Mending the Past

by Avery June Ligon

  * * * * *

  Even Bud had to admit that, for tofu stir-fry, dinner had been good. Maggie and Ed had kept up the conversation. She told stories about Jet as a girl– How she’d spent hours in the garden making little fairies out of rose hips and flowers and singing to herself inside a circle of sunflowers that Jet and Sam had planted each spring. Maggie told about a time that a neighbors dog had disrupted a bee hive and the swarm had come after Jet.

  “I heard her before I saw her. She came running across that field over there, up the hill, screeching her little head off. She had bees stuck in her clothes, her socks, her jacket, and oh– her hair. They all died trying to sting her. Not one of them got her though.”

  “Fifty two,” Sam said. “She had fifty two of them caught in her hair. And a half. Must have broken it screaming and flailing her arms around.”

  “Sam had always called her hair ‘that rat nest’ until he spent the afternoon cleaning the bees out of it. Then he called it her beehive. When she’d pester him, following him around, asking questions, he’d tell her, ‘Young lady, get your buzzy little bee hive out of my bees-ness.’ She’d get mad and stomp off and wait for him to ask her a question, so she could tell him, ‘Buzzy Bee, away from my hive.”’

  Sam smiled. Then the corners of his mouth dropped and he asked without looking up from a browned square of tofu he was stabbing, “Well, where is she? Is she dead? Why are you here without her? Haven’t heard anyone talk about a surprise party.”

  “Well, I, I don’t know,” Ed said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Dead,” Maggie said. “I can’t believe you’d even put that out into the universe. She isn’t dead, Sam, I’d know if she was dead.”

  “Know? How do you think you’d know?” Sam raised his eyes enough to see her.

  “I’d just know. Okay. I would just know. I’m her mother.”

  When they finished dinner, Maggie led them back to the room with ill-defined couch and drooping flower ceiling and looked at Bud and Ed. Then she turned to Sam. “Look at these men. They need dessert. Would you make something, Sam? Please make us something, and then we’ll begin our search for Jet.”

  Sam studied them with his bright green eyes, nodded and went to the kitchen. Ed tried to imagine what he would have done if Jet had asked the same of him. He’d have laughed and turned on the television.

  “Sam is a wonderful baker,” Maggie said. “He makes a German chocolate cake that’s just to die for. Not that he’d have time for that right now. Next time, let us know you’re coming. A hand of Gin Rummy?”

  Bud loved competition, tennis, cards, an argument, anything, and agreed to play before Ed had even looked away from the ceiling. Maggie gave Bud the deck to shuffle.

  “We try to use as little electricity as possible,” Maggie said as she walked around the room lighting candles.

  She talked about solar energy and raising bees and making candles, but neither Ed nor Bud listened. Bud was thinking about the rules and strategies of Gin Rummy. Ed was focused on the sound of rain hitting the roof, and the reflections of the candle flames as they appeared in the windows. Ed watched the small illuminated drops sliding down the glass– where their paths met and merged, their momentum increased. He watched them race off the glass and into the night.

  They were in the middle of their third game and Bud was losing when Sam returned with a plate of cookies. Bud frowned when he saw that the cookies were a dismal shade of green. A bit like avocado flesh that’s begun to brown, he thought.

  “Oh, pistachio. I love pistachio,” Maggie said.

  “Want to join in, Dad?” Ed asked. He eyed the cookies. As a baby he’d had a few episodes where he had vomited and then slipped into an impenetrable sleep before his nanny and family had realized that he was allergic to peanuts. Ed couldn’t remember any of these episodes, but he’d been told about them and steered away from eating any nuts at all as a child. As a result, he’d developed an aversion to them.

  “Nope. Maggie always wins. Stopped being fun,” Sam said as he filled his hand with cookies and took a seat to watch and chew. Bud kept his eyes focused on his cards. His body was tense and his mind bent on winning. He popped one cookie after another into his mouth. Chewing and plotting. Ed took a bite of a cookie and waited to see if his body would accept it. Maggie was too busy winning to eat.

  It was Bud’s turn. Maggie and Ed were exchanging stories about Jet. Sam had his eyes closed and feet up. Bud looked at Maggie over the fan of cards in his hand. He stared at her. His mouth open. He watched Maggie. He saw her hair most of all. In the candlelight, each silver hair glistened. They caught the light. Then they were the light.

  Maggie and Ed noticed Bud staring. They waited for him to speak. Ed thought there might be something behind Maggie and leaned to look. Nothing. He looked back at Bud, who hadn’t moved.

  “What?” Maggie asked.

  Bud turned toward Ed, but kept his eyes on Maggie. “It’s coming out of her head.” Ed looked at Maggie and then back at Bud. “No,” Bud said. “It’s going in.”

  “What?” Maggie’s voice was higher than usual. She brushed her hands around her head as if to shoo away any spiders that might be on her. “What?”

  Sam was laying on the couch with his eyes closed, feet up, and a small smile on his face. He rumbled out a low laugh and Maggie suspected its meaning. Annoyance washed over her face. She looked at Sam out of the corner of her eye. She looked back at the plate on the table and took the last cookie.

  “Samuel,” Maggie said, “what have you done?”

  He opened one eye and looked at her.

  “What you asked.” He looked at Bud and Ed. “Except for spells of longevity, Maggie can only work magic with my help.”

  Bud was looking hard at Maggie. “It isn’t going in or out Ed. It’s doing both. Maybe it depends on the strand.”

  “What strands? And what’s going and coming?” Ed asked.

  Bud looked exasperated. “The lights, Ed. The little lights.” He pointed with both of his hands. “They’re moving up and down each strand of hair. They’re going into her brain. Like little stars,” he said, wiggling the ends of his pointer fingers around. “Like little stars carried on the backs of little bugs. Little bugs that gently bore into her brain and take the little bits of light there and back and there and back and....”

  “And Sam would just sit around watching the seasons change until the day he died, if I didn’t give him a little direction,” Maggie said.

  “But I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ed said.

  Bud started to laugh.

  “You told me they looked like men who needed a little something before the search began,” Sam said.

  Bud was still laughing.

  “That wasn’t code, Sam. I just meant that as good hosts we should offer them some dessert.”

  “What’s so funny? Are you okay?” Ed asked.

  “Butt-Eye still don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bud laughed repeating what Ed had said to him.

  “I’m not talking about anything,” Ed said. “I’m asking if you’re okay.”

  Bud slumped to the floor giggling. He laughed until he was curled up with his knees to his chest and his hands over his stomach. He looks a lot like Marley, Ed thought as he crawled the couple of steps from his seat on the floor to look at Bud’s face.

  Seeing Ed’s worried look calmed himself down and explained, “Butt-Eye don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I already told you, I’m not talking about any-”

  “No.” Bud let one last giggle out before he growled “Argh.”

  Ed was startled, which encouraged Bud.

  “Argh,” Bud growled again. “I feel Captain Butt-Eye near and though Butt-Eye don’t know what you’re talking about, he’s a story of his own to share.” Bud jumped to his feet. He saw Ed still kneeling at his feet. He saw the whites of Maggie’s eyes, and the star bugs zipping in and out of her brain. He heard the rain
on the roof and saw the earth and sky making love through bright tentacles of lightning. Then the earthquake of Sam’s laughter broke from his body and shook the house. Bud turned toward Sam just in time to catch a dark blue bandana that Sam carried in his back pocket. Bud snatched the bandana from the air and tied it around his head. He let a corner of it flop over one eye and said, “And positioned thus and dressed thus, the Captain began his tale.”

  “For three long days, I kept in me home an emerald the size of a large man’s fist. Me sweet little wife needed both of her delicate hands to carry it from the greasy food bag it arrived in to a low table where she bathed it, and lay food before it.”

  “The jewel had been secreted from the inner sanctum of a Shaivite temple, where more than four hundred years had passed since the death of the great Chandella king who’d given it. Only the inscription on the altar, the place where the linga was worshiped, kept a memory of him alive.

  “Now, there was a man living near that temple who owned some land on which he grew grain. This land had been in his family from time immemorial. But, the last ten years had given less rain and more pests, and his debt to the village moneylender had increased. Unless he made a payment soon, he’d be passing his land to the sons of the moneylender. There would be nothing for his own.”

  “Despite righteous living and daily worship at the temple, the gods seemed to offer no help. It was this man that an agent of me employer found. And it was this man who, one day, on his daily trip to the temple, left with the emerald god.”

  “The nights spent with that jewel in me home were nearly sleepless. I feared greed filled men, or angry devotees. The crazed are capable of unnatural and uncommon acts. Me wife was more nervous than I, though not because she feared the living. She believed any connection to a stolen linga would place us many lifetimes from the city of a god. She threatened to return the linga herself, if I didn’t move it along quickly.”

  When Bud had begun his story, the storm had started in earnest. Rain pounded on the roof. Bud paused to look up at the ceiling, as though he could see through to the sky.

  Ed looked at Maggie. She looked stunned and her eyes tracked Bud’s every move.

  “And did they die in the night?” Maggie asked.

  Bud looked down at her and shook his head no.

  “She took it back to the temple then?” she asked.

  “No,” Bud said. “This beautiful object of worship traveled through a network of men and landed in England. There, it was displayed beside a dried out cat and the horn of a sea unicorn.”

  “She didn’t take it back?” Maggie asked.

  Bud watched Maggie. The star bugs zipped in and out of her brain. What a worried brain. Star bugs, take out the worry. Bud felt sad for Maggie. “Out!” he said to the star bugs. He threw his arms wide. “Out!”

  Maggie and Ed started.

  Bud studied Maggie’s face and was surprised to still find worry lurking there. “Let the star bugs take the worry out,” Bud said, and when he didn’t see a change in her face added, “She’s taking it back Maggie. Don’t worry. She’s taking it back, right now.” There was a clap of thunder and Bud looked through the ceiling at the sky again, and then ran up the stairs.

  Chapter 20 The Past Haunts

  Looking at the silhouette of the other tower and listening to Mrs. Mae’s description of the creature scaling the walls, of entering, was making Luisa dizzy. She wanted to help because helping Mrs. Mae was her job, but also because she wanted to sleep that night. “I could call an exterminator. Or, maybe there’s a county department that deals with wild animals?” Luisa looked at Mrs. Mae, who seemed not to have heard her suggestions. Mrs. Mae stared at the south tower in much the same way she’d stared into the woods at the gate.

  Even with Luisa there, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the tower. She hadn’t entered the south wing of her home in years. She appreciated the raw monetary value of the collection housed there, but she hated history. She hated the past. She hated those rooms.

  Mrs. Mae turned to Luisa. “My telescope. Bring me my telescope.”

  Luisa did so and also brought a chair before being asked to. Mrs. Mae sat down and sent Luisa away, though first she asked Luisa to stay by the phone. Then she brought her eye to her telescope and began to examine, in the dark of the growing night, the south tower.

  * * * * *

  She was Eileen Lark before she was Mrs. Mae. She’d gone to the same college as the Mae brothers Efrem and Steward.

  Efrem was tall and broad shouldered, and even when he took off his football helmet his hair was neat. He was a good student with a reserved and controlled manner that came from years of knowing his place in his family. As the oldest boy, he’d been raised to take over Mae Shipping. His father had been training him from birth.

  Eileen dreamt of becoming the next Florence Nightingale. She spent her time studying and worrying about starving children in other countries. On Sundays, she met her parents to go to church as a family. She didn’t waste time fretting over men. This led to a demeanor that, Efrem thought, would make her the perfect wife. This, combined with her tidy and simple beauty, put her at the top of Efrem’s Potential Wives List, which he’d made at the beginning of his senior year. He’d been crossing young women off it for various reasons since. Sophomore Eileen was left.

  When winter formal was announced, Efrem walked to the classroom he expected Eileen to be leaving. The door opened and students streamed out. Maybe I missed her in the crowd, he thought. He moved closer to the door to look in through its tiny window. Eileen was still inside copying a few sentences from someone else’s paper. Eileen finished and put her papers and pen into her folder. Efrem watched her smile and watched her lips say, “Thank you.” Who’s she talking to? Efrem leaned to the side trying to see. He saw her start walking his way and he moved to the side. As Eileen and the other person came through the door, all feelings of jealousy that Efrem had had were erased. “Hey Steward. Hello Eileen,” Efrem said.

  “Hello,” they said together as they walked on.

  Efrem caught up with them and fell in step. “If you haven’t already agreed to go to Winter Formal with someone else, and you don’t have your heart set on it, I’d like to take you to do something else.”

  The smiles on Steward and Eileen’s faces dropped and they all stopped walking. Eileen turned to look at Efrem. Steward moved toward Eileen as if to touch her arm, but stopped, and took a few steps backward into the stream of students. Efrem was happy to see that his little brother had taken the cue and left.

  “Oh,” Eileen said, looking over her shoulder to where she expected to find Steward. “Winter Formal, I, um, I hadn’t even thought about it.”

  “Then you’d be fine doing something else?”

  Eileen looked around a little confused. “Something else would be okay.”

  “Great. I’ll pick you up around five.”

  “Something else would be fine, but not anything else,” Eileen said, looking Efrem in the eye.

  Efrem looked down at Eileen. She was more than a foot shorter than he. She was just a tiny little thing and in complete control of herself. He scanned the hall and saw other girls pretending to busy as they listened. One was a girl who had come to his home for a party his brother Steward threw. She’d let her bathing suit slip at a time when he would see. She’d feigned embarrassment and, having made her offer, ran off giggling. He hadn’t even taken the time to write her name on the list. He looked back at pretty little Eileen who was looking right back into his eyes, waiting for a response. If there had been any chance of her saying yes he might have dropped to his knee and proposed. “Sorry, a benefit dinner. My parents have two extra seats,” Efrem said.

  * * * * *

  Instead of asking someone to Winter Formal, Steward screwed wheels onto a pedestal belonging to the fragment of a torso of a Roman copy of a Greek statue. The fragment borrowed a dress from one of Steward’s friends. Steward took his headless date out to dinner with a gro
up of other couples. He introduced her as Lucretia and gave her place of origin and approximate age. He did his best at dinner to order a meal that would have suited her cultural tastes. He shared her meal because she made no objection and offered to share his though she didn’t seem interested.

  Steward’s friends helped him get her up the wheelchair ramp to the dance where Steward led her through the first song. For the rest of the evening Lucretia stood to the side as Steward danced with other girls. Most boyfriends there were fine with that. Some of them were uncomfortable because they knew that Steward could make any woman laugh and they were jealous of how easily he could talk to their dates. It infuriated a few guys, who were friends and teammates of Efrem. These guys made a habit of hating Steward. His existence bothered them for a number of reasons: he never complied with school uniform, his hair was a mess, his family was rich, and they knew that all of their girlfriends adored him. Also, everything seemed easy for Steward and he always seemed happy and furthermore, everyone knew that, unlike Efrem, Steward didn’t have the stress and responsibility of running Mae Shipping in a few months, or ever. Efrem’s friends had watched Efrem forfeit some of the pleasure of being a kid, a teenager, and a man in college to do what his parents expected of him, when they expected it. Steward, on the other hand, did what he wanted, and on his own schedule, and it was rarely what anyone else expected.

  It was a shame that Steward was hated by any of Efrem’s friends because Efrem had never held a grudge and in fact he felt important in his family and considered himself lucky. Efrem had watched his brother grow, and it seemed to Efrem, that Steward was given so little direction that he struggled and floundered through life.

  While Steward fed compliments to the dates of other guys, and drank spiked punch, Eileen was feeling very proper indeed dining here with Efrem under the watching eyes of his parents. She too watched. She watched Efrem’s mother and decided that being the next Mrs. Mae would be wonderful. She admired Mrs. Mae’s nonchalant glamor and saw how she improved the lives of the less fortunate with the focus of her time and money. She’s at least as helpful as a nurse, Eileen thought, and her outfit is better. That night Eileen fell in love with the idea of becoming Mrs. Mae and let this feeling of love transfer itself to Efrem.