Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  “Or we could hit the new toll road, making a clear shot all the way to Louisville. Whatever road you picked there was sure to be a haul of cousins at the end of it waiting for Sunday company, or people that weren’t cousins, but might as well be,” Harlan says. “We always stopped in at your granddad’s place on the way home. And there Carl would be.”

  So that’s it, Billy thinks, Carl is what inspired this ramble.

  “Old Carl,” Billy says, hoping Harlan has not finished. He wants to know why, really why, his uncle went away.

  “Carl always had some new project, something he was building, some new animal he was raising. Fancy chickens. Peacocks. Goats. Chinchillas, of all things. He even talked his father into letting him get a pair of Percherons. There would always be a handful of other kids from town who had walked to the Juell farm, late on a Sunday afternoon. I swear, I believe those kids would have walked twice as far to get to spend time with Carl. Best entertainment around.”

  “Did everybody know he was nuts back then?” Billy says, and instantly regrets it. There is a slight hesitation in Harlan’s pace next to him. Billy can feel the man looking at him, feel his own blood rush to his face. He continues to stare at the ground in front of him, aware he has made some sort of grave error.

  “For most of us, Carl Juell was as close as we were going to get to an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, without ever leaving home. You know what a bagworm is?”

  Billy nods. “Sure. Bunch of them hanging on the cedars right now.” He looks around to confirm that he knows what he’s talking about and plucks one from a tree, fingers its intricate brown sac of shingled twigs.

  “We could sit for an interminable time, watching Carl cut those bags open with his pocket knife and pop those things into his mouth,” Harlan says, and when Billy grimaces and throws the moth case aside, Harlan laughs. “We’d help him gather eggs—Carl knew how to blow an egg dry without breaking the shell, poke a pinhole on either end with a good-sized needle—and he’d hide a couple of empties in his mother’s egg basket for a joke. I once saw him tie himself by a single foot to a tree branch hanging out over the river. He scooped water in his hand as he swung, then let the water fall through his fingers like liquid pearls.”

  This is a Carl Billy does not know. A Carl before his and Willis’s mother had passed. Before Willis had left for Korea. Before Carl’s and Willis’s daddy went into the barn and hung himself. Before they found Roy Stubblefleld with his head caved in.

  Billy had heard versions of the story, outlandish tales that had reached the proportion of myth by the time he was in high school, the way kids will make up a story in the absence of the truth. He could remember being at the homes of friends, overhearing the adults talking, whispering usually, in another room, the women making the little sucking sounds with their tongues over their teeth, the sounds of nonjudging judgment that serves mostly to distance the lucky from the judged. While his friends bragged about imagined exploits with girls, Billy would be listening to see if the adults would talk about what had happened to Carl, if they would let their guard down enough for him to get the real story, or some semblance of it. What he wanted was something along the lines of relief from the uncertainty surrounding his uncle, the fate he sometimes worries might be also closing in on him, a hereditary curse.

  He gathered from people’s whispers that after his mother’s death, Carl had taken to loitering at the depot with a bunch of lowlifes and hobos who drifted between a rooming house and the railroad tracks, pretending to wait for work to open up. Willis was already off in Korea by then. Carl quit going to school—the nuns sent him off the grounds at Holy Ghost every other day anyway, due to his outbursts. And then a drifter named Roy Stubblefield—Billy pictured a filthy man more than twice Carl’s age, all covered in creeping eruptions with a Lucky Strike hanging off his bottom lip—Roy Stubblefield had taken to lingering around wherever Carl was. People were always seeing him standing close to Carl, closer than seemed right for an unrelated man and boy. None of the mothers Billy heard whispering at night in his friends’ kitchens ever came out and said it outright, probably out of respect for Mrs. Juell’s memory, but Carl was maybe funny in more ways than one. Then Stubblefield turned up dead and all those no-accounts got hauled in and questioned, and somehow Carl’s name didn’t make it on the list of those present, though people said, low under their breath, of course (by then Billy had come to understand that under the breath is the only way things of this sort can be discussed), they said, Everybody knows Carl was there . . . those tramps likely were fighting over him. You know. As if he was a girl. The details and the timing were fuzzy, but Billy had pieced together that, one day, his grandfather had gone into the barn and tied himself a good strong noose. Uncle Freeman must have gotten word to Willis, because he came home from Korea. In no time, Carl was whisked off to one of those places where people go to “rest.” Apparently a person could be so tired it was a long, long time before they let him go home again.

  Walking in silence beside Harlan O’Brien, Billy wishes he could work up the guts to ask whether the story he has assembled is anywhere close to the truth. Harlan would know; he had been there. But Harlan is finished with talking.

  They are both sons of Cementville after all, where good people raise good kids and even in the face of tragedy go on about their lives, strong where it counts, and knowing right from wrong. Billy follows the lieutenant across the last stream, wondering whether the artificial leg minds the water, whether the stump carries memories of fording this creek in the past. They mount the hill and finally reach the rock wall that divides their fathers’ lands. They shake hands, part ways.

  Walking toward his father’s house, the unopened boxes of bird-shot chatter softly against Billy’s chest.

  NINE

  Wanda Slidell sat up late knitting a cap for her friend June Cahill’s cousin who had the Big C and had lost all her hair.

  “Rats,” she whispered, not wanting to wake her mother. There was a monkey wrench in the cable pattern twenty rows back. That meant ripping out an hour’s work, minimum. It reminded her of the old days, learning to knit, picking out the crooked little rows. Her mother had taught her. Tried to teach her to spin, too, but she never got the hang of spinning, and after Loretta was diagnosed with lupus, they sold the sheep, and the spinning wheel got pushed further and further in among cast-off furniture and mountains of canning jars in the old meat house.

  Wanda’s mind wandered to thoughts of having to leave Hanging Valley, drive down the hill, walk into the hospital in Travelers Grove, and hand the red cap to a sick girl she barely knew, and her heart flipped and flopped around her chest. In her head, she rehashed the words to the argument she and her mother were having—again.

  “How about the one Doc Carruthers recommended,” Loretta had said. “You don’t have to commit to anything long term, just see what he has to say.” It seemed that the sicker Loretta got, the more she insisted that Wanda needed a doctor. She wouldn’t say the word “psychiatrist.” Thinking about driving into downtown Louisville, Wanda broke into a sweat.

  Agoraphobia, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual said. She had looked it up at the library, pinned it down. Naming a thing did not make those assaults any easier, Wanda discovered. Whatever was wrong with her, she figured she could handle it as long as she stuck with what worked. Namely, staying home unless life’s necessities sent her out.

  But she did struggle against it, this agoraphobia, and mightily. Forced herself to do the grocery shopping, for instance, ever since the lupus had made driving excruciating, not to mention unsafe, for Loretta. And Wanda allowed June to drag her to the movies once or twice a year, until the Arco downtown closed and the only theater within seventy or eighty miles was the new eight-plex on the edge of Louisville. Crowds gave her hives.

  To show how hard she battled her condition, as her mother had come to call it, Wanda had even competed for a scholarship to college in her senior year of high school, and won it. Reading wa
s the only thing that ever sparked a fire under her. Discovery of the English department at Saint Brigid College was a magical thing: the only place she had found where she wouldn’t stick out. Nobody marked it as strange for a person to go around with her nose pressed in the gutter of a book all day, or if they did, they never said it to her face. The English Department was a safe little cocoon, a couple of classrooms and offices tucked on the tiptop floor of the Saint Brigid College Library. There she could move from class to the stacks and to the next class with practically no extraneous contact with gangs of marauding college students. She had come home after college graduation with a double major in literature and linguistics and had not found a compelling reason to leave Cementville since.

  Her father’s life insurance policy kept them out of the poor house. Loretta Ferguson Slidell was not going to make her daughter go to work at the cement plant, much less at the distillery, since Wanda had been half-orphaned by the effects of liquor. Whenever Wanda thought of looking for gainful employment beyond the county line, thrusting herself out there into the wide open land past the knobs whose profiles she knew by heart, her chest muscles clamped a vise around her rib cage and she had to fetch a paper bag to breathe into. She would be ever grateful to Charlene Cahill, who had convinced her to come and work part-time in the college’s library, where she could again hide in the stacks without fear of aggravating her condition. Dusting, re-establishing order in the card catalog, lining the spines of books on the shelves. It made her feel like somebody.

  And now here was Carl Juell, returned to them.

  “‘Because I do not hope . . . I no longer strive to strive towards such things,’” Wanda recited out loud. Her Eliot had not left her, nor her Hardy, her Woolf—for all the good they did her. And yes, Mrs. Dalloway, she thought now, with Carl’s round face before her in her mind, you are right: Perhaps the reward of caring for people is that they come back.

  Wanda’s head leaned against the little cervical pillow behind her neck. Falling asleep in her grandfather’s easy chair wasn’t so easy anymore. The springs were sprung and the upholstery on the arms was pretty much nonexistent, leaving a bare wooden frame where a person could set her tea. Loretta talked about sending it to the dump now and then, but Wanda insisted it would leave a hole in the house.

  “You know how many naughas died for this chair?” her grandfather used to ask several times a week, and she would have to laugh, because his feelings were hurt when she didn’t.

  She might have been aware of the last flutter of her eyelids as her head came to rest against the wing of Poose’s chair. Then Wanda was sitting at the feet of Death, meticulously unraveling the hem of his long dark cloak. She felt his frosty breath raise the coppery wisps of her hair. She knew, even sleeping, that the special feature of dreams is that bizarre goings-on can seem perfectly normal. Still, Wanda couldn’t fathom what was compelling her to take apart the cloak of Death. Maybe she thought she could knit him a better one. Poose’s theory had been that dreams were the sleeping mind’s attempts to untangle the knots of one’s waking problems. So maybe the twisted cable pattern in the red cap was begging for a solution. Stitch after stitch unlocked itself from the cloak’s edge as Wanda rolled the crinkled black yarn into a ball.

  She glanced up into Death’s bloodless face to see if she was about to get clobbered. His mouth spread open and thinned the way the skin stretches wide over an old person’s teeth when they’re close to passing through the veil. When his lips turned up on the corners, Wanda could see he intended it for a smile—it wasn’t unfriendly or evil. She had seen old people die. Too many people confused Death and the Devil, as far as she was concerned.

  She felt his cold hand on her head. He smoothed the thick orange curls where they’d gotten all matted with napping. Wanda thought of her grandfather in his coffin at the Duvall Funeral Home. The last night of his wake, Wanda’s mother had encouraged her to say goodbye, to touch Poose one last time before they closed the lid for good, and when Wanda put her hand on Poose’s plastic-looking one, she immediately wished she hadn’t. Strangely, she did not mind holding Death’s hand now; he seemed in need of companionship, comfort of some kind.

  Wanda stood and the two of them proceeded down the main hall to the front door, which they passed through as if it were nothing but air. They strolled around Loretta’s perennial beds in the dark. The full moon made the peonies glow like big white bulbs, lighting up the path in an accommodating way.

  Wanda murmured, “Really, I ought to wake up,” but the dark figure next to her said nothing. Part of her did not want to wake up, not yet.

  “What brings you here?” she asked after a polite interval.

  “Eet’s your grand-mère,” he wheezed.

  She let go his frigid fingers.

  “Hold on, hold on.” Wanda looked at him with a skepticism some might have found rude. “I never knew Death had a French accent. And besides, my grandmother has been dead thirteen years.”

  “La mère de ton père,” he clarified. “Le Mort, he speaks all zee languages, Mademoiselle must know that.” He flicked his long cape over his shoulder.

  Wanda was not a fan of the melodramatic. She had learned from her mother never to trust pretension in any form. “So old Evelyn Slidell’s passing on, is she? I never met the woman, not officially. She refused to have anything to do with us after my father kicked the bucket.” Wanda reached down and deadheaded a handful of poppies, throwing the withered blooms onto Loretta’s compost heap. Wanda reminded him, as if Death needed reminding, how her father had passed on during the same bitter winter she was born. “I can’t even remember getting a birthday card from her.”

  “Elle n’a pas une famille, or no family to speak of, but you,” Death intoned mournfully. “When her only child died—ton papa—Evelyn shut herself off from the cruel world.” He plucked a heavy-headed peony blossom and tweezed the individual petals, letting them fall like snow from his long fingers. He sighed deeply. “There are people who do that, you know, hide behind doors, don’t venture out, except for groceries or the occasional movie. They quit trying.”

  The French accent had waned as he spoke, but Wanda didn’t appreciate the preachy tone that replaced it. She stopped in front of a shrubby vine, its dingy purple blooms writhing over the path.

  “Look! Deadly Night Shade—one of your favorites,” she said to change the subject. She yanked the plant out by its roots, knowing Loretta wouldn’t want such an invader in her garden. Could he know about the agoraphobia? Was it possible Evelyn Slidell suffered the same condition as Wanda?

  “She wants to see you, ketsele.” Death put his long cold arm around her shoulder and pulled Wanda closer.

  “Wake up,” Wanda whispered, pinching herself. The reek of his breath reminded her of something she couldn’t place. An old bouquet of roses, maybe, that should have been thrown out weeks ago.

  “Last wish of a dying woman,” he said. “That altercocker husband others—may he rest in a peace he never allowed her while he was alive—wouldn’t let her make a single decision on her own. Even the rich have regrets.” His bony hands flew around the air in front of him as he talked. “Bubbeleh, listen, it’s one of the six hundred mitzvoth: When someone asks forgiveness—love, hate, hate, love—you can’t refuse them, no matter how meshuga.” And he raised his flapping cold hands in a hopeless shrug.

  “Hold on, hold on—now Death is Jewish?” It was better than the French accent, but still. Cementville’s only Jewish family, the Kirshbaums, ran the clothing store on Council Street. The narrow aisles between dress racks and shirt boxes and lingerie provided another place for Wanda to hide, and she sometimes lurked there for the pleasure of listening to the Kirshbaums holler at one another in the stock room. She had picked up a few handy Yiddish phrases of her own, but rarely had the opportunity to put one to use.

  “And call me Wanda, oy gevald,” she ventured.

  “Wanda, she’s asking for you. Please do come tomorrow at four for tea. Nurse al
ways lays it out proper.” The dark stranger clasped his hands under his long chin like an English schoolgirl. “Cakes, crumpets, and lots of sugah!”

  “I don’t think people in Cementville eat crumpets. Biscuits, yes. Scones and crumpets, no. Do you always get involved in patching things up between people?”

  “All part of the job.”

  They strolled like old companions back to the house and Wanda couldn’t help noticing how similar their frames were. They could have been cousins to Oz’s lanky Scarecrow. Death left her at the door and she watched him fade off down the road toward town. He looked lonely, stooped, yet at the same time somehow tireless.

  SHE WOKE IN POOSE’S EASY chair around five with a stiff neck. There was a knot in her back and when she reached behind her, she half-expected to find a ball of scraggly black wool. Wanda laughed when she pulled out the familiar red yarn still attached to Valine’s little cancer cap.

  Out the kitchen window the rising sun lit up Juell Ridge. She put water on to boil for the coffee and before long heard her mother stirring at the top of the stairs. Loretta’s lupus was flaring up again, badly this time. Loretta refused to move to the downstairs bedroom, so Wanda held her breath each morning while her mother gripped the banister and crept down the steps sideways like a crab. She thought about not mentioning her plan of calling on Loretta’s nemesis of a mother-in-law. But who was she kidding? Lying to her mother, even by omission, was out of the question.

  “I think I’ll go into town this morning,” Wanda said over a bowl of oatmeal. She avoided Loretta’s eyes and focused on the cloud of hair. The notorious Ferguson red never quite disappeared. On Loretta, it had become a swirl the color of ripe cantaloupe riddled with silver wire.

  Loretta had been a looker in her day, generous of figure and fair in the old Scots way. Wanda’s favorite rainy afternoons were spent perusing musty albums stuffed with snapshots, lingering over pictures of her parents on their honeymoon in the Great Smoky Mountains. Even in the black and white photograph, Wanda could see Loretta’s long strawberry tresses trailing over Stanley’s shoulder as he pressed her in a kiss, his shiny black hair glinting in the sun. It was a secret she kept from her mother, the nearly operatic version of her parents’ brief and flaming passion, Wanda’s prized creation. She imagined the stranger they asked to click the button on their Brownie Flash, pictured the stranger’s smile warmed by Loretta and Stanley’s fire, up there in the Smokies. They had run off on Loretta’s sixteenth birthday and been married in Gatlinburg, a transgression beyond all forgiveness as far as the bluestocking Evelyn Slidell was concerned.