I picked up the phone. Stella bent down, seized up one of the big rose quartz rocks Grand had gathered to decorate the borders of the house, and heaved it through one of the kitchen windows. Glass shattered. I ran outside.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I screamed. I faced Stella, who still stood in front of the shattered window, looking as if she couldn’t believe she had done it. She turned and said, through her gritted teeth, “It’s almost the second anniversary of when you killed your father. Doesn’t surprise me that you don’t remember it.”
“I know damn well what day it is, Stella. He died of a heart attack. I didn’t kill him. And you are some holy-o drunk,” I said. “I’m not arguing with whatever craziness you’ve swallowed. Go home and sober up.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Stella said. “And you know what? Your mother was a whore. She wasn’t the saint you think she was.”
Arlee finally began to cry. “Go home,” I said. “You’ve waked up the baby.”
“Oh, I’ve waked up the baby. Well, that’s too goddamn bad.”
Someone, most likely Grand from her rocking chair in heaven, touched my soul, and for a few seconds I understood the pain clawing at Stella’s heart. Soft as I could I said, “I’m sorry you miss Daddy so much. I miss him too. But shouting at me and getting mad at me won’t bring him back. You need to go home and sleep this off.”
Stella responded by bending down and picking up the fork Bud had used for supper. She ran at me, and before I could grab it away from her, she scored my cheek with the prongs. The pain, and Arlee’s cries, made me crazy, but before I could wrap my hands around Stella’s twiggy neck, Bert Butts pulled us apart.
“Grab her, goddammit,” Stella screamed. “She’s a killer!”
Bert put his big lobsterman’s arms around Stella’s slight body and held her to him as she struggled.
Dottie and Madeline had followed Bert. Dottie’s eyes were dazed, but Madeline, who appeared to be more on top of things, said, “What the hell is going on?”
I held my hand up to my bloody cheek and moved to go into the house to get to Arlee. Dottie stopped me. “I’ll fetch her,” she said. Madeline took me into the kitchen as Parker rocketed down the dirt road in his car, lights flashing.
“I called him,” Madeline said. “Thought you were being murdered.” She gaped at the broken window. “My god,” she said, “did Stella do that?”
I sat down hard at the table. Madeline wet a cloth at the sink and dabbed at my cheek. “She got you good,” she said. “You had a tetanus shot lately?”
“Doesn’t sound familiar,” I said.
We listened to Stella cry and protest as Parker and Bert talked to her outside.
Dottie came downstairs toting my red-faced baby and I took her and tried to settle her down. I told Madeline and Dottie that I had been waked by Stella’s screams, that I had tried to talk to her. “Things bottomed out fast,” I said.
“She’s drunk,” Madeline said.
“No shit. That’s nothing new,” I said. “But she’s never attacked me.”
“She’s been alone in that house too much,” Madeline said. “Ida and I have both tried to get her out, but she’s been stubborn about leaving. I guess everything got to her tonight, somehow.”
Sadness washed over me. “The hell of it is, she’s right,” I said. “I probably did kill Daddy.”
Madeline said, “Your father had a bad heart for years, Florine.”
“Yes, but I was hard on him.”
“You was hard on everyone after Carlie went missing and Stella showed up,” Dottie said. “None of the rest of us died from it.”
Madeline rolled her eyes. “Dorothea, you have such a way with words.”
“Just telling it so Florine can understand that she didn’t do nothing wrong. She wasn’t awful nice, but she had some reasons. She sure as hell ain’t no killer.”
I gave Arlee an idle boob to suck on. “I hope my milk isn’t sour,” I said.
Madeline asked me where we kept the first-aid kit, and set off for it.
Sheriff Parker Clemmons came into the kitchen, saw me nursing Arlee, turned on his heel, and started to leave.
“It’s okay, Parker,” I said. “Dottie, get me a dish towel.” She fetched it, and I put it gently over Arlee’s head and my boob. “All covered up,” I said. “You can look.”
Parker turned around and came back, but he didn’t take his eyes from my face or from the notebook he pulled from his shirt pocket. Parker was Ray Clemmons’s younger brother, but they looked completely different. Parker was tall, while Ray reminded me of a barrel with legs. Both spoke in short, to-the-point sentences. Parker asked me to describe the evening’s events. I explained what had happened. He asked me if I wanted to charge Stella with trespassing, vandalism, and assault. Part of me wanted to hit her with the book. But part of me remembered her keeping my teenage vandalism a secret from Daddy, and so I said, “No. Let her sleep it off.”
“You sure?” Parker said.
“No, but what the hell.”
Madeline returned with Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls, and an old bottle of iodine. She said, “Really, Florine? She broke your window and bloodied your face. You sure about this?”
“No,” I said. “But I owe her a favor, and Daddy loved her.” To Parker, I said, “But I sure as hell don’t want her near me, or the baby. Can we make sure that doesn’t happen?”
Parker said, “We can get it down on paper.”
Madeline disinfected my cheek and we decided that the scratches weren’t deep enough for stitches. We left them open to the air so the wound could breathe. Parker finished up and walked Stella home. We decided it was a good idea for Dottie to sleep on our sofa for the rest of the night. I put Arlee back to bed and went downstairs to sit with her for a while.
Dottie said, “What did you mean when you said that you owed Stella a favor?”
I shrugged. “I’ll tell you someday, but not now. I’m too tired.”
Dottie let it drop and we watched television until I went to bed.
My face throbbed and it was hard to get comfortable. I finally wrapped Bud’s pillow in my arms and that did the trick. Dottie and I shared an early breakfast with Arlee. Bud called me at about eight o’clock. Sam was gone, he said.
I said, “Come home.”
6
Besides being pastor, Billy Krum was a lobsterman and a handyman. The next day after Stella’s attack, he served double duty at the Warner households. He showed up at about ten in the morning and walked down to Ida’s house to talk to her about Sam’s service, and then he helped Bud fix our kitchen window.
He was a good-looking fella, as Grand had noted to me, trusting that I wouldn’t pass that on lest it seem disrespectful. She was right, though; he was a good-looking fella. He reminded me of Daddy. His eyes took on the color blue in a serious way, and his skin was ruddy for life. His age was up for debate, but Maureen Warner said she thought that he was about twenty-nine or thirty. “There’s barely seventeen years of difference between him and me. If we get married when I’m eighteen, he’ll only be thirty-five or so. That’s not so old,” she told me one day.
“That’s pretty old,” I said.
She lifted her stubborn chin and shook her head. “Not really.”
“Well,” I said, “my parents were twelve years apart. That worked out until Carlie went missing. But they were happy before that, as far as I know.”
Whenever I saw Billy, I thought about Maureen’s crush on him.
As he and Bud removed the busted window from its frame in the kitchen, the summer breeze sifting off the water laid its warm fingers on every person and item in the house. I brought Arlee downstairs and put her in her bassinet and in a rare moment of idleness, I watched the men work.
Bud looked awful, as was to be expected. He
hadn’t slept all night. When he had seen the cuts on my cheek earlier in the morning, I had to talk him out of letting Stella have it.
“We’ll deal with it later,” I said. “We have enough going on today.”
“Well, that’s bullshit,” he said, but he left it alone. As I watched, he turned away from Billy and me and wandered down toward his mother’s house.
“He’s in a state today,” I said.
Billy nodded. “That’s to be expected.”
“Yes,” I said. I wanted to follow him and take him walking. I would hook my arm through his elbow and we would find ourselves beneath two rows of tipsy pines that had nothing to do but shade us as we strolled underneath them.
“I bet Sam would want to be buried at sea,” I said to Billy. “Like Daddy.”
Daddy’s remains were drifting along the floor of the ocean somewhere, although he had a grave in the cemetery up on the hill near the white church where Billy preached. The men, including Billy, had spirited his body away at some point during the day of his funeral. They had roused me at midnight and we had taken him home to his beloved sea, said goodbye to him, and dropped him overboard. We had told no one. As far as I knew, Stella thought Daddy was buried in the cemetery. His plot was the most flowered and watered one in the whole place.
Billy didn’t answer me. Instead, he walked through the empty window frame into the kitchen and went to the bassinet on the porch. He looked down at a sleeping Arlee, a smile around his eyes. “I remember your mother well,” he said. “This little girl looks like her.”
“Carlie had more hair and she was bigger,” I said. Billy smiled.
“You’re God’s little wiseass,” he said. “That’s for sure.” He frowned at my cheek. “You probably should have that checked out.”
“It’ll heal,” I said.
“I’m going to see Stella after I leave here,” Billy said.
I moved over to the missing window and looked over at the house across the driveway. No sound. No movement. I shivered.
“She was so crazy last night,” I said. “Not sure what set her off.”
“Loneliness. Grief. Watching you continue on with your new family. Missing Leeman something awful, I imagine.”
“I know all that. I just don’t know why now.”
“No reason that makes any sense to any of us, or maybe to her. She’s been to see me a couple of times, just to set and talk. That’s something you could do, if you had a mind to do it.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I could. If I had a mind.”
Billy smiled and shook his head. He walked back through the open window and returned to work. “Grand used to say about you that Jesus needed someone to keep him on his toes.”
“Well, Jesus can relax for a while. I’m plenty kept on my own toes with this baby.”
And as if on cue, Arlee made a sound, and I went to her. I picked her up and we walked down to Ida’s house. Our joint appearance would help keep the sadness in the shadows and help us all through the next few days. On the way down the hill, we met Bud heading up to help Billy. He took Arlee in his arms and held her to him for a few seconds, then he kissed me and handed our baby back to me and we continued on our separate ways.
We decided to hold the funeral lunch for Sam at Grand’s house, because it was bigger than the Warner house. As soon as I knew that, I began to clean while Ida and Maureen kept Arlee. All day long, in between feeding Arlee and then dusting and sweeping and polishing up, I kept my eye on Stella’s house. But it remained quiet. No one came out. No one went in. Her car was still parked there when we left for the wake.
Once inside the funeral home, we spoke in quiet tones as we stood in front of the closed, dark coffin containing Sam’s remains.
“I would have left the lid up,” Ida said. “He didn’t look so bad and they can do wonders with makeup these days. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want anyone saying how good he looked. ‘I’ll be dead,’ he said. ‘How good could I look?’”
Sam had a lot of friends, most of whom he had grown up with and had known him most of his life. We all knew them too, in one way or another. If I didn’t recognize them by name, I knew them by their boat names. The tall bald man ran the Boden. The gray-bearded man with hands the size of big flounders was captain of the Celeste. Most of them were quiet, but the sight of the baby in my arms made everyone relax a little more. It was good to chat with mothers and grandmothers and to people who had known my parents and saw them in Arlee. A few folks asked about the scratches on my face. I didn’t want to go into the whole fight with Stella, but I got tired of mumbling this and that about it. Finally, I said, to Tillie Clemmons when she asked, “It was rough sex.” Tillie, who was as talkative as her husband, Parker, was quiet, spread the word. I got a few shocked stares, but no one else asked me any more questions.
As the evening wore on, we wandered through the carpeted rooms with the long, thick drapes, nodding at one another with shy eyes or whispering bits of comfort. Finally, Ray Clemmons said to Dottie and me, “Why are we so goddamn quiet? He’s dead, for chrissake. He can’t hear nothing.” Dottie and I giggled at that, and then giggled even harder when several people shot us cross looks. We ended up standing outside on the lawn with Madeline, watching Long Reach cars whoosh by. Arlee’s fussing made my breasts heavy and I told Bud goodbye. Dottie drove Arlee and me back down to The Point.
The service was held almost two years to the day of Daddy’s funeral. At the church, a tearful congregation sniffed and listened as Billy gave a solemn and personal remembrance of a man who wouldn’t have set foot in church but for his determined wife. Ida wept in the front row alongside a hiccupping Maureen. Bud remained tearless beside me in the pew, but his hand never parted from mine.
At the graveyard on the hill, the sun and a summer wind held sway. Hair blew back from sad faces, dresses danced and settled as if they were on a clothesline, black pant legs whipped back to outline bony knees and legs. The coffin was lowered into the earth, flowers were strewn over the top of it, and we filed away from the grave to continue on with the day.
Dottie, Evie, and Madeline were at Grand’s house when I showed up. Most of what we had to offer had been put out on a long table set up against the rose bushes in the side garden to block the wind. Dottie and Evie were on the porch swapping off a fussy Arlee as Madeline finished up coffee and tea.
“She likes me better,” Evie said to Dottie.
“Well, that would be a miracle, now wouldn’t it?” Dottie shot back.
I took Arlee from the squabbling sisters and went upstairs to feed her. I listened to the slamming of car doors and the murmurs of mourners as they filed into the side garden and into Grand’s house. Arlee sucked and purred for a while before she fell asleep, her open mouth still on my nipple. I put her to nap in her crib and paced back to our bedroom, not ready to go downstairs and face my guests.
I looked out of our bedroom window toward Daddy’s house and saw a car parked in back of Stella’s car. It looked familiar. Then I remembered Stella’s sister, Grace, who had come to take Stella away shortly after Daddy died. Was she back to take her away, again?
“Florine, do you have more cream for the coffee?” Madeline called.
“Yes,” I called back, and I joined the people celebrating Sam’s life.
Most people left within an hour, but the captains of the Boden and the Celeste, along with Bert, Bud, and Billy, sat in the side yard and drank up all the beer so we wouldn’t have to do it later.
At midnight, my exhausted and half-drunk husband left our bed. Through half-raised lids, I watched him pull on his jeans.
“You going for a walk?” I said. “You all right? Want me to get up?”
“No. Go back to sleep. We’re going out to sea,” he said. “We won’t be long.”
“Does Ida know?” I whispered.
“She’s coming along
,” Bud said. “Bert’s taking the family out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I figured you’d be better off here with the baby.”
It made me grumpy that he had left me out, but I let that go, and when he bent down to me, I put my hands on either side of his face and gave him a long, deep kiss. He snuck downstairs and out the door. I drowsed and listened until I heard the Maddie Dee’s motor start up. Bert put her into gear and she chugged toward the ocean.
“Goodbye, Sam,” I whispered, and I went back to sleep.
Sometime later that night, I woke up. My breasts were full, but my baby hadn’t cried. Crap, I thought, I’ll have to wake her up. I settled back into the mattress for a sleepy minute. As I lay there, I heard a man singing. I got up and went into Arlee’s room. No baby. My heart thumped as I stood at the top of the stairs and took in the voice downstairs. It sounded like Bud, although I’d never heard him sing. I tiptoed down the stairs and through the house. As I moved closer to the porch, where he sat rocking, I caught the words to the tune he was singing to his daughter.
“Who’s that knocking at my door?
Who’s that knocking at my door?”
Said the fair young maiden.
“It’s only me from over the sea,”
Says Barnacle Bill the Sailor . . .
“My ass is tight, my temper’s raw,”
Says Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“I’m so wound up I’m afraid to stop,
I’m looking for meat or I’m going to pop,
A rag, a bone with a cherry on top,”
Says Barnacle Bill the sailor.
I peeped over the rocker to see that Arlee was wide-eyed and awake, watching him. I put my hand on his left shoulder.
Written on My Heart Page 6
