wasn’t my style and, it turned out, it wasn’t even in my size. It was a ten.”

  I had to smile, I who wore a size ten on my good days.

  “It was so wrong, I was speechless. How was it possible, I thought, to live with someone for thirty-two years and still be a total stranger? I held it up against me; it was big as a house. And I could just imagine Knox handing it to me Christmas morning, and me saying all the things you’re supposed to say. I wanted to cry.

  “Then I remembered exactly where I’d seen one like it before. We were at a bank party in Houston, one of those things with mountains of shrimp and ice sculptures and mobs of people I was supposed to remember. And this old girl came up, clearly having been in banking since paper money was first put into circulation, the sort with humped shoulders and logs for legs. She had on this very blouse. Knox asked her, sweet as taffy in that way he had, ‘Honey, where’d you get that knocked-out blouse, if you don’t mind my asking?’ And of course she was dying to tell she got it at Neiman’s and how much it cost. All the while I was standing there thinking the money would have been better spent on calcium tablets. Knox said, ‘I think I’ll get one of those for my secretary; she’s always saying I don’t give her anything.’ And I kept my mouth shut, but I knew that Mrs. Beeson wouldn’t wear that if her job depended on it. But I told myself that was just an unperceptive male thing to do.

  “Then, when I saw the blouse in the box, all that tissue paper, I thought, How could he have imagined I wanted that? How could he? But I guess I knew it wasn’t intended for me—” Harriet pressed her fingers to her temples. She’d been coughing as she talked, as if remembering had shut off her air, as if breathing and telling the story were too much.

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt defenseless in Knox’s place. I could imagine myself leaving behind a wrapped package—slippers, a book, a framed photo of Ben—and Nolan, a widower, going into a jealous slump, imagining a recipient in his mind, when the gift might have been meant for him, or our son, George, or Johnny, our son-in-law. It wasn’t really that I doubted Harriet had found a gift intended for another woman—Knox did attract females the way a bee attracts honey—but that I didn’t want him judged, condemned, when he wasn’t here to answer back. “Perhaps he bought it for Pammy,” I ventured.

  “You’re trying to be nice,” Harriet said, wiping her eyes. “You know better.”

  “Speaking of Christmas presents”—I decided to change the subject to give her time to regroup—“do you know that Nolan is still getting the one you sent him? Posthumous potatoes?”

  “Great heavens! The Potato of the Month. How ghastly, ghostly, to have a gunnysack arrive addressed to someone dead. Do you want me to cancel them?”

  “Not at all.” I visualized the hefty burlap bags with their neat New Penny Farms cards attached, giving the name of the potato, the cooking suggestions, the starch content. The Norland Reds arriving just as Nolan began treatment; the Yellow Finns, the day after the funeral.

  “I remember I thought my card to him was cute: ‘To a real meat and potatoes man.’ ”

  “So he was.”

  “I always do that, don’t I?” Ha
rriet said. “Remember Fruit of the Month? And Chocolate of the Month? Remember Fifty Designer Day Lilies?” She hugged her knees.

  “I liked the boxed set of Eight Great Classic Colors discontinued by Crayola. Goodbye to maize, violet blue, raw umber.”

  “That was a birthday present.” She began to pace the floor, went to the door, then sat back down.

  “The potatoes will serve to mark the year,” I said. “When they stop coming, we’ll get out of our widows’ weeds.”

  She made a shaky smile. “Us, in widows’ weeds. What were they anyway, weeds?”

  I looked around the room that had been Dwayne’s and then Knox’s, and now was being readied for a young man who might or might not sleep under this roof if not in this space. It was like archeology, like excavating down through layers of the earth. Rooms and their histories, occupants and their antecedents. “Harriet—he isn’t here to ask about it. Don’t make yourself miserable guessing.” I touched her arm.

  “What would you do if you found out that Nolan had been having an affair?” Her voice was scarcely a whisper.

  “With a size four like you?” I tried to make it a joke.

  “I’m serious, Sarah.”

  “I don’t know. There are so many ways husbands and wives miss connections, don’t you think?” There were so many ways we were all unfaithful to one another. So many ways that Nolan had been to me, and I to him. Would a sexual lapse have mattered? “I think I would feel the most grief for her,” I said, “the other woman. Someone unable to properly mourn.”

  “I’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND if I live to be a hundred,” Harriet said, slowing the car to a crawl on the bumpy two-lane, “how Mom could have come back here to spend her last days at Grandmother’s house.”

  We passed muscadine vine, wild strawberry, Indian strawberry, blackberry in bloom. A loon called in the twilight, and a whippoorwill. High in the trees, owls waited for night. What a lovely time of year this was in East Texas, a lush season not yet the steaming hot summer, crawling with bugs, air so thick that breathing was work. “Perhaps she likes being out here,” I said.

  “It’s a flat-out country place. And that means never-ending chores. I can’t tell you. Every time I come out she’s got a project. She’s canning pears and plums or she’s shelling pecans or hickory nuts. She’s got the hired man mending a leak in the roof or repairing a gate. Or she’s called the county about her water well or septic tank. I can hardly stand being out here for more than an hour.”

  When Harriet’s mother moved back some years ago to tend her own dying mother, she left her husband behind in their house on the edge of Louisiana, where Harriet had grown up and I had visited. With the move, it was as if Harriet had lost not only having her parents together, but her childhood home as well. I thought that part of her resentment about the old country place was no doubt this—anger at all she’d lost. “We don’t have to spend the night,” I offered.

  “No, no, I want to. A slumber party at Mom’s house—it’ll feel like we’re back at Pritchard’s. But such endless failures of the physical world give me hives. I guess I’m afraid I’ll be next. I can see me moving in when Mom is gone, and starting to call you to talk about how the linoleum is cracking or the flue isn’t drawing or the window sashes are rotting out.”

  Sensing, beyond the pines to the east, the Big Thicket with its massive hardwoods, dim light and oppressive undergrowth, I couldn’t imagine Harriet living out here alone.

  We parked in the dark on the eroded shoulders of the road, and Doll met us at the door. “You girls sit,” she ordered. “I’ve already got the mats and silver out. I waited to fix things until you showed up.”

  I could see that she had unwrapped the Towle sterling from the soft maroon bags where she stored it until company came. The last time I’d been here with Harriet, Doll had fried us up a late breakfast, although we just stopped in for an hour, dredging strips of bacon in heavily peppered flour, frying it up in wild-hog sausage fat. Batter-fried bacon, a delicious deep-country treat. “You’d have to be a woman to eat this meal,” Harriet had said. “Any man sitting down to this much animal fat would have a coronary occlusion on the spot.”

  It was hard to realize that then, a scant year ago, both men were alive.

  Tonight Doll had fixed chicken and dumplings, left over from the cemetery dinner, hot devilled eggs baked in a thick cream sauce, and, for dessert, fresh gingerbread, much too sweet, swimming in a dark chocolate glaze. She brought us each a cup filled to the brim with sweetened milky percolator coffee. The fact that Harriet preferred decaf and I drank my coffee black didn’t matter. Being good daughters, we took what we were offered.

  “It’s wonderful, Mother, WONDERFUL,” Harriet shouted.

  “I can fix you girls something else if you’re still hungry,” Doll said. Her voice rose and fell in the way of someone who can’t hear. Out of her Sunday clothes and her sun hat, away from the clusters of kin, she looked wrinkled, powdery, soft and old. Everything about her tonight was white—her hair, her cheeks, even the cotton duster she wore.

  She took our plates, insisting that she didn’t need any help in her own house. That if she’d wanted a maid she’d have hired one. We watched her through the kitchen door as she tidied up, retracing her steps, going through the slow motions of cleaning. Over her shoulder, she talked to us about the old days.

  “Papa used to take a single-shot down to the creek bottom and bring back two or three squirrels. He had a string of outbuildings in the back that were all workshops. He could fix a new blade for the scythe or new points for the plow. He made his own shears and built his own brakes. Most of the time he spent out with a bush-hog trying to clear the land. Back then it was a daily chore; the underbrush pushed up and you cut it back.

  “Youngsters played with what they had. My cousin—we’d take two corncobs, put a string between, play at being a yoke of oxen. We’d cut sticks, ride horses. My papa would get him an elm branch—he called it el-um—chew it down into a brush, use it to dip snuff. He died when his horse hit a fence. He hit his head on a rock.”

  We could hear the sound of pans and her talking to herself. Then she said, “Well, now, that’s water under the dam.”

  Harriet and I smiled. This had been the favorite fight between Doll and Nat in the house where I’d visited, a fight repeated over and over, sometimes half joking, sometimes truly angry. Doll would say, “That’s water under the dam,” when Nat went on and on about his super-het, his first-ever Rose Bowl game. He’d flare up, holler out that water did not go under a dam, it went over a dam, that, in fact, water usually didn’t go anywhere. That was the purpose of the dam, to dam the water. To which Doll would answer, drawing herself up to her full five feet one, “That’s what I said, it’s water under the dam.”

  When Doll finished her clean-up chores, we sat on the sofa and went through the ritual of looking at the old photo album and opening the flowered drawstring bag and taking out Harriet’s letters from school.

  We turned the thick black pages, looking at the pictures held in place by tiny gold stickers. There we were at fifteen, sunbathing in the summer in our two-piece Rose Marie Reid bathing suits; there we were at Pritchard’s, dressed for a formal, both of us in strapless gowns with wide skirts, both with corsages taped to our shoulders; there we were bridesmaids in each other’s weddings, only six months apart; here as young mothers in heels and long skirts holding fat baby boys, then in short skirts with bouffant hair holding wiggling baby girls. Last, posing with our husbands as beaming couples. Where had those people gone?

  I lifted the tissue-thin green Hallmark pages of Harriet’s letters home. How I’d wished to copy them, those messages that had gushed forth from her pen almost daily, seeming so carefree and affectionate. Now they seemed to me forced; cheerful missives never quite reaching their mark.

  Dear Mom, I met a new boy named Stewart. He is from Virginia. He sails in the summer and sleds in the winter. I’m sure he will ask me to the Cadets’ Ball.…


  Dear Mom, Today in Latin we learned eight ways to say, The soldier carries his sword.…

  Dear Mom, Four of us got to go to the movies today without a chaperone.…

  Dear Mom, Today I was invited upstairs to eat chocolate cake with the seniors. I think I must lead a charmed life.…

  Outside on the porch, we watched mayflies flock to the aromatic insect-repellant candles. A light breeze stirred, the stars came out and, across the road, the pines stood solid as a canyon wall. High in the air an owl hooted.

  Harriet lit a cigarette.

  Doll stuck her head out the screen door. “You girls want separate or together? I’ve got six bedrooms, eight beds made up. You can have your pick.”

  “Mom, we’ll take the front room. FRONT ROOM,” Harriet hollered.

  “It’s yours. I’ve got plenty of quilts in the hall closet. You know where they are. It’ll get cold toward morning. It’s likely we’ll get a rain in the night. Did you bring gowns? There are plenty in the chester there, inside the bottom drawer.”

  Harriet rolled her eyes. Since moving back here, her mother had picked up the old country terms. Chest of drawers, she told me, had become first chester drawers and now was just chester.

  “You let me tend my business in the bathroom first,” Doll said, closing the screen, “then you can take your time. I drew a full tank of water if you want a bath. There’s Cashmere Bouquet soap. I put your towels out already, they’re the pink ones on the side of the tub.”

  “We’ll be FINE,” Harriet told her, gesturing to her mother’s back, then catching herself and sighing at the futility. Throwing her cigarette out into the dark among the fireflies, she slipped her shoes back on. “Look at her,” she said, “stuck out here in the sticks, in nowhere-nowhere East Texas, beyond country, doing fine. Neighbors bring her over stuffed Russian hog sausage, hired men mend fences and shore up outbuildings for her, and the Sloanes, who by rights belong to Dad, fetch her to reunions and church. You have to hand it to her.”