Some Go Home

by Odie Lindsey

  Bel Arbre, now the lynchpin of the Grandiflora campaign, approached 130 feet in height; its base was broad enough to engulf a cabin. The tree had surpassed the life expectancy of any recorded giant southern magnolia, anywhere. Tourists and photographers, historians and dendrologists, had for years gathered on the lawn to take photographs and measurements, or for guided walks. Visitors clamored for genteel portraits with the specimen, their noses buried in bouquets of its saucer-sized flowers. Lecturers went on about the species itself, noting that the Magnolia grandiflora even predated the existence of bees, that the toughness of the bloom had evolved to suit beetle-as-pollinator.

  The iconic tree and parkscape had served as the Pitchlynn centerpiece for well over a century (though truth be told, the tree was only christened “Bel Arbre” with the arrival of Wallis House, and that 1965 parade). Generations of marriages and picnics, memorials and outdoor plays, had been hosted on the estate grounds beside the great evergreen. Now and again, when a foreign diplomat or pop icon had come through, they were invariably led to a photo op beneath the tree.

  Line drawings of the colossal magnolia were now featured on formal civic objects, from LMA letterhead to the Pitchlynn Board of Tourism logo. One could pick up packets of party napkins embossed with its likeness, likewise bookmarks or decorative plates, bumper stickers or porch flags.

  Bel Arbre was what made Pitchlynn special. It was what made them, well, them. Even greater, at least for the LMA and invested parties, the tree would now beckon a new generation, and once more restore the town’s momentum.

  So it was arresting, sickening even, to discover that after the death of the estate’s final inheritor—JP’s wife, Dru Wallis—the property had been reclaimed as private. Pitchlynn citizens, having grown intimate with her family’s de facto donation of the land, couldn’t process the fact that the pike iron gates were now shut when not in JP’s service. They were appalled that the floodlights at base of Bel Arbre were now cut off in the evenings, dousing the tree in darkness.

  The most prominent among them had at first tried to reason with JP. As a blind offering of faith (and, to be explicit, fortune), the LMA had presented him an inflated purchase offer on the home before he moved down from Chicago. The cover letter detailed their love of the town, their respect for his situation, and their sorrow over the circumstance. It kept mentioning “our tree” and “our house,” explaining that though they wished to own the property outright, the offer guaranteed him a say in its use, e.g., memorials and pomp, likewise on-site accommodations for JP and his “future family.”

  Upon receipt, he slipped their envelope under the silverware tray in his kitchen drawer, then tossed it when packing for the move to Mississippi.

  Future family?

  It wasn’t that the money didn’t tempt him. Nor did JP want to leave his hometown. Yet selling the estate would have violated his promise to Dru: that they would move back together, and raise their daughter in Pitchlynn.

  He had broken this promise, repeatedly, when she was alive. If she had still been alive, he would have broken it again, offering in its place another weekend trip South, or some related geographic panacea. Over the majority of their relationship, he’d been able to tamp down her depression (whether pre- or postpartum, conditions that were never, ever verbalized). Most successfully, he had done so by enabling her return: for weekend and three-day visits around the state, which had mollified Dru’s insistence that she needed to come home to heal.

  The trips had been, JP believed, an earnest compromise. It wasn’t as if he had any interest in Mississippi. Hell, he’d never even had interest in the region as a whole, save the time he’d considered a college spring break tagalong to Somewhere, Florida. Before he fell for Dru, the South for him had been a one-liner punch line. A banjo lick, or dumbstruck drawl.

  Yet there he’d been, in his thirties, with her, in a rental car picked up at Memphis International, cruising through rural spaces he’d not imagined existing in America, in pursuit of what Dru termed only a picnic.

  “I hope my being here is a testament to my love,” he’d said.

  “I believe,” she replied. “it’s a testament to mine.”

  They drove past untold numbers of manufactured homes, as were moored on cinder-block slabs; past squat brick ranches with stuck-on carports or cars-in-yards; they passed tractors and chicken-wire trash pens and granaries, and umpteen old pickup trucks parked at the roadside, posted FOR SALE. They moved through verdant fields and treelines, and, for a moment, their car hugged the curved banks of a mud-rich river, the brown water glistening in the spaces between bankside cypress, and with splatters of purple wisteria strangling everything. Now and again, JP had caught sight of chalk-white egrets perched in the shallows. Dru had guided them past kudzu vines that covered the rolling expanses like some green topographical quilt. Kudzu that appeared to be pulled over power pole and barn, blanketing any copse of pine or hardwood that wasn’t defended, that had not been chopped back by work crews in orange vests, their ax-like mattocks stabbing the earth in hunt of vine crowns.

  All the while there was the sun, the sun, the summer the sheen, the light praising everything into a polarized sort of crispness. That first trip South was about sun, the sun, the sun . . .

  The visits had proven an initial success—for Dru’s well-being, for them, and for a decent stretch of time. JP trusted the excursions, and he applauded his process. But then one day, back in Chicago, in winter, Dru had walked into the road. Having phoned him a few times, she left a yellow Post-it note on the kitchen table—Fed Lucy. Going out. Back later—and was gone.

  JP never had the chance to stop breaking his promise, and he never wanted to forget a detail of those trips. So alongside saudade, and indulgence, he’d moved down to Pitchlynn for little stabs of lost joy. He was here to understand who Dru would have been, to see what she would’ve seen, in the flash of her features and her mannerisms in Lucy.

  Lucy. Their daughter. He was astounded that the infant had already started to crawl. (Well, she was crawling backward, anyway!) It was an enlightenment to watch her nudge to and fro over Berber carpet, her body a test site of wobble and doggedness. As counterbalance to JP’s rifted emotional life, his child now occupied all physical space, care of diapers and onesies and binkies and bibs, and bottles of Dreft detergent; care of nursing nipples that had to be boiled clean, and in burp rags to wash, and in the drums of Earth’s Best formula he had to keep on automatic online order, because they didn’t carry the stuff anywhere in this dinky-ass town. (Lucy was working through a whey allergy, so she had to have Earth’s Best, versus any dairy-based formula. The allergy was a passing, semi-mundane condition, yet try going through that diagnosis alone: finding a blood streak in a then-four-month-old’s diaper, and navigating the head-on collision of your-just-buried-wife and your-infant-daughter-is-bleeding-internally.) Lucy’s plastic bath basin had colonized the kitchen sink. Her putrid, heat-baked diaper disposal defined the air on the back deck. There were the stain sticks, and a car seat, and the banana-flavored Mum-Mum cracker crumbles all over everything. There was the packing of supplies for every single tiny outing: diapers and wipes and rags and spare clothes, and the crying, the howling.

  There was the adoration, eclipsing all. JP had experienced, was experiencing, a new-universe-style love for that child. For their child, Lucy, who showcased Dru’s single dimple, and who bore the name that Dru had given her, and who was the constant affirmation of her father’s redemption, care of the plans Dru had made before the child was even conceived.

  Having been too selfish to put his wife’s needs above his own, let alone confront her over what he’d known for months before her death—that she was sick, and slipping, not just “moody” or in some “stage”—JP’s consequent vow was to live out her expectations. He now swore to provide what she had wanted all along: the restoration of a proper childhood at home, by way of a child, brought home.

  JP’s arrival to town had been met by an even stro
nger purchase offer on the house, followed by letters to this effect, and relentless phone calls—none of which he answered or returned. When prominent figures began knocking on his door unannounced, crashing Lucy’s naptimes and raking his nerves, he had moved out to the former servants’ quarters, an austere beige bungalow at the back of the property. In public, as strangers approached him on the square, or at the grocery or gas station, he walked right past, not a hint of acknowledgment.

  The LMA and Pitchlynn elite decided to meet JP on his own terms. He wanted solitude? So be it. They would wait him out, their own silence or influence thrown back twice as hard. At certain restaurants JP was then made to sit without service for as long as he could stand it, or as long as Lucy could stay quiet in the child seat beside him. Boutique store managers often handled every other customer, or vanished altogether, when JP walked in to shop. Now and again, even a lowly grocery clerk closed their aisle just as JP reached the head of the checkout line. In between, everywhere, were the small-town slights, and the turnings-away of service.

  He had no family here, nor any prospect of friendship. Pitchlynn, they knew, could be a very lonely place.

  Only, they didn’t count on his anger, nor the fuel of his regret. The more the Pitchlynnites iced him out, the more determined he became to stay put. To an extent, he even made a game out of things. He realized, for instance, that any restaurant refusing to acknowledge him at a table was entitled to the opera of Lucy’s howls. (That child’s ability to scream when hungry was profound. And because JP knew precisely when the infant’s want turned to need, he could lift her public crescendo like a maestro.) At the hardware store or grocery, or any place that made him wait in excess, he’d leave a check on the counter and walk out with his items, daring any clerk or shopkeep to test the limits of their passive-aggressiveness.

  He was in town now, period. “Future family”? Not a fucking chance.

  The tension had played out like a chess match in a room on fire, until late one evening (if you could call a 3:47 a.m. bottle-feeding “evening”), JP envisioned the ultimate affront: he would take control of the thing they valued most, enacting a highly visible, contemporary renovation of the Wallis House itself, with a postmodern rearrangement of the property grounds to follow.

  He would gut the place. Cut their hearts out, real slow. From that midcentury paint scheme to a green, leach-field septic; from ab-ex lawn art to a shimmering rooftop field of silicon solar panels. Window frames to wainscoting, every inch of that home would be wrung free of memory, right before their eyes.

  Inspired, elated, he had scoured his old rehab plans from back in Chicago, consulting databases of design resource and structural manual, even pop-cultural trend mags and hipster hack websites. His contractor background was reignited to full flare. His creativity was reunited with craft, calculation, and the ability to connive (e.g., he sourced materials from nearby towns, so nobody would get wind of his project). He’d researched both Pitchlynn and Mississippi codes, and had his Chicago property lawyer do the same, just in case. His holdings were shifted and his accounts interlinked. Any legal intrusion on their part would involve motion after motion, year after year.

  To keep watch over Lucy during the work hours to come, JP hired a squad of young enrollees in child development and early childhood ed at North Mississippi CC. These young women (for there were only young women in the program) were eager to ply their trade and squirrel away a few bucks. With this caretaking secured, he had at last looked for an assistant.

  Interviewing Derby, JP noted the younger man’s drive, and his attentive, mindful demeanor. Small-town or not, the guy knew a ton about the materials and process JP planned to employ. What’s more, Derby was ravenous for further expertise. And while JP wasn’t sure why a local guy with a such a skill set hadn’t sustained any clientele, at the end of the day he didn’t care. Truth be told, Derby was the only one who applied for the job.

  ***

  SO NOW, this: flies spattered a lynched sow carcass like raindrops.

  JP’s arms were locked around the wavering limb. Only after Derby threatened to climb up and fetch his ass did he gather himself and start inching down the tree. Reaching the base of Bel Arbre, JP took a few steps before dropping to his knees in the grass.

  Derby squatted beside him. “I’ll cut that lever rope and get it down now, boss. Take it out to the country and—”

  “No.” JP said, wondering how close his hired hand was to the LMA, and the rest. How was it, for instance, that the young man brokered no explanation? No shock, nor surprise. Hell, he didn’t even offer to call the cops. “Don’t you touch it,” JP ordered, wondering if what he’d read about Derby’s father was true.

  6

  Susan George Wallis sat in a gold silk wing chair and unfolded Dru’s letter. Reading it had become almost ritual over the months. Depending on her mood, the process could take on an act of contrition, or catharsis. After crossing JP, however, she’d been struck with a new understanding of the document. It was a threat.

  The light through the tall windows of her drawing room was dampened by sheeny white curtains. The crisp ticks of her grandfather’s regulator wall clock filled the high ceilings of the house.

  Susan George,

  You and I know how it works: over time, a secret becomes a lie. A fact becomes lie because of its very keeping. A secret is thus the middle ground: a memory of a fact that dies. Revises. That turns from the truth into lie.

  Why is this process so hard to explain? It’s so strange to write you after all this time. (I can’t remember the last time I even wrote a letter.) But I can’t not write you, either. You are the only one left who remembers. The only one who might understand that for me, the lie of that tree has turned back on itself, and into memory. It is gravid, flowering again. I know now that the facts of that night will return. I fight this process and try not to obsess. But I can’t stop it Susan George: the reversal of time. The remembering of truth is so much just too much.

  I think this was triggered by my pregnancy. Did this happen to you, when you carried her? Did you remember things? Remember facts buried in lie?

  In memory: Lucy’s legs swayed beside mine that night, in the tree. In Bel Arbre our teenage boyish legs were made thick against the high limb we rocked on. Our feet bumped carelessly as they dangled. I remember her lips: wet around her smile. We were newly-minted teens. We could still climb so high. We laughed and she laughs and . . . it was nighttime. It is . . .

  Only: this is no longer memory Susan George. The lie has turned back on itself, towards fact: we are never away from the tree. Our faces are still shined by humidity. Her mother’s car is in the driveway below. The headlights flare the lawn. Her mother calls out for her.

  You call out for her. She and I are in the tree, again. The ivory blossoms are the perfect mask: our bodies hidden in the leaves. (Do these facts make you uncomfortable, Susan George? Have you moved forever through memory, into lie?) Her smiles: her teeth shining between spread fingers. Her mother yells for her. Car headlights flare the yard.

  You yell for her. Your headlights flare the yard. We laugh at you and she wipes her mouth. Spits. Giggles. She is bored with us. You and I are lost to her budding adolescence. You scream for her, your headlights beaming. I paw at her to no loving reply. Lost to her attention, we’ll do anything to get her back. Below: you scream, while I pull at her, above. She laughs I swat you scream she sways. You call she smiles I pull she . . .

  She falls. She fell. The truth of this is too much. It was too much for any of us after she fell.

  I was run off from this fact. Sent away. Banished: my eyes fit to blinders. Run off from her death as if memory were a physical geography. Across years across schools or jobs or loves or cities: run off from that night, pushing fact down to memory, toward lie. As if we could move past her gelled eyes. Past the pulling and screams and the fall.

  And over years, over jobs, over continents, at long last: things started to revise. For a time, the m
emory simmered into secret, then cooled down to lie: I had nothing to do with her death. That night in the tree became a pastel of sadness that could come but then leave in a breath. It was a shiver at best. I was released.

  Until one day I looked into a bathroom mirror in Chicago, considering facts: my lips split by winter. My rings under eyes and my belly cast iron. My coming, kicking child. And I saw Lucy’s ghost just behind me. And I see her again now: in Bel Arbre. When I sleep when I sit, when I dream. In mirror or window, or still pool of bathwater. Reflection: the lie has turned back into memory, towards fact. The more I fight this process, the more poison floods my body.

  I am trapped, Susan George. So who else can I ask: did I do it? Did I matter that night? What on earth is the truth?

  This all sounds crazy. I am sick over writing you with this, but who else can I ask? Who can I tell that she’s come back to me? JP? Tell JP that she is just there, outside our window? Floating, her lips parted and glossed? Teeth shattered?

  No. This is not how it works. You can never confess to an outsider. Never tell someone who stands beyond the map of experience. They can only be permitted to know the lie.

  Time has reversed itself, Susan George. And this reversal is pulling me down. Lucy is pulling us down . . .

  7

  Colleen propped up on her elbows, in bed, in her undies and the worn peach bathrobe. Her legs showed as tan against the bleach-white sheets, and her tummy was freakish in protrusion. She snuck the day’s first Misty while watching the morning show out of Tupelo.

  Derby popped into the doorway. “Hey? I was callin’ you.”

  “Keep callin’,” she griped, whistling smoke toward the open window, then, “Sorry, babe. Didn’t mean that.” She dropped the cigarette in a bedside water glass. “Just half asleep, you know?”