Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  But this photograph is not what Evelyn is looking for. More digging, and there it is at the bottom of the box, something that had flitted through her mind as she seethed on Freeman Hume’s rickety stage this afternoon. A yellowed tract from Twain—a piece he composed in the midst of the Philippine War—torn from a magazine. Was it Lewis who had found its bitter irony so appealing, and intended to hang onto the clipping, maybe to pass it down one day to a son or daughter? Stanley had been spared ever knowing conflict. Born after the First World War, dead before the Second. How Lewis had loved Mark Twain. Still, he had left her to go off to the Great War. Such things he saw over there. Such things he brought home with him.

  Maybe some long-lost version of Evelyn herself had clipped the article from Harper’s. She runs the tips of her fingers over the slick page, feeling the impression of the type. Evelyn can imagine her own younger simulacrum, thin and already embittered, cheated, though she was not quite sure how, stealing into the library and ripping out the page and folding it to fit in the bodice of her dress, keeping it there like some kind of talisman against war ever blighting their home again. She reads the whole story now, her dry lips whispering each word. In it, a preacher delivers a fiery exhortation to the God of war to deliver an obviously deserved victory. Then a hoary stranger ascends to the pulpit and cautions the congregation to be prepared to accept the consequences of what they pray for. He holds forth to their stunned ears what he says are words given him by God. It is this portion of the story that Evelyn needs.

  O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

  With scissors from her sewing basket, Evelyn clips out the tract, refolds the paper, soft as silk, along its creases. She fits it into an envelope that she will slip into the mail slot of his front door tonight while the Judge and his wife are gone to dinner at the country club.

  “We always fight ourselves, Freeman,” she says to the empty room, the empty house. Why hadn’t she been able to say that to him as he handed her down from the platform today, instead of giving him a vacant nod? Evelyn imagines her friend’s confused face tomorrow, opening the morning mail. Unable to help herself, she feels her mouth draw up in the rictus of a wide grin.

  FIVE

  When Lieutenant Harlan O’Brien comes home from two years in a bamboo prison, dead eyes sparking an ice fire, his stiff shoulders square and strong—they have their man. And they decorate their manikin, a purple medal directly above the heart. They fling flakes of colored paper as he straddles the mayor’s black-as-midnight mare in full dress blues, Irish eyes unsmiling at his hero’s welcome.

  If the young lieutenant cannot imagine the life stretching in front of him, it may be that the howling jungle he recently left has so cleanly swept away his past. The town’s desperate insistence on the life they need him to have holds him upright in Judge Hume’s good leather saddle, squeaking now beneath his meatless buttocks.

  They take down their big toy soldier and fold him into a metal chair in the church cafeteria, his medals clinking rin-tin-tinny. They shove him up to the table groaning with German potato salad steaming with vinegar and pink-singed bacon; kale greens in brackish pot likker; white navy beans glistening with bloated chunks of fatback; banana croquettes and banana cream pie and banana pudding built of layers of yellow puffy cream and wafers and more wafers; blackberry cobbler, crust bruised blue; tender catfish flayed and fried; sliced tomatoes and mounds of legs and thighs and necks and breasts and backs and hearts crisped brown and crunchy the way he remembers.

  All you want! All you can eat! they sing. All he wants, shoveling it in right then, is his clay bowl of gray rice speckled with twitching legs of grasshoppers, headless, wingless bodies lolling, lidless eyes clinging to the sides of the bowl and mingling with the browner grains of rice. (Brown is better for you, his mother had always stressed, being whole food straight from the hand of God.) He misses that crunch between his molars, now unfortunately loose.

  He rides home with distended belly in the backseat of his mother’s Pontiac, to the future they have imagined for him, to the house of his father. Harlan O’Brien stretches out that night beneath the rigid tin roof, rain beating a Taps tattoo. He stares, sleep-starved, at the ceiling memorized in boyhood, blood beads leaking from under his thorn crown.

  * * *

  AT THREE, THE PAIN AT the small of her back snakes up to the base of her skull. Giang Smith rolls onto her left side, but it won’t do. Her husband, a warm rock in the middle of the bed, produces sonorous booms, letting go the tissues in the back of his throat, his arms and legs thrown wide on her side and his. Jimmy Smith has slept harder and longer lately since the Phenobarbital. Some nights Giang sleeps through the racket coming from her husband’s mouth. Others, she lays staring at the brown stains in the ceiling, raggedy islands in a dirty sea.

  She tries to put her finger on when the aches started. The persistent twinge between her shoulder blades came from swinging the sickle in her father’s lowland rice fields. She remembers a burn lower, in her hips, after she and her sister went to work in the city, from legs spread too wide, too long.

  These new aches have their own source.

  Giang rises from the bed and downstairs makes strong tea, folds herself into her husband’s big chair by the wood stove. She fishes a diary from under a pile of Field & Streams. She doesn’t worry about her husband reading her private words.

  Looks like a chicken danced over the page, Jimmy always says of the wild characters and diacritical marks swimming across the leaves of her cloth-covered book.

  Zzhhaaang, he drawls at night, drawing it out to make her laugh when he’s feeling good, the Phenobarbital coursing through his blood. An office boy for a general, Jimmy was lucky to not see real combat, unlucky to be driving an explosives-rigged jeep, a bomb meant for his boss. Read me some poems, he’ll say. Several times a day, Giang rubs sweet oils into the skin where tiny scraps of metal still freckle his ribcage and back; she is grateful for the training Saigon gave her. She and the drugs and the occasional poem give him some relief. It’s the least she can do, considering what he did for her.

  She lights a candle each morning at the little Buddha altar she has made here in this strange country. And each morning she calls to memory the day Jimmy Smith came for her, how he appeared at the brothel door with a fistful of money, intent on buying her way out of there. She lays flowers before the statue of Quan m, the bodhisattva of compassion, and marvels at how her simple obligation has become comfortable habit, how the duty and debt to one’s savior, fed and watered, ripens to something like love.

  He came home from work on the second shift at the cement plant last night and woke her. “It’s the summer solstice, baby, get up!” he said, and they had stayed awake until one in the morning trying to make eggs balance on end, laughing like children at the kitchen table. “Why won’t it work?�
�� Jimmy guffawed as one rolled to the floor. “There goes breakfast!” She does so love him at times like this. Giang tells him about Ha Chí, the name for summer’s apex; today, June 21, is the middle of summer in Vietnam, the time to make offerings to the god of death so that loved ones will be safe from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Tet Duon Ngo is the time for “Killing the Inner Insect Festival,” she tells him, and this makes him burst with laughter all over again. She does love him. She does.

  Jimmy has tried to correct the Geee-ang his bumpkin friends call her. He brags that Giang’s mother was boi tai, a high servant in a French household, fluent in both Vietnamese and French, governess to the sons of a Parisian diplomat. Years later she would teach her twin daughters to form the words for both languages.

  Restless day and night, Giang has taken to walking along the river at all hours. She returns to find her untouched tea cold and throws it down the sink. Hours still before she will pad upstairs to draw Jimmy’s bath. From the dark of the kitchen window she watches the eastern sky, its tinge of blood seeping from the bottom edge. A cloud is on fire.

  Giang bends over the kitchen sink and, stretching an arm overhead, lets the muscles pull sharp at the waist. She breathes into the pain at the base of her spine, imagines herself an arabesque, pliant and muscular, a tight coil ready to spring. She reaches her hand into the fruit bowl and draws forth a plum, rubs a thumb over the skin’s powdery bruise.

  The floorboards creak overhead and Giang knows her husband will stumble down the hall soon. She should go and draw his bath. She keeps her eyes closed for a minute more, a finger holding the page where yesterday she copied a few lines. Beneath the nôm, the traditional Vietnamese characters of that watery land, an ancient poem flows. This one tells of the river and its inhabitants, and of lost love: Stepping into the field, sadness fills my deep heart. / Bundling rice sheaves, tears dart in two streaks. / Who made the jerry’s leaving? / Who made this shallow creek that parts both sides?

  Giang tries to write a poem per day, from memory.

  There are poems that cause a startle—in them she sees a double of herself, whether she reads them once or a hundred times. The first time it happened she was thirteen, the last year her mother was alive, the year before their village was relocated. The words drifting around her, she was both the fish and the river. Like the promise of her given name, the river constantly keened toward the sea, struggling against the crags and banks and the men who tried to hold it back for their own purposes.

  Her father keened and crashed and grieved like a crazy person for his dead wife. Came the day he placed his twin girls, Giang and Suong, on a riverboat. He told them to wait, he would return with tea and food. But he did not come back. The riverboat carried them away, down to the city, to the five black years.

  When she thinks of the brothel, she sees a pair of matching strung playthings in the vague shapes of herself and her sister. Tangled puppets, dancing to the rigged fate of a fickle and careless god, collapsing into each other’s arms, sleeping through whole days.

  She wonders whether her husband is right. Would she be less sad if she let the poems go? Simply toss all three of the little cloth-bound books—one for each year she has been in this place—into the Papa Bear wood stove? They could curl up the chimney with the smoke of the rotted crabapple Jimmy split and stacked into a neat rick last August.

  She should listen to him. He had saved her, after all.

  I WANT TO DANCE WITH my wife, Jimmy says, breaking the spell. He has been teaching Giang the contra dances in anticipation of the big annual barn dance. He won’t hear her protests that it’s too early for dancing. He lets the diamond needle down on the record player and he spins toward her across the wooden floor of the living room.

  Twirling in her husband’s arms, Giang tries to dislodge from her mind the specter of Suong floating away from her. Watching her sister plunge into the filthy river below their Saigon bedroom that night, Giang had dug her nails into the windowsill.

  She thought she had swallowed for good that old companion, despair. But closing her eyes and resting her chin on Jimmy’s shoulder now, her twin is forever falling from the window, her arms cartwheeling, her black eyes sparkling in the muddy current.

  Suong had yelled to Giang three times, jump! before the river carried her away.

  Jimmy and Giang Smith make a lovely pair, the townspeople will say, the china doll in the arms of a burly farm boy, wheeling around the room to the Spanish Waltz.

  * * *

  “HARLEY, GET UP! GET UP, Mr. Harlan Wilder O’Brien! There’s the fences want mending, and holes in the roof that want stoppering from the rain, and there’s the barn dance, Harley, the barn dance coming soon, where Analisa Frasier wants dancing, dancing by the light of the moooon.”

  Lieutenant Harlan O’Brien lying board straight on the wood floor, under a storm-strewn sky, under his father’s roof, under his mother’s wedding quilt, tries to recall: Is he a good son? The son who mends fence and roof and who mows and gathers hay into great round bales? The woman singing at him up the stairwell, a crazed meadowlark, seems to think so.

  His mother’s laugh sprinkles the air with birdsong and confectioners’ sugar. She tousles the head of her boy on whom the sun has cast the brilliant light of bravery—or would as soon as the sun cleaves the black-clouded sky. She shoves at her sweet stranger the plate of turnovers she has made for him.

  She is anxious to show him off again.

  After breakfast, he works alongside his silent sentinel of a father, the older man’s stride certain, the younger’s half-pained, stretching new wire across the breaches where bawling animals have scratched their massive sides, mashing down the fence. The two men work through a persistent drizzle until finally a wan sun rolls up the storm sky like a window blind. The two do not speak, but walk toward the house and the smell of lunch rolls. The roof will not dry enough to mend this day.

  The noon meal would be a silent affair but for the meadow-lark voice of his mother. “Analisa, Analisa,” she keeps saying, “you remember Analisa, Molly and Leonard’s girl a few years behind you in school? She’ll be calling you directly. Everybody’s saying she has her hopes pinned on you.” The annual barn dance, to which the girls invite the boys, is this weekend, a vaguely pagan festival ushering in the summer.

  The men stare into their Dutch blue dinner plates, gradually revealing the windmill design in the center by scooping up the navy beans with hunks of lunch rolls, light and flaky, washing it all down with buttermilk.

  SIX

  When the Duvall Funeral Home got a window in its schedule, Malcolm Duvall drove his hearse to the county morgue to pick up the body of Daniel Ferguson. Arlene Ferguson was still a mess, and it seemed urgent to her that someone from the family accompany the boy, whose embalmed body had been kept iced, so to speak, in the hospital basement for ten days. It fell to Byard to ride along with Mac Duvall. Levon was unreachable, and who else was there? Not their no-account grandfather. Nobody could remember when Angus Ferguson had last drawn a sober breath.

  “I feel bad this took so long for us to get to, Byard. You understand, with the sheer number of funerals here lately, something had to be put on hold.” The mortician kept his eyes on the road as he spoke. He was a rather wooden man, something Byard reckoned was the result of all his years managing other people’s grief. “And Reverend Aiken agreed to the delay. I had no idea he hadn’t conferred with your mother.”

  Aiken was the traveling Presbyterian minister who passed through town once a month or so and preached to the few of his flock that called the predominantly Catholic Cementville home. Byard was not about to give Duvall the satisfaction of an answer, even though he did understand perfectly—he understood that his clan, his kind, would always be the ones at the bottom of any list. He also understood that the undertaker was trying to apologize. Leaving the hospital, the long black car rolled almost soundlessly through town, cut down the alley, and pulled in behind the funeral home.

  Roddy Du
vall came out to help his father unload the gurney from the back of the hearse. Byard remembered him as a sweetnatured kid who was chummy with Daniel. Roddy and Daniel had been in special ed together at the county high school. Roddy appeared to recognize Byard too, and he dipped his head in a respectful nod and mumbled something Byard couldn’t catch. Evidently Roddy’s draft deferment for low IQ, unlike Daniel’s, had gone through without a hitch. The mortician and his son rolled the gurney across the loading pad, and Byard followed them through the funeral home’s back door.