Phantom of Riverside Park

by Peggy Webb

  “What made you cry?”

  Nicky ducked his head and his voice became very small.

  “The girl called me ugly.”

  A little boy’s pain shot through David and he had to clench his hands into fists to keep from going to the bed and gathering the child in his arms. As long ago as it had been and as impossible as it seemed, David still remembered the comfort of his father’s hugs.

  “No one will ever call you ugly again, Nicky.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Nicky considered that for a while, then nodded his head vigorously.

  “You a good angel. Can I have Bear back now?”

  David passed the beat-up bear to its rightful owner.

  “It’s time for sleep now, Nicky. Scoot down on your bed and cover up tight. And remember ...don’t tell anybody about our visit. It’s our secret. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Goodnight, Nicky.”

  “‘Night.” David was almost at the door when Nicky called to him again. “Do angels sing?”

  “Some of them.”

  “My mommy sings me to sleep at night.”

  Nicky looked at him with such shining expectation that David felt his heart crack. Once when he’d been young and full of the promise of youth, he had sung for the sheer pleasure of it. One of his favorites was the song his daddy would belt out when he’d scoop up David’s mom and waltz her around the room.

  David stuck his head into the hallway to make sure it was empty, then he closed the door and started to sing “Blueberry Hill.” His singing voice was rusty from disuse, but the child in the bed was no music critic. He was merely a little boy who needed the comfort of a familiar ritual.

  Nicky was asleep before David finished the first verse. Watching him, David ached. There was purity and innocence in the room, qualities so rare in today’s world that finding them was enough to make a man yearn. With a start David realized he wasn’t yearning merely for innocence lost but for something much more personal, much more powerful.

  He was yearning for love, the kind of solid enduring love that would produce a small boy with a smile that could break your heart in two and a simple faith that could fill your empty soul.

  David wished he had the right to lean over the bed and kiss the boy goodnight. But he didn’t. He couldn’t even risk stealing a kiss for fear of waking the boy and being discovered--not as an angel, but a beast.

  Instead he left the hospital and drove through the pre-dawn city to an empty apartment and an even emptier bed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Papa made a batch of chocolate chip cookies to celebrate Nicky’s return from the hospital and Elizabeth picked up a half gallon of cherry ice cream. They were all sitting around the living room stuffed and smiling. She and Papa couldn’t seem to stop.

  Nicky never had stopped in the first place. He’d always been a sunny-natured child who, until recently, had no idea that he looked any different from other children.

  Elizabeth would never have to worry about that again. She glanced at her son. Sitting on the sofa with Bear in his lap and a ring of chocolate around his mouth, he was so beautiful he was almost angelic. As he bent over his crayon drawing, a lock of blond hair slid into his eyes. Elizabeth reached over and smoothed it back.

  “I guess I know what you’re thinking,” Papa said.

  “That the cookies were good?”

  It felt wonderful to be playful again.

  “Naturally they were good. Sara Lee and Betty Crocker are small berries compared to Thomas Jennings.”

  Nicky looked up and suddenly began to sing “Blueberry Hill,” except that he didn’t find a thrill: he found a pill, which must have made perfect sense to him. The only thing he’d complained about during his hospital stay was the medicine.

  He belted the song out the way he did all his songs, and by the time he’d finished Elizabeth and Papa were wiping tears of mirth.

  “Where did you learn that song?” Elizabeth asked her son.

  “A angel teached me,” he said, then clamped his hand over his mouth, his eyes as big as saucers.

  “If you listen they’ll teach you lots of things,” Papa said. “The trick is to listen. Seems kids are better at it than adults.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know, Nicky. I guess old folks have too much else to listen to. So much racket going on all the time they can’t hear the angels.”

  Elizabeth smiled as she cleared away the ice cream bowls. This was the kind of evening she loved, being at home with her family, listening to conversation meander as slow and easy as the creek behind her childhood home.

  Thinking of the Delta, Manny and Judith whispered through her mind, and Taylor Belliveau. She wondered what they were all doing tonight, and if they knew how impoverished their lives were because they didn’t have Nicky in them.

  She stood in the kitchen listening to the sweet flow of words between her grandfather and her son, newly restored.

  “Life doesn’t get better than this,” she said to no one in particular, then she went back to the den to admire her son’s crayon drawing. It was a crude stick figure, a man in a hat and trench coat. Or it could have been a short-haired woman in a dress.

  “That’s great, Nicky. Who is it? Papa?”

  “No. It’s my guard John angel.”

  She and Papa smiled at each other over the top of Nicky’s head, then Papa went to turn on the evening news.

  “That’s a very nice angel. After your bath we’ll put him in your scrapbook to save him.”

  “I’m not dirty. See?” He caught his ears in both hands and stretched them as far as he could. “I got clean ears.”

  “Nevertheless, you have to bathe. But because tonight is special, I’ll put in lots of bubbles then sit on the side of the tub and give your back a good scrubby dub dub.”

  “I’m gonna get a scrubby dub dub, Papa,” he shouted, then raced down the hallway, his crayon drawing forgotten.

  Elizabeth tucked it in her pocket and followed her son while Papa listened to the top news stories of the day. As she sat on the side of the tub watching her son splash in the water, she thought of the one last detail she had to take care of before she could finally close the book on this chapter in their lives. She had to see David Lassiter about the debt she owed him.

  She wasn’t going to think about that tonight. Nothing was going to mar this celebration.

  “Elizabeth.”

  Papa appeared suddenly the doorway, looking as if he’d seen a ghost. She jumped up and caught his arm.

  “Papa, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “You’d better come in here.” He went back into the living room and Elizabeth followed.

  The image on the television screen burned into the room as the announcer spoke.

  “The one-car accident that claimed the life of one of the Delta’s leading citizens occurred around two a.m. this morning.”

  “Who...”

  “Shhh.” Papa shushed her.

  The camera panned closer to the wreckage, a red Corvette convertible wrapped around a telephone pole just beyond the bridge that spanned the river. Elizabeth shivered. Death had always frightened her. Not that she was afraid of what would happen to the one who had died, but she was afraid of what would happen to those left behind.

  “Friends of the family say the victim was returning from his engagement party when the accident occurred.”

  A picture of the victim flashed on the screen.

  “Taylor...” Elizabeth sank to the sofa, her insides ripped out, while the announcer droned on about Taylor.

  The things he knew where statistics, which had never seemed colder to Elizabeth than at that moment as she listened to the reporter using them to sum up a man’s life. A man’s life couldn’t be captured in facts, but in the small day-to-day activities that touched the heart.

  Sitting in her little house on Vine street in her own sofa that she’d picked up at a gara
ge sale for twenty-five dollars and then covered with some blue corduroy fabric she found for a dollar and ninety eight cents a yard, Elizabeth drifted backward to a golden day in Oxford, Mississippi.

  She and Taylor had been sitting side by side under an oak tree in The Grove on the Ole Miss campus with their books scattered about and remnants of their picnic still spread on a beach towel. Elizabeth could picture the towel as plain as day. She’d bought it at Fred’s Dollar Store on sale for three dollars, in spite of the fact that it featured Mickey Mouse which usually made anything more expensive.

  That’s what she’d been telling Taylor, all about finding this great bargain, and she guessed she’d been secretly trying to impress upon him the fact that she was frugal, which she considered one of the hallmarks of a good wife. It was a subtle campaign she waged. She knew she was pregnant, but hadn’t yet told Taylor because she was waiting for exactly the right moment.

  She’d told about the table cloths Fred’s had on sale, too, just in case he got the hint that domesticity would be a nice thing, and decided to propose to her on the spot.

  All the talk of table cloths didn’t make him propose, but it did set him on a trip down memory lane, which was a rare thing for Taylor Belliveau, a man accustomed to living completely in the present.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time the beetles tried to take over Miss Anna Lisa’s dinner party?” he said, and Elizabeth knew immediately the memory was a fond one for Taylor because he only called his mother Miss Anna Lisa when she’d done something that tickled him.

  “No, you didn’t.” The fact of the matter was that Taylor rarely told her stories about his family. It was almost as if he had shut her up in a compartment totally separate from them. She took this new openness of his as a good sign. “Tell me.”

  “Well, you know how Miss Anna Lisa loves to entertain. She’d spent three weeks getting ready to put on the dog for Daddy’s birthday. It was the tail end of spring, and by all the laws of nature the beetles that had invaded the house during the winter should have been gone.”

  “What beetles?”

  “Lord, Lizzie. Don’t you know about the Japanese beetles?” She shook her head. “Our own government brought them over here because of the pecan trees, some disease or other. I forget. Anyhow, these yellow-backed Japanese beetles were supposed to take care of the problem without chemicals, and that way everybody would be happy, the pecan growers as well as the environmentalists.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s another kudzu story.” Kudzu, a Japanese vine that had been imported years ago to stop erosion and had now taken over the South. Everywhere you looked kudzu was growing rampant, covering shrubs and trees and whole houses before you could say Jack Robinson.

  “Yep,” Taylor said. “Same thing. You see, what the government didn’t know and didn’t take the time to find out was that these Japanese beetles winter under rocks, and there’s just not enough rocks in the South to take care of all those multiplying critters, so they moved on to the next best thing. Folks’ houses. One day Savannah Rose counted a hundred and sixty-five beetles clinging to the front porch ceiling.”

  “Who’s Savannah Rose? An aunt?”

  Taylor gave her this funny look, like she was supposed to know Savannah Rose when the plain fact was, she knew hardly anything about his family.

  “She’s the maid.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  Taylor gave her another look, then flipped open his chemistry book as if he’d completely lost interest in telling his story. Elizabeth wished she hadn’t asked about Savannah Rose. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut and listened to the one and only family story Taylor Belliveau had ever told and was ever likely to tell, considering the way things were going.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me about the beetles?”

  “What’s the use?”

  “Please.”

  “Well, all right.” He leaned over and kissed her. “You’re so pretty when you smile, Lizzie, you could make a man do anything.”

  “Thank you, Taylor. Now, about the beetles...”

  “The party was in full swing, all set up in the dining room with Miss Anna Lisa’s finest china and the cut crystal Daddy bought in Austria and everybody all gussied up in their finest feathers. They were eating turtle soup when all of a sudden Myra Jane Crocket crunches down on a beetle and says, ‘Anna Lisa, I do declare. What did you put in this soup to make it so crunchy? Peanuts?’ Mother was just getting ready to deny the peanuts, when beetles started dropping off the ceiling like dead flies.”

  “Well, you know Miss Anna Lisa,” he said, which of course, Elizabeth didn’t. The only thing of a personal nature she knew about Miss Anna Lisa Belliveau was that she was a regular Friday morning customer at Wanda’s Kut ‘N Kurl and that she always left a ten dollar tip, no matter what Wanda did or didn’t do to her hair, which was naturally gray and thin as tissue paper.

  And Elizabeth only knew those small details because Wanda’s daughter Betty June had told her. But she wasn’t about to say to Taylor, “No, I don’t know,” not after the Savannah Rose incident.

  So she kept her mouth shut and Taylor continued his story.

  “Well Miss Anna Lisa just picks up this little silver bell, cool as a cucumber, and Savannah Rose comes out of the kitchen. ‘Savannah Rose,’ she says, ‘I do believe we have a few uninvited guests.’ She rolls her eyes at the beetles, still dropping off the ceiling, right and left. Savannah Rose just sashays out as big as you please and comes back with a Dust Buster. ‘Would y’all mind scootin’ your chairs back,’ she says, and then she proceeds to dust busting the linen table cloth till every last beetle has been sucked up.”

  “Miss Anna Lisa never blinks an eye through the whole thing, and then after all the beetles are cleared away, she says, ‘Bring Myra Jane another bowl of soup, then mail that Dust Buster to the President of the United States who should have been paying attention before letting a foreign bug into this country.”

  Elizabeth had had to wrap her arms around herself to contain her own mirth.

  And now she was doing the same thing, only this time it’s not mirth she’s trying to contain: it’s grief.

  She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised at how much she’s grieving over Taylor. After all, he was the father of her child, and a woman never forgets that connection.

  All the things she’d loved about Taylor pulled at her like a riptide. Papa got up quietly and went into the kitchen where he proceeded to turn on the water and clank the teapot down on the stove. Hot tea and hugs had always been Mae Mae’s remedy for sadness, and Elizabeth knew that pretty soon Papa would come out of the kitchen and dispense both.

  Nicky started calling to her from the bathroom.

  “Mommy, you said you’d scrubby dub dub,” he called.

  She couldn’t possibly go down the hall in the shape she was in. How could she explain to Nicky that his daddy was dead when she’d never told him a thing about Taylor? Someday he would ask the hard questions. Who and where and when? But most of all, why?

  Elizabeth had always harbored a secret dream that before that day came, Taylor Belliveau would change his mind about his son and decide that he wanted to be a part of Nicky’s life, after all. A real part. A man who would stop by to take his son to ball games and teach him to ride a bicycle and set up a fund for his college education. But more importantly, she’d pictured him telling his son the family history, weaving it around the quirky, humorous sort of stories he’d told to Elizabeth that long ago day when autumn leaves rained on them in golden confetti and all things seemed possible.

  “Mommy?”

  “I’m coming.”

  Papa handed her a cup of steaming hot tea, then braced her shoulders as if his big hands were the only thing keeping her on her feet. And many times, they had been.

  “Everything’s going to be all right, Elizabeth.”

  And she knew it was true because Thomas Jennings never lied. He was the one true thing
in her life that she could always count on.

  “I know I will,” she said, then she carried her tea down the hall to the bathroom where Nicky was waiting.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Celine didn’t like it when Elizabeth asked for a day off to attend Taylor’s funeral.

  “Is he kin?” she’d said.

  “No.”

  “I don’t usually allow absences unless the deceased is kin.”

  It was hard to think of Taylor as the deceased, even now, sitting in the back of the First Baptist Church at Tunica and watching his family follow the casket down the center aisle, Miss Anna Lisa sobbing so hard she had to be supported on both sides.

  She passed right by Elizabeth without even turning her head. Sitting there with her hands clutching the Baptist hymnal and wearing the pink dress she’d imagined herself wearing to her wedding with Taylor, Elizabeth felt rejection as fresh as if she were sitting on a quilt under the moonlight listening to Taylor say he couldn’t marry poor white trash.

  There she was, the mother of Anna Lisa’s only grandchild, and she might as well have been a pillar of salt. Elizabeth’s thoughts confused her. Only a few weeks ago she’d been terrified that the Belliveaus wanted to take Nicky away, and now she’s saddened that they don’t even acknowledge her presence.

  It’s not herself she sorrows for, but Nicky, whose idea of family has been shrunken by events beyond his control. There are many things that define a person’s life, but his name is one of the most important. The past is wrapped up in a name, and sometimes the future.

  Just think how different her own life would have been if her name had been Belliveau instead of Jennings. Not that she’s ashamed of her own name, not by a long shot. But it seems unfair that Nicky’s got stolen from him by a father who is now dead and soon to be buried and will never again have a chance to rectify his mistake.

  The preacher had been droning on for nearly thirty minutes, which was one of the things Elizabeth absolutely hated about Baptist funerals. The dead have to suffer a long-winded sermon before they can be put in their final resting place.

  Maybe that’s a good thing, though. Maybe it gives them a chance to find out about eternity.