Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Most of the calls were false alarms, but there were a fair number of real emergencies. On those occasions he got no special attention, no second looks. No victims cared if the man breaking down the door to their burning houses once had some legal trouble. No one begrudged a horse saved from a collapsing barn. Only once, after about six months on the job, did someone recognize him as the infamous Jim Wilcox. He was an elderly black man whose modest house on the west side of town had gone up from an improperly insulated stovepipe. Out in the street, leaning against the wheel of the engine as he caught his breath, he fixed on Jim, and said in a hoarse, smoke-desiccated whisper, “Good lord, I know you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Your trial was the only time I ever got to sit down in the courtroom.”

  “Glad to oblige,” replied Jim. “But best think about covering that pipe.”

  Good as Jim was at the job, he saw no reason to stint on his pleasures. A steady paycheck meant a steady number of off-duty hours at the saloons, some of which even extended him a tab. Folks listened to his particular way of coughing up his lungs, and felt sorry for him.

  “Never met a fireman with a cough like that,” said one barkeep, “and I’ve met a few.”

  Jim said, “There’s nothing a little smoke can do to these old lungs. I’m like a back-fired lot. Now set me up again, will you?”

  Set him up they did, time after time. But the day came, perhaps inevitably, when he was at the saloon when he was supposed to be on duty at the firehouse. He had only intended to be there a few minutes—just long enough for the one drink that would take the edge off his nerves—when he lost track of time because damned if anybody kept a clock above the bar in those days. He was sunk down pleasantly on his stool when Jerry Flora came in and yelled, “Wilcox, what the hell are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” Jim snapped, not recognizing to whom he was speaking.

  The saloon fell silent. The chief stood his ground for a few moments, until Jim understood the trouble he had bought for himself. Then Flora turned and left.

  Back at the station, Jim found him at his desk, scribbling in the duty roster.

  “Jerry, sorry about that. I didn’t see you there in the dark—”

  “Also seems you didn’t hear the bell either. There was a hay-fire on the north side.”

  Jim was stunned. “And I missed it?”

  “You missed it clean, son. Never happened before in the whole history of this department. We’ve had volunteers not show up for a call. But the officer of the watch missing an alarm? Never.”

  Head still buzzing from drink, Jim scratched under his suspenders. He was not sure how to proceed.

  “I suppose you know you’re out,” said the other. That was when Jim realized he was crossing Jim’s name off every column in the duty list.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll be gone by the afternoon.”

  “See that you are.”

  As Jim collected his things, Jerry simmered down. He came to him as Jim was heading through the door.

  “Sorry it had to be like this.”

  “You got to know I never meant to be away more than a few minutes,” said Jim. “Was anybody hurt?”

  “Nobody but a few hay bales.”

  “How I missed that bell I’ll never know.”

  “You didn’t mean no harm.”

  Jim’s eyes wetted.

  “I have to tell you, Jerry, that I hardly know myself anymore,” he said. “I got myself broken somewhere along the way, like I left pieces spread all over the road on the way back. I know they’re all back there, but don’t know where to find them.”

  Flora put on a hand on his shoulder.

  “Any notions on your next move?”

  The other heaved a laugh. “Oh, you know me. There’s always something next.”

  “That’s great, Jim. You know it’s nothing personal. You’re always welcome to come around here, share a meal. You’re still one of us.”

  “Thanks. I might.”

  Jim pushed through the door, his entire life’s contents in the duffel around his shoulder. His immediate destination was never in question: he headed straight back to the same saloon, where he found the same seat waiting for him. The same barkeep was there, and seeing Jim’s belongings at his side, poured him the same drink.

  “Hell of a day’s luck,” he said.

  “Nothin I don’t deserve, Timmy,” replied Jim.

  “That one’s on the house, Jim. But just so’s you know, we’re settling up tabs today.”

  Jim raised his glass. “Here’s to you, bub.”

  And so it was back to odd jobs and sleeping where he could. After a couple of days, he took a job painting a fence. After that, he weeded out an old garden some widow wanted to put back into vegetables. He manned the cash register at the feed store, until the farmers complained about his bodily smell. There was just one thing he refused to do: one of the big potato planters hired a large crew to dig the beds, drawing itinerant workers from all over the county. The sight of them all, just like when Cropsey put the word out, was too much like old times for Jim. The money was good, but he steered clear.

  In most respects, Jim had always been a cheerful sort. When he was provoked, he was quick to anger, but those storms passed quickly, leaving the usual sunshine behind. He was known to post drinks for men he’d brawled with the day previous. At Hayman’s, a co-worker once dropped a two-hundred-pound crossbeam on Jim’s foot. The impact broke two of his toes, and blackened four. Then all the nails peeled off, leaving him so tender that just putting on his boot was agony. But Jim never complained, and never blamed the man with the slippery fingers. Life was too short, and there were too many opportunities to seize, to dwell on past hurts.

  In the days after he left the firehouse, though, he became conscious of a different mood overtaking him. He discovered a certain hopelessness. In time, it became almost a pleasure to think how worthless he had become—if idle familiarity could be called ‘pleasure’. He would lie out under the stars, and it would occur to him that each of those uncertain lights would long outlast him. And it wouldn’t matter a bit if he was there to contemplate his own insignificance. It struck him as a particularly deep sort of obscurity, the kind that was too insignificant even to note its insignificance. In his humor, he had always played at perversity. Now, for the first time in his life, he was no longer playing.

  For what would the world lose when Jim Wilcox was gone? In the few decades since he had worked at the boat trade, most of what he did was now done with a tenth the number of employees, with machines. He was unwelcome at Annie Mae’s. He was too ashamed to show his face at the firehouse. He was delinquent on several accounts at bars around town, and avoided those places. In every direction, he felt the circle of his prospects tightening.

  There was one person on whom his existence had a profound effect, and she turned up floating face-down in the Pasquotank twenty years in the past.

  He wondered, “Why didn’t I marry her?” And then, like a bullfrog stealing his lure, his self-revulsion raised its warty head above the muck and croaked, “Fool question!” Did he remember nothing from the three years he had invested courting her? She was handsome, and she was lively, and a man could feel proud with having her on his arm. But a constant strain of conflict ran through their every moment. She had a way of reproving with the merest twitch of a nostril. He learned the vocabulary of her gestures—the skeptical eyebrow, the hair-tuck of embarrassment. That look over her shoulder when she wanted to be enveloped. She could eat a peach like a countess, and banish the pit like a magician.

  He assumed what he felt was love. Her standards, alas, were too high for this world and the people in it. Pleasing her was a full-time occupation; before too long, he was infected with her unease, and looked with disdain even upon himself. Finding the comfort simply to exist with her, like with any ordinary soul, was hard enough that the idea of proposing marriage seemed like proposing a bridge over the ocean. Yes,
it was love, because it was also fear.

  And yet, the powerlessness of losing her, that way! If she’d run off with some swell, he could at least have had the satisfaction of hating her. But this. As challenging as Nell could be, there was one thing for sure: she was not disposable. Not like Jim Wilcox two decades later, whose lingering was only a prelude to his just, overdue end.

  He had never fooled himself in believing he was a reflective man. In almost all things, Jim was content with his ignorance, if that was all the world required of him. But if the lost years had taught him anything, it was that unanswered questions killed.

  They called to him through the thickness of his drunk, pleasantly engirdling. This unfinished business meant he had a last call to make at the Cropseys. It was not the most prudent place to show himself, and might get him a fist in the face or a bullet in the gut for his trouble. But it must be done.

  “Pour one for yourself and drink to me,” he said to Timmy. “For I am like unto Daniel, about to enter the lion’s den.”

  V.

  On Mondays, Ollie used the relative coolness of the morning to air the laundered sheets. She hung them on the line in the back yard, one by one, until a barrier was erected between her and the vegetable beds where her father fussed. When she was done, she stood staring at the cotton surface as it rounded with the wind, gently bowing like the belly of a dozing beast.

  “I’ll leave two of these on the table…” said William Cropsey, who appeared suddenly and made Ollie jump. He had a canvas sack filled with green peppers.

  “All right.”

  “You awake?” he asked.

  “As much as I care to be.”

  With a dubious shake, he left her. For it was his practice to go door-to-door early in the week, when the wives of the neighborhood might want fresh vegetables after the weekend. His rounds kept him away all morning, giving her several hours of blessed solitude.

  It was not literal solitude—her mother was in the house. Mary Cropsey’s inability to sleep at night, however, had worsened over the years, to the point where she was obliged to keep to her bed until after noon. Ollie brought a tray up to her every morning, with bread and a bit of cheese and a hard-boiled egg in a porcelain cup they had brought all the way from Brooklyn. The little vessel was the color of buttermilk, with cartoons of Dutch farmhouses and a windmill rendered in blue, and tiny human figures indicated with mere dashes of glaze. Having stared at this landscape at innumerable breakfasts since her girlhood, those squiggles of Dutch farmers had become as familiar to her as the lines in her own hand.

  After delivering the morning’s tray to her mother, she sat in the dining room with her tea. The clock struck eleven, and then eleven-thirty. The peal of the last train of the morning rose in the distance, and Ollie sipped. Her cup had gone cold.

  There was a knock at the front door. Ollie listened. Her visitor knocked again, and a shiver went straight to her heart. Ollie recognized that rapping.

  She opened the door.

  “It is you,” she said.

  “Hello, Ollie.”

  Jim Wilcox looked apologetic standing there, head bowed like a naughty little boy. For her part, Ollie was only conscious of what she didn’t feel: not anger, not sadness. Not even surprise.

  “I guess you didn’t figure on seeing me.”

  “We all heard you got out,” she replied. “Do you want to sit?”

  His eyes widened, and he peeped over her shoulder.

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “My father is out, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  She showed him into the parlor. The furniture there, he saw, was the same as decades before, the last night Bill Dawson brought him to Seven Pines. Ollie herself was still thin, still favored with a certain elegance, but worn and yellowed around the edges, like an old book.

  “You’re in mourning,” he said.

  “So I am.”

  To Ollie, Jim seemed to have aged twice the number of years he had been gone. His frame, so robust in its time, had withered, his gleaming head of blond hair dulled. His clothing was that of a roadside bum. When the stench of his body reached her nostrils, she said nothing, but rose to open the window.

  “Would you like tea? Some water?”

  “No thanks. I won’t stay long.”

  “As you wish,” she said, sitting and smoothing her skirt.

  They stared at each other as the birds sang and the grandfather ticked. Jim, thrown by her equanimity, scarcely knew how to begin.

  “How are your parents?”

  “Well enough,” she replied. “Mother doesn’t sleep at night.”

  “That’s a shame. Both my folks passed, years ago.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “And Miss Carrie? How is she?”

  “Carrie is married and living in Rockland County.”

  “Guess I got back too late then!” he said, with a grin. Then he thought that, under the circumstances, that kind of joking was in poor taste. But Ollie only gave a faint smile, and a hint of a wink, and continued to regard him.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here.”

  She was motionless.

  “I wanted to tell you—alone and with no reason to lie anymore—that I had nothing to do with Nell. It’s what I said from the beginning, and it was the Lord’s honest truth then, and it still is. I swear on the graves of my parents.”

  She tilted her head. “Well Jim, I wouldn’t say you had nothing to do with it.”

  “Fair enough. I think you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do. And I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “That you had nothing to do with it.”

  “You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  She was tormenting him now with this reticence. He shifted in his seat.

  “Then would you mind telling…”

  “…if you’re looking to be forgiven somehow,” she interrupted, “you should know I’m the last person in the world who could give you that. Best you make your suit to the Almighty, in your prayers. Like I do.”

  “The Lord and I have been talking a lot, in the years I rotted in prison. I wonder if you can imagine what that was like.”

  “I have an idea.”

  None of this was going as he had expected.

  “Well if you’ll excuse me, but I’m hard put. If you know I had nothing to do with it, why did you swear that I did?”

  “If you remember, Jim, I never testified that you were guilty. I only told what I remembered about that night—”

  “Forgive me if I say that sounds a little lawyerly—”

  “…and remember,” she continued, icy, “you didn’t exactly help yourself, the way you acted. I might ask you to explain yourself, Jim. I never thought you were capable of harming Nell, but you were so cold that night. So…callous.”

  Jim stared at the carpet. “I was pulled out of bed in the middle of the night. I thought Nell was playing one on me, running away. Believe me, the way she treated me those last weeks, I had plenty of reason to think so.”

  “Maybe you did. You might have said so—”

  She stopped as a voice filtered down from upstairs. It was her mother, calling out “Olive! Olive!”

  “What is it, mother?”

  “I hear voices. Who is there?”

  “No one. I’ll be up soon!”

  Jim started to speak, but Olive lifted a finger to stop him. Nothing more came from the bedroom above.

  “It’s probably best she doesn’t know you’re here,” she said. “Speak softly.”

  “Does your father also know?” he half-whispered.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What would you say, then?”

  “I would say that he is absolutely sure that you are responsible, in the final instance.”

  “‘In the final instance?’”

  “Correct.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Ollie. I have only a high school education, so
I don’t know what you—”

  He coughed, which triggered more coughing from deep in his chest, until he was doubled over. He pulled out a filthy handkerchief patched with old blood stains and hacked into that. Ollie watched until it occurred to her to cross to the dining room and return with a napkin. He waved her away.

  When the attack subsided Jim fell back against the cushions, exhausted. Ollie stared at him, unused napkin in her hand.

  “You’re ill,” she said, obviously but not knowing how else to acknowledge him.

  “Appears. I’ll take that water now.”

  She watched him drink and saw him with new eyes. Jim had always been small, but she also knew him as powerful, as when he put his hands around her waist to help her down from the buggy and she felt his grip. He handled her easily, lifting her higher into the air for her to meet his laughing gaze as he held her helpless, thin and insubstantial like a snared kite. He could snap her in half if he wished, and in a way she was loath to face; the knowledge filled her with a vague exhilaration.

  No more. Now, his shortness looked like the consequences of a long, relentless grinding process. His hand shook as he held the glass. Even his clothes belittled him as they hung from his frame.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I know you loved Nell,” she said, “so would you let me show you something?”

  “Show me what?”

  “Come with me.”

  She led him upstairs. As she preceded him, the chatelaine swung from her waist, jangling against her skirt.

  They came to her mother’s open door. She leaned in and closed it. “Who was that coughing?” Mary Cropsey demanded through the door. Ollie didn’t answer.

  He followed her, a thin black figure through the twilit hall, to her bedroom. It occurred to Jim that in the years he had courted Nell, he had never made this walk to his woman’s bedroom. He was mystified.