I am a terrible musician. My own mother says I am hell-bound. And I am fat.
After she had shaken the hundredth hand and her throat was dry from repeating, “Thank you,” Clarice stood inside a circle of appreciative hospital board members. They yapped at her like overly stimulated Chihuahuas, excited by the event and the private reception that would occur later at Ballard House, the Queen Anne mansion Barbara Jean owned in downtown Plainview.
Just beyond the ring of well-heeled admirers, Richmond stood waiting. Broad-shouldered and bursting with virility, he made everything around him, even Forrest Payne’s yellow tuxedo, seem dim.
Clarice crossed her arms and drummed her fingertips against her elbows. As the guest of honor, she had to put in an appearance at the reception. But she would duck out early. There was practicing to do. And, praise Jesus, there was Richmond.
CHAPTER 15
After giving their congratulations to Clarice, Odette and James moved toward the back of the auditorium to join the cluster of guests preparing to walk to the reception at Ballard House. Before they reached the other members of the procession, the staticky scratch of the hospital intercom drifted into the hospital auditorium. James inclined an ear toward the open door, listening. Then he said to Odette, “I should go check that out.”
“Check what out?” Odette asked.
“That announcement. It’s the code they use when somebody needs security to come fast.”
The announcement filled the air again. “Dr. Strong needed in room 426, stat.”
Odette said, “You’re off duty today, you know.”
“I know. I’ll just see if I can help. Then I’ll be right back,” he said, already turning toward the hallway.
Outside room 426, Darlene Lloyd was slumped against the doorjamb. She grimaced as a doctor probed her arm. As he approached, James heard Darlene say, “I don’t know what got into him. He was always such a sweet old guy. Maybe he’s having a reaction to one of his meds.”
James stepped into the room and saw El, red-eyed and perspiring, standing in front of an open closet door. El leaned on a metal crutch as he swung its mate at one of the two security guards who stood between El and James.
“I’m goin’, dammit! You can’t keep me here!” El yelled.
The security guard who had just dodged the crutch said, “Mr. Walker, nobody is trying to keep you prisoner, but you still need help.”
The other guard said, “Yeah, old fella, we’re just trying to help you.” When El swung the crutch again, the guard nearest to him backed off. Then the guard used a hand gesture to signal his colleague that it was time to move in and put an end to El’s tantrum.
James recognized one of the guards as a moonlighting state trooper. “Can I help?” he asked.
The guard answered, “I think we’ve got it, Captain Henry. Something upset Mr. Walker here and he pushed a nurse against the wall. We’re just going to get him under control so the doctor can administer a sedative.”
El turned and looked at the newcomer in the room. Then dropped his crutches to the floor. His defiance drained away, and he fell back onto his bed with his arm flung across his face. The security guards moved in and placed El in restraints, and the doctor stepped forward to administer an injection.
El groaned, “This damn town. I never should’ve come back to this shit hole.”
Now that the old man was under control, James stepped into the hallway. A small crowd of familiar faces greeted him just outside the door.
Downstairs in the auditorium, Odette had mentioned to Barbara Jean that James had run off to room 426 to help attend to an emergency. Knowing that the room number was El’s, Barbara Jean had decided to go to the fourth floor to find out what had happened. On her way, she’d asked Forrest Payne to come with her, thinking that, whatever was going on with El, he would be comforted by the presence of two friends. Odette had come along because James was already there, and because it was her nature to be where trouble was percolating.
Now Odette, Barbara Jean, and Forrest stood blocking James’s way.
“Is he okay?” Barbara Jean asked.
James said, “He’s all right, I think. Something got him agitated, and he gave his nurse a shove. The doctor’s in there with him now.”
Forrest placed his hand on James’s arm. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said in his sweet, whispery voice. “I told El you were a good man. I told him, no matter what happened way back when, you’d want to see your daddy.”
James blinked and tilted his head slightly as he tried to comprehend what Forrest was telling him. “What?” he said. But it was becoming clear then, and he didn’t wait for Forrest to say more.
James entered room 426 again and walked over to the side of El’s bed. The doctor and the security guards stepped aside as James moved in close and leaned over the patient.
El turned away from James with a quick, almost spasmodic motion. He didn’t fight, though, when James placed a hand on his jaw and brought the older man’s face around so that their eyes met. The hand that wasn’t on El’s beard came up suddenly and landed on the metal railing of the hospital bed with such a loud clank that everyone in the room jumped.
Odette entered the crowded room and went to James’s side. When she placed her hand at the center of his back, she could feel his heart racing beneath his suit jacket. James released El and, in a gesture Odette had seen thousands of times, brought his hand to his own jawline and rubbed the long scar there.
El let out a moan and muttered another curse about the “damn town” that had done him wrong again.
James bent down and brought his lips close to El’s ear. Speaking in a tight, halting voice just loud enough for Odette to make out, James snarled, “I forgive you.”
Odette heard her husband speak of forgiveness, but no absolution was offered in his angry growl. When he straightened and glared down at the man in the bed, she placed a hand on James’s arm. She was that sure he was going to strike El. But James turned around and walked stiffly toward the doorway. He stopped when he stood beside Forrest. He said, “Thank you. I appreciate you telling me.”
In the hallway, James strode toward the elevator. Odette ran after him, forced to take three steps for each of his in order to keep up. Inside the elevator, she reached out and grabbed his hand as they rode down to the lobby. Odette watched as his mouth twisted, his jaw jutted forward, and his eyes squinted. She had believed, after forty-two years of observing nearly every twitch of his lips and contortion of his brow, that experience had shown her how any emotion would present itself on James’s face. The worries and joys of raising Jimmy, Eric, and Denise. The blinding grief of losing family and friends. The stress of keeping a roof over their heads in the hardscrabble years. Now she gazed up at him and was both amazed and frightened that this face she knew so well could still produce an expression she had never seen.
CHAPTER 16
A fat orange tabby leapt onto James’s lap. The purring cat marched a slow circle in a futile attempt to find a comfortable resting place atop James’s bony thighs. Then she gave up in frustration and stretched out beside him on the living room sofa.
James reached out and cradled the cat’s chin in his palm, lifting her face. This one might be a new one. He would have to ask Odette the cat’s name. Of course, there was no guarantee that she actually belonged to them. Unfamiliar felines appeared in the house frequently enough that James often couldn’t distinguish the permanent residents from the visitors.
Word had spread among the animals of the area that a sweet deal was available at the Henry home: indiscriminately affectionate humans, a dog-proof fence, and an ample food supply. Cats flocked there to take advantage. The Plainview Humane Society regularly sent people to Odette and James to inquire after lost pets. Anxious strangers who came by in search of their wayward cats often found their animals fatter and better groomed than they’d last seen them and, more often than not, highly displeased to be dragged away from their vacations.
When Odette was a little girl, it seemed that cats always accompanied her. Throngs of them pranced along after her, darting between her feet as she walked and coiling themselves around her ankles when she stood still. They waited patiently outside the doors of the school for Odette to leave at the end of the day, so they could accompany her as she walked home.
The way the cats assembled to greet her every day seemed like a magic trick to James and the other children. It therefore struck her schoolmates as logical that Odette could attract and communicate with animals. She had that kind of reputation. By the time Odette was in the first grade, most of her classmates had heard some version of the story of her birth in a sycamore tree. Even if they hadn’t been told the entire tale, the kids had heard the superstition related to it: that the novel circumstances of her entry into the world had cursed her with fearlessness. Also, several of the other children’s fathers had been left physically and emotionally damaged by encounters with Odette’s aunt Marjorie in her capacity as the Pink Slipper Club’s volunteer bouncer. Odette’s classmates had been instructed to give her a wide berth, and for the most part, they did.
There was, in fact, a far simpler explanation for the cats seeking her out. Dora Jackson was such an extraordinarily terrible cook that, from kindergarten on, Odette’s grandmother would fill her granddaughter’s pockets with supplementary food to substitute for the unappetizing or downright inedible lunches Dora prepared for her daughter. While the cats might well have connected with some unique and shining facet of Odette’s soul, it was more likely that they gravitated to her because of what she carried. Any halfway sensible cat would cozy up to a chubby girl who often traveled with a couple fried-perch sandwiches in her sweater pockets.
During their elementary school days, Odette had been known as the girl from an oddball family who was born in a tree. Just as Clarice was thought of as the spectacularly gifted daughter of the religious zealot who handed out miniature Bibles on Halloween instead of candy, Barbara Jean was the child of a whore. The scar on James’s face had set him apart from other children. Even before his first day of kindergarten, James had been pointed out to his schoolmates as the unfortunate boy whose junkie father had slashed his face. That shorthand had served the parents of the other kids well, and it was eagerly adopted by their offspring.
James’s scar ran from the tip of his right earlobe, down along his jaw, and curved up slightly toward the center of his lower lip. When they were bored, or couldn’t come up with a more exciting diversion, a group of boys entertained themselves by following James to or from school, teasing him about the scar.
At first it happened only once every few weeks. Then one of his tormentors hit upon the idea that the thick, raised line along James’s jaw looked like something from a horror movie. Suddenly it became a daily game for some of the boys to swarm around James. Walking with a teetering, stiff-legged gait, they would extend their arms straight out in front of them as they yelled, “Frankenstein!”
Their taunts never advanced to physical violence. James was several inches taller than the majority of his classmates from his first day of school until the day he graduated. While he was never one to start a fight, his height and serious demeanor gave him the appearance of someone who could easily end one. But his unwillingness to use his fists to put a stop to the harassment made him a safe target.
The first time they called him a monster, James ran home and sobbed on his mother’s shoulder, insisting that he would never return to school. Ruth Henry’s response was to wipe his tears and say, “Baby, you and me are too poor to be this tenderhearted. You’d better learn to make fools invisible. These won’t be the last ones you meet.”
It hadn’t been easy, but James had taken his mother’s advice. The situation quickly improved. There was little sport for his tormentors in abusing someone who barely noticed. Only a few of the older bullies had been tenacious, a devoted contingent that performed the “Frankenstein” routine nearly every time they saw James. They kept it up until Odette and her cats brought it to an end.
Odette and James hadn’t been close friends at the time. That would’ve been impossible for a boy and girl of their ages. But like all the other children, even those who professed to be afraid of Odette and what they saw as her supernatural powers, James had been a guest at Odette’s birthday parties.
Dora and Wilbur Jackson threw extravagant parties for both of their children’s birthdays. More than fifty years later, James still recalled the amazement he’d felt entering the Jackson home for the first time. It was a palace. Unlike the walls of his home, which were perpetually eggshell white, as dictated by their agreement with the landlord, it seemed that a twenty-four pack of crayons had been set free on the walls of Odette’s house. The kaleidoscopic windows borrowed their shapes from geometry books or puzzle pieces. Stairways curved artfully from one floor to the next.
And the food. The spread on display at Odette’s birthday party that first time, and each time thereafter, was just as impressive as the house. There were tables of cookies and cakes, baked hams adorned with pineapple rings, and piles of golden fried chicken. If something could be roasted, candied, pickled, jellied, or spiced, it was on display. Every bite of food was cooked to loving perfection by Odette’s grandmother and an assortment of relatives who believed that no one should be condemned to eat food prepared by Dora Jackson.
Young James’s words upon stepping inside Odette’s childhood home for the first time would become a running joke throughout their marriage. He had looked around at bounty that was an absolute wonder to the eyes of a desperately poor child and asked, “Odette, what’s it like to be rich?”
The last day the boys called James “Frankenstein”—at least the last time they dared say it to his face—was just a few days after Odette’s ninth birthday party. James was walking home along a stretch of dirt road that was surrounded on both sides by the distinctive twisted trees that had given the neighborhood of Leaning Tree its name. He heard them coming up from behind him, all of them grunting and howling, doing their best imitations of the Frankenstein monster.
James walked faster, but the boys soon caught up with him. He didn’t run. He was determined never to run from them. Chin high and set straight ahead, he thought of his mother’s words and tried to make the lurching boys invisible.
They continued their monster imitations, breaking character only to laugh.
Then Odette appeared. More precisely, the cats appeared. First one, then another. Then a half dozen, and, ultimately, twenty more. Mewling and yowling, they zipped between and over the feet of James’s persecutors.
Finally, Odette crashed her way out of the underbrush that lined the gully. She rushed onto the rutted road, shrieking, “Leave him alone!”
The brigade of cats parted to make a passageway for her as she threw her solid four-foot frame at Ramsey Abrams, the largest of the boys who had been harassing James.
As Odette pounced onto Ramsey’s back, the pack of cats attempted to scale his legs to get at whatever delicious snacks lay hidden inside her pockets. The cats clawed at Ramsey’s legs, and Odette wrapped an arm around his shoulders, pummeling his head with her free hand. Soon he was on the ground, held down by a round girl and a throng of cats while his friends looked on, their mouths open in astonishment.
In nearly every retelling of the story over the coming half century, James would joke that the finale of the scuffle had been the true definition of an ass kicking. Odette, having brought Ramsey to the ground, aimed her shoes at his rear end. She stomped on him until he cried and begged her to stop. All the while, she kept shouting, “Leave James alone!”
The other boys ran off, abandoning their ringleader to Odette’s harsh punishment. James stayed and watched her short, thick legs churn, her scuffed saddle oxfords repeatedly finding their target. With each strike, she made an indelible impression on Ramsey and solidified what would become a lifelong reputation as a fierce, if somewhat unhinged, guardian of justice.
At ten years of age, James had been old enough to understand that having a girl fight for his honor and, even worse, win that fight was not something he wanted anyone at school to hear about. He imagined—correctly, as it turned out—arriving at school the next morning to hear the boys who had once called him Frankenstein instead chanting, “James loves the fat girl!”
As Odette continued to work Ramsey over, James scampered away. Running home, he grinned and thought, I love that fat girl.
* * *
DINNER WAS LATE. In the two days since Clarice’s recital, Odette hadn’t been able to do anything around the house with her usual efficiency. The roast chicken with herbs that normally took her an hour to cook had been a two-hour project tonight. James was even more preoccupied than she was. His mind had taken him off somewhere. Maybe his thoughts were in the tiny house in Leaning Tree where he had grown up, struggling so hard with his mother, or maybe in a hospital room across town with the man he had glared at with a searing hatred but claimed to have forgiven.
Since leaving El’s hospital room, James hadn’t uttered a word about his father. Odette had prodded and probed, wanting to know what he was feeling, but that had only made him become quieter. Throughout their years together, she had been grateful for James’s hushed restraint and serenity. She couldn’t imagine living with one of those boisterous men who spilled out every half-baked thought in their heads. But this was a deeper silence than ever before.
Like a song, a long marriage had its own rhythm. Neither of them had been hitting the beats they were supposed to. It had been only two days, but that was an eternity when you knew how your song was supposed to go and heard clanging and banging instead.
Odette had talked through her worries about James with her mother in the gazebo that morning. The conversation with Mama had gotten off to a rough start when Odette had asked why, in the nearly six years since she’d been visiting from beyond the grave, her mother had never mentioned that James’s father was still alive. Mama had been insulted by the suggestion that she’d been holding back such important information. She’d also been highly offended by the insinuation that all dead people knew each other.
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 12
