by R.J. Ellory
And that I couldn't do, because if I forgot about Nathan I would also forget why North Carolina was going to kill me.
And dying for no reason was something I never wished to do.
* * *
Chapter Eight
1965 ended on a bad note.
Caroline Lanafeuille had been gone four months. No-one spoke of her. No-one spoke of the family. Seemed whatever her daddy had done was sufficient not only to excommunicate them from Greenleaf, but also from our collective memory. That had saddened me. I missed her, and in missing her I confronted the awful truth: that I had done nothing to stop her leaving. I had failed to defend what I had yearned for - yearned for for so long, and with such passion. And in some way I also felt that I had been betrayed, that she had taken what existed of my heart, had filled it with something so strong and seemingly permanent, and then burst it in a single stroke. And when Christmas came and I sensed my mother possessed neither the spirit nor the enthusiasm to celebrate the season I felt truly alone. I did not pity myself, I did not crave sympathy, I merely wished to be with people, and I was not.
Reverend Verney took Nathan and the rest of the family to see relatives in Chicago at the beginning of December. Nathan wanted to stay. He was nineteen and fiercely independent but, regardless of his will and desire, the sense of religiously sanctioned discipline so expertly administered by his father was the greater motivation. He went. He had no choice. I remember standing at the edge of the Lake the day before he was due to leave, how he shook my hand, and then hugged me, his broad hands on my shoulders, his grinning face right there before me, and how he told me hang loose… take it easy. He'd be gone for a month, back in the first week of January, and I should spend the time finding myself a girl.
'So should you,' I said, feeling a small sense of reassurance and self-satisfaction in knowing that Nathan was utterly unaware of what had taken place between Caroline Lanafeuille and myself the August before.
'Let me take care o' my own business,' Nathan said, and there was something in his expression, something in his tone, that made it clear as daylight. He had. He really had.
'Who?' I asked, my voice pitching a good three tones above normal.
'Hold it down,' Nathan said, and started laughing.
'So who? Who for Christ's sake?'
He shook his head and smiled. 'No way Mister Motor- mouth.'
'That girl who does the flowers at the church… whassername, Melody something-or-other?' I persisted.
Nathan shook his head. 'Not saying. No clues. A promise is a promise.'
'Hey,' I said. 'No deal.'
Nathan shook his head again. 'Hell, man, I tell you, you go tell someone else who tells half the world, and then my father finds out he'll stripe my back for a week.'
'I won't say,' I said, my expression suddenly solemn.
Nathan shook his head. 'No,' he repeated. 'I said I wouldn't say a thing to anyone, so that's the way it's gonna be.'
There it was, that conviction, that stubborn dig-your- heels-in resilience that I had seen before. There would be no moving him. Later, much later, I thought that at any other time I would have pursued him, insisted. I think the real reason I let it go was because I had a secret of my own. A secret called Caroline whom I had loved, and watched… no, whom I had let disappear.
Nathan changed the subject. He told me the reason they were going to Chicago was to see his ma's sister. She had three boys, all around Nathan's age. Two of them had already been killed in Vietnam. They were going out there to help her, to counsel her in her loss. The third son, no more than eighteen, was in a field hospital somewhere. That was all they knew, nothing more nor less. He was just somewhere. The Army said they would find him, promised they would find him, but they'd been saying that for nigh on a month. Nathan believed he was dead as well.
They wanted to get out to Chicago before his mother found out.
In that light I wanted him to go. I grieved for his cousins, people I neither knew, nor would ever know. I did not know their names, could not recall their faces from some summer picnic we had shared in Myrtle Beach, nor from playing tag with them along the edge of the County Fair grounds, nor from swimming in Lake Marion at the height of a Greenleaf summer when the sun scorched your back and made the rocks too hot to stand on. But I felt I knew them. Just like I knew those boys who became men in an Army tent back in November.
I felt I knew them all.
I watched him go when he left. He walked the long way round and took the path that ran out towards the black quarter of Greenleaf.
I watched him grow smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance like a memory, and when he'd finally disappeared I stood there and looked out over the cool surface of the water.
The Lake was silent. A gray mist hung along the opposite bank and obscured the land. The way the Lake looked it could have been the sea. Swim out there, keep on going, and at some unknown point you'd just fall off the edge of the world.
I remembered the day I met Nathan. The baked ham sandwich. The little kid with jug-handle ears, traffic-light eyes and a mouth that ran from ear to ear with no rest in between.
I did not long for those days to return, but I missed the sense of levity. Seemed to me that growing up was a matter of taking everything more seriously, and I had never found that easy.
I walked home then. I lay on the bed where I had fallen completely in love with Caroline Lanafeuille, and I thought about what I would do when the Army sent for me.
A week after Nathan's departure I went to see Eve Chantry.
Why I went I cannot remember now. Perhaps I fabricated some reason, some purpose to visit, but the true motivation was to remedy my lack of company.
It was the first day of snow. I saw a deer on the way down. It stood in a grove of trees near the bend in Nine Mile Road, and it just watched me. It did not run. It stood stock-still, watched me as I walked, and unnerved me. I even clapped my hands, hollered once or twice, but that deer stood immobile, didn't even blink.
For some reason that brief and unimportant incident made me feel insignificant.
When I arrived at Mrs. Chantry's house there were lightbulbs strung from one side of the verandah to the next. I went up the steps, opened the screen door and knocked.
I waited patiently, I knew she'd walk slowly, and after three or four minutes I knocked again.
I heard a sound above me. I went back through the screen door and started down the steps to the path.
The snow came down like a blanket.
I remember looking up and the sky appeared to be falling towards me.
Suddenly I was on the floor. Snow was in my eyes, my ears, in my mouth even.
And then I heard her laughing.
I finally surfaced and stood up, and there above me, leaning from a window in the front of the house, was Eve Chantry. She had opened a window to see who had come a- calling, and the narrow roof that overhung the porch had let its covering of snow fall.
I had walked backwards down the front steps to meet it. My timing had been immaculate. And then I started laughing too.
It was a strange sight, almost as if I could see myself from a distance, almost as if I stood at the bend in the road that led down to the Chantry house, and there I was, standing no more than three or four feet from the porch steps. Like a ghost.
'You wanna see something?' Mrs. Chantry shouted from the upstairs window.
'Sure,' I shouted back.
She disappeared for a moment, and then suddenly the porch and verandah were ablaze with multi-colored Christmas lights. Red and yellow and blue and violet, every color imaginable.
Mrs. Chantry appeared once again at the window.
'Hell of a thing, Mister Ford,' she shouted.
I held out my arms as if to embrace the moment. 'Hell of a thing, Mrs. Chantry,' I hollered back.
'You spent enough time standing there lookin' like an eejut?'
'Sure have,' I replied.
'I'll come down,' she sa
id, and then her head disappeared once more, the window closed with a thud, sending another small shower of snow down from the sill, and I walked towards the steps again to wait for her.
Whatever she called it - Christmas punch, hot toddy - it was strong.
Beneath the taste of almond and nutmeg, something slightly bitter like new season blueberries, there was the promise of a warm slow death from sourmash or rye. I couldn't decipher it, but I drank it, and when I finished the first glass I asked for more, and it was forthcoming.
She drank too, Eve Chantry, and she didn't even ask why I'd come, merely took my coat and hung it on a stand near the fire to dry, told me to kick off my boots in the front hall and come inside.
Maybe she was short for company too.
'Benny did the lights,' she told me. 'Benny Amundsen from the soda shop.'
I nodded. 'They're cool,' I said.
'Cool,' she said, and smiled.
'So where's your buddy?' she asked me.
'Nathan?'
She nodded.
'Chicago,' I said.
'Seeing relatives?' she asked.
'Yes, his ma's sister.'
Eve Chantry nodded. 'Who died?'
I frowned, looked at her askance. 'What makes you think someone died?'
'Reverend Verney has never left at Christmas. Christmas is serious preaching time. Many souls to save at Christmas. There's a war to fight this time of year, between the birth of the baby Jesus and the shopping mall.'
I smiled. Mrs. Chantry was almost as cynical as I.
'Nathan's ma's sister's kids, two of them, and a third missing somewhere and the Army can't find him.'
'Vietnam,' Eve Chantry stated matter-of-factly.
'Vietnam,' I said.
She shook her head slowly and turned towards the fire burning in the grate.
There was silence for some minutes.
'They sent for you yet?' she asked eventually.
'No.'
She looked at me then. 'They will you know, and for Nathan Verney, and most of the other kids.'
I nodded. 'I know.'
'You willing to go?'
'Willing? No, I'm not willing,' I said. 'Who would be willing to go?'
She smiled knowingly. 'My husband was willing to go,' she said. 'He knew what he was doing, he knew it clear as daybreak. He knew that he'd die as well, but he still went.'
'He knew he'd die?' I asked.
Eve Chantry smiled. There was something beautiful and nostalgic in her face. 'Yes,' she said, her voice soft and measured. 'He knew he was going to die because he should have died in about 1938, and he didn't, and from that point forward he felt he was using up someone else's time.'
I frowned. 'I don't understand.'
Mrs. Chantry settled back in her chair. 'I was born around here,' she said. 'I was born in 1898, a different world back then, a different world entirely. I grew up in Charleston, folks had money, no shortage of money, and I was educated at a real school with real books and a chalkboard and everything. My father wasn't a religious man, but he attended church and he treated people well, treated them with respect, and he never considered I should have anything but the best.'
Eve Chantry reached for the bottle of Christmas punch and refilled her own glass. She handed it to me and I did the same.
'I met the man who would become my husband in 1922. I was twenty-four years old, he was eighteen. He wasn't even a man, he was a grown-up child, but I knew, I really knew, that this was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And he knew it too. His name was Jack Chantry. His father was a fisherman out near Myrtle Beach, and he couldn't read or write or spell his own name. They were poor, poor beyond anything I could imagine, but Jack
Chantry possessed a life and a spirit and a will to live like no-one I'd ever known.'
She paused; she was looking at pictures in her mind, snapshots of Jack and his father, images that conveyed the elan, the vitality of which she spoke, and though I could not see them I could feel the emotion in her voice. She spoke of something powerful, and I was acutely aware that that sense of magic and power was exactly what was missing from my own life. This was something I could perhaps have possessed with Caroline had I been strong enough to hold her.
Perhaps she knew this, perhaps it was her reason for talking.
'We met in secret for more than a year,' she went on. 'We'd meet down by Lake Marion here, and other places, and I took it on myself to teach him to read, to write his name, to learn the alphabet, and never in my life have I ever met anyone who possessed such hunger for understanding. He learned faster than I thought possible, and soon he was writing letters to me, even poetry.'
Mrs. Chantry smiled. 'It's ironic, but had I not taught him to read and write, perhaps it would never have turned out the way it did.'
I leaned forward. There was something about the way she spoke that made me so much want to know more of what happened.
'Jack wrote me a letter telling me he loved me, even suggested we elope together, and it was that letter that my father found. He was a fair man, an honest man, but he was rigid in his belief that there were classes of people, that people should marry within their class. But that was not so much the issue. The real reason he was so mad was because he felt I had betrayed him. That I had been carrying on with this man behind his back, that I had lied for a year or more about where I had been, who I had been with. That was something he felt he could neither understand nor forgive.'
Eve Chantry smiled.
'My father gave me thirty dollars, told me to pack all I wanted in one case, and to leave. If I was so committed to this man, this ignorant fisherman's son, then I could take my lies and my black-hearted deceit and find my own way in the world. I was twenty-five, Jack Chantry was a little more than nineteen, and we went to South Carolina where no-one knew us, and we started our lives together.'
I shook my head. 'Hell,' I said. 'That's tough,' I said.
'It was a different world, Daniel, a world we'll never see again. The main streets were dirt roads, people lived all their lives and died right there in the same town where they were born, and we just rolled into some place and made out we were a newly-married couple. I became Eve Chantry, he became older than me, he started work on a farm and I took in washing, and we found ourselves a little room to rent. It was good, I can't tell you how good it was, and we were happy, Daniel, possibly happier than anyone else in the world.'
She was smiling, a slow-burn glow of color in her cheeks, a light in her eyes that had not been present when she'd started speaking, and I watched with a degree of wonder.
'It was the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a time of change and invention and motor cars and airplanes, and everything was moving so fast and everyone was in such awe of how the world was growing, that they never really had a problem with two young folk moving into town and making themselves useful. People trusted others a whole lot more then. You started out believing someone was telling the truth, and they had to work to convince you otherwise. Now it's the other way round. Now you assume that someone's bullshitting you, and then they have to prove to you they ain't.'
She laughed softly, quietly.
'So we just settled down, settled right in there, and I never wrote to my mother or father, and as far as I know they never made any attempts to find me. Jack's father was different, he didn't give a damn who his son married as long as he was happy, and though he was sorry Jack wouldn't work with him on the boat he also recognized true love.'
Eve smiled, sipped from her glass.
'We'd go down to Myrtle Beach every once in a while and see Jack's folks, and that was fine as far as they were concerned.'
'Did you have children?' I asked.
She nodded. 'I'm getting to that, Daniel Ford. You want some more punch?'
I shook my head.
'You wanna smoke a cigar?'
I frowned.
'I like to smoke a cigar every once in a while,' she said, and got up from
her chair. She went over to the mantel, and from a mother-of-pearl inlaid box that sat there by the clock she took two slim dark cigars.
Using a taper from a jar at the other end of the mantel she lit both cigars and handed one to me. They smelled rich, spicy almost, and when I touched that thing to my mouth it was almost as if the haunt of its taste was absorbed through my lips.
I had smoked cigarettes before, many times. Smoking cigarettes was all a part of growing up. A cigar was a new experience, along with Eve Chantry's Christmas punch, and I took it slowly, carefully, and there was a magic in the smell and the taste, even the way the smoke drifted in curlicues and arabesques around our heads, that added to the mysterious ambience of that time.