“Don’t talk about him! I don’t want to think about him! Billy, please—I’ll never ask you for anything else ever again. Just this.”
“I loved you a long time. So long. Long as I can remember.” He shook his head; a tremor ran through his body. “If I’d thought you loved me back…if I’d ever thought that…”
He paused, and as Hélène opened her mouth to speak, he lifted one finger gently to her lips. “Don’t you go telling lies now. No lies, you hear? There’s no need for lies. Not between you and me…”
Hélène looked up at him. His face looked gentle, and his eyes immeasurably sad. Slowly she lifted her arms and wound them around his neck, her breasts brushing against his bare chest. She pressed her lips to his cheek, then softly against his mouth. Then she drew back.
“I know I’m right. I know I was never more right in my whole life.” Her blue eyes blazed up at him. “I know I could make you, Billy…”
“I know it too.” Billy smiled. “I understand. There’s no need for that.”
Gently he put his arms around her, then he drew her down onto the ground beside him. He looked into her eyes then, as if there were something he wanted her to understand, something he couldn’t say.
“First and last.” He frowned slightly. “You were always that, Hélène. Where I begin and where I end. That’s all. Tell me you know that.”
“I know.” Her voice broke.
“That’s all right then,” Billy said.
As he bent his head, and kissed her lips, she heard a bird stir among the branches.
When they lay beside the pool, Billy had three hours left to live. They killed him just around five, where the track from the trailer park met the Orangeburg road.
Hélène heard the shot when she was halfway down the track, starting the walk back to Orangeburg to meet her mother. She stopped; the noise was very loud; a flock of ring doves rose clattering from the trees, wheeled over her head, then settled again in the silence. Then she heard running feet, the tearing of undergrowth, the slam of a car door, the screech of wheels on dusty tarmac. When she reached the place where they had left him, the air still smelled of scorched rubber. Billy was lying on his back in the grass by the side of the highway. His hands were relaxed; he lay in an attitude of sleep except that his eyes were open.
She fell to her knees by his side, panting. There was a film of sweat across his forehead; the freckles across his cheekbones were each distinct; his hand was warm to the touch. She thought: He’s all right; they didn’t do it; they missed; they meant to scare him is all; he’s all right. Then she saw the red and the grayish-white on the grass, seeping out of the back of his head. She gave a cry and put her hands down to cradle his head, to heal the wound, to hold him together, to piece him back, to hide him—she didn’t know what. Then his head lolled and she saw what they had done with their shotgun; the back of his head had gone; Billy had gone. She lifted her head like an animal and started to scream.
There were so many people, suddenly so many. She couldn’t imagine where they came from so quickly, or why, when there was nothing they could do—it was too late. Children, dragged hastily to one side; the young couple from the trailer park; a man passing in his car, who stopped, and then turned into the bushes and threw up; the doctor from Orangeburg—who had called him? Couldn’t they see Billy didn’t need a doctor, not now? They were all looking, looking, and she hated them for it. She crouched over Billy, because she didn’t want them to see him, not the way he was, and they didn’t understand, they kept pulling at her, and saying things, and trying to get her to move.
Then there was a ripple, a sound like a sigh; she saw feet moving back. She looked up, and Mrs. Tanner came through the crowd. She had the latest baby on her hip, its fat legs hooked around her flowered pinafore. She stopped, and put the baby down.
Then she knelt down next to Hélène. She didn’t cry out; she didn’t speak; she just looked. She lifted Billy’s hand and held it in hers. One of Billy’s shirt buttons was undone; gently she laid his hand down and did up the button. As she did so the rain began, quite suddenly, the way it did after the hot days. Heavy drops splashed onto her head, onto Billy’s shirt. She put her hands out, fingers splayed, as if she could keep the rain off him.
“His new shirt. His clean shirt. I just laundered this shirt.” She lifted her head and her eyes met Hélène’s with the same blue gaze as her son’s. “My oldest. My firstborn son. Billy…” Her voice rose. She reached forward and shook him suddenly, as if she could wake him from this deep sleep. “Billy. What they done to you? What they done to my boy?”
Then she bent down and cradled him in her arms. She stayed that way until the police came. When they tried to move her, she hit out at them with her arms, wildly, then stopped, her eyes focusing on Hélène’s face as if she saw her for the first time. She pushed her violently, her hands wet with rain and blood, her face suddenly contorted with hate.
“You get away from him, you hear? Just get away. What you want with my son? I warned him about you. I told him. Stay clear of that girl. I said, that girl is trouble, Billy, you look at her and you’ll get hurt. Way back when he was a little kid I told him…”
The hate went out of her body then; one moment she was rigid with it, the next it was gone. She went limp, and they moved her away. The baby began to cry; the air flashed white and blue; the ambulance siren screamed; the people were being moved back.
Hélène stood up and groped her way to the side of the road. She crouched there, while behind her, people moved, and shouted instructions, and the baby’s cry grew to a howl. She was still crouching there when Cassie Wyatt pulled up in her old beaten-up Ford. She went over to the patrol car; she said something; she came back to Hélène. She bent down to her, her face furrowed and gray with tiredness, and lifted her to her feet.
“Get in the car, honey. Just get in. That’s right. You’re doin’ fine. You got to come with me now, honey. Your mama needs you. She’s askin’ for you. Hélène—you hear what I’m saying to you?” She turned on the ignition. “Your mama needs you, honey, needs you real bad…”
Her mother had come back on the four o’clock bus, two hours early. She had collapsed on the sidewalk outside Cassie’s beauty parlor, and Cassie closed up shop and took her inside. When she saw the bleeding, she got her into the Ford and drove to the Catholic hospital in Maybury. There was a bigger hospital nearer Orangeburg, but you had to have medical insurance to go there. “No Blue Cross card, they let you die on the sidewalk,” Cassie said.
The nuns knew what had happened. When they realized, Cassie said, their faces went pale and shut, but they took Violet in just the same. The first transfusion seemed to work. When Hélène and Cassie got there that evening, her mother was conscious. There was a crucifix above her bed, and an IV in her arm, and a woman at the end of the ward who kept groaning. Hélène looked down into her mother’s face. Her skin looked white and papery, stretched very tight across the bones. Her hands rested on cool white starched sheets; air-conditioning whispered; outside, the rain fell.
“This is a very nice place, Cassie,” she said. “They have a garden. One of the nuns told me. They let you sit out there, you know. When you’re better.”
It was the last thing Hélène heard her say. They gave her a second transfusion during the night. She died fifteen minutes before Cassie and Hélène got there the next morning. The sister who told them had a soft calm voice. She sounded as if she were praying. After a while, she stood up; the beads of her rosary glittered against the black of her skirt. Her mother was ready now, she said. Hélène could see her.
They drew the cotton curtains around the bed, and the sister stood back, but did not leave her. Hélène looked down at her mother. The IV had been removed, the bed tidied. Her mother’s hands were crossed on her chest, and her eyes were closed. Her features looked sharp and peaked. She didn’t look like her mother at all, Hélène thought. When she bent, finally, and rested her lips against her mother’s fore
head, her skin was dry and cold. She didn’t know what to do after that. There seemed nothing to stay for—her mother was not here—but she didn’t like to leave either.
After a while, the sister sighed, and took her by the arm, and led her away. She gave her a neatly labeled shopping bag with her mother’s clothes, and the zip-up carryall she had taken with her into Montgomery. Hélène opened it when she got back to Cassie’s. Inside there was a freshly laundered handkerchief, some clean underclothes, a comb, and a small notebook with nothing written in it. The underclothes were neatly folded around something hard and square. When Hélène opened them up, she found the old box of Joy, which her mother used to perfume her things, since, in Alabama, even the notions departments had never heard of lavender sachets.
Her mother died on a Sunday morning; the funeral was the following Wednesday, and Cassie and Hélène were the only mourners. Cassie paid for two big wreaths, fashioned from mauve immortelles, one in the shape of a circle, the other a heart. Hélène knew her mother would have hated them. All the way back from the Orangeburg cemetery, Cassie fretted.
“They should’ve been violets,” she said over and over. “I know she would have liked that. I had to settle for the color, that’s all. They last well—that’s a comfort. But they should have been violets. I just wished they’d had some of those.”
That evening she tried to make Hélène eat, and Hélène tried, too, because she knew Cassie was being kind, and she didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She managed a little of Cassie’s fried chicken, but every mouthful choked her. At last Cassie quietly took the plates away. When she came back into the room her face was flushed, and she had a manila envelope in her hand. She put it down on the table, then she sat down opposite Hélène. She looked awkward, and fidgety.
“We got to talk this through, honey,” she said at last. “We got to. You ain’t cried. You ain’t said one single solitary thing nearly. We got to talk it through.”
She hesitated, and when Hélène said nothing, she burst out, “Honey, you can’t stay in Orangeburg, not now. You got to go someplace else, some place real far from here. Your mother, she had a sister in England. She used to tell me about her, and the house where they grew up and all. I figure you ought to go to her. She’s your own flesh and blood. I figure—when she knows about your mother—she’ll be glad to take you in. Your daddy now—” she stopped—“I thought about him too. But Violet never wanted nothing from him. Told me once she didn’t know if he was alive or dead and didn’t care either. And I know for sure he never lifted one finger to find you all, or help you, and Violet wouldn’t go to him, no matter when things were hard. But her sister…I think Violet would have wanted that. She talked about England so much. Not so much of late, it’s true. But in the old days. When she first came to work with me. If she could speak now, Hélène, I reckon that’s what she’d say.”
She paused, the color rising in her cheeks. Then she pushed the manila envelope across the table.
“Five hundred dollars. Take it, honey. It’s yours.”
Hélène stared at the envelope; slowly she raised her head. Cassie nodded and smiled.
“I kept it by me. Kept it for a rainy day, as the saying goes.” She shrugged. “Then I thought—what the hell am I keepin’ it for? I ain’t as young as I was; I got no kids of my own; the business is doing fine now. I don’t need it. You do.” She leaned across the table. “Honey, I checked. You got enough there to get a train and a plane. A ticket out, and a bit left over to help you get started in England. I wish it was more, that’s all. I was real fond of your mama, Hélène. I reckon I owed her a lot, helpin’ me get started with the business the way she did. And it hurts my heart to think of all the things went wrong for her. So you take it now, you hear me? You take it, or I’ll start gettin’ mad…”
Hélène rested her hand on the envelope. She kept it there a moment, then slowly she slid it back across the table.
“Cassie,” she began slowly. “Cassie—I can’t. I’m grateful to you—more grateful than I could ever say. But I can’t take this. It wouldn’t be right. And anyway…you must know, Cassie. You saw. I can’t go. Not now.”
Cassie’s mouth tightened. “You mean that Tanner business—that what you mean?”
“I know who did it.” Hélène’s voice was steady. “I know why they killed Billy. And I know who. I’m not going. Not until I’ve said what I know.”
There was a silence. Cassie suddenly looked terribly tired. She leaned her face on her hands, and when she straightened up, her voice was sharp with anger.
“Don’t folks ever learn? I took you for a lot of things, Hélène Craig, but I never took you for a fool until now. You got a head on your shoulders, girl—you use it.” She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “Okay, you got something to tell. You tell me. You saw them, did you? Saw their faces? Saw the gun in their hands? Saw the gun go off?”
“No—not exactly…” Hélène looked at her in confusion. “But they did it to stop Billy talking, to stop him giving evidence about the other night. I know that! You know it—everyone in Orangeburg knows it! You saw Billy when he came out of the police station—you must have seen the car following him.”
“I saw the Calvert Cadillac. Saw the folks in the car. Saw it drive off down Main Street.” Cassie’s mouth snapped shut. “Couldn’t say if it was following you and Billy or not. It was just drivin’—that’s all I saw.”
“Well, it’s not all I saw…” Hélène’s voice rose in indignation. “I saw them all talking—up by the gas station. Ned Calvert. Merv Peters. Eddie Haines. Two others. One of them had a hunting rifle. They followed us down the road, nearly to the trailer park. Then Eddie Haines shouted out that Billy just lost himself his job. Then they drove off…”
“It ain’t a crime firing a man. Not as I know of. Not in this state. Shooting’s a crime. Sometimes…” She sighed, and her voice softened. “Hélène, honey, can’t you see what I’m sayin’ to you? You go down to the station, they’ll laugh in your face. You got no evidence, honey. None at all.”
“I haven’t?” Hélène looked at her uncertainly.
“Honey, if you’d seen them do it, you know what’d happen? The same thing happened to Billy, that’s all.” She gave a bitter smile. “You’d find the whole machinery of justice just run out of gas. Its wheels’d turn so slow you wouldn’t believe it. And then you’d end up the way Billy did. Dead. Hit by an automobile. Drowned swimming in the river. How long you lived in this place, honey? How come you don’t know things like that?” She stopped, her fingers resting on the manila envelope. Slowly she pushed it back across the table.
“You think Billy Tanner’d want you to get hurt any more than your mama would? When it’ll do no good. When it won’t change one thing? When you didn’t see enough, and if you had, you’d never make it to a court to say so? Billy was no fool, ’spite of what folks said ’round here. When he went down to that station he knew—knew he was puttin’ a noose right around his neck. That was his choice, honey, don’t you see? You ain’t got a choice, not unless you’re figurin’ on dyin’ along with Billy. So you take that money and you go. First thing. Soon as you can. There’s a train in the morning…” She pushed the envelope under Hélène’s hand.
“Think of it as a loan, honey. Think of it any ways you like. But take it. Take it for me, okay? I’ve seen enough hate and enough killin’.” Hélène slowly picked up the envelope. She raised her eyes to Cassie’s face.
“It was Ned Calvert,” she said slowly. “Maybe he didn’t hold the gun himself, but he was involved. He killed Billy. And he killed my mother.”
She saw Cassie’s eyes widen as she took in Hélène’s words. Then slowly her face composed itself again. She rested her hands on the table and levered herself tiredly to her feet. She turned away.
“I hear a lot of talk when I’m workin’,” she said quietly. “Women’s talk. I heard a lot of talk about Ned Calvert. I heard talk about your mama. I even heard talk abou
t you—and sometimes it was all three together. I don’t want to hear no more. It makes me so weary, my bones start to ache. I thought Ned Calvert was one smart sonuvabitch the first time I laid eyes on him, and if ever a man had it comin’ to him, he’s that man. But nothin’s going to touch him, honey, you got to understand that—leastways, not in Orangeburg, it ain’t. Forget him. Put him right out of your mind. Take the money…” She turned around and looked at Hélène’s face, her eyes apprehensive, as if what she saw there alarmed her.
“He’ll die, honey,” she said. “One of these days, he’ll just up and die. Then he’ll face his Maker. There’s justice in the next world if there ain’t in this. Sooner or later—it comes to us all. You’ll see…”
There was a silence. The girl didn’t believe her, Cassie could see that; at the mention of divine justice, her lips curled. She sat looking down at the manila envelope. Then, after a few minutes, her fingers closed over it. She picked it up off the table, and with a sudden odd passionate gesture, pressed it against her heart.
“I’ll take it. Thank you, Cassie. I’ll do as you say.”
She looked away, and then quickly, with an awkward grace, she got up and hugged Cassie tightly. She pressed her face into Cassie’s bony shoulders.
“You’ve been so kind,” she said. “So kind. I’ll never forget that, Cassie. I’ll pay this back one day. I promise.”
Cassie patted her shoulder; she dropped a quick kiss on Hélène’s hair. Then she tilted Hélène’s chin up, and looked down into her face with a troubled frown. The beautiful blue-gray eyes met hers, then slid away.
Cassie stepped back. What she saw in Hélène’s face frightened her. She saw affection for herself, gratitude—sure. But she also saw something else, something the girl was trying to hide.
Hate.
Such a beautiful face. Such a young girl. And such hate.
Cassie went into the kitchen to fix some coffee, and Hélène sat alone in the shabby sitting room. She shut her eyes and let the loathing loose. It swept up through her body, a current of astonishing power.
Destiny Page 38