Mumble mumble, one of the men said. He spit on the ground and they all looked over at her at the same time. A boy broke off from the group and came to where Maureen was sitting. He stood there a while, the smoke from his cigarette curling around his face and making him squint.
“Maureen Juell,” he said.
She didn’t know where to put her eyes.
“Ain’t you Mo Juell?” He was staring at the top of her head in a way that made her reach up and touch her hair. The ladybug hair clasp slipped into her hand. She tried to smooth her bangs over but could feel them sticking straight out from her forehead like a hat bill.
“I thought for a minute you had a bug in your hair,” he said. Another of Augrey’s brothers—Tony, she thought he was called. The cigarette didn’t disguise the fact that the boy was close to Maureen’s age, nor did it hide his red-rimmed eyes. “You know Augrey?” The tone in his voice said nothing would convince him that could be true. He sized her up. “You come to gawk, didn’t you? Don’t worry, you ain’t the first.”
Straight into her face he blew three perfect smoke rings at which Maureen silently vowed not to blink or cough. She waited for him to turn away, bored with her, and rejoin the men.
“Well, come on then,” he said. “I’ll take you to her.” He cut through the circle of men and headed up the steps and into the Duvall Funeral Home. She slinked after him.
She had been inside Duvalls’ only two times before, and that was years ago when she was just a kid. Her mother’s second cousin had electrocuted himself rewiring his house. A little girl she didn’t know had contracted tuberculosis from her own daddy. The dad recovered at the sanatorium in Glasgow, but his child did not. Tiny coffin, all pink satin and lace. Maureen had not forgotten that spooky combination of sounds unique to funeral homes. Weird quiet music of no particular tune that comes out of invisible speakers in every corner. The muffled ruffling of a couple dozen Kleenexes being removed from and shoved into pocketbooks. Women’s cut-off sobs buried in the shoulder of somebody’s Sunday suit, the wind seizing in their throats, catching and gasping like something being tamped into a soft hole. Maureen followed the boy and those sobbing Kleenex sounds. On the left was a room filled mostly with older men she’d never seen before. They looked up when she and Tony passed. One man handed a small, flat bottle to another. Maureen had seen Uncle Judge bring such a bottle out of his inside coat pocket sometimes after supper and tip it to his lips. The men stared at her with their long faces, their jutting chins and tall slanting brows telling her without using words: She was interrupting.
“In here,” Tony said, and he directed her to a doorway across the hall, a parlor outside of which stood a pedestal with a white guest book waiting for people to sign in. The boy handed the pen to her and pointed to the next open line, his dirty fingernail leaving a little black half-moon scar on the page. Maureen signed her name, then stepped across the threshold and into Augrey’s parlor.
Heavy velvet drapes floor to ceiling, deep burgundy walls, dark woodwork, brocade settees positioned in angles near the casket. This was probably the fanciest room Augrey had ever been in. On the couch nearest the front of the room sat two large women, enough alike to be identical twins. Maureen wasn’t sure which was Arlene Ferguson, Augrey’s mother, and which was her Aunt Bett. Both of them looked pretty well cried out, their faces matching wrung sponges. Several rows of white folding chairs were lined up for the service. Maureen picked a chair in the back row, and the boy who’d shown her in sat beside her, as if he didn’t trust her to be around his sister’s coffin.
One after another, people bent toward the larger of the two women. They clasped Arlene’s hand in both of theirs and murmured. Maureen couldn’t make out what was being said. She was going to have to walk up there and give her condolences to Augrey’s mother, and she had no idea what she was meant to say. Maybe if Katherine had allowed her to attend Brandon Miller’s wake, she would have had more experience with these things and she would have known. But Bran’s mother Raedine had talked Mr. Duvall into letting Bran have an open casket, despite the fact that her son’s neck had been gashed by a satchel charge thrown into his bunker as he slept. Katherine understood Raedine’s thinking: She wanted people to see what war had done to her boy. It was not, however, something Katherine thought Maureen needed to see, not with her own brother newly returned, and not with several other local boys still there in battle. So it was Katherine’s fault that Maureen didn’t know the appropriate sorts of things you were supposed say to a grieving mother. People generally whispered in the presence of the dead; she remembered that much from when she had been here as a child. She was wracking her brain for a simple comment or greeting for Augrey’s mother when Ginny walked in. Maureen melted with relief at the sight of someone she recognized.
She practically ran to greet Ginny. “I’m so glad you came!” Maureen said, realizing at once that she’d blurted it too loud for the circumstances. It wasn’t as though they ran into each other at a party or something. What on earth was wrong with her?
But Ginny appeared not to mind. “I’m glad you came too,” she cried, and embraced Maureen so tightly they had to lean awkwardly over top of Ginny’s pregnant belly. Ginny didn’t let go for what felt like a very long time. She hugged and wailed into Maureen’s neck until Maureen could feel tears rolling down the inside of her collar. When Ginny finally came up for air, they stood and held hands and inspected the swirling pattern in the carpet.
“Well,” Ginny said, and turned toward where her mother-in-law sat watching. Maureen followed Ginny to the front of the room. Maybe listening to Ginny’s words of condolence would help her figure out what to say.
“I am so sorry, Mama Arlene!” Ginny crumpled to the carpet and buried her face in Arlene Ferguson’s lap. She cried so thoroughly and loudly that someone was sent across the hall to tell Levon to come get his wife. Maureen backed up a few steps and made way for that scary man she had so long despised. But it wasn’t Levon who helped Ginny to her feet. The other Ferguson brother, Byard, cupped Ginny’s elbow in his hand and once she was standing, put an arm gently around her shoulder. Maureen and everybody else turned to watch them go out to the hallway. She heard the rough slur of Levon’s voice. There was the sound of a scuffle, and a high shriek from Ginny, and everyone craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the scene between the two brothers.
In the midst of the melee, Maureen turned and looked into the waiting face of Augrey’s mother. She bent over stiffly and thrust her arm toward the woman’s thick hand. In a sealed box not five feet away lay the body of a wild girl who drank and smoked. People said she danced for men for the cost of a cheap glass of whiskey at Pekkar’s Alley. It was more than a rumor now that she had moved in with Nimrod Grebe this summer and took care of him after his stroke. People said Augrey was a trashy little loner who, yes, had drawn a fistful of short straws; but she had willfully broken that final straw, living with an old colored man that way. When she had finally worn out all of her town’s possible forgivenesses, someone had been angry enough to hurt her. Someone had hurt her to death.
But the girl in the wooden box was fifteen years old, and she was the daughter of the big woman whose face was tilted up at Maureen now, no doubt trying to place who, exactly, Maureen might be.
For a long moment in that mental blank spot, Maureen forgot what it was that made her come to the funeral home. In the next, what she could remember about her motives turned her face hot with shame. She had come to stare into the maw of grief, to see if she could grab hold of something there, something she could use, swallow it like a magic potion that would provide her with instant understanding. A kind of medicine for the fear, a sticky balm that might seal the hole being bored through her gut by the raw guilt she shared with her town for Augrey Ferguson’s death.
She looked into the face of the dead girl’s mother, a face newly drowned, eyelids full up, floodgates all ready to let go. What came out of Maureen’s mouth were the words of an idiot.
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“She. She was. Very popular.”
Arlene Ferguson patted Maureen’s hand and said with shocking grace, “I thank you for that, honey.”
Maureen followed the line of people waiting to pray in front of the sealed coffin with its spray of red gladioli draped over, a pile of bloody spears. Augrey’s school portrait sat atop the flowers like an icon of the Virgin in a scarlet shrine. In the photograph, that stunning hair fell over one shoulder as if she had gathered it all to the side to show off her long white neck. Maureen leaned in to study the photograph. Her face went hot again as she recognized a chain of purple blotches there. Cheap makeup hadn’t quite covered up the unmistakable hickeys. Augrey’s crimson lips were an exact match to the gladiola spears darting from beneath the picture frame. In spite of herself Maureen pictured a boy, or a series of boys, heading into a closet or a darkened room by turns to kiss those lips, passionate kisses that moved from her lips to her neck—and then what?
The nuns at Holy Ghost School had taught Maureen plenty of prayers. But when she bowed her head, what popped into her mind was Now I lay me down to sleep . . .
She tiptoed through the sniffs and sobs that sounded like dozens of tiny strangulations, all the way to the back row of folding chairs where she reclaimed the seat next to Tony or whatever his name was. He was holding Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones open to its middle, and it was obvious he was only pretending to read. Maureen glanced at the words under his finger: . . . when he got in bed beside me I found I was still feeling hurt . . .
Maureen felt the heat rise up her neck, an instant mortification that vanished when a drop of water fell on the page of the open book. And another. She looked at the boy’s wet face, silent, motionless, flowing with tears. Maureen reached over and closed the book but kept her hand over his for half a minute, until he jerked it violently away and scowled at her.
Mr. Duvall floated through the mourners, an imitation shepherd in a polyester suit, tending his flock, patting a shoulder here, holding a hand there. He owned his position at the lectern to the right of the coffin. His practiced undertaker’s voice did exactly what it was supposed to do, lulling the mourners off to a counterfeit valley of peace, all green pastures and milk and honey where they could pretend for a while that a forgiving god had gazed upon a sweet girl and called her home. The funeral director led the faithful in prayers Maureen did not know. He is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? His droning voice was comforting, and she felt herself grow sleepy.
Her head jerked up when Levon Ferguson strode to the lectern, setting off the soft flurry of a new round of whispers. He stood with his hands folded in front of his groin and he closed his eyes. His big flat mouth opened in song. It startled the room, and after half a minute of shocked murmurs the gathered mourners calmed down enough to listen.
Love’s own tender flame warms this meeting, he sang, and Maureen was glad his eyes were closed, because she would not have wanted to look into them. And love’s tender song should sing. But fly away little pretty bird, and pretty you’ll always stay. This haunting melody, clear as mountain air, couldn’t be coming from the mean drunk whose battered and bruised wife lived in the tenant cabin below the Juells’ house. His song pushed against the walls of the old mansion, and even the men from across the hall left their pint bottles and came to stand in the doorway and listen, bleary-eyed and weaving on their feet.
The draft-dodging brother squatted at Arlene’s feet and glared at Levon. Maureen could see his face only in profile, but that did not prevent her from reading the amused bitterness in Byard’s expression. The Ferguson clan had come together to mourn their loss. But there was something wrong here, and not just the men’s drunkenness or the dagger gaze of one brother to the other, or Tony’s refusal to openly cry for his dead sister.
Maureen hadn’t known it was possible for family to hate family.
She looked at the glowering boy next to her but he wouldn’t look back.
“Thank you, Tony,” she whispered. He continued to stare at his hands, pulling at a hangnail until a bright bead of blood popped onto his filthy thumb. Maureen gathered her library books and slipped out of the Duvall Funeral Home the same way she had come in. She walked down the alley and out to Council Street. She used the phone at Happy’s to call her mother.
“Did you and Eddie have fun?” Katherine gripped the steering wheel at ten and two and stared straight ahead, but Maureen could see she had the single eyebrow arched, the sign that she meant to be sharing in whatever mischief Maureen was up to.
“I might be coming down with something.” Maureen let her head fall against the window. “I just need to be home.” She made herself keep her eyes open, made herself watch her town pass by on the other side of the car’s window glass, committing to memory what remaining things she knew to be true.
FOURTEEN
Wanda had put off meeting with Alden Wilder as long as she could. It had been weeks since her grandmother’s passing—could it already be September? Given all that had happened this summer, there had been plenty of excuses to postpone getting together with Evelyn Slidell’s attorney.
When first she had taken a seat at the old woman’s bedside, Wanda had assumed it was a gesture of kindness on both their parts, an obligation of blood bond. In some strange way, spending time with Evelyn was like a traded penance for Wanda’s failure to attend the funerals of this grisly summer. She really had meant to attend at least some of the services for the Guardsmen, but as the appointed day and hour for each funeral loomed, she found herself laid low with intestinal difficulties, arrhythmia, the sensation of numerous tiny screws being driven through her skull, et cetera, et cetera. She was so weary of herself.
Nor had she gone to the funeral of Giang Smith, or her audacious little cousin Augrey only last week. At no time would she have said out loud that her grandmother was working on her. But that must have been it. Getting to know Evelyn Slidell, a helpless and lonely elder, during all those visits into town had wrought something of a change, a translation of the woman Wanda was.
Now she sat in Alden Wilder’s office. Loretta had declined to come along, having rarely ventured far from her bedroom since Evelyn’s funeral.
“You’re aware that Mrs. Slidell has left everything to you.” Mr. Wilder carefully placed his half-eaten fried egg sandwich on top of a wedge of paper towel on his desk, its runny yolk and faint sulfur smell creeping toward her. Wanda struggled to keep her eyes off it. Packed and labeled boxes sat stacked against the office walls, ready and waiting for their owner’s retirement.
“Yes,” was all Wanda could manage at first. The threat of arrhythmia lurked in her chest, the slightest flutter of stamping feet, that sure marker of an oncoming panic attack. But as quickly as it threatened, it diminished, as if some stronger part of her had come out of hiding and yelled Boo! to the frightened rabbit in her. “But I’m not sure I know what that means.”
“Well, there’s the house. I don’t know if you’ll want to list it for sale, auction it off, or move into it. I can give you as much or as little help as you wish on any of those options.”
That was a lot of information. She tried to create an outline in her head. Roman numeral one. The House.
Capital A. List it.
B. Auction it.
C. Live in it.
“May I have a piece of paper and a pen?” Wanda said.
The lawyer rummaged through an open cardboard box on his desk and pulled out a yellow pad. He slid an elegant cup of pens to her side of the desk. “I apologize for the condition of my office. I’m afraid this box is my temporary supply cabinet. I’m supposed to retire next week.”
“Oh, don’t mention it. I can’t begin to say how much I appreciate you helping me out.”
“Now. There are several accounts,” he said. “Eight fifty in Farmers Bank right here in town. The mutual fund, which we might want to get out of—the thing is tanking right now—my man tells me this bear market isn’t likely to move for a while—your mutu
al fund is worth about six and a quarter. I’ll have Mrs. Slidell’s accountant calculate the value of the stock portfolio, and you can decide how you want to handle that. No rush.”
Wanda scribbled the figures in a column. She relaxed and let out a pleasant exhale. “So there’s about fourteen seventy-five, plus whatever the stocks are worth,” she said. She wondered if it was the first time she ever used the word stock as a noun to refer to anything not on four legs.
“Fourteen hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, yes, that’s right. A million, four hundred and seventy-five thousand. The portfolio is probably another million. Give or take.”
The last thing Wanda saw before she lost consciousness was the top of Alden Wilder’s shiny head as he reordered papers in the fat file representing Evelyn Slidell’s earthly possessions.
THE LAWYER COULD NOT HAVE done a single other thing to make the execution of her grandmother’s will go smoother. He routed the paperwork through the bank to combine the myriad accounts her grandmother had set up. He put Wanda in touch with a financial planner in Louisville who would personally drive out to Wanda’s house and help her sort through the stock portfolio, all the buying and selling and what not. He arranged a trust that would issue a modest check on a regular basis.
All of Alden Wilder’s paper shuffling uncovered the circuitous ways the old woman had helped Wanda and Loretta over the three decades since Stanley Slidell’s untimely death. The full ride to Saint Brigid College, which Wanda had been led to believe was from some nebulous foundation, was only a portion. Wanda remembered times when Kirshbaum’s store in town notified them that there had been a mistake and there was a credit on their account, usually around the end of the year—the only way Evelyn could secretly manage a Christmas gift for her grandchild. Then there was the money that had appeared every month—the bank called it a “death benefit” from Stanley’s life insurance.
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