A MistY MourninG

by Rett MacPherson

  “Good,” he said. “Well, honey, I don’t mean to cut you off but your father is supposed to be calling me.”

  “Oh.”

  “I love you, sweetie,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” I answered.

  “Be good. Stay out of trouble.”

  Nineteen

  I tried to ignore everybody at the dinner table while I read the newspaper articles that Elliott had copied for me. I intended to be rude, although I’ve never understood why reading something in the presence of others is considered rude. Reading is a staple of life, like bread or water. Or chocolate. Anyway, I really didn’t want to be drawn into any conversation with Clarissa’s family, and besides, Craig Lewis still had my bra.

  “So, did you get what you wanted from my mother’s attic?” Prescott Lewis asked me.

  “She wasn’t your mother,” I said, without looking up.

  “She was my mother-in-law for more years than you’ve been alive,” he said. “She was just like my mother.”

  I thought about that. Having a mother-in-law for that long. I said nothing and went on reading. Gert had been extremely tired today and already had gone on up to shower and relax for the night. So I sat, without an ally, eating as fast as I could and trying to ignore everybody.

  “So?” he asked. “Did you find everything?”

  “They were my great-grandmother’s things,” I said. “As much as you feel that I am not entitled to Clarissa’s things, so I feel that you are not entitled to Bridie’s.”

  One more word from him and I was going to finish my dinner upstairs, in my room with my grandmother. Dinner was fried chicken and mashed potatoes, with beets, peas, and homemade biscuits. It would not carry well, but I’d take that chance rather than have to suffer through this dinner with him in the same room.

  Maribelle decided to try and change the subject. Prescott was her husband. I don’t know why she didn’t just tell him to get lost or take a cold shower or something. It seemed as though he spoke all the time and she never heard him. Not one word. “Danette,” Maribelle began. “Why don’t you tell Torie what you found.”

  Quiet fell across the room and that was my cue to look up. Danette’s Caribbean mop was piled high on top of her head with most of it deliberately falling down around her face and neck and in her eyes. Her eyes were lined with severe black kohl, and she was wearing one of the coolest oversized T-shirts I’ve ever seen, Albert Einstein’s face peering out from a galaxy of stars. Does any-body actually make smalls anymore? When was the last time I saw somebody wearing a T-shirt that actually fit?

  I looked around the room and nobody said anything. “What did you find, Danette?”

  Danette would not look me in the eyes as she pulled a huge syringe out of her pocket and set it on the dining room table. I say it was huge, but then, all needles look twice as big as they really are. I was a little horrified at first. Germs, you know.

  “What are you doing carrying that around in your pocket? Haven’t you heard of AIDS?” I asked. “Or hepatitis?”

  Danette just shrugged her shoulders. My gaze went from the needle to Maribelle and then to Prescott, to Lafayette, Craig, and finally Edwin. Everybody just stared at me. It seemed as though the table grew a hundred feet long and I sat at one end and they were all the way down at the other end. My jury. Them against little old me.

  “That’s interesting, Danette. Where did you find it?” I asked.

  “Out in the yard,” she said quietly.

  “Anybody here a diabetic?” I asked innocently.

  Nobody answered. Sherise Tyler came sauntering in and pulled out a chair next to me, unknowingly breaking a tense moment. She must have just gotten out of the shower because the smell of rose water was intense and the underneath side of her hair was still wet. She reached for the fried chicken and spied the syringe on the table, along with everybody’s accusatory stares. At me.

  She looked at me, and I think I saw real pity on her face. “What’s up?”

  “Danette found a syringe,” I said.

  “I see that. Danette, why don’t you take that off the table,” she said. “Needles are a hothouse for disease.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “My thoughts exactly.”

  “What do you think a syringe was doing out in the yard?” Edwin asked as he leaned forward on his elbows.

  “Don’t put your elbows on the table, Edwin,” I said. “Why would you think I would know that?”

  “You know a lot of things, Mrs. O’Shea,” Prescott said. “Don’t you?”

  “Actually, yes. I know quite a bit. About that syringe, I know nothing,” I said. I began to tremble slightly, and put my chicken leg down on the plate lest people would think it was still alive.

  “Awfully funny how you arrive and Mom just up and dies,” Edwin said and snapped his fingers.

  “Edwin. She was a hundred and one,” I said. “She didn’t just up and die. You guys have been waiting for it for twenty years.”

  “Who said that?” Maribelle asked, instantly defensive. “None of us have ever said that.”

  “Why would you think I had anything to do with this?” I asked. “And why didn’t the sheriff and his deputies find that syringe when they were out scouring for evidence?”

  Nobody said anything. I looked to Sherise, who seemed to know where I was going with this. “How long have you had it, Danette?”

  Danette did not answer.

  “When did you find the syringe?” Sherise pressed.

  “Friday,” she said, after a long moment filled with her eyes darting around the table and her chest rising and falling in nervous spasms.

  “Friday,” Sherise said. “Before Torie and Gert arrived?”

  She nodded her head.

  “You didn’t tell us that part,” Maribelle all but hissed across the table. Gasps and groans and general noises of discontent wound around the table until a single tear ran down Danette’s face.

  “You didn’t ask,” Danette said. Suddenly she turned to me, tears streaming. “I didn’t know what they were going to do. Not until just now. You have to believe me.”

  “I believe you,” I said. I stood up with my photocopies in hand. “Is that it? You all assumed when you saw the syringe that I poisoned Clarissa or something?”

  “Nobody said nothing about any pizen,” Lafayette said. I knew from my grandmother’s momentary slips into her accent that he meant poison.

  “Then what do you call this?” I asked. “Look, I got news for you people. It would be the stupidest thing in the world for me to have killed Clarissa. I knew nothing about the wills, either one of them. But guess what, folks? Clarissa was just returning this godforsaken place to the right family.”

  They all looked at each other briefly. “What do you mean?” Maribelle asked.

  “My great-grandmother Bridie owned this boardinghouse before Clarissa,” I said. “She left it to your mother in her will. Clarissa was just giving it back. That’s it. No conspiracy. Now, why don’t you guys grow up? You don’t even know how she died.”

  I turned to leave and then went back to the table and grabbed a chicken leg to go. It took a lot more than a confrontation to curb my appetite. “Or do you? You all seem to act as though you know it was foul play. And how would you guys know that if you weren’t the ones who did it?”

  With that I turned and marched toward the doorway of the dining room with my chicken leg in hand. I was feeling mighty brave and pious and so I turned for yet another one last word. “Craig, I want my bra back.”

  Twenty

  I shut the door softly behind me, as Gert was fast asleep and snoring. I could never understand why her own snoring didn’t wake her up. I can remember as a small child having to turn the television up because my grandmother’s snoring in the other room drowned out Starsky & Hutch.

  Rain began pelting against my window and I instantly recognized it as a gentle rain, without lightning or thunder to accompany it. There was no breeze to speak of and so this
would be perfect sleeping weather.

  If only I could sleep.

  I locked the door behind me and then went and opened the window about two inches, so that I could not only hear the rhythmic patter of the rain better, but also smell its wonderful clean aroma. How is it that the smell of the wet earth, which equals mud, smells clean? Isn’t that an oxymoron or something?

  I turned the lamp on in my room and noted that the clock said seven-thirty. Gert was asleep early tonight. I laid the photocopies on the bed, took off my shoes, and climbed on top of the bedspread. Thus I prepared myself to read the rest of the newspaper articles and eat my chicken leg, whose grease had somehow managed to get smeared all over the photocopies. I swear I thought I’d been extra careful not to touch anything with chicken leg.

  The baby rolled back and forth in my stomach as I read quietly to myself. When I’d finished eating the chicken leg, I tossed the bone into the trashcan between my bed and Gert’s.

  Somewhere around nine-thirty I found the article that I’d been looking for. It read:

  TWO MINERS MISSING

  September 8, 1917, Panther Run, WV—Doyle Phillips and Thomas MacLean were last seen on the August 31, a little over a week ago. Phillips, who worked the tipple, and Mac-Lean, who worked in demolition, both for the Panther Run Coal Company, were not strangers to the townfolk here. Phillips came from Boggs and MacLean was from Blue Springs, and both were well-known and vocal about their stand on the UMWA. One reason the authorities are concerned is because both men were wanted for questioning in the murder of Aldrich Gainsborough this past June. It is suspected that both men left the state to escape questioning, but none of their families or friends have heard from them, either, leaving authorities to wonder if some ill fate has befallen the two local mineworkers.

  By the way Aunt Millicent had said that many a miner had been swallowed up by the mines, I had assumed the two missing miners had been lost in a cave-in, although that wasn’t the impression I had received from everybody else. Providing, of course, that everybody I had asked about the missing miners was thinking of the same missing miners.

  How likely was it that people of the twenty-first century would still be talking about two miners that had gone missing eighty-two years ago?

  It would be fairly likely, I thought, if there was a conspiracy or secret that went along with the disappearance or some sort of theory that had gone unproven. There is nothing like a subject without closure to keep the gossip mill turning for centuries, eventually becoming legend. The supposed ghost of Victory LeBreau, back home in southeast Missouri, was a good example of that.

  Wanna keep a secret, tell Bridie Mac.

  I hadn’t expected that to jump out at me from the recesses of my mind, but it did.

  Why was it that the woman at Denny’s, when we mentioned the boardinghouse, immediately brought up the two missing miners? She wondered if anybody would ever know what happened to the men. Was the boardinghouse connected to the disappearance of the miners? Or the owner of the boardinghouse? Tell Bridie Mac.

  Who would tell Bridie MacClanahan?

  Clarissa Hart.

  Who would tell Bridie MacClanahan what?

  What happened to the miners, maybe?

  Nah, Couldn’t be. I stifled a yawn and realized that I had to use the bathroom. I was not looking forward to this, because I’d have to leave the room and either take the key with me or leave the room unlocked. I was not leaving the room unlocked. Not after the bizarre things that had been happening here and the way people had been behaving toward me. If anything happened to Gert, I’d never forgive myself.

  I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and was quite relieved to return and find Gert safe and sound. I changed into my pajamas. I’ve never been able to figure out why all of the maternity pajamas have those little slits for breast-feeding in them. It’s not like you breast-feed while you’re pregnant. It can be a tad distressing to feel a breeze and realize that you’re hanging half out of the slits in your pajama top. So to prevent such a horrible thing. I take a safety pin and pin them shut.

  I sat back down on the bed and fingered the greasy photocopies once more. The miners had been wanted for questioning in the murder of Aldrich Gainsborough. I thumbed through the pile until I found the earlier article in which Gainsborough had just come to town and wasn’t sure how long he would stay. How had I missed an article on his murder?

  I found it about halfway through the stack. I assumed I just skipped over it because I wasn’t looking for anything on him, just on the miners, who now had names: Phillips and MacLean.

  The article read:

  SPOKESMAN FOR THE COAL COMPANY LYNCHED

  June 29, 1917, Panther Run, West Virginia—Authorities are calling what happened in this sleepy little coal town nestled into the ancient mountains of central West Virginia an atrocity. A barbaric display of what man is capable of.

  Late Tuesday night after leaving the Panther Run Boardinghouse where he was staying, Aldrich Gainsborough went to town to mingle and partake of the spirits with the locals. The details of the night are sketchy, but sometime around midnight he was seen leaving Rowse’s. He was feeling good, but not drunk, witnesses say.

  The next time he was seen was four o’clock Wednesday morning, hanging from a tree in the front yard of the Panther Run Boardinghouse. His neck was broken, the soles of his feet were burned, and there was quite a long list of other marks of torture.

  Authorities believe that the boardinghouse and its occupants were never in danger, and are compiling a list of suspects.

  At this point, given the tension between miners, who want to be unionized, and the Panther Run Coal Company, which is against unionizing, the list of suspects could include several hundred.

  Impressive. The local townspeople had mentioned to me the fact that there were two miners missing when the subject of Clarissa or the boardinghouse came up. But nobody, I mean nobody, had mentioned that there was a man lynched in the damn front yard!

  What the heck was wrong with these people?

  My eyes were droopy. I knew that even if I settled in to sleep, either my back or bladder would wake me up two hours later anyway, but I still had to sleep. I put the photocopies in between my mattress and box springs. Don’t ask me why, just paranoid. I crawled back into bed but my mind would not wind down right away.

  I thought about the boardinghouse. Aldrich Gainsborough. Bridie MacClanahan. Clarissa Hart. Two missing miners. The boardinghouse. I wondered if the only connection between Gainsborough and the boardinghouse was the fact that this was where he stayed on his visits or was there more to it? Were Phillips and MacLean residents here, as well, or did they live in town in the shacks owned by the company, with their own families? Was there any way for me to find out?

  There were so many questions bouncing off the inside of my head I didn’t think I would ever go to sleep. The next thing I remember was waking up at midnight to go the bathroom.

  Twenty-one

  It was a good night. I only had to get up once at midnight, so that meant that I got a six-hour chunk of sleep. Unheard of for me this far into a pregnancy. I awoke to chirping birds and the sound of the river rushing by outside, since my window was still up. For a second, I thought I was at home in my blue gingham bedroom in New Kassel. But I knew better. There were no children below making noise.

  The breeze billowed the clouds just barely, and I was amazed to realize that it was a little on the cool side. I love cool mornings. They make me just want to snuggle back in the sheets and sleep all day. Or snuggle next to a warm body.

  It was my first fully awake thought of the day, and so, of course, it had to be about Rudy.

  I rolled over to see that Gert was not in her bed. This bothered me a little, so I did not allow myself the luxury of snuggling into the covers and thinking sappy thoughts about my husband several hundred miles away. I didn’t even bother to put on my house slippers.

  I did, however, put on my yellow and white checked robe
and head out the door into the hallway to see if my grandmother was in the bathroom or eating breakfast already. She usually got up early, and I talked myself out of getting too worked up by rationalizing that she had gone to bed at seven the night before. Anybody would be up at six in the morning if they went to bed at seven.

  She was not in the bathroom, however, and so I descended down the long picture stairway to the floor below to find her. The house smelled of biscuits and gravy, and I knew that Susan Henry was already up and cooking for the household.

  I walked into the kitchen, and Susan scowled lightly at me. I’m sure she was afraid that I was going to start snatching at her food. She was dressed in a flower-print cotton dress and a paisley apron. It clashed something fierce, but this woman’s arms were twice the size of mine and I was not going to comment on her fashion faux pas. Besides, who was I, Miss Jeans and Tennis Shoes, to judge her wardrobe? Right?

  “Good morning,” I said. “Can I have a glass of juice?”

  “Your house. You can have whatever you want,” she said without looking up from the pile of dough she was kneading.

  “I don’t think, technically, this is my place just yet,” I said. “I’ll have that glass of juice, though, all the same.”

  I got myself a glass of orange juice and watched her silently working that dough. The ease with which she worked it made me think that this was something she had done her entire life. I couldn’t exactly say how old she was, but I’d guess fiftyish. She was a bundle of contradictions. On one hand, her face was nearly wrinkle-free, but her hair held generous amounts of grey. Her body, however large, seemed to move with great ease, indicating somebody younger, but her style of dress was of somebody born in the late forties in the middle of nowhere and without access to fashion magazines or cable television. Either that or she just didn’t care.

  “What are you staring at?” she asked.