Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “You want my card?” The man fished in his overall pocket.

  “Your wife around?” Will looked toward the back of the tent.

  “She died two weeks ago. She said for me not to think I didn’t have to get my butt down here just because it was going to be twice the work without her.”

  It was too much. I looked at the man’s weathered face, at the still way he stood there, saying those things about his losses, and I turned and buried my face against Will’s chest, cow stools and wooden toys poking out in all directions. “I can’t bear it,” I said in a near whisper. “I can’t bear that it happens to all of us.”

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, Harriet said, “I’d like to go to church.”

  “That would be good.” I checked the clock.

  “That’s what they say about religion.”

  We made a small laugh together.

  “St. Andrew’s starts at ten-thirty now, not eleven.”

  “St. Bart’s does that at home. I have no idea why.”

  We were eating heated-up biscuits and scrambled eggs at the kitchen table, and being fairly gingerly with one another.

  Harriet had gone to the fair with me Saturday in the late afternoon. She had eaten her dark rich cake slices on the spot, had asked the woman at the Mt. Zion booth for the recipe and been disappointed to find it was a secret. “I could have taken a cake next time to the Sloane covered-dish dinner,” she said, “and knocked their socks off.” We had listened to a set by the Crawdaddy Brothers, this time with a Patsy Cline sound-alike vocalist. But Harriet had grown winded quickly; her legs had tired. The vast park was hilly, the pathways steep except in the crafts area, and the crowd was jostling and noisy—with smokers on every hand.

  When I came back from the time with Will, carrying my milking stool and sending the dogs home with him, I’d found her at the table, wearing the short shorts I’d promised would go anywhere in western Carolina in August, ready to go.

  “I’m so sorry about last night.” I stood across the room, uncertain what to do.

  But she’d brushed it aside with Doll’s old line. “That’s water under the dam,” she said.

  At the park and back home after an early supper of leftover stew, she’d been full of plans. What she was going to do at her lunch party on my visit next spring, the trip she and David were going to take to the coast in the fall. How she was going to duplicate that fantastic cake. How she thought she might fix up the panelled downstairs room that had been Knox’s library, make it into a green and white sitting room, a more intimate place to invite a man than the living room but not as bold as upstairs. “It never was a ‘study’ anyway,” she said. “You know, it was one of those rooms men claim in houses and all but never set foot in.”

  It was as if the present were uncomfortable, the past had proved painful, and so she had set her sights on the future—which she willed to be a better time.

  Now, as we arrived at the church, she asked, “What do you call him?”

  “Vicar,” I said.

  “I mean, what do you call him?”

  “I call him Reg. It’s Reginald. He refers to himself as Father Neill in the bulletin, but I can’t go along with Father. Anyway, he’s younger than my children.” I thought of our new clergyman, tall as a beanstalk, who appeared barely old enough to shave.

  St. Andrew’s was a simple gray-painted frame building, with no stained glass windows—although the congregation was quite proud of the old leaded glass panes. It was not only Mineral Springs’s sole Episcopal church, it was also the oldest in our part of the state. A church with a history tended to reassure: some things endured; some things did not fall away, were not forgotten.

  Harriet wore a white suit with caramel blouse to match her new slingback spectators, her best pearl choker, hose and gloves. I wore my brown linen, the present from Edith I’d worn on Mother’s Day.

  The last time we’d been to church together we’d stood, young mothers in roll-brim straw hats, having our infants christened. When we’d visited each other with our families, back when the children were young, Sunday had been reserved for an outing, a trip into the Big Thicket to glimpse the marsh’s water snakes and colored birds, or a drive into the Blue Ridge for a day of white-water rafting. Later, when we got together just as couples, we’d lazed on Sundays, eating pancakes, just the four of us, or had friends over for brunch, pouring them pitchers of fancy drinks.

  In St. Andrew’s, I let Harriet sit on the aisle, in case she wanted to leave, in case she began to cough. We were directly behind the two eldest women in the congregation, both in their nineties. Widowed since Lee met Grant, they always came together, Miss Ima and Miss Lucille. They shared the old Book of Common Prayer between them, and moved their lips along with the vicar even when it was not time to respond aloud. The new prayer book had hardly made a ripple in our congregation anyway; everyone recited what she already knew. Visitors said the new words at the same time. It made a sort of responsive reading.

  Seeing the old faithfuls, I wished I’d picked a different pew, one that might have been less painful—seeing friends older than us by a quarter of a century, still here and still together. But I’d sat here from habit, where I always had, where Mother and Bess and I, and later Nolan and I and the children, had sat.

  He had never warmed to St. Andrew’s; in fact, he had never warmed to Episcopal ways. There was too much bowing and scraping, he’d said, having come from another denomination. “Scraping is just another word for bowing,” I’d told him, “and kneeling is hardly bowing.” Besides, I liked to see grown men come in and get down on their knees. I liked to see old women, older by a dozen years than my mother, come in with their well-shod feet and proud air and sink to their knees. Had Nolan been devout about, or even truly attentive to another church, I might have compromised. But going mostly alone, I preferred one with a history—mine, my mother’s and grandmother’s, a whole people’s history on this one spot in this one gray frame church.

  Rising from the kneeler, Harriet pointed to the program. “Oh, no,” she whispered, “a baptism.”

  I wondered if she fretted that she might not be able to keep her cough at bay at an extra-long service, with both baptism and communion. I could have reassured her that this would only mean a shorter sermon—Reg Neill was careful never to run over his time—but the organ music began and with it the service. It was the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (the old Jewish Harvest Festival). The baptism was to be of twins, James and Jeremy Bywater. The Bywaters were sitting conspicuously at the front, armed with bottles, pacifiers, diaper bags and receiving blankets. The parents looked to be about fifteen. Such an impossibly rosy-faced young woman with a wealth of light hair, and an earnest clear-faced young man, who had, you could see when he craned his neck to check out who had come, the typical South Carolina face, thick brows and cleft chin. A local boy, Bywater, perhaps new to this congregation but not to the state.

  I found I was looking forward to taking communion; it had been too long since I’d been to church. I liked the feel of the paper-thin wafer on my tongue, the sip of wine from the chalice. It took me back to school days, to the drama of communion at Pritchard’s, with half the girls fasting, becoming dizzy with the combination of low blood sugar and piety, with someone always fainting, with at least one girl having to be helped from chapel. It was a wonder we didn’t have visitations or levitate from the ground before the dazed eyes of our rapt classmates. Our youth, our readiness for sex, menstruation, hunger, awe, all combining to make a very real transubstantiation of the eucharist—if not the one intended.

  I saw several of the women from the apple fritter booth sitting in the front, wearing silk, but none of the younger members had dressed up—that was part of the new man’s influence. Come as you are. There were young men in shirtsleeves—it was August after all, though coolish—and young women bare-legged in cotton dresses or skirts and shirts. Their children wore rompers and playclothes, depending on the age.

  I watched the vi
car’s assistant, Doris, mount to the lectern and give the First Reading. Dark, ethereal, skinny as a rail with a viselike handshake, she would get her training here and then take over her own congregation somewhere else. I was reminded, watching her, of the two youth leaders at boarding school who’d been in training to be DREs, directors of religious education, the highest church post in those days that a woman could aspire to. Had they gone on to divinity schools when the opportunity arose? Had they lived long enough to have churches of their own?

  It was a moment before fragments of the lesson reached my ears; I’d been back in time. I’d been recalling Pritchard’s, and those days, no doubt because of my fight with Harriet, wondering if we’d been after all even at the same school. It was from a new translation of Isaiah: “We have made a covenant with death.… When the overwhelming scourge passes through you will be beaten down by it. As often as it passes through, it will take you.… For the bed is too short to stretch oneself on it, and the covering too narrow to wrap oneself in it.” But if Harriet, hands clasped tightly in her lap, heard or was disturbed, she gave no sign. Perhaps she was also, in her own mind, back, a girl again, attending chapel.

  The Bywater boys did a fine job. James bellowed lustily while Jeremy was being sprinkled; Jeremy wailed when it was James’s turn to get attention. After, each could be heard gulping and sobbing, then settling down in their parents’ arms. Reg had come down to the front row, bringing the silver cup of water with him, handling the whole thing in a young, easy way. Chatting with the babies, gazing at the congregation, encouraging them to join in, to feel in their bones the sense of support and welcome which went with the familiar words. I half thought he might pass the babies around a bit or have everyone come up and do a mild laying on of hands, all the friends of the Bywaters in their shirtsleeves and summer dresses.

  It was hard to know how much of this old church had rubbed off on my children. I knew George had been going sporadically to the Huguenot church in Charleston. And that Fannin had taken the boys to Sunday School, because Matthew had mentioned stories about baby Jesus. Which, I suspected, he’d mixed up with baby Revelations in his mind. Wondering if, in some tangled theology, I had no doubt, Jesus had died in his mommy’s tummy. I could picture my son here clearly, a small boy riffling through the Book of Common Prayer, finding all those passages I’d never seen in all my years of reading from it (for example, the Circumcision of Christ According to Luke). How did the fingers of the young find unerringly anything in any way titillating? I thought of today’s infants, somewhere down the road, becoming two men, James and Jeremy, the Bywater boys, grown with families of their own. Their fresh-faced parents grown also, into other people. I thought of mortality.

  Harriet had wept quietly, wadding up a white hanky, during the baptism, but was not seized with coughing until she was standing at the rail waiting her turn to receive the wafer and wine. I was already on my knees, my palm held out before me, when I heard her racked with a cough which seemed to tear her lungs loose from her chest. I didn’t know if I should rise and follow her when she left. But Harriet did not go; she stood, clutching her white suit jacket with one hand, the handkerchief held to her lips with the other. When it passed, she knelt beside me and took the wafer. No one had moved to walk around her; no one had moved out of line. At the rail, Miss Ima and Miss Lucille turned and exchanged glances.

  After the service, Reg found us in the rose garden, a large plot of blooms in St. Andrew’s deep front yard, planted in the shape of a cross. He was in a suit and clerical collar. He didn’t like to stand outside in his robes; this was the wrong community for that, he’d said; it gave the wrong idea. Often he dispensed with his jacket. He must, I thought, in his boyhood, long after the time young girls fasted to fainting, have served his own apprenticeship; been an acolyte, a crucifer, given up treasures for Lent, committed the Scriptures to memory. He must have indulged in some necessary excess at an early age that left him now comfortable with himself, not distressed by small matters. No doubt he would grow into someone with a steady nature, able to comfort. That would be at a larger church in a larger community. We got the young ones, our old churches in this iron-laden part of the world.

  “Oh, those precious babies,” Harriet was saying, wiping her eyes. “Those precious little babies.”

  She had exited the church looking back at the cluster of friends around the Bywaters. She’d hesitated, as if she wished to press through the crowd and see the infants for herself. I recalled her from when our own children were christened at those joint ceremonies, our boys in Texas, our girls in Carolina. I could see her beaming proudly, holding out the fat offering of her young to the sprinkle of blessed water. What had that represented to her that she wished so fervently to repeat it?

  If it had been her Dwayne, his head full of electronics, or her Pammy, her mind stuffed with appellate briefs, presenting their descendants, what role would Harriet have played? The grandmother with the terrific legs; the grandmother sitting in the front row out of the picture. Where had I been when Fannin’s boys were named? Twice there with Nolan, twice there with Mother. Nor could I recall now which grandson had got which two of us. It had not been my occasion; it had been each child’s in turn. Harriet wanted not grandbabies, I guessed, but rather to be the young Mrs. Bywater in the crowd of parishioners, her cheeks flushed and her prospects stretching far into the new century.

  I made the introductions.

  “We’re always glad to have visitors swell our ranks,” Reg said in a welcoming tone.

  “I was admiring your roses.” Harriet held out a gloved hand.

  “Twenty-two varieties,” he told her, as if he’d be tickled to tick them off for her if she was interested.

  “Does your wife look after them?” She was imagining him half of a pastoral couple.

  “When I have procured a wife, will she tend my roses?” Reg smiled down from the heights. “I think not. I feel certain that because of my love of being their sole caretaker, I will select a woman who perceives them as a collection of thorns and busies herself with her brain surgery—but one mustn’t be classist, must one?—or perhaps her auto mechanics.”

  “I hope,” Harriet said apologetically, “I didn’t disturb your service.”

  “Not a bit of it. We get some objections to our use of the common cup—although Doris turns it, as you saw.”

  “She did a good job, the—woman who helped you.” Harriet did not say black, faltering only for a moment. She seemed subdued, as if all the wind had been knocked from her.

  “She’ll make a fine member of the clergy,” Reg agreed, a beanpole in a turnaround collar. He bent and selected a peach rosebud and presented it to Harriet.

  “Those babies.” She turned her sallow face away.

  With the sure instincts of the young, Reg Neill reached out and put his hands on Harriet’s head. “Bless you,” he said.

  With that her eyes filled again. Looking up at him, she whispered, “I wish I had had grandchildren.”

  It was the only time I heard her speak of her own death.

  FIVE

  WILL AND I WERE on the front porch looking out at the oak and the dogs chasing the start of fall when the mail carrier brought an overnight delivery from Harriet’s Uncle Bob with her obituary. Doll had called me two days earlier with the news. “She’s gone,” she said, her voice shaky and faint. “They said it was just for overnight, but she’s gone.”

  She gave me the name of the hospital in Houston and said the service would be at the Sloane plot on Thursday. That was today. I was dressed; Will was taking me to the airport in Greenville. We’d sat a few minutes over a second cup of coffee, not talking a lot. He promised to hold down the fort. I promised to come back in one piece.

  He had called Harriet’s attending physician and got the story straight. They’d put her in to give her oxygen and some relief from the pain. The tumor, he said, had grown into a main vessel. She had drowned, four weeks to the day after her visit to Carolina, her
warm heart beating and her great legs kicking no more.

  Reading her death notice was like seeing a vivid life-size portrait shrunk to a dim miniature, and I crumpled it up after I read it. But Will retrieved it and smoothed it out, knowing I would want to keep it.

  BANKER’S WIDOW DIES

  Harriet Sloane Calhoun, 55, died Tuesday at the M. D. Anderson Hospital in Houston. A homemaker and member of St. Bartholomew Episcopal, she is predeceased by her husband, prominent area banker Knox M. Calhoun. Surviving are her parents, Nathaniel and Dolly Sloane of Cypress and La Salle, son Dwayne Knox Calhoun and daughter Pamela Sloane Calhoun, both of Houston. Services are to be held Thursday at the Sloane Family Cemetery in La Salle. Memorial contributions may be made to the charity of your choice.

  I’d slept at Will’s the night Doll called. The thought of being in that upstairs room where Harriet and I had had our slumber party that went so awry was too upsetting. I could see her again rocking my bed back and forth against the wall in anger, hurting in body and spirit. I could hear her wheezing breath mark the time like the ticking of a clock. But last night we’d come back here, to let me sleep in my own bed and know that she would never again scoot down beneath the covers of the other one. To let me get used to losing her.

  “I brought you a little something to take along with you.” Will was standing; it was time for us to leave.

  “What?”

  He handed me the little drawing I had done of Harriet’s chest. “I made a copy before I parted with it,” he said. “I thought you’d like to scatter it or some such thing.”

  I was touched and tucked it in my bag. I could see Harriet look at it, pleased.

  “And I brought you a towel.” He handed me a sack from which I pulled an old soft blue bath towel with? for Perry embroidered at the hem.

  For that I gave him a serious smooch.

  Walking to the car, I said, “You didn’t have the summer party for your married friends this year.” I was trying to patch the year back together, remember where I’d left off noticing.