Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  Harriet grabbed the foot of my bed and began to ram it against the wall, screaming, “And none of it was true. Not ever. We never did anything the same way; we never did anything at the same time. The two of us never were the two of us, were we?”

  I got down and took Harriet in my arms. She was weeping and doubling over coughing, unable to get her breath. Her arms still pushing and shoving.

  “Come downstairs,” I pleaded. “We’ll have hot chocolate. Mother says warm milk cures everything. I’ve upset you. I got carried away. That was all such a long, long time ago.”

  She jerked loose and slapped my face. “Keep your hugging hands off me. I’m going to sleep across the hall in that mausoleum, where I belong. And don’t come knocking on the door with any of Famous Edith’s cures. Because I don’t want anything else from you ever.”

  WILL APPEARED AT my kitchen door for early morning coffee, bringing Ben and Missoula back. “I’m on duty at the Middle School until midmorning,” he said. “They’ve got cancer-screening booths set up. Health is this year’s theme at the fair. How about meeting me at the apple fritters at ten-thirty?”

  I was in a wicker chair at the windows, gazing out at my peaches, still in the pink T-shirt and a cotton robe, my hair still down, a sleepless night’s fatigue in my bones and doubtless on my face, too. I’d been clearing my mind. I held the idea that the iron-laden soil in our part of the world was the source of the special flavor of the county’s fruit, and was grateful this morning that the primordial ore had settled beneath my orchards.

  I shook my head, too wrung out even to worry that I must appear a wreck. “I don’t think I can make it,” I said. “It was a—rough night.”

  Will poured himself half a cup, eyeing me. He had on scruffy sweat pants of a faded gray and a sweatshirt nearly as old as he was. He didn’t appear to be in much better shape than I did. I was exceedingly glad to see him, although too bone-tired and frazzled by last night’s fight to do much but motion to him to pull up a chair.

  “Didn’t my pharmaceuticals work?” He stayed by the door.

  “They did,” I said, not knowing where to begin. Or quite where the blowup had begun. When Will had exited out that same door last night, whistling up the dogs, it had seemed an almost perfect evening to me. I stared down at my pale legs in their dog-walking shoes, then at the pups, still frisky from an early morning run. “But by the time she took them …” I started again. “She got upset, it was my fault, and ended up sleeping half the night in …” I could hardly bear to go over it all again, even to Will. “In Nolan’s room. I moved her toward morning; she was groggy and I wanted to have her where I could hear her.”

  Will rubbed a hand over his eyes. Maybe he’d made a call to intensive care in the night himself; he seemed wrung out. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying here that Harriet is not going to make it to the fair this morning. Well, fine, let her have her rest; the shape she’s in, she’s entitled to come unglued from time to time. I’m saying I’ll see you at the apple fritters at ten-thirty.”

  “I can’t go off and leave her.…” I pushed my hair back behind my ears. If I wasn’t going to sleep I ought to eat something. I thought of last night’s cobbler.

  Will poured himself a refill, watching me. He took my cup, warmed it under the hot water tap, and filled it halfway. “Here,” he said. Then, “If you’re going to pal around with a doctor, Coop, you’ve got to toughen your hide. We’ve got a nice day planned: see the crafts fair, buy handmade toys, listen to the Crawdaddy boys tune up their banjo, ukulele, fiddle, harmonica and spoons, eat a catfish plate and a barbeque plate. I traded weekends. You’ve got Harriet to worry about—she’s the good news compared to what I’ve got in ICU. If I worried about each of them in direct proportion to how bad they’re doing, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. And I barely did.”

  “I don’t see how I can leave her—”

  “Fix yourself up pretty,” he said. “You look like you’re trying out for the part of a nurse in the Gone With the Wind hospital scene.”

  I flared up, “You planning to distribute information on preventing cancer looking like some great gray unshaved bear? You’re a fine one to talk.”

  “There,” he said, approving. “That’s more like it.”

  “Smooch.” I went to the door. And we did, for a minute, with the puddle of dogs at our feet. We kissed and nuzzled and reminded each other what it was all about.

  “Say TGIF,” he said, on the back steps.

  “Toe Goes—”

  “Thank God I’m Fine.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  Will bent to stroke behind Missoula’s ears and tell her he was leaving. “Eat her out of house and home, girl. Make her add an egg to that chow.”

  I watched him trot out of sight, then washed our cups and sank back into the chair by the window, feeling iron-laden myself. I couldn’t make sense of the scene with Harriet. It felt quite similar to old scenes with Nolan, and that made it all the more painful and all the more bewildering. How could they have been so disappointed? Wasn’t being friends for life or being married simply an agreement to be there? If you took away the trappings of similarity or sex that drew you together, wasn’t it just a promise to remain? Perhaps what they saw as entitlement I saw as covenant.

  Well, it was too late to right old wrongs with Nolan. But not with Harriet. So as not to wake her, I showered in my husband’s old room, steeling myself against the sense of trespass and the almost physical impact of absence. I braided my hair loosely and then slipped across the hall into my room for a dress to wear to the fair. Harriet was sleeping heavily, her breathing labored but steady.

  Downstairs, still listening for her with one ear, I formulated in my mind what I would do. Something she would see and even smell as soon as she walked into the kitchen looking for me, before she had time to be angered afresh or to feel once again betrayed—by her husband, one of her own in Birthday Club, her daughter and, now, her oldest friend.

  I made a batch of biscuits, cutting the shortening into the flour as if I’d done it every morning for a dozen years (the hands remembering such matters—separating eggs, beating batter, kneading dough—just as they recalled the smooth feel of piano keys or the heft and pull of a hairbrush). I made cream gravy to pour over them, hot and split, something I had never done before. But I’d seen many times in old country homes and cafes the look and texture of it, white, thick, slightly browned. I mixed melted butter and flour, then some of last night’s cream, plus black pepper and a spoon of coffee for color. Then, trying to picture in my mind’s eye Doll’s plump white hands, I dredged short strips of bacon in flour and fried them in butter and their own grease (having no wild-hog fat handy in my larder). After I put the breakfast where it would stay warm until Doll’s daughter woke, I spread the pink T-shirt with our picture on it out on the kitchen table.

  From a sheet of paper I cut a large white balloon, and from my teenage mouth put the words:

  Harriet,

  I’m at the Fair. See you later.

  I’m so sorry.

  Love,

  Sarah

  • • •

  CARS WERE PARKED for blocks in the residential neighborhoods around the fairgrounds, and couples with small children, and teenagers, hurried along the cracked sidewalks in front of old pink brick homes which had sunk a foot a century into the red Carolina clay.

  Little was left in the shady sprawling park of the famous spa: a wooden covered bridge, a rickety old springhouse, a few foundation stones from the grand hotel, the railroad trestle past the creek. I thought that if both Harriet and I lived in such once-fine forgotten towns, then surely there were millions more of them across America. Places that everyone came from and no one was going back to.

  Will was waiting where he’d said, at St. Andrew’s Apple Fritters under a blue-and-white-striped awning, leaning against a chest-high wooden counter. The smell of the pastries was so enticing, I had to close my eyes to breathe it in.


  “Made with tart green Golden Delicious,” he said. “Not Granny Smiths, as you might think.”

  “How do you know that?” I held out my hand for a plate of six steaming fritters dusted with powdered sugar, and left a dollar in the jar.

  “I’m getting into fruit,” he said. He looked pleased with himself.

  I tasted a sample, assessing its texture and flavor. “I wouldn’t have guessed Golden Delicious,” I admitted.

  “I asked the first good Episcopal lady I saw what kind of apple, and she said ‘Green.’ But the one slicing them into circles on the machine back there, she gave me the low-down. How come you’re not back there dipping slices? This is your congregation—”

  “I don’t do much for them,” I said. I looked across the counter toward the clump of women in the back. “A couple of our clients worked on this.” I didn’t see them there; perhaps they had a later shift.

  He put a hand on the shoulder of my blue cotton dress. “You look mighty nice. You doing better?”

  “Some,” I said. I’d also tied a blue ribbon on my plait. He was in a fresh shirt and tie, a dark suit, and I said, “You’re an improvement, too.”

  He led me a few steps away and said, “I guess it’s not telling tales out of school, but the woman slicing the apples—”

  I looked. “I know her. I understand her husband’s been sick.”

  “That’s what I was about to tell you. He’s the man who was on the table in my office the day you called.”

  “Oh, Will, that’s awful.”

  “Good fritters she’s making.”

  “Yes.” I looked back again at her busy bent head, reminded that our world was smaller than most.

  Will took my elbow and turned me to greet a trio of men wearing big felt hats, their bellies hanging over their belts and their shirtsleeves rolled up. They were the husbands of the church women.

  “You know Emmett, here—” Will said, “and Otis and Dawson.”

  “I do.” I shook hands all around.

  “The wife comes to your shop, correct me if I’m wrong,” the one named Otis said.

  “She does.” I was glad he made the connection.

  “Your girl fixed up our dining room real nice. Looks just like, I said to my wife, the one I grew up in, it’s got that molding and what I call bird paper.”

  “I’m glad,” I told him. “Katie’s good.”

  After they’d moved on, Will took my hand and kneaded the fingers. “I guess you need to know what’s what,” he said. “Dawson’s boy is one of my Siege of Shiloh patients.”

  “How is he?”

  “Still here.”

  “How hard that must be for a man like that.”

  “It’s harder for the boy,” Will said grimly, more a reminder than a reprimand.

  I had a long way to go before I could hear his stories without my legs going wobbly on me. How on earth had he learned to deal with such bad news daily?

  At the First Baptist Pork Barbeque stall, he said, “I got us pig tickets already; that’ll save us standing in line.”

  “I thought we were going to eat catfish.” I was still looking after the three men in felt hats, who were now standing at the apple fritter booth, chatting with their wives.

  “That’s lagniappe.”

  At the Mt. Zion Bakery booth, I stopped. “Why don’t I get two slices of chocolate cake to take Harriet, before they’re gone.” I remembered this cake from last year—so rich and moist that it sold in about ten minutes after people had finished their dinner plates.

  Will took a finger and rubbed away a line between my eyes. My worry line. He studied my face. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Ask the nice lady there, Mrs. Thompson, to put you back a couple of slices. But your friend Harriet made this trip to see the Springs Summer Fair. She’s going to want to see the fair. Don’t deny her that.”

  A lot of things Will had said about Nolan toward the last came back to me, things I’d let get beyond my recall when I was coping and mourning. “He hasn’t been a baby for nearly sixty years,” he’d said, “and he’s not one now.” “He’s a man as long as he’s got breath. Treat him like one.” “He came into this world alone and he’s got to go out that way. I’m not saying you have to open the door for him, Coop, but you can’t bolt it either. You stand to one side while he makes up his own mind when to go through it.”

  I nodded, shut my eyes for a minute, and then negotiated for the slices of chocolate cake.

  “Let’s go hear a little music.” Will put an arm around my waist and led me past the springhouse up the slope of the hill toward the street.

  We stood by the bleachers, which had been set up for the crowd’s favorite band, the Crawdaddy Brothers. They were playing the first of four hour-long gigs for the day. The fiddle and ukulele players were singing into the mikes, carrying the melody, while the harmonica and banjo did the backup and an impossibly tall man with a red beard played “drums” with a couple of spoons on his blue jeans.

  “Who’s gonna shoe her pretty little feet, who’s gonna glove her hand? …” The crowd was singing along and we did, as well.

  On the way back down the hill we listened to hand puppets “singing” gospel songs to a tape, and passed a sign-up table with a placard reading PUT THE TEN COMMANDMENTS BACK IN THE SCHOOLS near clusters of black and white school kids in designer T-shirts drinking from quart-size paper cups. Will bought a bag of boiled peanuts and I tasted one, the hot salty water still inside the shell. Fat free, they advertised, this year’s theme being health. We had a ceremonial cup of the cold bubbling spring water, which tasted of iron and like my memory of well water.

  I was taking lessons in how to walk around and mingle and not let myself be pulled back home to the thought of Harriet straining for breath in the upstairs bed, or the memory of Nolan in an earlier bed. Taking lessons in how to eat the apple fritter or boiled peanut when I was eating it, and listen to the country songs while I was hearing them. I wasn’t the best student, but I had a good instructor.

  We wandered up and down the rows of craft tents which had been set up near the old railroad tracks, where eight trains a day once stopped. Artisans were selling handmade aprons, toys, furniture, rugs, rag dolls, baby dresses, potpourri, pottery, blackberry jam and watermelon rind pickles. Most were from the Carolinas and Georgia, a few were from Tennessee, Virginia and north Florida.

  “Would you look at that?” Will pointed to a red-and-white-striped tent, below which two tables covered in white cloths held cow crafts: cow shoeshine kits, cow wastebaskets, cow bread boxes, cow hat racks and towel holders. But the winner was a wooden footstool painted like cowhide with pink wooden udders hanging down under the seat.

  “For Bess,” I said, clapping my hands. “I have to get it.” I was thinking of her guest quarters, former milking sheds, and the milking stool in the kitchen, where she kept her riding boots. I knew when I called her on her birthday, she’d be a good sport about the two hammocks and say each had room for two small boys and that she’d leave them up until Labor Day. But I thought she might not mind just once getting something that wasn’t from a mail-order catalogue.

  “I might have to get myself one of those things, too,” Will said, holding it up and admiring it. “Prop my feet up on it and clean my shoes.”

  Stools in hand, we stopped at a tent under a banner for MOUNTAIN MADE TOYS. “Model T,” Will said, picking up a wood replica of a car, painted bright blue. “Is that a fine piece of work.” He asked the man sitting at a table in the back, “You got a big sack?”

  “Sure I have.” The man was in overalls that looked to be bought just for the fair, and had short white neatly parted hair.

  Will wandered around, finally settling on the Model T, a large dump truck made of the same sanded wood, this painted bright yellow, a smaller truck, a pickup, in cherry red, and a grasshopper pull toy whose legs moved up and down, in apple green. “I’m practicing to be a grandpa,” he told the man, who appeared to be in his seventi
es. “Got boys from not yet three to not yet nine.”

  “That seems about right to me.” The man gestured to his choices with a large hand.

  “How’d you get started making these?” Will asked, after he’d written out a check. “You look to be my vintage, same model I’d say.”

  “More than likely,” the man agreed. “More history than coming attractions.”

  “This is the boys’ grandma,” Will said, calling me over to make introductions.

  Shaking hands, I thought I would have known the man was from North Carolina—the broad shoulders, that mountain voice, the brow ridge—even if the sign hadn’t said so.

  “My pleasure.” He stood to answer Will’s question. “I started modelling these toys because”—he scratched his head and then smoothed his white hair—“I used to make them for my boy, when he was small. I modelled that dump truck there on a real truck he used to get a kick out of watching that worked at a quarry near us.” He spent a minute examining the wheels of the truck, making them turn. “My boy was killed about a hundred years ago by some drunk punk son of a bitch. I spent a couple of years deciding I’d go around with my shotgun and blow the heads off drunk drivers, but then I figured they’d lock me up and that would be an end to that.

  “My wife, the boy’s mother, she didn’t cotton to that idea anyway, me and that shotgun. She said it was too much an-eye-for-an-eye for her taste. So then I was at loose ends, and I thought, Well, I’d make myself a truck and give it to the church for their Christmas bazaar, and I did, and one thing led to a few more. I got to liking it.” He picked up a version of the pull toy in blue. “This is a first, the grasshopper. My granddaughter was pulling some duck around after her, a toy, and having herself a big time with it. But the wheels kept falling off, and the metal sprong that held them, it wasn’t safe, not for two-year-olds. So I thought I’d try my hand. If the grasshopper takes hold, I’m going to try a rabbit next year. Another pull toy. I’ll make its ears flopping, I reckon.”

  “I guess we’ll be back to check that out,” Will said. “Boys’ll be a year older.”