Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  She was a third of the way down the driveway when Uncle Carl came barreling behind her on foot. Maureen skidded her tires to a halt in the gravel.

  His face said, Where are you going?

  “Today’s a research day.” She explained that she had already covered as much as she could from home and memory and her own imagination about the dead soldiers, their families, this war, and other wars that had sent dead soldiers back to Cementville. “There’s some stuff I need to look up at the library. Some stuff about the Army. About how the National Guard came to be something different from what people thought it was.”

  Carl squeezed the bridge of his nose hard.

  Maureen remembered Billy’s old five-speed in the barn. She pushed her bike back up the hill. They brought her brother’s bike out into the sun and checked the chain and tires. Willis squirted it with WD-40 and spun the pedals to get the chain oiled. The tires were low, but not dry-rotted, so he thought they could make it to town all right, if Maureen and Carl promised to stop at the filling station and put air in them.

  “Your mother knows you’re taking off, right Mo?” Willis said. She nodded. Lying was getting easier. “Carl, you behave. Mo, keep an eye on him.”

  Which seemed to Maureen a ridiculous thing for her father to say regarding a grown man. They flew down the hill, gravel pinging crazy tunes against the spokes of their bicycle wheels.

  Mrs. Cahill always had things picked out for Maureen in advance, books and articles that might add something interesting to her research on Cementville or help her improve her prose. Maureen would vote Mrs. Cahill the Best Librarian in the World, even given that she is the only librarian Maureen has known, except for Miss Wanda, Mrs. Cahill’s part-time assistant who was not a real librarian but basically just a haunter of the library stacks who never talked to anybody and probably would have made a good librarian if she were not so afraid of people. Maureen would not have been surprised if creepy Miss Wanda was snooping around the stacks right now, peering out at them this very minute between Billy Budd and Moby Dick.

  “This is my Uncle Carl,” Maureen told Mrs. Cahill, who was already checking him over like she was trying to figure out whether he was the kind of person who could pass muster. The librarian dabbed her eyes with the wadded tissue she kept in the sleeve of her green cardigan and came round to the front of the desk. She was a small woman, and when she tried to gather Carl into her arms as if he were her own lost child, she looked like an elf attempting to tackle a large mammal.

  “I heard you were home, you handsome thing, and you haven’t stopped in to see me before now! How is my favorite researcher?” She glanced at Maureen. “I mean my two favorite researchers?”

  Maureen picked up the stack of books Mrs. Cahill had set aside at the front desk. Carl followed her to the table by the microfilm viewer. He flipped through her notes about everything interesting she had learned so far from old Cementville Picayunes.

  “You still don’t have the murder in here.”

  Before Giang Smith, people did not get murdered in Cementville, except maybe in the Civil War days, when Confederate raiders roamed the hills, shooting people at random and stealing their farm animals. When kids told ghost stories at church weenie roasts, some of the boys swore that renegade guerrillas ate whole calves raw like bloodthirsty vampires. But it looked as if Maureen was going to have to pander to her uncle’s obsession with somebody’s murder or he was not going to let it go.

  “Okay, what murder?” she said.

  Carl rifled through the drawer of film canisters and pulled out July-December 1954. He dragged a chair next to Maureen at the microfilm viewer and inserted the film and whirred through the frames.

  “How do you know how to do that?” she asked him.

  “Why do you think Mrs. Cahill likes me so much?”

  Maureen leaned in and read the clipping he had centered in the viewer. “Police Probe Slaying. Man Found Dead Behind Council Street House. Coroner Rules Homicide,” Maureen read aloud. Then silently down the narrow column. “Roy Stubblefield bled internally from being beaten with a blunt object, possibly an ax handle found near the scene,” the coroner said.

  She pushed the chair away from the microfilm viewer. Her heart pumped furiously like it had the day Ginny blabbered out her angry story. Hobo, rope, grandfather, barn. The words swarmed around in her head. 1954. Fifteen years ago. Fifteen years since Carl Juell had been locked up in the nuthouse.

  “Nobody’s going to want to read that,” she said, afraid to look at her uncle. “Besides, I wasn’t even born then. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  Carl glowered at the microfilm viewer as if it had let him down. “I thought you wanted to write a history.”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “Dead people are part of history. Murderers make history.”

  They had covered some gruesome events in school. Hitler and Mao. Genghis Khan. The guillotine. The Salem witch trials. Maybe her uncle’s line of reasoning wasn’t all that crazy. Maureen peered into the viewer again. “What does ‘home-at-large’ mean?”

  “Means you don’t have one.”

  “Everybody’s got to live somewhere, Uncle Carl.” She couldn’t stop reading. The article gave the names of men who were there when Roy Stubblefield was killed. Two Fergusons. A Goins. A few names she didn’t recognize. An unnamed witness. “Wonder who the mysterious witness was? Did they ever figure out who did it?”

  But Carl was squeezing the bridge of his nose, lost somewhere once again.

  VIRGINIA FERGUSON SAT IN THE Juell kitchen. The weeping this time was over the whereabouts of her sister-in-law. None of the Ferguson clan had seen Augrey for weeks.

  “Bett was in regular touch with her all that time while Augrey was taking care of Nimrod Grebe—you know she been staying there with him for going on three months, but ain’t nobody seen her since he tried to shoot himself.” Ginny shrugged a shoulder to wipe her nose on her blouse.

  Katherine shifted uncomfortably and nudged the box of Kleenex closer. She told Maureen to go up and clean her room, but didn’t seem to notice when Maureen parked herself on the stool by the refrigerator.

  “Levon tried and tried to get that girl to go home to Arlene. He’s that way, you know, always looking out for family,” Ginny sniffed. Levon had moved in and out of the little tenant house at the bottom of the hill three or four times since the beginning of summer, generally leaving Ginny behind with a new shiner.

  “I expect she’ll turn up.” Katherine got up and began whipping egg whites for the meringue pies. Uncle Judge and Aunt Mary Frances were coming for supper and she preferred to get some of the work done ahead of time so she could put her feet up and rest before her godparents arrived. “Maureen, didn’t I tell you to go upstairs? Start your bath.”

  Maureen remained in the corner, pretending absorption in The House of the Seven Gables, which she had renewed ten million times at the library already this summer. If something had happened to Augrey Ferguson, she needed to know.

  “Virginia, did you want Maureen to walk you home today?” Katherine said.

  Ginny and Maureen glanced warily at each other, then away.

  “Oh, I’ll run on home,” Ginny said. “Levon likes me to be there when he gets off work.”

  Maureen was about to say, Levon works? But Ginny was out the door.

  She watched her mother closely to gauge whether it was a good time to spring an idea on her, an idea that would require Katherine’s permission. She took in a good breath and said, “What would you think about me doing some interviews?”

  “Interviews?” Katherine dabbed a finger in the egg whites to see if they were stiff.

  “Maybe with the mothers of the dead soldiers.”

  “Absolutely not,” Katherine said, stopping the Mixmaster and looking at Maureen, clearly appalled. “Chop the celery and apples for the Waldorf salad, would you?” She flipped the mixer on.

  “Well, which is it, Mother?” Maureen hadn’t kn
own she was going to yell until she did. “Clean my room, take a bath, escort Ginny, or chop apples?”

  Katherine switched the machine off again. “I—”

  Maureen braced herself for a good fussing.

  But, “I’m sorry,” Katherine said.

  Sorry? What on earth had gotten into her mother?

  Katherine started to speak, seemed to think better of it, tapped a finger on her lips. “Then again—the effects of the war. I can see where you’re going.”

  This was the moment for Maureen to stay quiet. She could almost hear the cogs clicking in her mother’s mind. Katherine was a self-described pacifist, had become stridently so after a series of photographs published in LIFE magazine showed anguished children running naked down dirt roads in rural Vietnam, that faraway place that now seemed to turn up in every other conversation. Tiny Cementville had lost so many sons, all by itself. With the escalating death toll Walter Cronkite tallied up for them every night, and images that stayed in people’s minds long after they turned off the television, there seemed to be no end to the amount of things Katherine and Willis could find to argue about behind their closed bedroom door. Maureen suddenly saw her mother as a woman whose own son had gone away and come home a stranger.

  “Lila O’Brien maybe . . .” Katherine said. “After all, she’s been watching her boy try to recover from the most extraordinary experience imaginable. And Lila is the loveliest person. She’s nervous, of course, you would have to go at it obliquely, gently, try not to pull anything out of her too abruptly . . .”

  It was Maureen’s turn to be horrified. Harlan O’Brien, the weird one-legged son of their neighbors! She’d had nightmares about the artificial foot in which it scrambled on its own across the field toward their house. “Some people say Harley was the one who—” she started, but Katherine cut her off, holding up an index finger, a dollop of egg white on the end.

  “Don’t. I will not hear a word of that horrible gossip in this house.” Her voice was angrier than it needed to be, in Maureen’s opinion. “Lila was nursing Harlan’s fever the night Giang Smith died. She told me so herself. He was in bed for days.”

  And before Maureen could make further objection, her mother was dialing the phone. Lila O’Brien shrieked, loud enough for Maureen to hear from across the kitchen. Now would be the perfect time for her to come on over! Right away! She was just pulling brownies out of the oven!

  “I didn’t promise you the calmest person,” Katherine said, hanging up. “One of Lila’s brownies may be just the thing to pull you out of this mopiness. Carl can walk over there with you.”

  “I am not a mope.” Maureen finished chopping a stalk of celery and threw it in the salad bowl. “I just never expected all this obfuscation.”

  Katherine looked up from the chicken she was trussing. “What sort of obfuscation have you experienced, Miss Webster?” She knew good and well that Maureen hated when adults acted like certain people don’t have the right to use certain words.

  She decided to ignore her mother’s condescension for now. “I thought you wanted me to take a bath.”

  “It’s only Uncle Judge and Aunt Fan,” Katherine said. “They don’t care if you have a smidge of summer dirt behind your ears.”

  “I can’t so much as go to the library anymore without Carl breathing down my neck!” Maureen threw hunks of apple into the bowl. Hot tears rushed to her eyes. “Did you know he used to help Mrs. Cahill? I might as well have been invisible yesterday at the library.”

  “Chop those apples fine, Maureen. Aunt Fan will make those cow eyes and run her tongue around her dentures the way she does.”

  Maureen bit into an apple. “Who knew everybody would be so crazy about him? You should have seen Mrs. Cahill, falling all over herself. It was all: Carl, are you settling in okay? Carl, have things changed much? Oh, Carl, I’m so glad my best researcher ever is back. He must not have been all that loony.”

  “Watch it, missy.” Her mother did not even have to stop trussing and look at her when she said this for Maureen to know she was on razor-thin ice. It was plunge in now, or lose her chance.

  “Well, what happened, then?” Maureen said.

  “What happened when?”

  “When you all shipped Uncle Carl off to the loony bin.”

  Her mother’s shoulders tensed, just a little. Katherine finished stuffing the roasting hen and wrapped it up to rest on the counter. “He just—got sick. . . . Your grandfather died suddenly, and with your father getting back from Korea and us trying to get on our feet, and Billy was a baby then—we couldn’t take care of him, Maureen.” Katherine looked at her as if to gauge whether her daughter was satisfied with this.

  She wasn’t. “Sick how?”

  “Nervous. Strange,” Katherine said. “Carl was, I guess you’d say, unpredictable.”

  “What about Roy Stubblefield?” Maureen kept her eyes on the apples she was mincing to a fine paste on the chopping board, then glanced up in time to see her mother’s face go from surprise to that vacant look adults get when they’re pretending not to have the slightest idea what you are talking about. “The murder?” Maureen persisted. “1954? Right before Uncle Carl went off to rest?.”

  “Oh, that drifter, you mean. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, poor thing. Some vagrant nobody knew.”

  “I get the feeling Uncle Carl knew him.”

  “I don’t think so. That man wasn’t from around here. I can’t see it has anything to do with the history of Cementville.” Katherine started humming and took some eggs out of the refrigerator. “I’m thinking deviled eggs. Uncle Judge loves deviled eggs.”

  Nobody could tell Maureen she didn’t know obfuscation. But she had pushed her mother as far as she could for one day.

  Billy walked past the kitchen window dragging the lawn mower. Katherine ran water into the Dutch oven. She placed the eggs in, two at a time. “What about your brother? Interview him. What it’s like to be home. The war. All that.”

  “Already tried.” Maureen followed her brother’s movements, watching through the window as he coiled a garden hose around his arm and stared off toward the O’Briens’ pasture. “It’s not hard to picture him killing somebody,” Maureen said.

  “Your brother didn’t kill anybody.”

  “He was in the war, Mother. Shooting people is sort of part of the job? Plus there was that black guy in his platoon—”

  “That boy had a freak heart attack. It was coincidence that he and your brother were in a tussle when it happened.” It was the tone meant to stop the conversation in its tracks. “Now, shoo. Go see Lila. Make her feel good. Eat some of her brownies,” her mother said. “Carl!” she called out the window toward the picnic table, where he sat like a misshapen lump of clay.

  Maureen gathered her notebooks and papers and slung the strap of her book bag over her shoulder.

  Katherine put some new potatoes in a paper sack and tucked them into Maureen’s book bag. “Tell Lila I just dug those. Tell her to boil them twelve minutes. And they’re sweet enough you don’t even need butter.”

  LILA O’BRIEN WAS LEADING HER son out to the yard like a blind man when Maureen came across the pasture, Carl panting behind her. A card table in the front yard was decked out with a white tablecloth and checkered napkins and lemonade and the brownies piled in a neat pyramid in the center.

  “Maureen, you remember Harlan, don’t you—although you were a baby when he left for the service, gracious, what two or three or something—Harlan, Maureen Juell, you remember Willis and Katherine’s little girl, and her brother Billy, he was in the war too!” Mrs. O’Brien sang, capable of long strings of words unpunctuated by breath or rest.

  Maureen started to introduce Uncle Carl around, but Mrs. O’Brien reminded her that Carl Juell was no stranger in Cementville, and she tucked napkins into both men’s collars. Maureen tried to keep her mind away from the artificial foot. In her whole life she had never been in the presence of a real live amputee.

&
nbsp; Mrs. O’Brien lowered her voice and said, “Now. I already had to give him his evening pills, they help him sleep, you know, so he’s in a sort of quiet mood now.”

  “But it was you I wanted to interview, Mrs. O’Brien,” Maureen said, pulling out her notebook.

  “Oh, pshaw! As if somebody like me could know anything about war! It’s Harley you want to talk to,” Lila said. She bent over her son and straightened a lock of hair that had fallen over his brow. “Harley, you help Maureen with her paper now, she’s writing a paper about the war.”

  Before Maureen could argue further, Lila O’Brien flitted across the lawn and into the house. Maureen turned back to her uncle sitting lumpen and smiling next to the soldier. She was suddenly glad Carl had come with her.

  “Well,” she said, and laughed nervously. She stuffed half a brownie into her mouth at once, then realized she was the only one eating. She opened her binder to a clean page. Lieutenant Harlan O’Brien, she wrote at the top of the page in cursive that looked nothing like her own, it was so shaky and ragged. She had the strange feeling the person sitting across the card table from her wasn’t really there. She could see him there all right; but what she was seeing made her think of the eerie costumed mannequins her class had seen in a Civil War museum. She wondered, if she tapped Harlan O’Brien’s chest, whether she would hear a soft empty thud.

  Question #1, she wrote, like this was the interview she had prepared for, and begged her mind to stop repeating Wooden leg, wooden leg, wooden leg.

  “Lieutenant O’Brien, people are curious about what it was like—they had a special about POWs on television? About a deserted prison camp they found over there in the jungle? Maybe you could describe a typical day for a prisoner of war. Those pens, sort of birdcage-looking things? I mean, every day, day in, day out—”