Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  “I can understand,” she said. She always had some project in mind she was afraid to tell her parents. She moved her hand again along his leg in a kind of commiseration, thinking of their similarities. “Did Sallie go with you?”

  “She toured other places with friends. They always travel together.”

  “That’s nice.” She’d like that kind of small-town compatibility.

  “I met up with them in Scotland. That’s when I got my bagpipes. I’ve always wanted to learn to play them. I wanted to meet the head of my clan, but I was too shy to get in touch with him.”

  “Why didn’t Sallie do that too?” Was the edge in her voice directed toward him or Sallie?

  “Sallie had shined her ass enough, I was told. Prancing around trying to make the guards at Buckingham Palace laugh.”

  “Oh, good God. No wonder you wanted a divorce.”

  “It’s such a waste, Laurel, that I killed that boy. If only I hadn’t hung on so long. I think if I hadn’t killed him, I’d eventually have killed Sallie.” Hal held both of her hands between his. “There’s been so much frustration in my life. I should have broken away from Daddy years ago and farmed on my own, like a lot of my friends did. I didn’t know how to tell him. He ought to have turned things over to me, and I think he wanted to. But he didn’t know how to do it, either. It’s just been a sad situation for years. I was doing well, married to Carla and farming. Then I had to give her everything I had. I went on salary and after a while I deteriorated so, married to Sallie and drinking, Daddy couldn’t turn anything over to me. I could farm that place, Laurel. I used to make better decisions than Daddy, and he wouldn’t listen. One year we lost half a crop because he poisoned at the wrong time, when I’d told him not to.”

  “Maybe now you can take over. Tell him you want to. You’ve grown and changed here.”

  “That’s what I plan on.”

  She said, “Do you have a grape arbor at Matagorda near a swimming pool?”

  “We used to. It blew down so often, Daddy left it down.”

  “Then I’ve been there,” Laurel said. “To a high school sorority party.” She told how there were grapes set out in silver bowls that seemed elaborate to be by a pool.

  “That sounds like Mama,” he said.

  She had kept eating grapes, one after another, until a boy spoke to her about it; not hearing him exactly, she had been afraid to ask what he said, something that reflected on there being something wrong with her.

  “I never did get to see my trophies,” Hal said. “I had to write the taxidermist to hold them for three years. But I brought a few home and had them mounted here. An old Negro on the place named Field looked at the zebra head and said, ‘I ain’t never seed no striped mule before.’”

  “Oh, Hal!” There was that god-awful squeal again. “Matagorda sounds wonderful. I wish I could see it.”

  “You will. I dreamed the other night about us making love in my bedroom.”

  “Well, that won’t happen at Matagorda,” she said.

  “It will when we’re married,” he said.

  She laughed. “You haven’t even asked me to marry you.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes,” Laurel said.

  “Then you belong to me now.” He sat with his back to the wall again, holding her hand. She leaned forward and touched her hand to his cheek. They could kiss just once quickly again, but there were footsteps out in the corridor, and a group of prisoners went by the windows.

  “Hal,” she said, sitting back. “Can we have a baby?” She thought Matagorda needed an heir, and she wanted to provide one: to make up for the son he’d never had. He and Carla had planned on another child, hoping for a son and namesake, but then they’d divorced.

  “If it’s safe for you,” he said. “Maybe this time it will be a child I can keep.”

  “Suppose Sallie won’t get a divorce?” she said. If Sallie had not met someone else in three years, maybe, past forty, she would decide Hal was better than no one. Past forty, a woman was made to feel she was without much chance of finding a man.

  “Then I’ll get the divorce. I promise.”

  She felt a tightness in her throat and chest at his words about keeping a child. More than ever, she wanted to take care of him. He seemed to need it so much. Laurel went to the door reminding herself that what self-sufficiency she had had been taught her by William. Without it, she could not have thought of leaving him.

  9

  She carried a toothbrush along in her pocketbook. A toothbrush, at least, seemed necessary to take along on an affair. Something was wrong. That was apparent as soon as she saw Buddy’s face. He gave her a note. Baby, I could die!

  “They carried them out of here at dawn by the busload,” Buddy said. “Took them down to the Gulf Coast to clear up all that debris after Camille.” Laurel had read on, and she nodded. “There was nothing he could do about it.”

  “I know that, Buddy. Thanks a lot for waiting.” She drove the round trip back to the cabin.

  Early the next morning she burned her final garbage, watching ashes fly away in varying shapes. She and Buff drove out of town, and she had that strange feeling that no one would much care or miss her; lives went on. She felt pain at leaving Hal, fear about when they could possibly meet; and she took their engagement seriously. Yet she could not help wanting to get back into her old routine, her life. She was tired of other people’s houses and their supper tables; she wanted her own. Soon winter clothes would have to come down from the attic. Bees would gather around apples fallen to the ground, humming their closedin sound.

  She passed the outskirts of Knoxville with a salutatory, unseen handwave. She expected to stay on the borderline of Tennessee and Virginia, as usual. But had no luck. Hours later, she was still driving through an obscuring rainstorm. And she had investigated every motel, the sleaziest kind. Her jaws clenched in fatigue. She repeated a magical phrase in time to the windshield wipers: If I make it, Hal and I will be married. A voice spoke back in its sardonic manner. Make it? her father said. Hell, you’ve got to make it. Only he spoke about more than this paved road or the rubbled ones that spent his life. She was nodding at her legacy as she turned into a Holiday Inn knowing she had to stop, finally, and would sleep here in the parking lot if necessary. The clerk was sorry they were full. He looked solicitous as she wavered at the desk. “I’ve been driving thirteen hours,” Laurel said.

  “Nothing up the road, either. I’ve been phoning for people all night.”

  “Someone should have told me that a long way back.”

  “There’s a woman in town who sometimes takes in a person overnight. I’ll phone her.”

  She found the woman’s house somewhere out in a dark, strange town and went inside, too tired to carry in her overnight case. She and Buff slept in a canopied bed, with nothing for dinner but candy bars Laurel had bought in the motel’s lobby. Leaving at daylight, she would arrive home earlier than planned, having spent so much time on the road the day before.

  Only her mother’s car was in the driveway. The smell of chicken frying drifted outdoors, and she saw her mother inside, darkened by the screen door. Mrs. Wynn stood too long staring out a kitchen window, though she would know her daughter had arrived. She came to the door. “You’re early.” Her cooking fork was poked upright in one hand as she offered her cheek for kissing.

  Laurel wanted to tell her about that long, horrible night. She wanted motherly comfort. But she had learned in life to keep back so much information; too often it was turned against her. Her mother would say, Nobody but you would have started out Labor Day weekend without a reservation. “Where’s everybody?”

  “Rick’s gone on his bike.” Mrs. Wynn returned to the stove. “William went to the Hamptons. He went yesterday to play golf with some men from work. I stayed with Rick. He said he’d be back today before you got home.”

  William had given up golf years ago as a boring, time-consuming, old-man’s game. His clubs had long sat in t
he attic. I imagine he did expect to be back before me, Laurel thought, carrying her luggage upstairs.

  Mrs. Wynn called after her. “I’ll finish cooking and go home.”

  “You don’t have to go.” Her mother deserved not to be alone over the holiday when she’d been housekeeping, staying with Rick. “Stay another night.”

  “I don’t want to spend the night,” Mrs. Wynn said. “You can catch me up on family news later.”

  “Well, stay for dinner,” Laurel said.

  “William says this thing of you going to Mississippi every summer has got to stop.”

  Why should William tell her what to do? Laurel thought. And never see the South?

  Mrs. Wynn said, “There’s three New Mexican chipmunks up there in a cage Rick smuggled back on the plane. That’s all you need, more animals. This house already smells.”

  “Hello, Jubal.” Laurel turned to greet him as he shuffled toward her. “Hello, Amos.” In Rick’s room she greeted their errant cat, which sat atop the cage. “Glad you made it through the summer.”

  She sat down in her bedroom, with chicken frying below. Every sense of the summer was with her, ponds, roads, faces—the library. She read Hal’s letter, written after they were last together.

  My darling:

  You have just driven away. My mind is not here. My heart left with you, and so at least that one small part of me is free. I wonder if society would be chagrined knowing I am cheating it that much. Right now I am so completely wrung out I can bearly move.

  (Barely, she spelled, smiling to herself.)

  I finally fell into bed a while ago, and because of the utter desolation I felt, the tears simply came. I have cried before, once when Greg died, once in jail just before I pleaded guilty. I thought I was all through crying. In the name of God, get your divorce soon. Our hours together will …

  Will never be, Laurel finished. She thought his misspelling endearing. In a while she hid the letter where she knew there would be a cache of them, hearing William come in.

  “Hello. Hello, Grandmother,” he cried. Always, coming into the house, he made his presence known. Laurel liked that. She had grown up in a household where people seldom spoke, passed by one another in silence. She listened to the low murmur of his and her mother’s teasing voices as William came upstairs.

  She turned away from his trying to kiss her. “Something told me you were going to get home early,” he said. “I just suddenly picked up and left.”

  “You didn’t go to the Hamptons to play golf,” she said.

  “Are you accusing me of something?” His face grew thunderous. She turned from his look of cold and silent fury. And she would make no more comment. She wanted to avoid confrontation, arguing, screaming. Maybe she did not much care what he had been doing. She would not lower herself to demand the names of the other players and call them up if he could give them to her. She wished simply to tell William she was sorry he had had to cut short his stay in the Hamptons. At that moment, she heard Rick on the stairs.

  William began unpacking his overnight satchel and arranging things from his toilet kit on their usual bathroom shelf. She unpacked her own cosmetics and suddenly said, “When did you start using baby powder?” eyeing a large can.

  William started, then laughed and looked happy; evidently he wanted her to notice his reactions, to know implications; William was strange about that, she thought once again. “I just got on to it,” he said. “It’s great after the beach. I like the smell. I’d like for you to start using it.”

  Rick came into the bathroom and received a handful and rubbed it along his bony rib cage. “Yeah,” he said. She dabbled some to the noses of Jubal and Buff, and they sneezed.

  That night she was glad of the width of the king-sized bed; there was no sense of intimacy lying there. She waited for William’s light breathing to settle into his part-time snoring. She thought about Hal in the dark thinking about her; they had agreed the moonlight was the same wherever they were. William turned toward her, and she had a moment of panic. The easiest thing would be to lie there and cross her legs up over his back, the way he liked. But how often had she moved across this bed to touch him and had his back remain stationary. Now, there was Hal.

  She felt William’s frame against her, and his arm around her. Why was William making this move she had wanted so long, now that she had found someone else? She stared out at a sycamore tree near a window, its branches turned gold and silver in the moonlight, a fairy-tale tree. “I’m too tired from all that driving,” she said.

  In a moment, William rolled away. That night she dreamed about sunlit waves and beaches, the pleasures of love in the afternoon in a motel, a faceless girl with her hair spread round on a pillow, a nameless girl who had started the whole family using baby powder. Laurel turned over her dusted body.

  Buddy kited out letters for Hal and he was able to write more than through normal prison channels. She wrote to Buddy enclosing letters for Hal, though they could not overburden him, and wrote through the prison too. William noticed a change in her. “You’re so remote,” he said. She kept a catlike purr of satisfaction about her secret love, who was not even her lover. She had to get the divorce but could not make a move. She wrote Hal finally and asked him to do what might hurt; she wanted to know what had happened on Matagorda that night. His reply was painful, but it answered her questions.

  It was Saturday. I went to my deer camp to look for a place to erect a deer stand for the coming season. No one else was there since the hunting season had not opened. That night alone in my cabin, except for my dog, I drank most of a fifth of bourbon while reading and listening to the radio.

  Next morning I began to build the stand in a low tree. I had seen a beautiful buck on this spot the previous day. It was hot, and around ten o’clock I drank a beer. During the morning as I worked I drank several more, and arrived back at Matagorda. We were to leave shortly for an afternoon party. I fixed a drink to take along in the car—“a traveling drink,” which is a common custom here where there are such great distances between places.

  Sallie and I arrived feeling no pain; we were in a friendly mood. I had had neither breakfast nor lunch and at some point ate a hamburger one of the girls cooked, at Sallie’s insistence. During the course of the afternoon, I blacked out. That is, I simply ceased to remember anything. This had happened before if I drank early enough and kept on long enough. Apparently, my behavior does not appreciably change when this happens. I have surprised friends sometimes by asking what happened at a certain time when they were not aware I was especially drunk. From what I can learn, at some point Sallie and I had a disagreement and ceased talking. I remember for a while taking a sunbath around the pool’s edge. From that point on, all I know is what I’ve been told. When we arrived back home, the children had come in. Some of what happened I remember from a statement Sallie gave the District Attorney. Some of it I was told by lawyers. Sallie and I continued to argue. I went to the kitchen to fix food, remarking that I had to do it myself, that Sallie wouldn’t. I told her son to leave and go to his father’s, where he was supposed to be staying anyway. I suppose my wife was going at me all this time. I apparently got one of my rifles and loaded it. I have no idea why. I can only guess I wanted to scare her or impress her with how much I meant what I was trying to get across. I honestly don’t know what I was trying to prove. I happened to pick out a rifle that was equipped with a telescope sight, making it useless outdoors at night, or indoors anytime. All this is in retrospect; I do not remember any of it.

  As I understand it, I then started toward the door. The rooms are so arranged that I had to round a corner to do this. It seems that as I got to the door, it opened inward, and Greg and I almost ran into each other. I seem to have been carrying the rifle in both hands, with the muzzle pointed toward the front, the only way it could go through the door. It went right into Greg’s stomach. There is some speculation as to whether he grabbed the barrel or not, trying to push or pull it out of the
way, to one side. The weapon had a set, or hair, trigger. It takes almost no pressure to fire it.

  At the sound of the explosion my memory returns somewhat. I recollect the noise, but it seems to have been particularly quiet for that particular gun. Sort of a pop, as though it was a long way away. I remember seeing Greg lying on the porch, screaming that it hurt and not to touch him. I went to him and fell on my knees and tried to hold him in my arms. When I put my arms around him, I felt his intestines all in my hands and I tried to put them back where they belonged, and I thought, This won’t really help him, I’ve got to call a doctor. I don’t remember this, or anything else, until later when I was trying to call the police, the hospital, and couldn’t find either number in the book. All this had already been done, but I didn’t know it. While I was sitting there, the deputy sheriff came in—the ambulance had already come and gone—and he and I walked around and went over everything. Some of it I remember and some of it I don’t. He told me to wash my hands, they were bloody to the elbows. Then we went to my parents and told them what had happened.

  Later I learned that after I left Greg on the porch, I went to Tina’s room where the baby had been sent. She was in her bed, and I sat down and read her fairy stories, just as I did every night. When Sallie was ready to go to the hospital, she came and got her. I did nothing, just sat there and kept right on reading the story. I have no idea how long I did this. I don’t remember going to the phone.

  The lawyers had an architect reconstruct rooms of the house where things took place, to show that I could not have seen Greg in advance of what happened. This would have been used at the trial. The hardest thing to explain is why I loaded the rifle, why I got it out in the first place, what I was going to do with it. There is no satisfactory answer to this that anyone would understand. That I have done it before to frighten Sallie, to try to get through to her, is not explanation enough. But I have none better.