Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “I’m waiting till we get out of this confusing parking garage and onto a familiar road before saying anything meaningful, Feron, but I’m sorry that Blanche Buttner’s death had to be the occasion of our reunion.”

  “That sounds meaningful enough to me.”

  “I am so glad to have you next to me in the car,” Merry said, as she whipped the svelte silver hatchback through the airport traffic.

  “Do you still have the red truck?”

  “No, I sold it to a woman who keeps horses in a stable we built and never used. Jack had always wanted to have horses, but … many things haven’t continued the way we’d planned. The tobacco acreage is now a gated community with a man-made lake and a golf course. I’m sorry you never got to see our tobacco fields, Feron. Right about now we would be transplanting from the seedbeds into the ground. This time of year will always make me feel nostalgic. Did you have any warning about Blanche?”

  “It was there if I had known to look for it. In recent letters there had been a certain tone of letting go. She sent the pieces of furniture she wanted me to have to Pullen, and spoke a lot about her romance with Uncle Rowan, sort of summing it up. You know they dated for years before their long engagement that never turned into a marriage? And she was two years older, she told me, and managed to keep it secret from him to the very end.”

  “You used to talk about them a lot when we were at Lovegood.”

  “I did? What did I say?”

  “Well, I was thinking about it as I drove to the airport. You thought she was formidable, but you admired her taste. And you could be so funny about their long engagement.”

  “Funny, how?”

  “Oh, you would speculate about their sex life. Sometimes you’d do their voices. Or their thoughts. Like, ‘Not yet, Rowan, I don’t feel right about it just yet.’ And he would say, ‘Honey, is it because you think I’ll respect you less?’ Or you’d have him think, ‘Why is she putting me through this? At our age? When is yet going to be?’ Or you’d have her thinking, ‘Wives are supposed to go and live in their husband’s house, but what if the wife’s house is nicer?’ ”

  “Merry, I do not remember one single word of this.”

  “That’s what friends are for. And family. Even during Ritchie’s brief life, we often remembered entirely different versions of the same event. And Jack and I were always comparing our different versions of the past until he lost his memory.”

  “It must have been anguishing, losing him little by little like that.”

  “The doctor explained to us that it would be selective at first. It was different in each person, he said. He told me we would have to wait until his particular pattern of deterioration presented itself. Isn’t that an awful way to put it? Jack’s ‘particular pattern of deterioration.’ ”

  “I love these old county roads. Uncle Rowan used to drive me around on roads like these and tell stories about how it used to be.”

  “I love them for the same reason,” said Merry. “Plus, on this route I won’t have to drive you by Windbourne Oaks until we’re forced to pass it on the highway tomorrow.”

  “Windbourne Oaks?”

  “What used to be Jellicoe’s tobacco fields. Why on earth any developer would cut down mature hardwood trees planted purposefully over the land for two centuries and put in saplings somewhere else seems moronic to me. Jack said it was because the developers needed to arrange trees where they wanted them to be around the new houses going up. This was back when I could still take him out for drives from Laurel Grove. Then he was still enough himself to name the species of every old tree that was gone. He said there had been many other trees besides oaks on our old land, and the community might equally have been called Windbourne Maples or Windbourne Cottonwoods. Then one day he turned on me like an enemy and demanded why I would bring him to see a thing like this.”

  “I’m really sorry I never saw your tobacco fields, Merry.”

  “So am I. It just didn’t work out, did it?”

  “Do you have a Bible at home?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Blanche left instructions for me to do one of the readings at the funeral. I want to rehearse a little at your house so I won’t let her down.”

  “Do you know which passage you’re supposed to read?”

  “Romans Eight—here, I have it in my purse. Verses eighteen to the end.”

  “She’s a Catholic, right?”

  “Devout.”

  “Listen, Feron, I apologize for wearing this ugly bandage on my nose, but the hole underneath is even uglier.”

  “You had more of those things taken off?”

  “He thinks he got it all, but if not he says he’ll have to cut out more. ‘We’ll have to dig to China’ is the way he put it. This was just the basal cell kind, but after my bout with melanoma he’s not taking any chances.”

  Why were they stopping in front of the African Methodist Episcopal Church?

  “I won’t be a minute,” Merry said. “I need to pick up something.”

  How lightly Merry ran up the walkway to the white clapboard church. Glimpsed from behind, her movements were those of a girl in her twenties. EASTER SERMON: WE’RE DOING ALL WE CAN DOWN HERE IN GOD’S LOVING ARMS was posted on the billboard on the lawn. And below, in smaller letters: Sunday Easter Service 11 A.M., with Communion.

  Merry slid back into the car, handing over a single sheet of paper to Feron.

  “What’s this?”

  “Romans eight, verses eighteen to thirty-nine. From the New American Bible, which is the one the Catholics use. So you can rehearse properly. I photocopied it out of Pastor Ford’s Complete Parallel Bible. Sometimes we use it in our Bible study group; you’d be surprised how different some passages can be in their various translations. And these are just the English translations.”

  Feron skimmed the photocopied verses. “I think I can manage this. I wonder why Blanche chose this particular passage for me to read.”

  “You two got along, didn’t you? I mean other than you thought she was formidable.”

  “Oh, yes. But she was an acquired taste. And I certainly was one for her. She taught me many things I would be worse off without.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, everything from how to buy shoes to how to be gracious. I knew no one like her in my previous world. I never completely got over being a little intimidated, but, funny enough, after I was in New York and especially after she went to live in Uncle Rowan’s house, we became comfortable together. And she liked my last book; that may have helped some, too.”

  “You know, Feron, our dorm mistress once told me in confidence that Cynthia Chasteen was supposed to be my roommate. But when you enrolled at the last minute, they decided we might make a better match. Miss Darden said the dean compared it to horses who were comfortable together in the field.”

  “Horses!” Feron laughed. “But she was right about our being comfortable together. Oh, shit!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t bring a hat for Blanche’s funeral. Hell, I don’t own a hat to bring.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find something that will work. Oh, Feron, those were such unreal days, after I had to leave Lovegood. Everything was completely changed for us. I ran the farm along with Jack, then there was Ritchie to feed and help with homework, and after he went to bed the evenings went on and on. But you know who saved me? Miss Petrie. She always closed her letters with ‘Keep writing!’ So I filled up one of the Lovegood composition books I had bought in the campus bookshop. And then I filled up another, and when those were all filled, I went out and bought some more. But not the Lovegood ones, with the Doric columns on the cover.”

  “What did you write?”

  “Oh, first just little vignettes. The weather and the crop worries. Lots of nature descriptions, too many, I’m afraid. I love doing clouds. And little stories of things that happened to Ritchie, his ups and downs at school. I started copying them over and sending them to M
iss Petrie. She was having a difficult time. Miss Olafson had been offered a better job, but it meant they had to leave Lovegood, and Miss Petrie wouldn’t have a job. She chose to go with Miss Olafson, and I guess in the new place I was her only student. Feron, we corresponded for six years! And then Ritchie was killed, and I started writing this story about the curing barn, which got more detailed the more the narrator lets herself remember. And Miss Petrie helped me make it better, then she told me to submit it to the Atlantic First contest. By then she was very sick and never knew they’d accepted it.”

  “That is such a pure story, Merry. In comparison, my trajectory seems so erratic. Other than term papers, I didn’t write at Chapel Hill. I was hanging on by my fingernails to keep from flunking courses. Oh, I was still thinking about writing and envying the great ones, subtracting their birth dates from their publication dates. And then I was occupied with Will and how to get him without scaring him off. It was only after we got to England and he was off at Durham University all day that I started regretting I didn’t have a discipline like Will. The first thing I wrote was for Will. I typed up his notes for a chapbook on Aelred of Rievaulx, this English medieval abbot who must have been quite an unusual person.”

  “I’m so uneducated, Feron. What is a chapbook?”

  “I didn’t know either till Will told me. It’s a booklet, usually under forty pages, that sticks to one subject. Scholars and poets tend to make them. Abbot Aelred was Will’s star. He represented all that a person could be if he kept reaching toward the highest feelings human nature was capable of. He was a leader and negotiator, he preached, he trained novices, he traveled the continent, he made the abbey prosper, everybody loved him, he was known for his sympathy and gentleness. Luckily, he wrote well, so he was able to record some of his progress. He wrote a treatise on friendship, which is still in print.”

  “Oh, I want to read it!”

  “I’ll look for a copy in Barnes and Noble. It’s probably in a Penguin edition. Well, after I came to the end of the notes, I decided to try writing a story about Aelred the abbot. He suffered from various ailments, kidney stones, arthritis, shingles, and had to lie down a lot, so the monks would gather around his bed just to discuss things and be near him. First I planned to do it like a little diary by a twelfth-century monk. I was going to surprise Will. But then I got ambitious and tried to do the different monks’ points of view, what they thought of Aelred. And that meant stopping to sort out what sort of personalities they had. I was actually making notes on them when Will’s professor came to our flat and said he’d been notified by the constables at Saltburn that a man carrying Will’s identification had fallen off the cliff. It turns out that someone or some animal or even farm machinery falls regularly off that eroding cliff, but I didn’t know about that until later. But you know the thing that still upsets me about that night when we had to go up to Saltburn and identify the body? One of the constables asked me if Will and I had been having troubles in our marriage. You know the first thing that flashed through my mind? This is my punishment for lying about Swain hitting my mother and then leaving the house. Now I’m having it done back to me, someone assuming that Will jumped because our marriage was in trouble. And then when I was staying at Blanche’s, a widow of twenty-three, I started scribbling down everything I could remember about Will before it faded. Things he said verbatim. Even the way he smelled.”

  “Did you save your notes on the monks?”

  “Ah, no. I threw them away. I can’t believe all the things I wish I hadn’t thrown away.”

  “Did I tell you how I abandoned my Stephen Slade book? Sometimes I mix up what I told you with what I thought of telling you.”

  “God, yes. ‘I wish my master was still alive and I was his slave.’ The news item in the tobacco museum. What a killer. I owe you an apology for all the time you wasted on my presumptuous idea.”

  “Oh no, Feron. Without your task, you see, I would never have gotten up the courage to attend a service at Ezekiel Church. As it was, I changed outfits until there was a pile on the bed. I was afraid I wouldn’t be welcome. Well, when I pulled up in the church parking lot, I saw I was the only truck, but at least I was dressed well. And even before I reached the front door, they were coming out to welcome me. Most of them knew who I was, one of them had a father who had worked for Daddy during the harvest. What was I saying? Oh! I would never have thought to go there if I hadn’t realized that for Stephen’s sake I needed to be among living African Americans.

  “And that was because you set me that project, Feron. Otherwise I would never have gone. I would have missed so much. Our Bible study group, new friends. My first job! They gathered around me and saw me through my pregnancy. Paul was baptized at Ezekiel Church, and he was buried from there. And they were there for me through Jack’s decline. I wish you could meet them. Well, you’ll meet Rachel Blake, the daughter of my boss. She’s bringing over our supper later. Rachel will be graduating from Lovegood in May. Now, look, I’m going to turn off the main road. We’re going on a slight detour so you won’t have to see Windbourne Oaks. Oh, Feron, I can’t believe you are finally coming to my house.”

  “Well, I was a long time coming.”

  What a disgustingly lame response, Feron thought. I should have had a tutor like my late father Woody, who taught his sister, Aunt Mabel, how to gush.

  42

  Feron was here in this house. Getting settled in Ritchie’s room. And they had found her a hat for the funeral tomorrow.

  Without comment Feron had entered the room where she was to sleep. “What did you do with the flag?” she asked after looking around.

  “What flag?”

  “The flag that was draped over the footlocker.”

  “Oh, that was just in my ‘Curing Barn’ story. In real life I left it folded, the way his comrades presented it to me. It’s inside with his other treasures. I keep his air force blanket draped on top.”

  Merry had opened the locker and there, beside the folded flag, was Ritchie’s black straw trilby that he had worn in his starring role as Stage Manager. Feron tried it on in front of the mirror, Merry adjusting the angle until it looked captivating. She could see from Feron’s studied nonchalance that she thought so, too.

  “I should probably not wear the purple feather, though.”

  “You can wear it. Purple is for death, too.”

  “Well, you’re the funeral home expert, so I will.”

  They had agreed to “rest up” until six, when Rachel Blake was to bring over their hot barbecue supper from the Three Little Pigs. Merry was surprised at how glad she was to lie down. Her headache had returned, and she had chugged down more pain pills. In her room, formerly hers and Jack’s, before that, Mother and Daddy’s, she thought of Thad. (“Will you tell Feron?” “Tell her what?” “About us.” “No, Thad. We have to remain our own secret.”)

  She heard no sounds below. Feron must have felt like lying down, too. It was hard to believe they were getting close to the sixty mark. She remembered how congealed they’d thought the class poet of 1918 must have been in her midfifties.

  She dreamed that Feron flew in the window as a supersized gray bird and embraced her with the large wings. Merry could feel the softness of the feathers and the support of the spiny shafts. “Horses!” the Feron-bird exclaimed. “Well, we must thank the fates for dropping us into the same field.”

  Murmurs rose from the west porch beneath the windows. Feron seemed to be holding forth to someone. In the bathroom, Merry splashed and brushed herself into shape. She could tell from the outdoor light that it was way past six. A tiny spot of blood had oozed through the gauze pad in the band-aid. She slapped another band-aid on top to cover it up and went downstairs.

  Through the kitchen window she took in the two seated figures. Her long legs pretzeled around each other, Feron was reading aloud in stops and starts to Rachel Blake.

  “… nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the lo
ve of God.”

  “That’s good,” said Rachel. “Even and unemotional. The words will carry the feeling.”

  I couldn’t have laid it out any better myself, Merry thought. Feron’s Coke bottle and glass across from Rachel’s glass and backup pitcher of iced tea. Someone had set the oven at 150 degrees to keep the barbecue and the hush puppies warm, and she knew without checking that the meal’s cold accompaniments were in the refrigerator.

  She felt a great release and an equal amount of sadness. If the moment could have spoken aloud, it would have said, “See, Merry? You don’t have to keep carrying the world on your shoulders all by yourself.”

  It was as if her spirit were registering this scene from some future place. A woman watching the people in her life doing what they needed to do without her.

  “I had planned to lie down and refuel or reconnoiter or something,” Feron said, “but the air outside was too reproachful. I thought, tomorrow I will be breathing in jet fuel and recycled air. So I walked the complete circle of the paddock. First the horses pretended I wasn’t there, then one by one they got curious, and by the time I completed my circle, all three were lining up to smell my hand. Oh God, Merry, what a beautiful place this is.”

  The barbecue had been eaten, they were on their second bottle of wine, and the stars winked at them through the closed window. It was still too early to eat out at night.

  “I wish you could have seen it in its grandeur. All around you, nothing but fields. Now on the east side we have planted trees between us and them—a mix of white pines and poplar and pin oak, but they’re still too young to blot out what isn’t there anymore.”

  “If I had made that Christmas visit, in 1958, how would it have looked?”

  “All plowed under by then. But a horizon of loamy soil holding up the sky. I don’t know if I saw the grandeur back then. I saw it as a lot of acres and a lot of responsibility.”