Delta Ridge

by Frances Downing Hunter

  My grandmother knows how to nurture—how to love. She loves Garland, Ham’s son from a previous marriage, whom we all adore but don’t completely know. A quiet, gentle man, he is almost invisible in my memory. Ham, on the other hand, is not. He’s always been larger than large, both in girth and influence. “He always has to stir the pot,” Garland would say while shaking his head. Creating a commotion wherever he appeared, throwing dice in the corner in some poker-playing buddy’s back house, Ham would rampage down the highway to drink with an old-school friend at the Memphis Country Club, and then spend three days drunk at his duck club near Greasy Slough. In his younger days Ham was already a creature of myth and legend. He did what the more domesticated of his sex would have loved to do. Marriage didn’t stop him. Ham was the law or at least its enforcer.

  Ham’s father Harry hewed towns out of raw timber, built his house, Ridgecrest Hall on Main Street, out of the finest lumber and brick in the region, and indulged his boys with the profits he made. He lent them the best of everything except manners and culture, which had not been too much imported to eastern Arkansas in the middle of the last century. Their mother who had refinement was unable to pass it on. She died giving birth to Ham, who looked for her face always in so many places she never was.

  “Ham should be dead by now,” Aunt Elizabeth said after a visit where she waded through the smokescreen of his habitual cigars on the wide veranda at the big house keeping him company while he had his evening shot of Black Jack Daniels, diluted with a splash of spring water. A fan of do-it-yourself doctoring and patent medicines, Ham has taken his Carter’s Little Liver Pills every day for as long as I can remember. Generations. Hadacol and Geritol he alternated as his sleep companions every night until both were taken off the market due to their high alcohol content. His doctor warned him against Bay Rum as an after shave, because he knew Ham was also using it as a mouthwash, which Dr. Sullivan, my high school Latin and English teacher, suspected he swallowed. Ham reeked of the cloying smell for years until Charlotte substituted Old Spice and Lavoris in his medicine cabinet. Today his heart medications fill his bathroom, and his old cronies have disappeared into dusty history. It would take a strong man to outlive Ham, and so far, none of his contemporaries has. He’s happy enough with his new pacemaker, his staircase lift, his TV sleep timer, and closed captions on every television in his house, lest he miss a mumbling word of any sports event broadcast in the Western Hemisphere. After his last heart attack, Ham has almost no reason to be alive, except for the direct intervention of a perverse God. Even now Ham serves as the strongest male figure three generations of Carter women have ever known.

  HAM HAS COME to my rescue more than once. I came home last year, not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. I was so burned by an affair gone wrong with another lawyer in Little Rock that I had to get away. And no, it wasn’t the typical “I’m sorry, Holly. It’s not you, it’s me” kind of goodbye. It was the punch in the gut kind that rocked me all night every night kind of goodbye. I could hardly get out of bed or function; so, using Ham’s American Express card, I flew to Europe, where I stayed for a year, but not before signing away my soul on the dotted line. My pact with my personal devil was that I would return to Delta Ridge and practice law in the family firm. Back to my roots: bought and paid for, signed, sealed, and stamped “Return To Sender.”

  Delta Ridge and I are both clichés: it is the prim, provincial Southern town, and I am the silly, spoiled girl destroyed by the rejection of a sensible man. I’m certain that’s the story on the street, even though I’ve never heard it. That’s not the only story that people probably tell about me. The other story involves a mystery that continues to invade my dreams.

  Following my father’s sudden demise, Ham quickly committed my mother to a mental hospital in Nashville, where she stayed for two years. Before she returned I turned eighteen and was enrolled in the University of Virginia. I was and still am filled with resentment and anger and haunted by the image of my father’s untimely death, perhaps a murder, and possibly at the hands of the woman who gave me life.

  2 The Return

  WHY DID I choose February to return to eastern Arkansas? After all, the place may be where I serve my life sentence, so I want to be able to bear it. But the drive from Memphis home on Wednesday afternoon, before I could ever have imagined a double homicide in Delta Ridge, was so desolate and ominous that I sensed it might be an omen.

  This time of year it’s like a moonscape. The miles of barren trees and expanses of gray made me recall the driveway to Poe’s infamous House of Usher, but there is no House of Usher here—nothing that fine. Many of the farms are plantations of thousands of acres. Most of the Delta planters reside in Blytheville, Osceola, Wilson, Delta Ridge, or Memphis, where generations ago they moved, so their children could attend segregated or private schools and avoid the mosquitoes and the people who populate and work their lands.

  The Arkansas Delta stretches one hundred miles inland from the Mississippi River to the sloping foothills of the Ozark Mountain range which commences at the Black River, its back door, and extends south past Newport, butting up against little hamlets with strange names like Oil Trough and Possum Grape. Pine Bluff closes the side door. The front door faces the Mississippi River but is blindsided by Crowley’s Ridge, a long, tired mountain visible in all directions as it rises two-hundred-fifty feet above the pancake flat land of the Alluvial Plain. Coming out of the big river at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the ridge shakes its lumpy head of windswept loess as it climbs out of the Mississippi and catches the blown land around its neck and shoulders. Centuries ago a flat-topped, inland bluff appeared here, a geological sister to the Memphis bluffs. The puffed-up ridge now sprawls and sloops southwestward, zig-zagging from one to twelve miles wide from Missouri to Memphis across the Arkansas Delta without getting its feet into the water. Lengthwise it meanders like an exhausted serpent two-hundred miles until it falls back sluggishly into the churning river at Helena, Arkansas, never to reappear.

  The upper ridge jumps the Mississippi River and links Appalachian Kentucky and Tennessee and their hard vowel speech to eastern Arkansas. My father was a student of this ridge, this world, like newcomers often are to places too alien to be taken for granted. When he was alive, he taught me about this world, helping me to appreciate its uniqueness. Delta Ridge sits in the ridge’s center, half-hillbilly but surrounded by the Delta while parading the manners, the social graces, of the frontier.

  In my father’s absence I thought I could never return here, at least not to stay. Yet, there I was riding across the bridge, surrounded on both sides by the mud-brown river, bloated out of banks and creeping toward West Memphis. Silent and heavy from the flooding of the Red River way up in Minnesota, brooding and sullen now, the river swarmed the land, leaving little cover for the field mice, rabbits, and squirrels seeking shelter against the osprey hawks.

  “WHAT ARE YOU thinking about?” my cousin Felicia had asked from behind the steering wheel of Aunt Elizabeth’s old black Mercedes, jarring me from my notebook introspection.

  “About hawks. Look, there’s one.” A span of gray feathers arched above as the great bird dove from its tree top perch and zoomed downward to meet its invisible prey in the field below. “My dad and I used to count them. Each has his own territory. You can almost measure it. About a half mile is his alone. Each one separates with more precision than hunters in the deer woods.”

  “I’ll bet so. I get that way about my own space too.”

  “Do you feel you have it now that you’ve moved back home?” I asked.

  “I make it. Wherever I am. Even here. Back then, between Mother’s marriages and disappointments, we were always running back to you, your mother, your dad, for solace. I know a lot has changed, but when Ham insisted we reopen the house last year, it was like re-entering my own childhood home. That comfort is still there, but in adulthood, I need my space. And you do too. You’ll make it.”

  As the car curved
westward, the scenery changed from dull grays and muted browns to patches of green as a blend of pines, firs, and cedars climbed the ridge. I’ve often thought of the irony that surrounds this tree-shrouded place. More beautiful than the breadbasket Delta below it, the ridge demands new dirt, mulch, and sand whisked in from below to conquer its clay soils. The Delta is a stark brown wasteland nine months of the year, but in the other three, it throws up from fine black dirt the most bountiful harvest of rice, cotton, soy beans, corn, and all manner of vegetables grown between the coasts.

  “You look tired,” Felicia had said, snapping me awake.

  You too, I didn’t say, but I rehashed the memory of a gregarious girl full of fun and mischief who wasn’t riding in the car that day. I hoped that in the decade or more of intervening years, her spirit had not been deposited somewhere else.

  “OH, I AM. That damned layover in Atlanta.” I recounted how I felt like I’d left London the day before yesterday, but had been just twelve hours before. What a hassle it had been getting out of the Memphis airport. Why? Because the scene I made slowed down everything. Felicia had stood silently when I raged out about my broken and bulging suitcases, slashed together with silver freezer tape to keep them from falling apart completely. “Somebody’s going to pay for this,” I had yelled at the moving luggage carousel.

  “Who put the tape on them?” Felicia had asked softly, as if to curb the wild emotion I was remembered in my family for demonstrating. She didn’t know me now. Nobody had told her of my year of taking anger management classes in order to stop life’s regular wind gusts from turning into cyclones. Felicia wasn’t a soft girl. But she wasn’t stupid either. The Carter women know how and when to back away and yield the stage when another is cycling or about to cyclone out-of-control.

  “Come on, let’s go. I’ll file a claim later,” I’d said. I didn’t want her to know that the battered, mismatched grips looked like the rest of my life, over-used and under-serviced. I was broke and so was everything else. I had to come home and go to work and grow into my thirty-year old body before we wore each other out. I’d avoided adulthood as long as I could stall it off, and it was time to try and embrace the damn thing. I’d imagined Felicia’s own matched set of Louis Vuitton luggage neatly stacked in the top of her closet, sealed in plastic, no tape in sight. I cringed.

  “How long have you been home?” I’d asked the question knowing that a less self-involved person would already know the answer.

  “Oh, about a year, I guess. After I finished my culinary degree at Johnson and Wales, the Delta Ridge Country Club had an opening for an assistant manager. It doesn’t pay much, but it’s good experience,” she had explained. “I hear all the interesting news there, anyway. There’s a rumor the chef may leave. That’s the job I really want—head chef. But don’t say anything, okay? Word gets around all too quickly in Delta Ridge, and I don’t want anything compromising my chances. Remember, we’re going back to the place where gossip is as good a sauce to conversation as gravy is to breakfast biscuits.”

  I’d rolled my eyes. “You people are so into food. That’s just like always too. How’s Grandmother?”

  “Oh, the same as ever. She tends her animals and her garden and cooks for whoever takes the time to drive up to the farm. She raises her turnip and mustard greens all winter long. Just like always.” She paused. “By the way, Victoria sent you a surprise.”

  “In lieu of herself, I suppose? Never mind. What’s the surprise?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Felicia pulled the car into the circular drive of the English Tudor house on Vine Street. It had been my home for the first eighteen years of my life, but I hadn’t been back inside it since the tragedy occurred there twelve years ago. After she was released from the mental hospital, my mother packed her belongings and moved permanently to my grandmother’s farm in the Ozark foothills on the banks of the Spring River, where she has lived ever since.

  DADDY’S DEATH SET me adrift. Like a sore tooth the tongue won’t leave alone, my mind kept returning to the events of that night, conjuring and recreating the scene, over and over again—for three years with professional help. Now at thirty, tired and penniless, I hoped I could finally face it all again: this town, this house, the remains of an idyllic life that shattered with the bullet that ended my father’s life and disconnected me from my own life on the same night.

  Before help came, I had stood in the corner alone, my flesh riddled with goosebumps and my heart sinking slowly in my chest. I knew without being told that my father, my only lifeline, was gone, and that my mother would end up crazier than she already was. And she did. She broke like a dropped egg on a summer sidewalk, but I didn’t. I froze. There was no audience left for me.

  Mother sucked the air out of everyone around her with her “Oh, pity me please” wailing. And I always had the suspicion that she sucked it out of him too; and that even in her drunken insanity, she knew more about his death than she was telling. But that’s another story—another one of the secrets nobody talks about. We all know that our family’s Pandora’s Box holds a tight lid, probably made of tin. All the ills that populate my memory and my world still sleep there, like forgotten cobwebs, hanging darkly in this one hidden place on Vine Street.

  “Come on.” Felicia had stopped the car and made her way to the oak door of the red brick house, its surrounding boxwoods collecting snow. Aunt Elizabeth opened the door and smiled broadly, a strange, small, black puppy uncomfortable in her arms.

  “Welcome home, Holly! Here, you take him. He’s a gift from your mother. She’s so sorry she couldn’t be here. His name’s Jigger, you know, like the old Kingston Trio song, ‘Scotch and Soda. Jigger of gin.’”

  3 What Day Is It?

  WHAT DAY IS it? Saturday? The hands on the small, silver clock on the bedside table momentarily rested at seven o’clock. Where am I? Whose room is this? Wait. Let me think.

  I came home from Europe Wednesday night, rested from jet lag Thursday, and went to work at the law office Friday. Oh God, Friday. The murders. I can’t think about the murders, not yet. My mind is darting every which way except that way. Yes, this is my old house, my old bedroom. My Aunt Elizabeth and my cousin Felicia live here now. I’m going to do civil litigation for the firm.

  Could it be that Ham had discovered the real reason I wanted to leave Little Rock? I don’t think he had, but then again Ham knows everything. He has pipelines to Little Rock and Memphis, and everyone knows he’s guttered to God and the Devil.

  “Knowledge is money, and he who doesn’t know, doesn’t know how to keep his ass out of the chicken fryer. In this world, Holly, people get eaten for lunch before they realize they’re on the menu.” That was Ham’s philosophy.

  I’d had a year and a half to conjure Michael Martin into the prince who comes stamped on every woman’s heart at birth. We all long for Heathcliff, the mysterious stranger, the demon lover, the Byronic hero, James Dean, Elvis, even George Clooney—seven sandwiched into one. When we suspect the prince’s shoes are too loose, we fill them with Ken dolls. We prefabricate whatever it takes to make us as happy and unhappy as we can stand to be.

  I remember those girls in high school who settled for boys too ordinary to whip into fantasy. They aged quickly and lived on books, lovers, drugs, and bad television. I know that I have been shopping for a man for so long that my feet sometimes feel as though they’ve worn off.

  So what if Michael may be a robot boy built out of childhood’s left over G.I. Joes? Maybe if I’d not been so young when my dad died or if my grandfather’s life weren’t so sordid, I wouldn’t be so obsessed with manufacturing a man I can stand over time. What if Michael’s just some ordinary Joe I whipped up like cream and spread all over my heart to hide his ordinariness? What can I say? That my own ordinariness scares me to death, so I can only be attracted to the extraordinary; or that my model, Ham, was so wild that I could never be satisfied with tame. But my dad was not a wild man and he loved me. Since childhood,
with my own set of crayons. I have colored my prince as wonderful as my father was, like all girls want to do if reality doesn’t slap them in the face too hard.

  The Latin writer Virgil thought that men must come to women shrouded in a mist, or we’d have none of them. It takes a while for the fog to dissolve, and by then it’s too late. The contract is signed. Personally, I think that romance is like seven-minute icing on a tall cake. It’s camouflage and anyone who eats it is satiated before getting to the cake. Many women would eat iced gravel. The sweetness of the icing, that’s what it’s all about. I’m not the only woman who’s manufactured a man. Most women get so caught up in wedding plans and happy-ever-after-ville that they forget that their man’s a living creature until they see him in the wedding pictures.

  When the prince comes, he needs to stay in costume, (I prefer Zorro, Banderas style), eat his cake, then close his mouth, and use Crazy Glue as lip balm. As long as a woman thinks she’s caught the magic man, she’ll let him saw her in half. When his feet turn to clay, then he’s a clay pigeon, and it’s time to throw him in the air and take aim. Where is my mind going with this crazy riff? I’m in a mood. It’s called mad.