Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  “Jonquils,” said Hayes, smiling at Aura. He looked around the steps and lawn at his fellow townspeople. “I’m surprised Betty Hemans didn’t come to church. I mean, it’s Easter. I was going to try to see if I couldn’t get her to listen to reason.”

  “She’s home rewriting her novel,” Aura said. “She told me she’d be working all weekend.”

  “I thought she threw it in the furnace.”

  “Oh, not the original. But she said she’s changing everything. It’s not Remember Me! anymore. It’s Betrayal! Lady Evelen finds out her American pilot is a two-timer, and she takes her revenge on every American she meets at the canteen. I don’t think I’d try to patch things up with Betty just yet if I were you. Your uncle Whittier! Yowza! I can’t wait to read this book.”

  “Look at those jonquils! Gosh, gosh, the whole world’s new,” Sheffield bubbled, and then soared irresistibly back into song. “ ’Tis the spring of souls today! Christ hath burst his prison!”

  “Sweetie!” Vera shook her enormous spouse. “Stop it! Everybody’s staring at us.”

  “That’s probably because they think you’re Dolly Parton.” Raleigh winked at her, with an eyebrow ostentatiously raised at her lavish blond wig and tight, scallop-necked, white and gold dress.

  Vera’s sooty lashes fluttered. “Why, Raleigh Hayes, that’s one of the sweetest things you ever said to me.…Now, tell the truth. Are you excited about Aura’s running for mayor, or are you going to be an old chauvinist pig about it?”

  “Both,” he said.

  “Hi ya, Dad,” called his daughter Holly.

  “Say hey, Mr. Hayes, how’s it going?” With Holly was Booger Blair, her seven-foot friend and racing companion. “Hey, I heard something wild. I heard you scored twenty-eight points for the Tomahawks in the state finals way back when. That true?”

  “Come on, Booger!” Aura grinned. “ ‘Way back when’?! We’re just heading for our prime.”

  “Twenty-nine,” said Hayes. “Twenty-nine points.” He held out his hand to the boy.

  Holly tugged on his arm. “Dad, listen, okay if I split? I gotta get out of this straitjacket.” She yanked at the lovely leaf-green dress, rolling her eyes.

  “Where are you going?” said Hayes.

  “Just be at Aunt Vicky’s by six,” said Aura.

  “Don’t speed,” said Hayes. “There’s no reason to exceed the speed limit.”

  “Welcome back, Dad,” smiled Holly Ainsworth Hayes.

  Nemours Kettell, clutching his captive daughter Agnes, and shooting his hand angrily over his gray flattop as if he were firing a rocket at Aura, walked past them without a word, but Ned Ware stopped to sigh at Hayes sadly and to say, “Raleigh, when I heard, I swear my heart went out to you. It’s just a tragedy. Your poor daddy. Was he driving, or was it her? The, you know, Negro girl.”

  “What? What do you mean, driving?”

  “Didn’t Earley die in a car crash?” The thick-shouldered banker let go of Raleigh’s arm.

  “Who told you that? That’s not true.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No, he died in a nightclub.”

  Ware tried to keep the grief in his eyes but excitement pushed it out. “God! In a nightclub! Was, was she with him?”

  “A lot of his family was with him.” Raleigh tapped the man’s cast. “Ned, what happened to your arm?”

  “Can you believe this?” Ware looked reproachfully at the cumbersome brace. “Unbelievable. Boyd’s lucky he’s not in jail. I don’t know if you heard, but we had to foreclose on Joyner. Anyhow, the guy’s a maniac! This is somebody I put in time trying to help, personal- and business-wise, you know? So I was standing in the bank last week, and in he comes spewing crazy filth right in front of the tellers.”

  “He broke your arm?”

  “Well, Raleigh, I tell you, even if he did, I still feel real sorry for Boyd. I mean, losing his business, and they say his marriage is pretty damn shaky. But turn the other cheek, that’s my kind of philosophy. Lizzie Joyner moved in with her mother, is what I hear. Well, Raleigh, ’course, you know I’ll be there for poor Earley’s funeral. Tomorrow, right? Is there a viewing at Baggett?”

  Raleigh pressed on his glasses. “No, no viewing. The casket’s at Thomason & Jenkins.”

  Ware stepped back amazed, swinging his raised arm into Mrs. Pierce Jimson, who was trying to squeeze past him on the crowded church steps. The old football player whispered, “Raleigh, that’s a colored establishment. I mean. I’m no racist but…did she make the arrangements?”

  “I made them. Pardon me, Ned, sorry about your arm.… Caroline! Caroline! Come back here please!”

  Out of her choir robe, Raleigh’s beautiful rose and cream daughter was wearing rags. Ripped, tied, straggling pastel rags. “Yo? Oh, Daddy, you were toedully fab! Everybody, I mean, everybody was wasted!”

  “Ah, that’s…thank you. And your solo was beautiful, Caroline. Just beautiful. I’m sorry Grandpa wasn’t around to hear it.”

  “I know….” The girl hugged him tightly. “Listen, okay? Mommy says I can still go eat at Kevin’s, ’cause it’s all, you know, fixed, so I’ll see you later at Aunt Vicky’s.”

  “Kevin’s? Who’s Kevin?”

  “Oh, Daddy, you know, Kevin, rilly, Kevin! Holly’s off greasing with Booger, so I’ve got the wagon. Bye. Kiss kiss.”

  “Greasing? Come back, Caroline, come back here! I’d like to speak to you. I’m not even going to discuss the fact that your hair seems to be turning green. But…”

  She ran her hand down the lime green stripe. “Jeez! I told you yesterday, like you never ever listen, this is my hair.”

  “No doubt. What happened to your clothes? You can’t go to anyone’s home on Easter looking like this. Your blouse is ripped right off your shoulders. Did you have an accident? Or is this more of your new style? I’m just trying to understand. You tear up your clothes on purpose?”

  “Don’t be lame! They come this way, Daddy. Oh hi, Mom. He says fine.”

  “I do?” Raleigh asked Aura, who’d slipped her arm through his. “What do I say fine to?”

  A very tall, slender young black man dressed in a khaki suit was calling up from the foot of the church steps. “CAR! CAR! Let’s go! We’ll follow my folks. Hey, hi there, Mrs. Hayes, Mr. Hayes. Happy Easter. See you later. Come on, Caroline!”

  “Caroline, wait a…Aura, where is she going?”

  “What do you mean, where is she going? Kevin’s. But they’ll come over to East Main after supper. Do you think I dare smoke out here, honey? I suppose I have to watch my public image now.”

  Raleigh stared at his wife, tilting his head to look under the brim of her wide white hat. “Was that Kevin? That young black man is Kevin?”

  “Oh, Raleigh, you know Kevin. Kevin. Kevin Miller.”

  “That’s the Miller boy? The Starry Haven Millers?”

  Aura waved at a friend. “Of course. How many Millers do we know? Oh God, here comes Pierce Jimson.” She nudged her husband in the ribs. “I’ve got to leave. I’ll crack up.”

  “But, but the Millers’ son was only about nine or ten!”

  Aura laughed. “About seven or eight years ago! Bye-bye. Yep, the Voice of the Patriarch is headed our way. Yuck, look at that man! Pretending we don’t have the goods on him, the slimy creep. Here’s poor Boyd Joyner going bankrupt and leaving town, and here’s old Pierce buying Knox-Bury’s and opening a second branch, and his wife and everybody else still thinks he’s Mister Truth and Light.”

  Pierce Jimson, deep circles under his eyes and his long upper lip twitching with a nervous tic, asked Raleigh Hayes for a moment’s privacy. They stepped inside the church foyer, colored light dappling through the windows. “Raleigh, you’ve destroyed my life,” the businessmen began without preamble.

  Hayes thoughtfully considered this possibility, then shook his head. “I don’t think so, Pierce. You look like you’re doing okay to me. Lizzie and Boyd seem to be the ones having the real trouble.
”

  The deep voice cracked in Jimson’s tight throat. “I have a position in this town to uphold. I have responsibilities, I have a reputation.”

  “Oh bullshit.”

  “I loved Lizzie, you don’t understand, but I couldn’t allow…” Jimson put his hand on his lip to stop it from twitching, and Raleigh oddly thought to himself, And God so loved the world, He really made a mess of things. The burden would have been so much easier on a God who didn’t care.…Jimson was struggling on to justify himself and blame others. “It’s over, Raleigh, and mercifully—despite you and Ned Ware—my wife’s been spared any knowledge, and you’d be a fiend to try any more of your vile blackmail schemes. You’ve got Knoll Pond, now leave me alone.”

  The furniture merchant started to push past our astonished hero, but Raleigh, as we know, was a very fast thinker. He turned Jimson back, hand on his shoulder. “Hold up, Pierce.” And Raleigh smiled. “I understand you’re opening a new branch.”

  Jimson’s flesh shriveled away from Hayes’s touch. “That’s right.”

  “…Well, Mingo Sheffield needs a job. He’s an excellent interior decorator. And I think he’d make a wonderful manager at your Knox-Bury store.”

  The two Better Businessmen stared solemnly at one another for a while. Then Pierce Jimson bit down on his fidgeting lip, then he nodded yes, then he slouched back out through the big doors and into the community of his admirers.

  For the first time in anyone in the family’s remembrance, Victoria Anna Hayes had invited her relatives to Easter dinner at the old East Main Street house of turreted bays and square columns they annoyed her by still calling “Papa’s House.” They all came, canceling what other plans they might have made or still hadn’t quite made or thought they ought to get around to making soon. They came because they were touched by Vicky’s “little surprise invitation,” and because it seemed right that they should mourn Earley at the home of the sister who had always been closest to him. They came to sorrow at Earley’s loss and to wish him well. “Wherever he’s gone,” said Raleigh’s youngest uncle Bassie, propped up at a tilt on the couch. Or at least they thought that’s what Bassie had meant by “Webber guggug-geez on.”

  “We shall meet, but we shall miss him, there will be an empty chair,” Lovie Clay sang; and pulling a Kleenex from her bosom of tissues, she bent down by the wheelchair and wiped tears from her sister Reba’s cheeks. “Oh Lord, honey, I bet they’re playing up there in Heaven to beat the band. Furbie and Hackney and Earley. Hey, Earley up there!” she called to the ceiling, then began to tap in her white plastic heels. “When I get to Heaven, gonna put on my shoes. Gonna dance all over God’s Heaven, Heaven.…”

  “Oh, Lovie, don’t cry,” said Reba, crying. “This is so sweet of Vicky Anna, fixing everybody dinner right when she just got back. And she says she’s having us all over again in two weeks’ time. She said, ‘I want y’all to meet somebody.’ ‘Somebody special,’ is what she said. Do you think maybe Vicky’s going to get married at last? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Somebody to take care of her.”

  “Good golly, Miss Molly,” Jimmy Clay whispered to his cousin Tildy Harmon. “Hand me another one of those frozen dacs, darling. We got to fill up now. You catch a winkadinkalinka at what ole Vicky Anna’s serving on Easter! Well, I sure wouldn’t want to call it ham and potato salad!”

  The counters of the old kitchen where Ada Hayes and Flonnie Rogers had baked and argued together for so many years were now stacked with dozens of white cartons, delivered to the house by Butch Shiono, who was out on the porch talking to Holly Hayes and Booger Blair about dual carburetors. Inside the cartons were each and every one of the Lotus House specialties, not the ordinary chow mein and sweet-and-sour pork that most Thermopyleans asked the Shionos to make, but the dishes the Japanese restaurateurs made for themselves and for a few favorite customers like Victoria Hayes.

  At the long, crowded dining table, all the Hayeses fell silent and stared as Aura and Victoria placed platter after platter of Blue Willow china heaped with strange meats and fish and vegetables in front of them.

  Victoria sat down, straightening her blue jacket. “Would anyone care to say Grace?”

  “Grace,” yelled Jimmy Clay. “Hotcha hotcha hotcha.”

  Then Lovie folded her hands. “For whatever we are about to receive, Lord help us be thankful,” she said. “Pass the one that’s pink and green.” And they all began talking and laughing at once.

  Two hours later, when the fortune cookies were passed around the table, Aura read hers aloud. It said, “This is your lucky day.”

  Jimmy read his aloud. “‘This is your lucky day.’ That true, Tildy? Just say the word.”

  Reba read hers aloud. “‘This is your lucky day.’ Why, they’re all the same! Isn’t that funny?”

  And Raleigh Hayes, strolling out with Aura onto the wide front porch, read his aloud. “‘This is your lucky day.’”

  As Orion brightened in the Easter sky, Raleigh sat with Aura in the green wood swing, while all around them his relations told each other stories about his father. “Remember the day Earley let the calf run down the street and Vicky had to chase it?” “Remember the day when…” “Remember the day…”

  Raleigh blinked. Out in the middle of the quiet street, under the glow of light, he saw a small man dancing. “Aura,” he said, “do you see anything over there?”

  “Where, honey?”

  “Over there in the street? You don’t happen to see Daddy standing over there doing something that looks like a jig, do you?”

  “No.” She took her husband’s hand and rubbed the old gold ring. “But I’m glad you do.”

  Chapter 37

  Why Raleigh Married Aura

  “HONEY, WHAT IN THE WORLD are you doing!?” whispered Aura to her husband. “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”

  “Doodling,” he whispered back, and chuckled. He was doodling in his Prayer Book the design for the gold medallions, embossed with trumpets, which he planned to have made out of the bar of Dahlonega bullion. A medallion for each of the travelers on the journey to New Orleans. A souvenir, a little surprise.

  “Shhh,” whispered Aura. “Stop giggling.”

  “I can’t help it,” he whispered back, and burst into tears.

  In St. Thomas Church, on Easter Monday, Raleigh Hayes sat laughing and crying through his father’s funeral. Surrounded by all his relations, he sat in the front pew, where he had once sat Sunday after Sunday beside his mother. He sat beneath the pulpit from which long ago Earley Hayes had preached the sermons that had so outraged Mrs. PeeWee Jimson. What would she think now, to see the color of the young curate saying mass? Raleigh chuckled out loud and was hushed again by Aura. Across the aisle, Betty Hemans shook her head gently and forgave him for being the nephew of the perfidious Whittier Hayes.

  “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.…”

  The small church was crowded with people, white and black; some of them Raleigh had known all his life, some he had never seen before.

  “Good turnout. Sort of says something about Mr. Hayes,” solemnly murmured the banker Ned Ware to his wife, as if the guests were collateral for a spiritual loan.

  The church was filled with flowers, flowers from Easter, flowers from Thomason & Jenkins Funeral Parlor. Flowers stood circling the rosewood coffin. Flowers lay heaped on the gleaming lid.

  Nemours Kettell paused before the casket, reverently bowed his flattopped head in pious respect, looked up and saw Raleigh Hayes grinning at him from ear to ear. Beneath the lid, swaddled in Tiny Hackney’s party dresses, lay two large rocks, a Confederate uniform, a cassock, a sword, a box of trinkets, and a golden horn.

  “I hate to see what living with That Woman’s done to
a decent man like Hayes,” muttered Kettell to his daughter Agnes.

  “Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.”

  Raleigh looked around the white wood church: at the stone font in which he’d been baptized, at the oak rail at which he’d been confirmed, at the altar before which he’d been married, at the stainedglass windows whose pictures told impossible stories he’d puzzled over Sunday after Sunday long ago. In all the years he’d been away nothing had changed inside these walls but the people. Not the order, not the words.

  “Remember our wedding?” whispered Raleigh to Aura. “Doesn’t it seem like yesterday?”

  “Yes, like yesterday, and like forever and ever. Now hush,” said Aura, and took his hand.

  In the presence of his family and her family and his friends and her friends and their neighbors and a few people that nobody even remembered inviting, with Mingo Sheffield as his best man, with his aunt Victoria Anna in the first pew, with his father Earley and his brother Gates ushering in the guests, with the choir singing in their stalls, and above the altar of his tomb the Son of God grinning like a fool through the stainedglass window, Raleigh Whittier Hayes had married Aura Eleanor Godwin because he loved her. Almost as much as he loves her now. And of all the sacraments and of all the sins, the greatest of these is love.

  Please enjoy the following preview of Foolscap, by Michael Malone, available in the spring of 2002 from Sourcebooks Landmark.

  Prologue In the West End of London, at eight o’clock on a cold starry evening, the red velvet curtain trembled and lifted a few inches off the floor of the great stage, letting out a shimmer of soft, amber light. Expectation rustled through the handsomely dressed audience. Tonight was the world premiere of a play called Foolscap, the theatrical talk of the town, for months now a cynosure of critical controversy, academic squabbles, even lawsuits.