by Lesley Kagen
“Sugar, it’s been so long,” Beezy says, disheartened. “Your mother—”
“‘Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.’” Sam used to say that to my mama all the time. “William Shakespeare wrote that. It means—time’s a-wastin’, so you better hurry up and do something before something else real bad happens.” Beezy doesn’t want my heart to get broken if I can’t find Mama. That’s why she’s holding back. “If I hadn’t waited so long to go lookin’ for her in the first place, maybe she’d be home right now,” I say, softer. “You understand?”
Clearly not wanting to, she sighs out, “Yesterday afternoon Dorothea Dineen was tellin’ Harriet Godwin that she heard Evie applied for a library position before she disappeared.”
It’s true Mama was at her happiest when surrounded by books, but well-to-do married women have their gardens and the pampering of their husbands and children to fill their days. They do not have jobs. I mean, Mama could’ve gotten a position at the library if that was allowed. She went to Sweet Briar College to study singing with hopes of appearing on Broadway someday, but then she fell in love with the great poets of the past and the masters of art so she switched over to learn about them until she fell in love with Papa. They got married short of her receiving her sheepskin.
I ask Beezy, “Ya sure you heard that right? A library position?” Papa wouldn’t let us go over there anymore after Mama vanished, so I started phoning on Tuesday afternoons, which was our usual checking-out-books time. I knew it was stupid, but I kept hoping that one of those times somebody would come onto the line, saying, “Miz Carmody? Why, sure she’s here.” Moments later, I’d hear Mama’s breathy “Hello?” and when I asked her where she’s been all this time, she’d say, “Oh, dear. I’ve lost track of the time. Your father’s not home from the courthouse yet, is he?” I finally had to give up the calling. That hog of a librarian, Jeanine Anderson, squealed to Papa and that’s why all that’s left of the downstairs phone is its roots.
E. J. stuffs the last bit of fritter into his mouth and asks, “What’s that you’re workin’ on, Miz Bell?”
“It’s something new I’m tryin’ out. It’s a muffler.” She holds up the piece of chartreuse and puce knitting. It’s anything but muffled. Since she can’t see what yarns she’s combining together, her stuff is louder in color than a marching band. “Ya like it, Shenny?” she asks, waving it my way.
“Love it,” I say, getting more and more riled by the second. We don’t have time for a regular visit like this, but trying to get Beezy to hurry through polite talk is like pushing a mule up a hill.
“Speakin’ of work,” she says, back busy with hers. “Little Walter thinkin’ of gettin’ himself back to the courtroom any time soon?” That’s what she calls Papa. Little Walter. So what if he’s got to sit on a phone book to see over his judge’s bench, she doesn’t have to say so, does she?
“I’m sure after Mama returns, His Honor will be rarin’ to get back to his gavel,” I answer, because it seems too disloyal to tell her that I can’t picture his erratic self in a courtroom any time soon. Who cares when he gets back to work anyway? It’s not like we need the money. We’re the richest family in town and my grandfather owns half the county.
Beezy hears me yawn and asks, “Not gettin’ your eight straight?”
“Not even six. Woody spends most of the night . . .” I glance down at my sister.
Her coloring arm is back and forthing with the only crayon she’s uses anymore—funeral black. It really bothers me that she won’t write words. If she can’t talk—fine. But she’s got the paper, she’s got the crayons, would it kill her to jot down one of these times Hey Shen, I love you?
“Have ya been takin’ her to visit the doc?” Beezy asks, sensing my upset the way she can.
“A course I have.”
Papa gave me permission to take Woody to Doc Keller’s office above Milligan’s Hardware every Sunday evening after the sidewalks get rolled up. Mostly all he does is ask lots of questions about what we think might’ve happened to Mama. I stonewall him, because what business is it of his anyway? “Can’t you just fix her?” I ask every time, hoping he’ll change his answer.
“I could. If there was something physically wrong,” he tells me when he’s done examining my sister’s throat. “Her vocal cords are in fine working order. She’s got hysterical muteness.”
Chester Keller may be Papa’s fraternity brother and oldest friend, but I think he’s gone over the hill and isn’t ever coming back. What’s so funny about my sister losing her voice?
Beezy’s forehead gets as furrowed as her knitting. “This lookin’ for Evelyn . . . it’s . . . it’s a lot to take on all by yourself, Shenny.”
I almost cry out, What am I supposed to do exactly? Papa’s threatening to send Woody away because she won’t talk. . . . We need to get Mama back more than ever. Beezy may be privy to a lot of what goes on around town, but she doesn’t know half of what’s happening up at Lilyfield. She knows that Papa is keeping us close, but has no idea how close. If I did clue her in to the root cellar and the interrogation sessions and all the other stuff, there’s not one thing she could do to help so there’s no sense in getting her worked up. That could be dangerous for her.
“Please don’t fret,” I say. “I’m not takin’ this on all by myself. There’s somebody else I’ve got in mind to lend a helping hand.”
Beezy knows exactly who I’m talking about and her lips are saying, “Mmm . . . hmm,” but she doesn’t mean it. If I could spend a minute more reassuring her, I would, but my sister has gone into a prey stance, rigid as a hound. If she had a tail, it’d be pointing.
“No . . . no . . .” I reach out for Woody, but she slips right through my fingers.
“What’s happenin’, Shen?” Beezy asks, always alert.
“It’s all right. It’s fine.” I pat her knee, which feels exactly like a glass doorknob.
“Woody’s just run off again. I’ll take care of it.” From the edge of the porch, I holler, “Get back here!” She not only ignores me, my sister doesn’t even bother to look both ways as she tears across the street to what she’s honed in on—the cemetery. “Don’t ya wanna finish your picture of . . . ah?”
I look down at what she’s been coloring on, already knowing that it’s going to be something morbid. Like a woman getting beat by a horned Satan or a hairy beast with foamy madness dripping off its stalactite teeth. Sure enough, today’s drawing reminds me a lot of our dog, Mars. Only it’s real bloody and gutsy. I should tell Woody that dog is never coming back. I really should.
“Quit catchin’ flies with your mouth and do something!” I shout at E. J. He’s lazing against the railing, watching with jaw-dropping adoration as my sister zigzags through the headstones to the side of Bootie Young, who is up to his belly button in a fresh grave. The reason E. J. is not rushing after her is that he knows what Woody has got herself all worked up about and it’s not Bootie Young.
Making my point, she doesn’t even seem to notice that handsome hunk as she begins pacing. Up and down . . . down and up . . . flapping her arms the length of the grave. Flapping is the second most irritating thing she does next to eye blinking, which always makes me think she’s trying to send me an SOS in Morse code and I don’t know Morse code. I better get over there quick before she does something wholly unpredictable.
“She’s not hurtin’ anybody,” E. J. says, clamping on to my arm as I rush past him. “Leave her be, Shen.”
I rip out of his grasp. “Get off me!” I’m surprised by how mad I am, and by the look on his face, E. J. is, too. “Quit telling me what to do and if you ever touch me again you . . . you . . . minin’ sludge . . . I’ll . . . I’ll—”
“Shenandoah Wilson Carmody!” Beezy admonishes. “Apologize to Ed James right this minute.”
“But he . . . he—”
“Shenny,” Beezy demands with a stomp of her little foot.
“Yes, ma’am.” I back off and say to E. J. in
my most ladylike voice, “Pardon me ever so much,” so Beezy will forgive me, but she can’t see me lifting my fingers up to his cheeks and pinching him hard as I want.
Stupid kid. He’s acting like Woody and him have already tied the knot.
Chapter Five
Following the exact same route through the headstones and mausoleums that Woody did, I pass a slew of our dead relatives on the way towards Bootie and his hole. Grampa’s also got a graveyard up at his place where some Founders are laid to rest because this cemetery wasn’t around back when they succumbed to Indian raids or plow accidents or plain old scarlet fever.
“‘Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah!’” Bootie is singing. He’s rehearsing. He always performs the traditional Civil War song “The Bonnie Blue Flag” at the opening ceremonies of Founders Weekend because he was born with a creamy baritone that can reach out into a crowd and grab it by the throat.
The Young family works a dairy farm, but according to a couple of reports that I heard him read up front of the classroom when Woody and I were still attending school, waking at the crack of dawn to milk crabby cows holds no interest for Bootie. He wants to attend college so he can be an archaeologist, which is a bone digger, so this cemetery job is good practice. Because he’s had to miss so much school during planting and harvest times, even though he’s in the same grade as Woody and me (going into seventh), he’s a year older at thirteen but looks even older, like all the farm boys do. I bet there’s still plenty of girls that draw his name inside hearts all over their schoolbooks or pass him mushy notes that are SWAK—Sealed With A Kiss. I don’t have time for that lovey-dovey stuff. I’m too busy worrying about Mama, taking caring of Woody, and keeping watch over Papa, so I am always courteous to Bootie when I run across him, but never overly so. Wouldn’t want to give him the wrong idea.
Coming up to the grave, I press Woody’s arms down to her sides and say, “Hey, there.”
“Mornin’, Shen,” Bootie says, thrusting his shovel into the dirt. He’s towheaded with a cleft in his chin that I’ve always wanted to stick my finger in to see how deep it’d go. First knuckle, I bet. “Haven’t seen you in forever.” Bootie looks more plumped out in the body than the last time I saw him but none of it’s chub. His bare chest is smooth, but the hair under his arms matches his brown eyes and he’s still got the most luscious smile. Like a gooey dessert. “Where ya gonna sit on parade day?”
“In the park with Beezy,” I say. “Like always.”
After Woody and I have led the Parade of Perpetual Princesses most of the way down Main, we peel off so we can join Beezy and the rest of the Negroes. The parade doesn’t go through Mudville so they got to watch it as it winds past Buffalo Park. Even though we are light-skinned, Woody and me are always nicely tanned by this time of the year. We also wear straw hats that cast shadows upon our faces so we do not stick out like two whitefish in that sea of brown bodies. (We have to be careful not to get noticed by Grampa, who does not in any way, shape, or form approve of us associating with Beezy or any of the other coloreds in a social way.)
When the parade turns the corner and heads our way, I tell Beezy every year beneath the shade of that big maple, “Here comes the high school band.”
Tittering from her folding chair, Beezy will say, “I’m blind, child, not deaf.”
“You’re blind? Really? How come nobody told me?” I’ll say in mock surprise, because she’s got one of those great booming kinds of laughs that you would never suspect could come out of somebody so small. “Next up are six baton twirlers whose sparkly uniforms are a mite skimpy on top and riding up in the back, especially Dot Halloran’s. (Never have been able to stand Dot, not sure why.) “Right behind them are Joe Morton and Cal Whitcomb dressed up like Uncle Sams and waving to everybody. After them, the float with Grampa in that Confederate uniform is coming. He’s sitting on top in that golden horseshoe throne.” I always spit into the grass once he passes by. “There’s six black horses makin’ a mess all over the street behind him.”
Beezy will sniff the air at that point and remark, “Always thought those animals were a lot smarter than folks give ’em credit for,” and that never fails to crack me up ’cause I think Grampa stinks, too.
“Whose body ya diggin’ that hole for?” I ask Bootie, narrowing it down to a Caucasian since Stonewall Jackson Cemetery doesn’t allow coloreds. They got to start their trip to the Promised Land over at Evergreen.
“This here is Mr. Minnow’s grave,” Bootie replies with a respectful bow of his head.
“Clive Minnow?” I may sound surprised, but I’m really not. I’ve been wondering why I haven’t seen our neighbor around lately. Usually when I’m doing some afternoon reading, he’ll appear in his adjoining woods with his metal-detecting device. Of course, Papa told me to stay away from him. They do not get along because you got to walk on eggshells around His Honor and Clive wasn’t light on his feet.
“Are you absolutely positive it’s Mr. Clive Minnow that you’ll be buryin’ here?” I ask, recalling how the last time I saw him, he didn’t look fatally sick. He had been complaining of stomachaches off and on, but that wasn’t unusual. A few years ago when Clive was convinced that he had gotten a brain tumor, I got worried because I’d seen a man on the Dr. Ben Casey television show get the same thing and he expired during the first fifteen minutes. But when I told Mama, she wasn’t upset one bit.
“He’s all right, Shenny. It’s not a brain tumor, just a headache,” she said, handing me a bottle of aspirins from the cupboard. “Mr. Clive is what is known as a hypochondriac.”
“A hypowhateeac?”
“A hypochondriac,” she said slowly. “That’s a person who thinks that they’re either sick or about to become sick or much sicker than they really are, but it’s only in their head.”
“But a brain tumor is all in somebody’s head!” I protested, but after I looked the word up in the dictionary that made sense. Hypochondriac means that Clive was the kind of person who had quite the imagination when it came to illness and that’s really true. Over the years, I’ve lost count of the number of times he told me that he thought he was coming down with polio or chicken pox, even leprosy and malaria. I explained to him we don’t have those last two diseases in the Commonwealth, but he hissed, “Ain’t nobody ever taught you that there’s a first time for everything, little girl?”
“How’d he die?” I ask, feeling guilty.
Bootie says, “Virgil went up to the Minnow place to deliver groceries Saturday morning like always. Nobody answered the door, so Virgil went looking. He found Clive facedown at the edge of the creek, his dog whinin’ by his side.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” I say with genuine regret. He and I had recently been bickering over a ring he’d found in the woods with his detecting device, but that’s not an excuse. I should’ve stopped by the Minnow place more often than I had been to check up on him. “Poor Clive. Poor Ivory.”
“Who?” Booty asks.
“That’s the name of Clive’s dog. Ivory Minnow.”
Bootie pulls the shovel out of the dirt, using muscles that look like they could keep you safe. “I heard drownin’s one of the worst ways to go.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too.”
My other grandparents drowned. For a while there, I think the sheriff thought that’s what happened to our mother, too. He had half the county searching the creek’s banks and bushes for her. The day Woody and I were out there watching, I pulled him aside and told him, “She’s a good swimmer. She was on the water ballet team in college.”
Sheriff Nash, who is not particularly smart, but is well-mannered, said, “Don’t think your mother drowned, Miss Shen. The rowboat is missin’.”
I told him, “But Mama would never take the boat by herself,” but would he listen?
He pulled me behind a yew bush and said in a lowered voice, “Are you aware of your mother and father havin’ any . . . ?”
That’s when His Honor spotted us and hurried
over. He said to the sheriff, “That’ll be all, Andy,” and then he dragged me farther into the bushes and reprimanded me. “Take your sister back up to the house immediately. Her crying is upsetting the hounds.”
Papa.
“Nice job on the hole, Bootie. Keep up the good work. Time to go, Woody,” I say, grabbing her by the arm and praying that this isn’t one of those times when she makes herself as stiff as her name. She can do that when she doesn’t want to leave one place and go to another. I don’t have time to look for a coaster wagon to set her in. We should’ve been back at Lilyfield by now.
“Wait a tick, Shen,” Bootie says, toeing the dirt at the bottom of the grave. “I . . . I was wondering if you’d like to . . . Y’all are goin’ to the carnival, right?”
“A course we are. Right, Woody?”
No matter how much our father warns us about staying out of the public eye, the Carmodys are the descendants of those that get celebrated during Founders Weekend. Grampa Gus will insist that we not miss any of the “brouhaha,” and that includes the two nights of the carnival, which is just fine and dandy with us. Woody and I have always gone crazy for those rickety rides and penny pitching games and most of all, the Oddities of Nature sideshow, which has an Armadillo Boy and the beefiest gal in the world named Baby Doll Susan, who lives behind a wall of glass with a refrigerator and a floral sofa set on cinder blocks. The best oddities , though, have got to be the Siamese twins. There was a time when I praised Jesus for not planting Woody and me so close inside of Mama that we grew into each other the way they did, but with my sister running off the way she’s been, I’ve begun to out and out envy joined-at-the-hip Milly and Tilly. If my sister keeps this up . . . well. I can’t find Mama and chase after her. There’s only so many hours in the day.
