by John Moralee
Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would find out.
*
“I really think I should do this alone,” he told Heather, in the morning, as they ate eggs-benedict in the king size bed, taking turns to feed each other with the toasted muffins and ham dripping with fresh butter. He hoped to catch her with her mouth full, so she would not put up much of an argument. Unfortunately, she held up a hand to her mouth, stopping him.
“Cal, I want to meet your relatives.”
“I don’t want you to meet my relatives,” he said. Seeing her expression, he needed to explain, “They’re crazy, some of them. Jimmy-Ray is about the best of them; he sent me the letter. The others never liked me. God knows what they’ll make of me for leaving here, never mind you coming back with me. If they hear your accent they are likely to spit in your face.”
“They have something against New Yorkers?”
“And anyone else. For your own sake, please stay out of it, okay? At least until I’ve made the funeral arrangements and tested the water.”
“Anyone suspicious would think you didn’t want me with you. Like you’re embarrassed.”
“That’s not it,” he said. “Well, a little – my family is embarrassing, not you. Look, why don’t you enjoy yourself at the mall or do some sight-seeing? Just a couple of hours? I know your mother would like a gift from the pottery store we saw.”
Heather nodded, albeit reluctantly. “This doesn’t mean I don’t want to meet your relatives, Cal. You can’t hide them forever.”
*
Dreading what he would discover, Cal drove to the trailer park. As soon as it was within sight he could almost taste the poverty, and it made him ashamed to be an American. The hundred or so mobile homes looked as if they had been dropped from a great height and left broken and flattened. They were not going anywhere in a hurry. There were recreational vehicles up on cinder blocks, rats crawling around underneath. Huge satellite dishes poked up from dark niches like mushrooms. Garbage was everywhere, of all kinds, as if a tornado had ripped through the valley rearranging the furniture. It looked like a disaster zone. But it was always like this. The townspeople had tried their best to hide the trailer park behind a white picket fence and some recently planted firs, but it would take fifty years for the trees to thicken enough to block the view from the road. He passed dozens of parked cars not fit for scrap, then turned right, going a hundred yards to where an evil-looking trailer hid between two junk heaps of damp mattresses.
Its owner was his half-brother, Jimmy-Ray.
Cal paused for a few seconds, opening the envelope Jimmy-Ray had sent him, reading the letter again. He had only found out about his mother’s death because of the barely legible letter. Jimmy-Ray wrote like a three-year old in big, wobbly letters, which was somehow endearing at the same time as being sad, but he’d made it clear someone had to pay for the funeral and it sure wasn’t going to be him. Cal was the oldest son; therefore he had to pay. Until he paid, his mother’s body would remain in the Diamond Pass Hospital morgue. Cal carefully folded the letter back into the envelope, put it on the dashboard, then stepped out of the truck. The smells worsened outside. Was someone keeping pigs? Possibly.
He trudged across mud and brackish water until he reached the trailer’s door. He knocked and announced himself. He heard some grunts and groans and swearing, then the door opened and a big man squinted down at him. Jimmy-Ray was dressed in grease-stained jeans, a string vest and a baseball cap that advertised a brand of beer no longer manufactured. His red hair was long and wild, just how Cal remembered it. Jimmy-Ray had a ginger goatee beard these days, and though he was slim his stomach bulged like a large fish trapped in a net. “Hey, Cal! You looking good, man. All that time in the Army done you good, I reckons.” Jimmy-Ray noticed the BMW. “You leave a car like that around here you’re asking for trouble, but I guess it’ll be safe long as we look out the window. Come in, get yourself a cold one.”
Bachelor clutter filled the small space. A shotgun rested against the refrigerator beside a fishing rod and a baseball bat that looked as if it had been dented by more than a ball. Cal was probably stereotyping Jimmy-Ray, but he knew what he had been like when he lived in Diamond Pass: violence clung to him like stale sweat.
Jimmy-Ray hurled a beer can at Cal, which he just caught. He popped it open and drank the beer that didn’t foam all over his hands. Then Jimmy-Ray began talking, getting him up to date on family business.
*
For over three hundred years this part of the Catskills had been the home to a poverty-stricken underclass. You could call them white trash, if you didn’t know them. Some people call them hillbillies … but no name adequately described them. They were as misunderstood as the Native Americans, and just as isolated. Unlike the Native Americans, no big Hollywood directors wanted to make movies about them. Cal was one of them, and though he’d gained a New York accent long ago, he found himself soon talking just like Jimmy-Ray. It was as if no time had passed, as if he had stepped back through a doorway into his old life, the life he had tried so hard to leave behind. Jimmy-Ray was everything he would have been if he had not left.
“Your mama wanted a proper burial,” Jimmy-Ray said. “Said you’d pay for a real wood coffin, not one of them cardboard things.”
“How long did she know she was dying?”
“Six months,” Jimmy-Ray told him. “Didn’t want you to know until after she died, though. Never could figure her out, you don’t mind me saying.”
Cal did not mind. His mother had always been a strange woman, sometimes as nice and loving as a Disney Mom, but sometimes a psychotic rage had possessed her that had turned her into something ugly and witch-like. Many were the times she would hit him for eating too loud or leaving the toilet seat up. Cal was one of her three so-called “mistakes”. His half-brother and half-sister were her other “mistakes”, but they’d been adopted by relatives, so maybe in his mother’s mind he had been her favourite, the one she’d kept. Who knew?
“I’ll pay for it all,” he said. Jimmy-Ray grinned at that.
“You can stay here if you like. Just fifty bucks.”
Fifty dollars to stay in a trailer. A bargain. “I’ve already booked a hotel. The Grange.”
“The Grange? Wow. You’ve sure done all right for yourself, Cal. Nice fancy suit you’re wearing must’ve cost a hundred bucks.” There was desperation in his eyes. “You ain’t got a few bucks to help out an old buddy?”
There was a pause you could have filled by reading War and Peace. Cal suspected any money he gave to Jimmy-Ray would be wasted on drink, but he was in too awkward a position to say no.
“Sure,” he said. He handed over what he had in his wallet – a pathetic thirty dollars. It disappeared into Jimmy-Ray’s back pocket. Cal headed for the door, but stopped. He had not asked any questions about Nadine.
“What’s up, bro?”
“I …” He could not ask. He was afraid of the answer. “Nothing.”
*
He intended to return to the hotel, but somehow he ended up driving to what used to be Nadine’s home where she’d lived with her mother and four sisters deep in the woods. The house was made of corrugated iron and a tin roof. Nadine had called it the Tin Box. How six people could have fitted inside was a mystery.
Today, the Tin Box looked deserted. He was glad in a way because it meant Nadine lived somewhere better. But to be certain, he went up to the dusty windows and peered inside.
It was too dark to make out anything. He tested the door. There was a padlock on it that was at least five years old. It would not move.
He walked around the house, accidentally disturbing a rat’s nest. A grey thing the size of a cat crawled over his shoes, trying to climb up his legs, trying to bite him. He kicked it off and hurried to his car.
It had been a bad idea coming here. What had he expected? Nadine running out of the Tin Box like a character in a romantic novel? Oh, Cal, you saved me! You’re my hero!
&
nbsp; Yes, he realised. That was what he had expected.
But things never worked out that way, of course.
He had to forget about Nadine. He had Heather now. He could not rewrite the past.
But the Tin Box stared at him, its windows glaring.
*
There was a general store nearby that looked closed except for a sign in the dirty window. He went in and asked the old man behind the counter if he knew anything about the people who had lived in the woods.
“Yes,” he said. The man told him they’d moved out a long time ago, but he didn’t know where.
Cal thanked him and bought a Dr Pepper and drank it as he walked back to his BMW. He saw some boys running off, and when he reached the car he saw that they’d scratched the paint on the door where they’d tried to open it. He was lucky they had not had time to steal the CD player.
*
As the week progressed, he soon discovered, as he had feared, that Jimmy-Ray was the only person who would be friendly towards him. When he visited his Aunt Jenny and Uncle Avery, Avery would not even open the screen door while he talked. Avery said, “You reckoned you was better than us poor folk, Calhoun. You come back like some kind of hero in your fancy BMW and Italian shoes, you think everybody wants to shine your shoes. You done wrong, now you want forgiveness?”
“Forgiveness for what?”
“You know. Well, it’s too late. I ain’t talking to you no more. I’ll be at the funeral, but don’t expect us to stand near you. Go on – get.” And he locked the main door and would not reply to another word.
The same happened with his old friends – Frank and Steve and Mitch and Zeke. He knew they had the right to feel the way they did – he had avoided them for over a decade – but the hostility was surprising. He felt as if there was something else behind their anger. It made him decide that if he wanted more than a handful of people at the funeral on Friday then he would have to use Jimmy-Ray as an intermediary. Jimmy-Ray agreed. Jimmy-Ray said he would invite everyone who knew or worked with his mother, but he needed gas money. Cal paid him a hundred dollars and ignored the whiskey on his breath.
By then Heather had grown weary of his excuses.
“Cal, what exactly happened when you left? Why does no one want to see you?”
“I wish I knew. I only joined the US Army, not the Iraqis.”
It cost a few thousand dollars for the coffin and the headstone and burial plot; more money than many people living nearby earned in a whole year. Boom or recession, the funeral business always survived.
He viewed his mother’s body a single time. He half expected to see some signs of the cancer, but all he saw was the pale and shrunken corpse of a middle-aged woman that had lived a hard and unrewarding life. Tears welled up as he touched her icy cheek. It was strange how he felt sentimental towards someone who’d shown him so little love. It was strange.
*
Friday was a nasty cold and wet day for a funeral. Cal held an umbrella over Heather as the rain began again. She squeezed his hand, her touch comforting. Cal could not wait for the ceremony to be over. He planned to leave Diamond Pass as soon as the ceremony was finished. A week in Diamond Pass had reminded him of all the reasons why he had fled and stayed away. Diamond Pass was like a scab waiting to be scratched off; you just had to ignore it.
The priest delivering the eulogy sounded bored as he read out a list of his mother’s achievements. There were few dozen people gathered, women mostly. Aunt Jenny and Uncle Avery were there. Uncle Avery glared at Cal. Cal wondered what he had done to so offend him. Nobody cried. Everyone who had stayed in Diamond Pass seemed to have aged faster than he had. The priest finished quickly; then did not stay long before excusing himself. The coffin was lowered into the coffee-dark earth.
“Do you want to go now?” Heather asked.
He surprised himself by saying, “Not just yet. I want to find out why everyone hates me”
“I’ll be in the car.”
“Okay.”
He walked over to Jimmy-Ray. “Well, that’s that then.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy-Ray said, sounding tired, which summed up how he was feeling.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“What’s going on with everyone? Uncle Avery looks like he wants to take me out into the woods and shoot me.”
“It’s the Nadine thing, Cal.”
“What about her? Is she doing okay?”
Jimmy-Ray looked down at the ground. “Ah, Cal, I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
He did not answer.
“Knew what?” he repeated.
“She’s dead.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“God. When? How?”
“I thought you knew, Cal. I didn’t want to bring it up - figuring you was sensitive about it. But – Jesus! – you don’t know nothing, do you?”
“No.”
“Nadine died a few years after you joined the Army. I sent you a letter about it. When you didn’t reply I thought you didn’t want to come back because of what people was saying. I guess you never heard she married that deadbeat Whit Wilson, huh?”
“She married someone too? Jesus. I never knew.”
“It was all in my letter.”
“I didn’t receive it. I was moving around a lot.” He shook his head as if trying to shake out the unwanted knowledge. “I can’t believe it. She’s really dead? You’re not kidding with me?”
“Would I kid about death, man? Her grave is just over there. The little black headstone. Check it out for yourself. But -”
Cal interrupted, “Hold on, tell me in a sec.”
He located Nadine’s grave. The cheap headstone was already weathered, the words faded to a ghost of the original. Rainwater trickled down the epitaph. He read the words once, twice, before he pulled up straight as though he had been electrocuted. The words were engraved on his mind like an angry wound, throbbing.
Nadine Marie Wilson,
Loving Wife and Mother.
Rest In Peace.
Born 1969 – Died 1986
“Loving wife and mother?” he said. She’d had a baby as well as a husband?
Jimmy-Ray appeared beside him, touching him gently on the shoulder. “Cal, come away. You don’t want to get into it.”
“Nobody told me Nadine had a kid.”
“Nadine didn’t want you to know.”
“Why not?” he said, but he already suspected his answer.
“Cal … the baby was yours.”
“She was pregnant when I left?”
Jimmy-Ray nodded.
“God, you mean people think I abandoned her?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Tell me everything,” Cal said.
“It’s a sad story, Cal. You don’t want to know it.”
“I do. I do. And don’t leave anything out.”
*
“Can you drive?” Cal asked, leaning down to the passenger window. He could feel his pulses throb all of the way up his arms. Heather looked up from reading a travel book and flicked a long strand of hair out of her eyes, frowning. He never asked her to drive because he knew she hated it.
“Is something wrong?”
He did not want to explain yet. He was too weary. “Can you drive?”
“Uh, yes. I can drive, but you -”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Heather changed seats. Cal got in and buckled up and stared at the cemetery. “Let’s get back to the hotel. We’re leaving.”
“Now?” Heather said. “What’s wrong? Are you thinking about your mom?”
“No, it’s not her.”
She started up the engine. She did not say anything until they were almost to the hotel. She looked at him with concern. “You’re not having an affair, are you?”
“God, no.”
“But it’s about a woman, though.”
> He nodded.
“Then what is it?”
“It’s Nadine.”
“Who?”
“She was an ex-girlfriend. My first girlfriend. We were deeply in love a long time ago.”
Heather almost kept the jealousy out of her voice. “You never mentioned her before.”
“No, and it was a mistake. I’ve got to tell you something that could change how you feel about me, something that might make you want a divorce.”
“Cal …”
“I think the only way I can do this is if I start at the beginning and tell it all and you don’t ask questions until I’m finished.”
Heather stopped the car. She closed her eyes and rubbed them with one hand. She looked as if she had toothache and was preparing for an extraction without anaesthesia. “I’m listening.”
“Before I enlisted I had a girlfriend called Nadine Bell. I didn’t want to leave her, but we were young and it seemed the best thing. She broke up with me to make it easier for me, though I didn’t know that at the time. So I left, and I never wanted to come back. She didn’t tell me she was having my baby.” Heather took an intake of air as though surfacing from a deep dive. “Anyway, she had the baby. Nadine’s mother convinced her to marry Whit Wilson, a guy who’d had a crush on her for a long time. Whit had a job and some money coming in, so it was a practical solution. Whit agreed to keep the baby girl as long as everyone pretended it was his. They pretended. Wilson loved Nadine, but I don’t think she really loved him. It must have eaten at him for two years. He would get drunk or high and beat her up, then beg her forgiveness afterwards. Nadine was so scared of his temper that she decided to take the baby and leave. This was 1986. But … he caught her. He was drunk at the time and he wanted to teach her a lesson so he hit her with a hammer. He hit her over fifty times. He killed her, and then kept hitting her. He turned her face into a pulp, smashing all of her teeth. He would have killed the baby, too, but Nadine had left the baby with her sisters while she was packing. After he had killed her, he felt such remorse that he took his rifle into the woods and shot himself in the head. His body wasn’t found for months. Just about everybody blamed the whole thing on me for leaving Nadine pregnant, which is why Uncle Avery could kill me. It’s like I’ve been leading a double life. It’s all my fault Nadine died, Heather. If Nadine had been married to me instead of Whit then none of it would ever have happened. I’m responsible for ruining three people’s lives. Me and my stupid selfishness. I should’ve never have joined the Army. I should’ve stayed here. Maybe then nobody would’ve died. God, I’m so sorry for dragging you into this mess.”
