by Bev Marshall
I was thinking she was about to get her fanny off my bed and back to Daddy’s and hers where she belonged when her crying signaled a backslide to her earlier misery. “Oh, Annette,” she wailed. “What’s the world come to? Why can’t everything be like it used to?”
I sat down on the bed then, my purple feeling fading, and I felt a terrible rage building up inside me. What right did she have to ask me questions like that? She was the mother, the one who was supposed to have all the answers. Suddenly, I felt cold and scared. If your own mother doesn’t know what-all is happening on this green earth, who does? What if Stoney did kill Sheila? Or what if he didn’t do it, but was found guilty anyway? Sheriff Vairo would send for the traveling electric chair, and Stoney would fry like a slab of bacon. I saw his eyes bulging out of their sockets, his hands turning black, his beautiful hair in flames. I fell over on Mama’s big stomach and held on to the bucking baby who was practicing his punches for all the fighting he somehow knew life would require.
If Mama wasn’t an A student on the answers to life’s questions, Daddy was about to flunk out. When I finally got Mama out of my room and back into hers, Daddy was less thrilled than I had thought he would be. Mama’s fussing fits were mere warm-ups for her attacks on Daddy, who had no intelligent defense. Grandma told him the hormones made her throw the iron against the wall when he forgot to buy grapefruit in town. And it must have been hormones that made her cry for over an hour when Daddy told her he was too tired to take her to the picture show. I knew their married bliss didn’t include the words “rapture” and “ravished,” but I was sure that they loved each other. Until now. Now their loud voices traveled down the hall and into my bedroom and angrily bumped me out of peaceful sleep. I covered my ears with a pillow, but I could still hear the unexpected roar of my good-natured father and the shrill cry of my gentle mother. I longed then for my Best Friend Sheila. She knew how to handle discord better than anyone in the world.
But Sheila was dead and Mama had never been more alive as she loaded up her suitcase filled with maternity clothes, Pears soap, and the good linen tablecloth that needed ironing. She turned to me and said, “Annette, you’re in charge now. Feed your Daddy and keep the bathroom picked up. Wet towels will mildew.” Then she marched out of the house with her jumping-jack baby and stood in the drive waiting for Grandma to come and rescue her.
Before Mama and Grandma drove off, Daddy came up from the barn. He stood silently beside Grandma’s Buick with the look I saw on his face when one of his Holsteins came down with hoof and mouth. “Aren’t you going to stop her?” I asked him as we both gaped at her through the passenger window. She was sitting ramrod straight staring out the front windshield as though she didn’t know two pairs of astonished eyes were boring into the side of her head.
“Nope,” Daddy said. “Her mind’s made up. No use in trying to make sense of her now.” He waved to his runaway wife and then stepped back from the car. As we watched the Buick bump over the camellia bush and buck out of the drive toward Carterdale Road, Daddy lifted his arm, “Good-bye, Rowena,” he called after them. Then he turned back to me and said, “Well, what’s for supper, Annette?”
CHAPTER 31
LLOYD
I couldn’t tell Rowena yet. She’d have to know eventually, and maybe if I’d come out with it, she wouldn’t have left us and gone over to her mama’s. The way I saw it though was that a change of scene might be just what the doctor ordered. She wasn’t getting enough sleep, the baby was twisting her guts up like a knotted rope, and she couldn’t quit thinking about how she had been entertaining a murderer in her parlor. Over at her mama’s she’d most likely sleep better and she’d get the pampering from her mother she was craving for. Meantime, I had to figure the best way to tell her what I would have to hit her with when she came home.
Hell, there wasn’t nothing in this world I could do or say to make Rowena feel better when it came time to tell her that Virgie Nell Jackson was the name on Bill Calloway’s list that Kevin Landry asked me about. What me and Virgie Nell’s little fling twelve years ago had to do with Stoney’s murder trial had been a mystery to me, and I said as much to him that day he came out to the dairy. “You’re sure Calloway is calling her to testify for Stoney?”
Kevin had tapped his pencil on the line where her name was printed in block letters. “Yes. She’s on the list.”
“But why do you think she’s going to tell about our affair? Maybe it’s something else.”
Kevin frowned. “I don’t think so. The word from the rumor mill is that Bill Calloway snooped around town until he heard the old gossip your sister-in-law, Leda, spread about your and Virgie Nell’s affair, and that’s the reason he’s calling her to testify.”
“But how would that help Stoney’s defense?”
Kevin took a deep breath and looked me square in the face. “Sheila was having an affair with someone. The baby wasn’t Stoney’s. He’s sterile.”
It was like hearing Rowena wasn’t born on earth, was from some planet far away in the sky. I couldn’t get my mind around what he was saying. It was just crazy. Sheila wasn’t laying with another man, not in my tenant house. Then I thought of the time in the barn when I’d guessed that her papa had been at her. Stoney had thought so too, hadn’t he? “Well,” I said, “my God, it could be her papa’s baby. I thought he might be coming round there, suspected him of it.”
Kevin was staring at the piano like it was going to start playing a song on its own accord. “I don’t think Calloway believes it was him.”
“Well, then who? Who else could it be?” When I asked him that question, I felt a rushing in my head that sounded like a gale wind blowing through the tops of our pines. I could nearly feel Sheila’s hump in my hands, her forehead against my lips. Kevin didn’t say anything, just kept his eyes on the piano. I said my next words in a near whisper. “They’re gonna say it was me. That I’m the father of the baby.”
Kevin Landry’s next words were like fists striking my gut. “I think that’s right. Virgie Nell Jackson will testify that you had an affair with her, and then Calloway will say you had another one with Sheila Barnes.”
My first thought was that this was going to kill Rowena; or more practically, she could lose our baby. So later that day, when I saw her getting in her mama’s car, I was so relieved that I wouldn’t have to look at her accusing face, I felt plumb numb with an odd kind of happiness. I imagine it’s the way a man feels when a doctor tells him his chest pains are just gas. He knows he’s gonna have that heart attack one day, but for now, he can just belch away his pain. I knew I was a coward and that I was gonna have to face what was coming, but not yet, I said to myself. Not yet.
The following night I went over to Howard’s house; we sat at his kitchen table, where we usually played poker, and talked it over. My big brother has always been known around town as the ladies’ man, not me. I thought he might know better how to handle this situation, but he kept shuffling the worn deck of cards like he didn’t know how to deal them. He said, “Lloyd, you got any proof that you didn’t fuck her?”
I held my head in my hands and raked my fingers through my hair. “No, but there isn’t any proof that I did either. I think it’s her old man’s kid. I think he went up to her house and beat her up and raped her. Maybe more than once.”
“But he’ll say he didn’t. And that lawyer will say you are the one that’s already screwed around on your wife. Hell, Mrs. Carruth must have twenty kids, when would he have time to fuck somebody else?” He was grinning, trying to make me feel better, but nothing short of Landry calling and saying it was all a mistake was gonna make me smile ever again.
Howard began laying the cards out face up. Five-card stud. He dealt four hands. He held an ace high and across from him a pair of queens stared at him. He raked the cards back in. “Shit,” he said. “Lloyd, I know you got worries enough, but I think you’re not looking at the whole sky here. You’re just seeing a little piece of it hanging over your head.
”
I watched him shuffle the cards. Listened to the rhythm of them falling against each other, then the tapping as he began again. I said, “Okay, what do I need to know about the sky over China or wherever you think I ought to be looking at it?”
He stopped shuffling and held the deck in his right hand. I could smell the eggs and bacon he’d cooked for supper still lingering over the table. “It’s this. We know Stoney is gonna accuse you of screwing his wife, being the daddy of that baby.” I nodded yes to that. “But he’s not on trial for not being the parent; he’s up for murder.”
“Howard, what do you take me for, a mule in the field? I know all that.”
“Shut your trap a minute. Just listen to me. The only reason he could have for making you out to be his wife’s lover is that he’s gonna say that you killed her.”
I don’t remember getting up, but I saw the chair on the floor lying on its side. My fists hit the table. “No,” I said. “He can’t say that. He can’t accuse me.”
Howard stayed calm. That’s the way he is when he’s about to lose a big poker pot, calm, his breath coming out smooth and even, like he’s about to fall asleep. “Lloyd, you better get yourself a lawyer.”
I didn’t hire a lawyer, but I went down to Kevin Landry’s office and asked him did he think I was gonna be accused. “You’re not on trial, Lloyd. Clyde Vairo hasn’t arrested you. All Calloway will be trying to do is cast doubt in the minds of the jury so that they can’t convict Stoney. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support his theory that you killed the girl.”
I leaned over his scarred desk covered with books and papers and pushed my face up close to his. “You better be right about this, because everybody in this town is going to know about me and Virgie Nell, and if you don’t get a conviction, some of them are going to think I did kill Sheila.”
On my way back from town, I pulled into Rowena’s mama’s yard and sat in the truck for five minutes or so. I couldn’t open the truck door. I sat frozen there, just staring out the windshield at Mama Bancroft’s gray house. I looked over at my face in the rearview mirror and saw the fear my eyes were holding. “Not yet,” I said. Then I backed out of the drive and drove on home.
Rowena
I knew it was time to go home. Annette and Lloyd needed me, and I wasn’t doing right staying over at Mama’s eating chicken pie, reading magazines, and taking a nap whenever I felt like it. Mama was so thrilled to have my company, she fussed over me like I was royalty. I could nearly forget all my troubles, and it was hard to think about returning home to what-all I knew I’d have to face. Every time I telephoned Annette, she was on the verge of tears; I knew she worried I wasn’t coming back, but still, I sat in Mama’s parlor, rocking my little baby who had finally calmed himself in my womb.
Then Lloyd telephoned and said he was coming to get me, that he couldn’t take my being gone any longer. He said that he was ready to tell me what Kevin Landry had told him and it was best that I hear about it in my own home where I belonged. Then he said the words that I was waiting to hear. “Rowena, I love you more than life itself. I need you, honey. Please come home.”
It was worse than I could possibly imagine. I sat on the side of our bed watching Lloyd pace around the room as he told me all that had happened in the six days I’d been away. I couldn’t believe it. How anyone in this world could think that Lloyd and Sheila had…I couldn’t even say that out loud. And Stoney! I wanted to go straight down to that jail and strangle him myself. How could he do this to us? To the people who had been so good to him, giving him a job, a home, helping them out time and again. “You go talk to him,” I said to Lloyd. “Tell him it’s not true, tell him to make his lawyer stop this insanity.”
Lloyd said it wouldn’t do any good to talk to Stoney or that Mr. Calloway, his lawyer, who was probably the one who came up with the idea to accuse Lloyd. I agreed with that; I couldn’t credit Stoney with sense enough to think of it.
“Annette will have to be told,” I said. “We should tell her before she hears about it at school or somewhere else.”
Poor Lloyd literally groaned out loud. “God, I’d give anything not to have to tell her. It’s bad enough causing you so much pain. If only I hadn’t…”
I went to him then and put my arms around him. “Lloyd, this isn’t your fault. I forgave you a long time ago for the other. Annette will forgive you too.” I felt his muscles beneath my hands, and I dug my fingers into his shirt, hanging on to him, wondering if she would forgive him, realizing with a cold fear coming on me that I didn’t know what thoughts might be in my own daughter’s head.
Annette
My happiness over Mama’s coming home evaporated like rain on a hot tin roof when Daddy called me into the kitchen for a family meeting. I slid into my usual chair, back to the stove, and looked over at Mama, who was hugging her arms close to her body. Daddy didn’t look too good either. His normally sunburnt face had turned to the color of a bar of Ivory soap, and his deep voice rose to soprano a couple of times as he told me the unbelievable news. My own daddy had had an affair with another woman, and she was going to tell the whole world about it. No, that wasn’t possible. My daddy was a churchgoer, a good husband and provider, a father who played Chinese checkers with his daughter and never got mad when he lost. It was all lies.
“No! It’s not true!” I yelled at him.
Daddy reached across the table and took my hand in his. “It was a long time ago. A terrible mistake. Your mother forgave me.”
I snatched my hand back. I hated him. I hated men and their stupid things that hung between their hairy legs, and I hated God for making us all have desires we couldn’t control. I stood up. “You committed adultery. You sinned.”
Daddy’s face fell about a mile, and I was afraid he was going to cry. I didn’t dare look at Mama who was so quiet I had nearly forgotten she was sitting beside him. Daddy’s voice was firm. “Sit down.” He grabbed my arm and pushed me back onto my chair. “Listen to me, Annette. As much as I’d like to be, I’m not perfect. No one is. There isn’t a single person walking on this earth who won’t make a mistake at some time in his life. You’ll make your own mistakes, and I hope you’ll remember this day when you do and find forgiveness from the people who you hurt.”
I knew I wasn’t going to commit adultery. I wasn’t going to grow up to be like him. But then I remembered Aunt Doris. I had prayed for her to die. I had lusted after Stoney, and he was a married man, just like Daddy. Maybe Grandma was right; the fruit doesn’t fall too far from the tree. I bowed my head. I didn’t know if I could forgive him, but I hated hurting him too.
Daddy stood up and held out his arms. “I love you, and I’m sorry you’re suffering.”
I let him hug me, but I didn’t hug him back.
Mama made a little sound, like she was going to start bawling out loud, but she held herself back. “Annette, there’s more you’ll have to know.”
Daddy let go of me and walked to the back door. “You should be the one to tell her, Rowena. A daughter needs her mama at times like this.” Then he was gone and I stared over at Mama. Her face color deepened to near plum, but she patted Daddy’s chair for me to sit in, and said. “Annette, there’s a reason Virgie Nell Jackson is going to tell about her and Daddy.”
She told all of it. Stoney couldn’t have children. Mama said she didn’t want to get into the why of it, but that it was so. Sheila’s baby had to have been fathered by some other man, and Stoney’s lawyer was going to try and make people believe that that man was my daddy. That my father could be perceived as a seducer of a young girl was monstrous. I saw him daily in his white shirt, with the embroidered red letters over the pocket that said “Cottons’ Dairy.” He smelled of milk and cow manure and Vitalis hair lotion on Sundays when he wore his blue suit with the gray and white swirl tie. I saw him with his brown hair matted with sweat beneath a straw hat, then wet-combed into a straight part on the left side under his gray fedora. Like most country men, he was st
ingy with words and money, but he had always been generous and kind to his family and hired help. I could no more picture him lying with Sheila in some narrow bed than I could imagine myself astride one of the camels standing in front of the pyramids of Egypt in the drawings I had seen in my history book. The notion seemed that exotic. And yet, yet there was the idea of it. Who knew what images were in people’s heads when they smiled and nodded at you on the street in town. And if they saw you as a camel-rider, did that make you more likely to sit atop one someday?
No, I knew that no matter what anyone thought, no matter what mistakes Daddy had made in his life, he would never never lie in a bed with my Best Friend. I said this to Mama, and she looked like I had told her the best news she’d ever heard. She pulled me out of my chair and hugged me so tightly, I thought for a moment or so that the baby was kicking in my stomach instead of hers.
I headed out to the fig tree to sort things out in my mind. I climbed to the highest branch and sat staring up into the charcoal sky. If Daddy hadn’t lain with Sheila, and Stoney couldn’t be the baby’s father, who had Sheila loved besides him? She had lied all those times she told me how much she loved Stoney. I closed my eyes and saw her wispy hair falling over blue eyes, the ugly hump that now took on greater proportions. I heard her stupid giggles, her moronic jokes. I had thought she was so wise, telling me on this very limb how to walk through shadows, but she was dumb. Her shadow was big and dark, and she was a sinner. Sheila wasn’t my Best Friend; she wasn’t a friend at all. She had told her big secret to Mama, not me, and she had lied about my hair curling too. Angry tears came, fast and hard and warm on my cheeks. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “You’re no angel, Sheila. You’re burning in hell, and I’m glad because I hate you. I hate you.”
